Sounds & Fury

From The Why Didn’t I Think Of That Dept

Classical music critic and blogger Marc Geelhoed of Deceptively Simple has up a nifty playlist of Halloween-appropriate listening in progressively abstract order. Although I’ve never heard his final entry, I think somewhere very near the end of that list — perhaps even the ultimate entry — should have been what gets my vote for the most spooky musical Halloween offering imaginable: Schoenberg’s Freudian monodrama, Erwartung; surely the spookiest — and one of the most darkly beautiful — stage work ever written, bar none. Make your spine crawl and your socks curl, it will.

(For some commentary on Erwartung by that stalwart defender of the modern in music, A.C. Douglas, see this post.)

A Delicious Halloween Scare Of The Literary Sort

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 5:16 PM Eastern on 31 Oct. See below.]

There are ghost stories of the Stephen King sort (The Shining, for example) and there are ghost stories of the Poe sort (The Fall of the House of Usher, for example). And then there is The Turn of the Screw, the 1898 Henry James long short story or novella; a ghost story nonpareil and sui generis. Is the young governess narrator (she’s not identified by name) reliable and her chronicle of the demon ghosts, Quint and Miss Jessel, and their evil purpose a record of events real and true? Or is she a love-struck, sexually repressed, flaming neurotic whose narrative requires a Freudian reading in order to even begin to rightly comprehend? Or is she simply a flat-out loony; an early-stage paranoid schizophrenic complete with hallucinations and lunatic delusions whose chilling narrative is the product of a disordered mind (so perfect a portrait of the clinical type does James draw that up until the very last page of the tale I was convinced of this even though I’ve never seen a critique that so much as touches on this possibility as an explanation of the tale)? After more than 100 years, hundreds of articles and theses, and hundreds of thousands of words, the members of the jury are still out on the answers to those questions, and I along with them.

And then there’s the writing itself. James’s prose and his sentence structure are maddeningly 19th-century tortuous and ornamented, and a 21st-century reader has first to mentally prepare himself for that before even beginning to read. Or is it rather that the governess’s prose and sentence structure are such (the narrative is a recitation of her written record)? As TTotS is the only James I’ve ever read, I’m in no position to make any judgment concerning that. (Note: See Update below.)

Its prose style and sentence structure notwithstanding, the text is ordered in such a tight, organic manner that my plan to include here a coherent, stand-alone representative excerpt from that text for those of you who’ve never read this tale was defeated utterly. Taken out of context, no part of the text makes any real impact. The genuinely chilling impact of both the individual events and of the tale itself is rather a product of the cumulative effect of the text of the telling, and it’s perhaps precisely that which makes TTotS the nonpareil and sui generis thing that it is.

If you’re looking for a delicious literary scare this Halloween, put down whatever it is you might be reading, and pick up this paragon of a literary ghost story. You can’t get from the movie (The Innocents) or even from the opera (Britten’s, The Turn of the Screw) based on the tale, brilliant though the latter may be, even a modicum of the sinisterly chilling effect produced by James’s text itself.

Trust me.

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Update (5:16 PM Eastern on 31 Oct): How thoroughly stupid of me to write as I did above:

And then there’s the writing itself. James’s prose and his sentence structure are maddeningly 19th-century tortuous and ornamented, and a 21st-century reader has first to mentally prepare himself for that before even beginning to read. Or is it rather that the governess’s prose and sentence structure are such (the narrative is a recitation of her written record)? As TTotS is the only James I’ve ever read, I’m in no position to make any judgment concerning that.

The entire Prologue of TTotS is written by James in propria persona, and the style and sentence structure of that text bears little resemblance to the style and sentence structure of the text of the tale itself which, as the tale has it, was written by the young governess herself. And so the answer to this question was all the while quite literally staring me in the face.

Jeez!

Taruskin Redux

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 1:53 AM Eastern on 29 Oct. See below.]

On the basis of this post several people (here and here, for instance) have assumed that I agreed with everything musicologist and music historian Richard Taruskin had to say in his savage, very personal 12000-word Declaration Of Principles (to use a term lifted from Citizen Kane) masquerading as a book review of three recent entries in the Classical Music Is Dead Sweepstakes. As I explained in the comments section of one of those two linked posts, what I agreed with was that portion of Taruskin’s piece that I quoted, leaving unsaid what I thought about other matters commented on by Taruskin in that piece; thoughts left unsaid mostly because I’ve read none of the three books under discussion.

I can, however, say one thing about Taruskin’s notion that some of classical music’s greatest enemies are to be found among its devotees; specifically those who argue for the worth and value of classical music in terms moralistic, character-building, or utilitarian: he’s right. Such champions of classical music need to have their kneecaps broken (figuratively speaking, of course). Any argument for the worth or value of classical music along any of those lines is not only imbecile but destructively wrongheaded and entirely in error. There’s zero moral anything involved with one’s listening preference for classical music or the popular sort, nor will listening to classical music make of one a better person and citizen, and listening to popular music, a reprobate. And arguments along utilitarian lines miss the point altogether and cannot help but obscure the issue in an almost impenetrable cloud of irrelevance.

I do, however, take exception to Taruskin’s somewhat ambiguous,

Belief in [classical music’s] indispensability, or in its cultural superiority, is by now unrecoverable, and those who mount such arguments on its behalf morally indict themselves.

Setting aside Taruskin’s descent into the pseudo-ethical, for which sin he rightly indicts some of the objects of his ire, Is Taruskin saying here that classical music is not indispensable; that it’s not culturally superior to other musics? Or is he merely saying that mounting such arguments in defense of classical music is futile because not persuasive to the legions of non-listeners?

If the latter, he may well be right. But then, that’s no reason to suggest abandoning the arguments, but rather to finding more effective, more compelling ways to argue them. If the former, then Taruskin is on shaky ground, I think, and, further, is guilty of a tendentious disingenuousness into the bargain simply to win an instant point. To argue that classical music is not culturally superior to other musics but is merely their cultural equal is tantamount to arguing that, for instance, the culture of, say, some obscure African tribe barely out of the Stone Age is the equal of our present Western culture; an argument that would be attempted in earnest only by the most rabidly loony multiculturalist. And to argue that classical music is not indispensable to that Western culture would be to deny the incalculable magnitude of the enduring influence some 600 years of classical music has had in the reciprocal shaping of that culture; a shaping influenced but transiently by all other genres of music.

For the author of The Oxford History of Western Music to be guilty of making such arguments — if that in fact is what Taruskin is doing here — is simply reprehensible, and I would have thought unthinkable.

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Update (1:53 AM Eastern on 29 Oct): I see by my eMail that a definition is required here even though I thought my meaning obvious in context.

By the term culture, I am here referring (as I assumed was Taruskin as well) not to civilization as a whole, but to “the intellectual side of civilization” (OED); that side that “concerns itself with arts, letters, manners, scholarly pursuits, etc.” (Webster’s).

I trust this clarification will remove any ambiguity on that point in my above post.

Alex Does Google

For those of you who, like us, have never had the chance to attend a talk by author and New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross, there’s this video from Google documenting a 60-minute talk Alex gave at Google HQ this month as part of its Authors@Google series in connection with the release of his new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Alex is as eloquent, erudite, charming, and informative at the lectern as he is on the page, and anyone interested in or curious about classical music and, in particular, the classical music of the 20th century owes himself an audit of this video.

(Our thanks to Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight for the link.)

Watson Resigns

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 8:53 AM Eastern on 26 Oct. See below.]

No-one who knows the brilliant molecular biologist and co-discoverer of the structure of DNA, James Watson, through his personal writings could have been the least surprised by his outrageous remarks that today led to his resignation as chancellor of the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, an institution which he was largely responsible for building into the world-class research facility it has become. Through those writings — most notably the bestseller, The Double Helix, and its less interesting follow-up, Genes, Girls, and Gamow — one fast becomes aware that the man is and has always been something of a social misfit: an insufferable intellectual snob and a bourgeois bigot of the first water, albeit of the benign sort, with an unendearing childlike (childish) propensity to run off at the mouth on matters concerning his fellow human beings before first engaging his considerable brain.

Dr. Watson, who shared the 1962 Nobel Prize for describing the double-helix structure of DNA, and later headed the American government’s part in the international Human Genome Project, was quoted in The Times of London last week as suggesting that, overall, people of African descent are not as intelligent as people of European descent. In the ensuing uproar, he issued a statement apologizing “unreservedly” for the comments, adding “there is no scientific basis for such a belief.”

The man ought to be awarded the Nobel for back-pedaling.

Too bad. It’s not how we like to see and perceive our scientific heroes.

RTWT here.

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Update (8:53 AM Eastern on 26 Oct): More here.

Block-In Time In Your Busy Schedule To Sit Down With This

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:31 PM Eastern on 28 Oct. See below.]

In an epic 12,000-word piece for The New Republic which is putatively a review of three recent books on classical music and its place in our present culture — Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value, by Julian Johnson (Oxford University Press); Classical Music, Why Bother? Hearing the World of Contemporary Culture Through a Composer's Ears, by Joshua Fineberg (Routledge); and, Why Classical Music Still Matters, by Lawrence Kramer (University of California Press) — musicologist, music historian, and author of the monumentally epic six-volume, The Oxford History of Western Music, Richard Taruskin, after savagely pillorying all three books (some more than others) as well as their authors (some more than others), has the following of his own to say on the subject:

What draws listeners to music — not just to classical music, but to any music — is what cannot be paraphrased: the stuff that sets your voice a-humming, your toes a-tapping, your mind's ear ringing, your ear's mind reeling. And that is not the kind of response anyone's books can instill. It is picked up, like language, from exposure and reproduction, which eventually lead to internalization. Kramer leads prospective listeners astray when he counsels them, in a chapter about performing music, that the "most vital role for performance" in relation to the fixed score "is precisely to suggest verbal and imagistic connections with the world, the very thing that the traditional culture of classical music, in the twentieth century at any rate, tried to get us to regard as forbidden." If the value of music lies in the words and the pictures it prompts, then why not cut out the middle man and go straight for the words and the pictures? Like a good citizen of Chelm, a listener taking Kramer's advice will go to the market for a goose and come home with a bucket of water.

[...]

As a team of Texas researchers have recently announced, there are exactly 237 known reasons why people have sex. There are at least as many reasons why they listen to classical music, of which to sit in solemn silence on a dull dark dock is only one. There will always be social reasons as well as purely aesthetic ones, and thank God for that. There will always be people who make money from it — and why not? — as well as those who starve for the love of it. Classical music is not dying; it is changing. [...] Change can be opposed, and it can be slowed down, but it cannot be stopped. All three of our authors seem reluctant to acknowledge this ineluctable fact. But change is not always loss, and realizing this should not threaten but console.

Altered demographics and evolving social attitudes will work their inevitable effects. New or advancing media will continue to transform what they convey. We may not like the changes, any more than speakers of Latin may have liked the transformation of their language into French or Romanian. That, too, must have looked to some like corruption, degeneration, and death. Others learned to reap its rewards. Maybe it takes a historian to realize that mediation, the hydra-headed monster at which the sub-[Theodor]Adornos tilt, has been around as long as music has been, and its function is adaptive — which is to say, destructive and preservative in equal measure. Autonomous art, the recent product of a chance concatenation of circumstances, will last only as long as circumstances permit. But its origin, whatever it was, and its end, whatever it will be, are points on a continuum.

Don't take it from me. There is a great moment in an early episode of The Sopranos, everybody's favorite example right now of popular culture transmuted into art, in which a Hasid, taking a beating from a team of enforcers with Tony Soprano at their head, is putting up unexpected resistance. He reminds his tormentors of Masada, where tough Jews held out against the Romans. "The Romans," he snorts. "Where are they now?" "You're lookin' at 'em, asshole!" says Tony. Do not expect nuance from a mob boss; but if you agree that the line is funny, then you have acknowledged its kernel of truth. Toynbee could not have put it better.

It all sounds perfectly reasonable to us.

RTWT here.

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Update (6:31 PM Eastern on 28 Oct): For more on this, and some clarification of our position vis-à-vis Taruskin’s essay, see this post.

Dead In The Water

And that’s even before actually jumping in. I’m talking about the promotion phase of my POD self-publishing experiment of course. During this period of enforced waiting until the book has made it through the distribution process and shows up (or, rather, is made available to show up) on booksellers’ online lists and on their brick-&-mortar-store bookshelves (about 8-10 weeks from now), I’ve been investigating what’s available to me promotion-wise, and just what needs to be done in order to promote the book after it’s finally made it through that distribution process, and just an investigatory dipping of my toes into those promotional waters has already overwhelmed me by the impossibility of the demands I now see clearly will be made on me if the promotion is to be even marginally successful.

I’d naively imagined that a satisfactory promotion campaign could be waged for very little money and right from my own living room utilizing the Net almost exclusively. While the Net is an important part of promoting a book today, I now see its use is mostly supplementary. The core of any successful promotion, I discovered very quickly, involves two central elements: 1) getting the book reviewed by established reviewers in established venues; and 2) getting one’s ass out of that comfortable chair in front of one’s computer, and onto The Street to Meet 'n Greet and Press The Flesh of both booksellers and the reading public. Both those elements are sine qua non — quite literally — in any successful book promotion today.

The first is, in practical terms, quite literally impossible for a POD self-published title by an unknown author, and the second, for me personally, is a virtual impossibility. Me, go out on The Street again? Me, Meet 'n Greet and Press The Flesh of actual, real-world, real-live humans?

Not in this life.

To begin with, such a situation would prove an embarrassment for everyone concerned as in short order it would be discovered that I, the author of a mystery fiction novel, never read mystery fiction, and in fact know absolutely nothing about the genre beyond what I was forced to learn before writing A Deed of Dreadful Note by reading ten-gazillion best-selling mystery fiction titles, past and present, over a three-month period — the absolutely longest three months I’ve ever spent — in order to get a grasp of the genre “formula(s)” involved. Never in my life have I been exposed to so much utter literary trash. I confess, however, that it served to encourage me to write Deed, and bolstered my confidence in its future commercial success. I mean, if that utter literary trash saw commercial publication, Deed would be a shoe-in.

Uh-huh. Right.

Further, I’m just not a people-person kind of guy. Not my thing, generally speaking, and most especially so when my sole purpose would be to sell people something. I lack entirely the “Salesman Gene”, and cringe physically at the very thought of having to sell anything to anybody. During my younger days I had the infamous (but secretly cherished by me) reputation of not being able to sell a glass of cool water to a thirst-tortured man in the middle of the Sahara.

All too true, I’m afraid.

So, it seems I’m dead in the water even before jumping in, as I've said. Too bad, actually. The experiment’s an excellent idea. Just not with me as the experimenter.

High Culture Noise

Below is a view of one of the major display floors in London's Tate Modern Gallery & Museum.

No, the Tate was not hit by an earthquake, nor was the building contractor at fault. What you’re looking at is...a work of art on display at the Tate titled, Shibboleth.

Honest. Would we joke about a thing like that?

What’s that? Why is that crack in the floor titled Shibboleth, and what makes it a work of art?

What an airheaded, reactionary philistine you are not to be able to grasp that for yourself. I mean it’s clear to any art connoisseur that the work is a work of art (it's on display in a revered art museum, is it not?), and

represents borders, the experience of immigrants, the experience of segregation, the experience of racial hatred. It is the experience of a third-world person coming into the heart of Europe,

as the artist, Doris Salcedo, put it.

Or as the curators at the Tate put it:

Salcedo is addressing a long legacy of racism and colonialism that underlies the modern world. A shibboleth is a custom, phrase or use of language that acts as a test of belonging to a particular social group or class. By definition, it is used to exclude those deemed unsuitable to join this group.

Did you really need the artist and the curators to spell it all out for you like that?

Yeah, well, it’s a dirty job, but someone had to do it.

And here we thought the noisemakers and acoustic experimenters from Cage to Boulez to Stockhausen and beyond were the true charlatans of high culture.

O tempora! O mores!

You can read more justification of the crack as a work of art here.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

An arts section news story by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp, reporting on the 18 million euros ($25.5m USD) personal debt left by the late Luciano Pavarotti, opens with this lede graf:

Opera legend Luciano Pavarotti died with 18 million euros ($24.7 million Cdn) of personal debt, according to Italian media reports.

and closes with this closing graf:

The singer was known around the world for popularizing opera by appearing on stage with pop and rock stars.

What’s wrong with this picture?

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

From The Inbox

It’s flattering, we suppose, but still cause for some serious head-shaking notwithstanding.

A reader writes laconically (and in toto):

Nothing to say about “Noise”?

Why anything we might have to say about Alex Ross’s new book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, should be of such pressing interest to anyone is simply beyond us. Be that as it may, the reason for our silence is that our months-ago Amazon prepublication order for the hardcopy edition of the book is coupled with our months-ago Amazon prepublication order for the paperback edition of Simon Callow’s, Orson Welles: Volume 2: Hello Americans, which is due for release 27 November, the orders coupled because being shipped free under Amazon’s Super Saver Shipping. That means both books will be shipped together 28 November at the earliest.

Our answer to our correspondent, therefore, is, If we can wait, so can you.

Featured Past Post #47 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("The Classical Music Critic Of The Future") is now up on the right sidebar.

Chicken Little Gets The Ax

The Chicken Little of the classical music world, classical music critic and journalist Norman "Hard Facts" Lebrecht, has gotten the ax for laying a particularly bad egg.

For years, the British critic Norman Lebrecht has been throwing firebombs in the world of classical music, denouncing what he sees as industry evils in a provocative style that has sometimes been described as accuracy-challenged.

On Thursday, in an unusually crushing act of contrition, his publisher agreed to recall his latest book, destroy it, say “Sorry” and promise not to do it again — all over a few pages discussing Naxos Records and its founder, Klaus Heymann.

The book, “Maestros, Masterpieces & Madness: The Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record Industry,” was released in Britain in July. Mr. Heymann sued the publisher, Penguin Books, in the High Court of Justice, saying the book wrongly accused him of “serious business malpractices” based on false statements. He cited at least 15 statements he called inaccurate.

In a settlement with Mr. Heymann, Penguin issued a statement in court saying it apologized for “the hurt and damage which he has suffered.” It agreed to pay an undisclosed sum for legal fees and to a charity. “Penguin Books has also undertaken not to repeat these allegations and to seek the return of all unsold copies of the book,” the statement said.

Who ever said there’s no justice in this world?

RTWT here.

Microsoft And Me

I swear, by all and everything I hold near and dear, that I'm not making any of this up, nor am I adding even so much as an iota of exaggeration or embellishment; devices normally excused as an exercise of "poetic license" or some such. The following is merely a direct bit of truth-telling, straight up.

Regular readers of Sounds & Fury know about my acquisition a few weeks ago of a new toy: Microsoft Office Word 2007 (hereafter referred to as Word). I obtained my copy of Word by downloading from Microsoft online the entire Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 suite containing the Word application as, oddly enough, it's the cheapest way to acquire Word which is the only application in that suite of four applications I'll be using as I can see no reason to ever have to use any of the other three.

What I downloaded is called a Trial Version. The Trial Version operates exactly the same as the regular version except it works for only 90 days, after which time it simply ceases to function unless you choose to "convert" it into the regular version. The Trial Version is free, and a neat way to try everything out before deciding whether or not to actually buy the product. A sharp marketing move on Microsoft's part, and one that benefits both Microsoft and Microsoft's customers.

The way one converts a Trial Version to a regular version, or Perpetual Version as it's called, is to simply buy the retail version from any retailer, online or brick-&-mortar; open the CD case; and read off from some location therein or thereon a 25-character code called the Product Key which uniquely identifies that copy of the software. One then simply brings up any one of the four Trial Version Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 applications in one's computer, clicks on a button labeled variously (depending on the application) Activate or Convert (there are other methods provided, but they all do the same thing), types the Product Key into the text box that appears, clicks the OK button, and the Trial Version software then converts itself automatically into a Perpetual Version, registers itself online with Microsoft, and you're home free with a brand-new Perpetual Version of the entire Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 suite without having to either uninstall the Trial Version, or install a new Perpetual Version from the CD.

Simple, slick, painless, and foolproof. Typical Microsoft.

So, after using Word for some weeks and loving it, I order from Amazon the retail version of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007. Amazon ships on 22 September by snail-mail, and the expected delivery date is quoted as 29 September to 9 October using Super Saver free shipping. On 14 October the package has still not arrived, and so I call Amazon, they assume it's been lost in the mail and so ship me out another by regular snail-mail with a quoted delivery of 18 October. The package arrived yesterday — the original shipment, that is, not the replacement which as of this date has yet to arrive.

No problem. I now have my retail copy of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007 which contains the Product Key, and I'm all set to convert my Trial Version by the above outlined procedure.

But there is a problem. I can't open the very sexily- and totally unconventionally-shaped Lucite CD case (see illustration at the above Amazon link) to get inside and read the Product Key. I don't merely mean the case is hard to open. I mean I can't figure out how it's supposed to open. The bloody thing is like a Rubik's Cube, only more complex because no obvious way of manipulating it.

There's a clue, however. There's a little red-colored strip of tape sticking up from the case's top edge all but inviting one to give it a pull. And so I give it a pull. Nothing. I mean, nothing budges; not the little red strip nor anything else. I give the strip a harder pull. Again nothing. The strip is strong, I'll give it that, and it's not snapping from my pulling, but it refuses to budge either itself or any other part of the Lucite case.

After about three-quarters of an hour of pulling and tugging, along with a number of thoughtful but unsuccessful attempts at trying to figure out how the Lucite case is supposed to open, that little strip of unbudging red tape still remains my only hope. And so finally, in an access of sheer frustration and desperation, I get a pair of pliers, grasp the little red strip in its jaws, and give a healthy pull, upon doing which the tape finally snaps away from the Lucite case, defiant to the very end, and I'm now left completely helpless and bereft of hope in the face of this unyielding Lucite monster.

Now I'm really pissed. I get on the phone to Microsoft. I get one of their outsourced "technicians" somewhere in India. Oh Christ! Not this, too. But I'm at my wit's end, and I'm now really, really pissed, and nothing — nothing!, not even a barely understandable, outsourced Indian "technician" — is going to prevent my getting to the bottom of this, and getting that damn case open.

I tell her the problem as calmly as I'm able. She tells me it's easy to open the case. All I have to do is to "gently" pull that little red strip up and back, and the case will then swing open on its hinged bottom.

Hinged bottom? There's a hinge? Turns out, indeed there is — if one knows where to look for it. I tell her that the little red strip exists no more because when I pulled on it "gently," it snapped. She says, no problem. Microsoft has a special website that tells one, step by step, how to open the Lucite case, and there's certain to be another solution there waiting for me.

Microsoft has a special website devoted to telling its customers how to open its products' Lucite CD cases? What is that? Some kind of ironic or perverse joke?

Jesus!

But I've come this far — this far being something over an hour and a half at this point — and I'm not going to give up now. I'm going to get that bloody Lucite case opened come hell or high water. I ask her for the website's URL. She begins to spell it out for me. When she gets to the 32nd character with a promise of many more characters to come, I explode. I throw down the phone, go to my toolbox, get out the ball-peen hammer, and smash the Lucite case to smithereens. Mercifully, the CD is left unharmed, and — mirabile dictu! — staring at me from one of the shattered fragments is the 25-character Product Key. I pick up the phone, thank the "technician" for her help and bid her adieu, fire up my computer, load Word, click on Activate, enter the Product Key into the text box, click OK, and within seconds I'm home free and the proud owner of a brand-new Perpetual Version of Microsoft Office Home and Student 2007.

Piece of cake.

Late To The Party, We Know

Due our current involvement in things neither classical music- nor opera-related, we're rather late to this first-rate piece by blogger and New Yorker classical music critic, Alex Ross.

Writes Alex:

Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to procrastinate. Yet a nagging sense of possibility also drew me in. Classical music, my subject, was thriving on the Internet in unexpected ways. Not all blogs, I discovered, were devoted to cataloguing continuity errors in the films of George Lucas; a smattering of musicians, composers, and listeners were writing on music with intelligence and verve, reveling in the chance to express ideas that had no other immediate outlet. Between 1980 and 2000, classical music more or less disappeared from American network television, magazines, and other mainstream media, its products deemed too élitist, effete, or esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology student’s ruminations on György Ligeti’s Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in question — Tim Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler — was himself twenty-seven.

RTWT here.

Featured Past Post #46 (Administrative Note)

A new Featured Past Post ("The End of the Properly-working Dog") is now up on the right sidebar.

I'd forgotten this now more than three-year-old post which, given my latest enthusiasm, is most especially pertinent as it tells the story of how the POD self-published book I'm now flogging got its start some twelve years ago, and how and why it met the destiny which is now being played out. As a BTW, A Deed of Dreadful Note now has a new webpage which I set up late yesterday under my personal domain, acdouglas.com. It can be reached by clicking on the preceding link, or by clicking on the book cover image in the right sidebar.

Of Elephants And Literary Agents

It's been said that elephants have long memories. Perhaps they do, but an elephant's memory is as nothing compared with the memory of a literary agent.

A Deed of Dreadful Note, the book I just POD self-published and began flogging in my last post is, as I've indicated, an old ms; some 12 years old, to be more exact. At that time, the ms made the standard lit agent and small-press publisher rounds (major houses were out of the question for direct submission by me as they all required that submissions come from established lit agents only), and was actually picked up for representation by a series of three lit agents — one after the other, not at the same time, of course — who then attempted to find a publisher for it, but met with no success.

A fourth, who chose not to represent the ms, was bluntly truthful about why she declined. She liked the ms, but held out little hope of its ever being sold. It was, she told me straightforwardly, simply out of synch and out of sympathy with the times, book-market-wise. Worse, it was a small-niche genre piece that didn't really fit its declared genre; didn't meet the genre "specs," so to speak, its worst crime being that it had a male protagonist. It in fact didn't really fit any genre, but sort of fell between the genre "cracks" with the result that she couldn't quite make out just who the finished book's audience would be. That's a virtual Kiss of Death for any work of genre fiction.

Part of my flogging of the current POD self-published A Deed of Dreadful Note involved posts on several writers forums. Lo and behold, who should contact me by eMail in response to one of those posts but that very same agent. Her entire message, which was sans salutation:

Persistent little devil, aren't you. Good for you!

Amazing.

It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe, Pt. 2

In the initial installment of this saga (which can be read here), I related how I discovered the new publishing phenomenon of POD self-publishing when, by happy accident, I stumbled across the online POD self-publisher Lulu.com, and subsequently "published" a trade paperback of an old ms of mine. I was so impressed by the ease with which one could self-publish a book, and even more impressed by the physical product produced by that process, that I determined right then to investigate the matter more thoroughly to see whether an author — specifically an author of fiction — could overcome the strictly-for-losers stigma attached to self-publishing, and actually make real money by self-publishing his own work. Toward that end, I embarked on an informal research project to attempt to discover just what it is that's required to accomplish both.

The first thing I learned is that if one wants to see one's book for sale in markets other than Lulu's own Marketplace, one has to get one's physical book into the proper shape to meet industry standards, and then get that book entered into the book distribution system so that it's available for purchase by booksellers — both the online and brick & mortar sort — worldwide.

Turns out that latter, which sounds dauntingly formidable, is actually a piece of cake with Lulu. One simply buys one of the two distribution packages offered: Published By You (cost: $50), or Published By Lulu (cost: $100).

With the former, you are the publisher; with the latter, Lulu is the publisher. In both cases you as the author retain all rights to your work, and with each you make the same amount of money from sales of your book. The only significant difference between the two distribution packages is that with the former you must first register yourself as the publisher and apply for an ISBN (International Standard Book Number) for your book, an absolute necessity as nothing can be done with a book in the book marketplace absent its assignment of an ISBN.

Well, that's a royal pain in the ass, and a two- to three-week wait before the ISBN — which you will then own for that one book — is assigned. With the latter distribution package you don't have to do anything, and there's no wait involved. Lulu is the publisher, and the ISBN for your book is assigned instantly but is owned by Lulu as the publisher, not you, which is a mere technicality.

With both distribution packages, once the ISBN is assigned Lulu will then,

1: Place a scannable Bookland-EAN bar code on the back cover of the book.
2: Feed the bibliographic data on the book to the major international bibliographic databases so that the book will be findable by booksellers worldwide.
3: Convert your retail price (which you set yourself) into five currencies (US dollars, British pounds, Australian dollars, Euros, and Canadian dollars) to facilitate global availability and purchasing.
4: Ensure a listing of the book in the catalog of the major US wholesaler which gives access to the book for purchase by all US booksellers including Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Needless to say, I purchased the Published By Lulu distribution package.

So far, so great.

Now, about getting that book into physical shape to meet industry standards, there are two areas of concern: the book's cover (back, front, and spine), and the book's interior (the "inner matter"). In my case, the cover was a no-brainer as I simply used one of Lulu's standard templates which is guaranteed to meet industry standards (and not so incidentally, in terms of the physical materials used, exceeds them; the perfect-bound Lulu trade (6x9 format) paperback, both cover and interior, is simply gorgeous). I merely customized the cover with the background color (I use no images on my cover), text typefaces, font sizes and font colors of my choice (the text being my own, of course).

The inner matter required no work at all as my original formatting met industry standards. The only iffy part is that I created the required PDF file directly from Word by using Word's own PDF file generator which sounds like it might be something complicated but is another no-brainer as one simply clicks on SAVE AS PDF instead of the normal SAVE which latter saves the file as a regular Word document (. doc or .docx file). The iffy part is that while the resulting PDF file generated in that way is perfectly OK for printing a book for the Lulu Marketplace, Lulu tells us that to meet industry standards (i.e., to comply with the requirements of industry-standard print converters) the PDF file must be "distilled" using the Adobe Distiller which would mean purchasing from Adobe (the inventor of PDF) an almost $400 piece of software for which I've no other use, or uploading my .docx file to Lulu (instead of a PDF file) who will then do the PDF distilling for me.

I'm fairly certain, however, that I won't need that pricey piece of software or need Lulu to do the distilling as Word's PDF file generator generates a PDF file that's in compliance with a PDF standard called PDF/A which is a PDF standard set by the digital printing industry itself. I'll know within two weeks whether I'm right about that or not. (The printer for the book wholesaler — not the same printer Lulu uses for printing books for its own Marketplace which books, as I've already noted, exceed the physical standards of the books printed for the wholesaler — will examine the PDF file to make certain it's OK for their use, and if not report back what needs to be changed.)

Well, I just uploaded my final-proofed inner matter PDF file of that old ms to Lulu (the cover is generated by Lulu themselves), approved all the things that Lulu requires one to approve (a matter of a simple button click, actually), and within seconds got this eMail back from Lulu:

Thank you for approving "A Deed of Dreadful Note" [the book's title].

You have completed your portion of the Published By Lulu process.

Your book information will be sent to Bowker's Books In Print [the publishing industry's "bible" of bibliographic data] and once approved by Bowker, Lulu will upload your title to our distribution network. Should there be any problems with your title in Books In Print, we will contact you. This process is generally completed within 2-3 weeks. You can expect to see your book listed on Amazon and other online retailers within the next 6 to 8 weeks.

Regards,

Lulu Support

Assuming everything goes well with that, then the truly daunting, positively scary, but sine qua non business begins: the promotion of the book.

What's that I hear you saying? How am I going to go about doing that?

Not a clue — yet. Except to give you all a link to the web page I've set up for A Deed of Dreadful Note which provides a general description of the book, permits you to read Chapter 1 complete, and contains the link to A Deed of Dreadful Note's Lulu Marketplace page where you can purchase the trade paperback. A Deed of Dreadful Note's web page can be accessed here.

The New York Observer Does Ross

Great promo/PR piece in The New York Observer on New Yorker classical music critic Alex Ross and his first book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), set for release on the 16th of this month.

He characterizes his writing as somewhere between “pure, objective, ‘did the soprano sing slightly flat?’ kind of criticism, and something more like music appreciation or writing with a slightly educational aspect to it.”

“The whole point,” he explained over a late dinner at the Empire Diner on 10th Avenue in Chelsea, is “to not be too in-your-face or condescending.”

That would also be an apt way to describe the 39-year-old Mr. Ross. Slightly built, Mr. Ross was wearing a light blue shirt and black jeans, comfortable black shoes and a wedding ring on his right hand, in the European style. (He met his husband, actor and director Jonathan Lisecki, in a bar seven years ago; they got married last year in Canada.) He speaks softly and deliberately, but smiles easily and gets animated when discussing his interests—which, beyond classical music, include Orson Welles, running along the West Side Highway and his two cats, Penelope and Maulina (so named because she’s an Egyptian Mau). Penelope, he said, sometimes acts like a dog, and sometimes like a bird.

We were especially pleased to learn from this article that Mr. Ross is into the network TV show, Ugly Betty. Makes us feel less shamefaced about being into that wacky and endearing network offering ourself.

RTWT here.

(Personal side note to Alex: Hie thee to a photographer's studio posthaste. It's time.)

Memo To The God Of Summer

It was 90 degrees Fahrenheit today in my neck of the New Jersey woods. It's October. OCTOBER! Give it up, damnit! You'll have your chance again next year you insufferable little cretin.

Delicious

In a piece for Canada's The Gazette that covers several items, The Gazette's classical music critic, Arthur Kaptainis, writes:

New from the normally reliable Amadeus Press is Wagner Moments, a compilation of testimonials by various celebrities, great and small, about Wagner and his operas. The book is too packed with middlebrow bilge to merit a recommendation (you would never know from her listless observations that Margaret Atwood is a famous author).

One revealing contrast, on opposite pages, is between a lyrical excerpt from the autobiography of C.S. Lewis and some off-the-cuff commentary from Michael Levine: "I have always found the whole subject of Wagner daunting and slightly irritating. All that high art scares me. It still does. I mean, how could anyone say that the Ring cycle is The Greatest Work of Art? ... Oh, please ... The works are long and bombastic and Wagner himself was, well, way too cocky if not extremely offensive ...."

Levine then half-heartedly concludes that "Wagner was attempting to paint a picture of the human soul." What makes all this noteworthy is not the content but the fact that the speaker was entrusted with the design of Canadian Opera Company Ring productions that opened the Four Seasons Centre in Toronto last September. They were ugly, cheap and incoherent.[*]

The No. 1 qualification of the modern opera director or designer? Disdain for opera.

Someone who meets those needs handsomely is Katharina Wagner, the composer's 29-year-old great-granddaughter. She made her directorial debut at Bayreuth last summer with a staging of Die Meistersinger that included topless dancers and a caricature of Wagner in his underpants.

Katharina is organizing a putsch to take over the festival from her 88-year-old father Wolfgang, who likes her and is willing to leave. Her accomplice is Christian Thielemann, music director of the Munich Philharmonic and thus something of a natural rival of Bavarian State Opera music director Kent Nagano. Indeed, these conductors formerly competed for funds in Berlin. All the same, Thielemann has mentioned Nagano as one of the guests he would like to bring to Bayreuth — assuming he gets the job.

Which he might not. Katharina's cousin Nike and half-sister Eva, both 62, are also bucking for the Bayreuth throne.

"I don't want to be uncharming," Katharina said, drawing attention to the fact that Bayreuth schedules are drawn up years in advance. "But it's a fact on the grounds of age (they) would not have the possibility to develop their own profile. As soon as they were given free rein to make their own mark, they would be way beyond pensionable age."

I think the Wagners should start blogging.

So should Arthur Kaptainis.

We love it!

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* See this post for a sample.