Sounds & Fury

Gift

[Note: This post has been edited as of 11:56 AM Eastern on 11 Nov to correct a number of small errors and infelicities of expression.]

As I grow older, I find myself reading less and less fiction preferring instead to spend my book-reading time with non-fiction works in the fields of music, theoretical physics, and cosmology, the latter two in works written for laypersons. In fact, since my early thirties, I think the number of works of serious fiction I've read could be counted on the fingers of two hands, and, aside from the Harry Potter books, of genre fiction, none at all (an exception to this last is noted in passing below).

That said, although I've spent much of the past two decades off The Street, so to speak, I've not been living in a cave entirely, and so was aware of the huge publishing success of Dan Brown's 2003 mega-bestseller mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code. Unlike with the mega-bestseller Harry Potter books, however, I wasn't curious or provoked enough to read the thing just to see what all the fuss was about, nor did I bother to see the 2006 Ron Howard movie made from the book.

This past week, TNT telecast the movie, and so I took the opportunity to give it a look-see just to get an idea of what the book was all about. The plot premise was intriguing if a bit farfetched, but the movie, a crashing bore its Hollywood car chases notwithstanding, and that was enough to provoke me into getting hold of the book itself to see just what it was that made it a runaway bestseller, for if the movie was any indication of the book, there was nothing there (as I later discovered, the movie in fact missed or merely brushed past just about everything that made the book even marginally worth reading).

My first — and last — attempt at writing a novel-length work of mystery fiction (the S&F posts recounting the 13-years-ago genesis of which experiment and the recounting of my subsequent years-later experiment at self-publishing are collected here) taught me two things subsequent to the passing away of my first delusional flush of triumph wherein I was convinced I'd written a niche-market hit: 1) writing a work of genre fiction requires an intimate knowledge of and "feel" for the genre in which one is writing which knowledge and feel I foolishly, not to say arrogantly, wrongly imagined I could gain by reading some ten-gazillion novels of the genre within the space of a few months just to get the "formula"; and 2) that I've zero gift for the writing of fiction. In fact, the work I'd written was not so much written as manufactured to formula; the formula I'd wrongly imagined I learned from the reading of those ten-gazillion mystery novels. Excluding a mere handful of exceptions, those ten-gazillion mystery novels also shared one other thing in common beyond their adherence to the conventions of the genre (i.e., the "formula"): their prose writing was, shall we say, less than stellar. And so when I began reading The Da Vinci Code, I was prepared for less than stellar prose writing notwithstanding that the novel was a runaway bestseller. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for what I found.

There's hardly a page of The Da Vinci Code that does not induce multiple cringes at the execrable prose writing; writing so execrable it's almost beyond tolerance. Excluding from consideration the efforts of my own good self, I don't believe I've ever read a work of fiction, even mystery fiction, that could equal or surpass it in badness. And yet — and this, for me, is the real mystery — I kept on turning the pages!

Why? The characters are two-dimensional jokes; the incidents, contrived; and the plot, while inherently intriguing, is not much more so than the plots of a number of mystery novels I'd read previously in my above noted several-months mystery novel reading marathon. True, the expansion and embellishment of the quasi- or pseudo-historical basis of the inherently intriguing plot of The Da Vinci Code gave that plot a certain frisson not otherwise attainable. But still....

So, what's the answer; the explanation of the mystery of what it was that made me continue to turn the pages of this execrably written work of mystery fiction? I confess, I'm not really sure. What I'm certain of, however, is that no matter how deficient a writer of prose Dan Brown may be (or, rather, clearly is), he possesses a gift — i.e., that which cannot be acquired, but must be inborn — for the spinning out of a mystery narrative absent which gift even the best of fiction prose stylists would be helpless to write an effective novel of the genre. Further proof, if any were still needed, that writers and artists of all sorts, like idiots, are born, not made.

Students (and instructors) engaged in so-called "creative writing" courses, take note.

Heads-Up

In conjunction with the release of the paperback edition of his award-winning book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has announced a new expansion of the book's companion blog, The Rest Is Noise, to include a newly compiled audio-illustrated Glossary and a newly expanded Audio Guide to help sharpen readers' appreciation of what's discussed in the text.

Neato supplements to a neato book.

Too Good To Be True, But True Nevertheless

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:13 PM Eastern on 4 Sep. See below.]

A couple weeks ago we received an eMail with subject, "Too Good To Be True?", from constant reader Thomas Smith informing us of an unbelievable offer: the complete prose works of Richard Wagner, translated into English by William Ashton Ellis, in eight (count em'!) hardback, library-bound volumes for the majestic sum of — wait for it! — $15. No, that's not a typo. That's fifteen U.S. dollars — total.

As we've said, an unbelievable offer. However, since it was Amazon.com making the offer we ordered the set immediately, but forbore to post anything about it here pending our getting the actual volumes in our hot little hands.

Well, the offer is unbelievable no longer. The set has just arrived, its eight volumes bound in a handsome black library binding. The printing on the pages inside is something less than handsome, but not bad; not bad at all given the price.

Want a set for yourself? Here's the link. Only four sets left at that price at last check, so hop to it, and good luck to you.

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Update (6:13 PM Eastern on 4 Sep): The $15 offer is sold out. It sold out within an hour or two after we posted the above notice. The set is now listed at its regular price of $560.

Off-Message But Quotable Nevertheless

In the process of fashioning a more female-friendly world, we have created a culture that is hostile towards males, contemptuous of masculinity and cynical about the delightful differences that make men irresistible, especially when something goes bump in the night.

[...]

The exemplar of the modern male is the hairless, metrosexualised man and decorator boys who turn heterosexual slobs into perfumed ponies. All of which is fine as long as we can dwell happily in the Kingdom of Starbucks, munching our biscotti and debating whether nature or nurture determines gender identity. But in the dangerous world in which we really live, it might be nice to have a few guys around who aren’t trying to juggle pedicures and highlights.

What's that? Who's the embittered male who wrote that Neanderthal screed? That would be columnist Kathleen Parker, and the above is an excerpt from her new book, Save the Males: Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care.

Read the full excerpt here.

(Our thanks to the always indispensable Arts & Letters Daily for the link.)

It's The Text, Stupid!

In his collection of essays on criticism and art, The Sacred Wood (1920), T.S. Eliot wrote in the essay titled, "Tradition and the Individual Talent", "[T]he more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates." We suspect author P.D. Smith, writing for the blog, 3 Quarks Daily, would agree.

There is something about Kafka’s writing that gets under your skin. Perhaps that’s because he was always so uneasy in his own skin. Kafka described it as “a garment but also a straitjacket and fate”, suggesting that he saw skin as both clothing, something you choose to wear for a day before shedding, but also as a tightly bound involucre, restricting and suffocating the self — a biological fait accompli and a life sentence. Only Kafka could react so ambivalently and with such psychological acuity towards something most people take for granted and indeed scarcely think about.

[...]

Reading Kafka is the literary equivalent of an earthquake: as you read, you can feel the walls of reality begin to tremble and shake until eventually they come tumbling down around your ears. At the end, you find yourself wandering in an unfamiliar wasteland. All around are scattered the jumbled fragments of what you once recognised as normal life. Now you, the reader, have to begin putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again.

[...]

Unlike Leonardo da Vinci and Newton who used mirror writing or coded language in their notebooks to obscure their words, Kafka wanted to tell us something important. He didn’t set out to create a series of coded autobiographical puzzles in order to keep future literary historians in a job. The Germanist Martin Swales argues convincingly that the obsession with Kafka’s private life does not help us to understand Kafka’s writing: “an unremitting interest in the personality behind the utterance suggests that the utterance has in some way broken down”.

In a recent article, Zadie Smith has suggested that Kafka is “a writer sullied by our attempts to define him”. Novelist James Hawes, author of a new book called Excavating Kafka (or in the US, Why You Should Read Kafka Before You Waste Your Life), seems to agree: “The myth of Kafka's life so overshadows what he wrote that millions who have never read a word of his know, or think they know, something about the middle-European Nostradamus, almost unknown in his own lifetime, trapped in a dead-end job, whose mysterious, endlessly interpretable works somehow foresaw the Holocaust (and so on).”

[...]

Biographical interpretations are an excuse for lazy reading. Using an author’s life to crack the code of his texts is just too easy. There are no shortcuts to interpretation.

And, we might add, not only "just too easy," but too easily misleading.

RTWT here.

Wuorinen On Brokeback

When it was announced a day or so ago that bad-boy postmodernist opera impresario Gérard Mortier had commissioned bad-boy serialist Charles Wuorinen to compose an opera for the New York City Opera based on brilliant writer Annie Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, we first did a sharp intake of breath, and then — most curiously for us, all things considered — nodded our head in assent. It'll work, we decided.

Following are some thoughts on the matter by the commissioned composer himself in answer to questions put to him by Peter Dobrin, one of the classical music critics of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Why did this project appeal to you?

Well, it has the potential to be a very dramatic thing — operatic doomed love and tragedy, the conflict between love and duty if you will. It’s just the basic material out of which many operas and tragedies can be made. It’s just that the circumstances are updated to our time.

Have you done any work on it yet?

We don’t yet know whether Annie Proulx will do the libretto, so I haven’t done anything directly. We have had a few preliminary discussions and I have a number of other works to get out of the way. I see starting in earnest beginning in 2009.

What will determine whether Proulx does the libretto?

It’s a question of time. We are all very busy. I don’t want to speak for her. I think she wants to, but there may be practical considerations that may get in the way.

What if she doesn’t do the libretto? Would you write it yourself?

We have some other ideas in mind. I doubt I would do it. It’s not a wise idea generally speaking.

What are the big challenges in this project, at least as you see them now?

Without knowing what form the libretto takes it’s difficult to be specific. I think that I would like to have a somewhat larger role for the wives of the two principal characters than in the current story. For questions of vocal balance and for theatrical aspects as well.

Have you thought about structure? Will it follow the film or the original story?

No, I think it will follow the story. The film has its own character, and I am not partial to referencing the film. One thing the film fails to do is to make quite clear the degree to which the landscape, the mountains, the effect it all has on the characters. It’s a very hard and unforgiving environment in which these people have to function and it does prevent them from taking the kind of escape routes they might otherwise have. I know that Annie Proulx is very much engaged by this question, not just in this story but in others that come from the same collection. I want to make sure that we have elements of menace in the landscape clearly delineated.

And that last is the key both to Proulx's story, and to why we decided a score by Wuorinen will work.

RTWT here.

A Little Depression Never Hurt Anyone

Here's something for y'all to think — and think hard — about.

North Carolina writer Eric Wilson thinks America's current addiction to happiness threatens the arts.

[...]

Wilson writes about it in his new book, Against Happiness ($20, Farrar, Straus & Giroux), which paints a disturbing portrait of what happens to art in a world filled with "happy types."

He predicts an America of vacant smiles and bland sameness. It's a place where poetry is a Hallmark card and where music is, well, Muzak.

"I fear we're creating a country where no one would aspire to write a novel like Moby-Dick again," said Wilson.... No one would even want to read it, because who needs Moby-Dick when you've got Dr. Phil?"

[...]

Dr. Thomas Svolos, an adjunct professor and the vice chairman of the department of psychiatry at the Creighton University School of Medicine, thinks Wilson may be on to something.

It's especially true because the psychiatric community has long known about the link between artistic genius and manic-depressive disorder. History is full of examples.

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven, painter Vincent van Gogh and writer Sylvia Plath all were famous depressives. And Springsteen was purportedly in a deep malaise when he entered a lonely room in Colts Neck, N.J., in 1981 to record "Nebraska."

"When you're melancholy, you tend to step back and examine your life," Svolos said. "That kind of questioning is essential for creativity."

But for happy types, life's deeper meaning may not be an active question. Wilson makes that point in his book, and Svolos thinks it points to an even broader cultural concern.

Before the 1950s, clinical depression was considered an extremely rare mental illness, affecting less than 5 percent of the population.

Now, Svolos said, depression is a catchall term.

"It applies to everything from a life-threatening mental illness to ordinary sadness or disappointment," he said. "It's all the same and often receives the same treatment."

And that treatment often involves the use of antidepressant drugs, which have been readily available since the 1990s.

[...]

"This overemphasis on drugs has become a knee-jerk reaction that's thrown our whole concept of happiness out of whack," Svolos said. "Happiness is now seen as a lack of suffering as opposed to accomplishing important societal goals, like creating art."

Sadly, all too true — except, that is, that last imbecile bit about the creation of art being an accomplishing of an "important societal goa[l]."

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Believe It Or Not, The Man's A Tenor!

Believe it or not, the most incisive and eloquent review of the half-dozen or so we've read of Alex Ross's first-rate book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was written not by a professional book reviewer or by a musicologist, but by an operatic tenor(!), the most excellent Ian Bostridge.

The price paid for classical music’s proximity to power was heavy, and the central chapters of Ross’s book lay bare the moral somersaults composers turned, the degradation into which they sank. The cultural theory which the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century had inherited from the nineteenth gave artists a dangerous potency, the all too useful capacity to become, in Stalin’s words, "engineers of human souls". Stalin’s amateur interest in classical music — he reputedly owned ninety-three opera recordings, writing critical remarks on his record sleeves — did nothing to protect composers like Prokofiev and Shostakovich from the cultural policy of a regime which saw no role for anything that smacked of autonomous art. Shostakovich’s output veered between the cryptic privacy of his chamber music, the crassness of his patriotic cantatas and songs, and the still-contested "irony" of the major public works. Ross’s analysis of the possibility of irony in music is at one and the same time sceptical and appreciative. "To talk about musical irony", he writes, "we first have to agree what the music appears to be saying, and then we have to agree on what the music is really saying. This is invariably difficult to do." His concluding advice is that one should "stay alert to multiple levels of meaning", making Shostakovich’s symphonies, the Fifth or even the supposedly propagandistic Seventh, "rich experience[s]". The consequence of Ross’s superbly nuanced historical accounts of both Prokofiev’s and Shostakovich’s music is to send one back to the music with new ears.

RTWT here.

But Of Course

Alex Ross has received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism for his book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

But of course.

Our hearty congratulations to Alex on his receiving this well deserved accolade.

Well Whadayaknow

A culture commentator who gets all his Wagner facts and commentary straight. New York Times culture commentator, Alan Riding, in his New York Times Sunday Book Review review of Jonathan Carr’s new book, The Wagner Clan, writes:

Is this how Richard Wagner should be judged: by his stormy life and by the oft abhorrent behavior of his family? Not in the view of true devotees of his music — and they are legion. Every summer, the lucky few with hard-to-get tickets traipse to Bayreuth in Bavaria for the opera festival that Wagner himself created in 1876. They enter the shrine of the Festspielhaus. They visit the composer’s grave. They are even welcomed by his octogenarian grandson, Wolfgang.

On the other hand, how can one ignore that this artist’s stirring music and anti-Semitic views were warmly embraced by Hitler, and that Wagner’s family identified his music with a Nazi regime that even the composer might have opposed?

[...]

Still, in Carr’s view, the past cannot be buried until the Wagner family admits it “made a terrible mistake.” Yet Wagner’s operas remain immensely popular, despite the sins of his family. And perhaps here lies the only shortcoming of “The Wagner Clan.” Carr has not tackled just what makes Wagner’s music so intoxicatingly dangerous. After all, without the music, the Wagners would have been just another family.

RTWT here.

Choice Morsel

Alex Ross, in an update to his blog post on his Colbert Report appearance — an update which we missed due our monitoring of Alex’s blog via its RSS feed exclusively — quotes a choice morsel from the “interview” that ended up on the cutting-room floor due to time constraints:

ROSS: ... and the Beatles were listening to avant-garde works by John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and ended up putting Stockhausen's face on the cover of Sgt. Peppers.
COLBERT: OK, but I’ve never heard of this guy Stockhausen.
ROSS: He believed he was from the star Sirius.
COLBERT: The dog star.
ROSS: He recently died — he’s on his way back to Sirius.
COLBERT: It sounds like some kind of cult.

Alex doesn’t record his response (if any) to Colbert’s last comment, but we could suggest one. A simple, direct, and laconic, “It is.”

This Ought To Prove Interesting

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 4:18 PM Eastern on 30 Jan. See below.]

Bet you can’t guess who will be making an appearance on Comedy Central's “The Colbert Report” tonight (11:30 PM EST). None other than Alex Ross. Yes, that Alex Ross, author of The Rest Is Noise, the blog and the book. This is what comes of bona fide intellectuals flirting with and dabbling in the world of popular culture. Well, if nothing else, this little foray tonight ought to prove interesting — at least.

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Update (2:50 PM Eastern on 30 Jan): If you missed the “interview”, you can watch it here. Alex pretty much held his own, we’re not surprised to report, and perhaps the “interview” did what it was supposed to do book-promotion-wise, but, really, was it absolutely necessary?

We think not.

Update 2 (4:18 PM Eastern on 30 Jan): Wherein we’re accused of “manifest envy of Ross' success” (see Comments section).

Heads-Up

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 8:33 AM Eastern on 15 Jan. See below.]

Undoubtedly due the huge (and justified) success of his book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross, long passed over by the show’s producers, will at last be interviewed tonight on PBS’s The Charlie Rose Show.

Be there or be square!

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Update (8:33 AM Eastern on 15 Jan): Might we also suggest to Alex that in addition to taking to heart The Standing Room’s excellent suggestion to “please, please bitchslap him when he tries to talk over you,” that before answering any of Mr. Rose’s epic-length questions, he first pause a beat or two to make certain Mr. Rose's mini-disquisition-posing-as-a-question is done, then, in a benign tone of voice, innocently reply, “I'm sorry, is there a question buried somewhere in all that?”

Just a suggestion.

Doing What Needs To Be Done

In October of last year, I wrote a post titled “Dead In The Water” which gave a brief account of the end of my brief POD self-publishing adventure involving my “cozy” mystery novel, A Deed of Dreadful Note. What it said, in short, was that I was unwilling to do what I finally saw needs to be done in order to give the novel even a chance of commercial success.

In today’s Boston Globe there’s a story about one, Brunonia Barry, an author who took a similar POD self-publishing route for her first mystery novel, The Lace Reader, who was willing to do what needs to be done in order to give her novel a chance of commercial success, and ended up by having her self-published novel sold to a mainstream publisher, William Morrow, in a literary auction which netted Ms. Barry a $2M advance for the novel and for an additional one in future.

And what had to be done by Ms. Barry in order to achieve this admittedly singular result? Here’s a sampling:

Barry and [Gary] Ward [Barry’s husband] were willing to do all [that needed to be done], and spen[t] freely in the process — more than $50,000 before they were finished....

[...]

By early last year, they were ready to test the market. The manager of The Spirit of '76 Bookstore in Marblehead put them in touch with store-based book clubs, whose members said they would be willing to test-read the manuscript.

"I would go to the meetings and take notes," Barry said. "I asked them to be brutally honest: 'Where did you stop reading? Did you identify with this character? What did you think of the mother?'" With the feedback, she made some minor changes.

They incorporated their company as Flap Jacket Press and planned to release The Lace Reader last September. They set up a website and hired a copy editor, jacket designer, and book publicist, Kelley & Hall of Marblehead. They attended bookseller conventions, handing out advance copies and buttonholing booksellers. Kelley & Hall sent copies to book bloggers and trade magazines such as Publishers Weekly and promotional announcements to 700 independent bookstores.

Then last summer came two big breaks: First, Kelley & Hall helped lan[d] a deal with a Tennessee distributor, Blu Sky Media Group; second, a rave review appeared in Publishers Weekly. The Lace Reader was hailed as "a captivating debut."

Still, the couple had to close the deal with booksellers. They ordered a first printing of 2,500, then began to visit stores, trying to get them to stock the book. Among the first was Salem's Cornerstone Books.

"Sandy [Ms. Barry’s nickname] dropped her book off," said Beth Simpson, events coordinator of Cornerstone Books in Salem. "I didn't know her. I like to do an author appearance to generate interest; otherwise the book will just sit on the shelf." She arranged to have Barry do a reading, then called Salem and Marblehead newspapers, which ran stories about the reading.

"That generated incredible interest," Simpson said. "We had a handful of people a day coming in, asking if we had the book. At the appearance, we had about 40 people, which was a big crowd for an unknown author. We sold out in a blink — probably 80 to 100 books. We don't sell 80 to 100 books of Stephen King or Dennis Lehane."

Word spread. Several teachers read the book, and both Swampscott and Marblehead high schools added it to the literature curriculum.

That’s what needs to be done, all right, not to mention that the novel itself has to be worth the time, effort, and money involved.

In writing this post I don’t for an instant mean to even imply that had I done the same for my novel that it would have achieved even a small fraction of the success now enjoyed by Ms. Barry’s novel. She’s apparently a genuine writer who wrote a genuine novel, not some dilettante who turned out a tiny-niche-market genre novel on a whim; a genre novel that was more manufactured to formula than written. In writing this post it’s my intention to point out that in today’s world self-publishing need no longer be a mere exercise in vanity as it has been since forever, but is today a commercially viable publishing route for an author to follow in order to get his work out to the public and make money from the enterprise into the bargain. Perhaps not the kind of money made by Ms. Barry — in that respect, her case is quite exceptional — but enough for a genuine writer to make writing and marketing his own work a profitable fulltime occupation.

It’s a brave new publishing world out there.

Sonofagun!

Despite an almost total lack of promotion and publicity, my adventure in POD publishing — the “cozy” mystery novel, A Deed of Dreadful Note — is now listed by and available for purchase from booksellers Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and Borders.

Sonofagun! Makes one feel like a real author, it does, even though the listings do need some corrections (being handled now by the publisher, Lulupress).

And The Beat Goes On

As an exemplar of the colossal ignorance of current-day thinking, both lay and scientific, whenever it concerns Freudian psychoanalytic theory, this article that appeared several days ago in the Brit Telegraph describing the findings of a Harvard Medical School Centre for Sleep and Cognition study on dreams sponsored by the Telegraph would be hard to beat. Reports the article’s author, the Telegraph’s science editor, Roger Highfield,

Freud called our dreams the "royal road to the unconscious". His seductive idea was that their content is shaped by experiences early in life, creating the hope that psychoanalysis could use our dreams to reveal our childhood miseries, and thereby cure our inner torment.

Today, however, a study of dreams conducted for The Daily Telegraph by Harvard University has come to the inescapable conclusion that Freud put too much emphasis on our formative years.

Although dreams are bizarre and otherworldly, they are as likely to be moulded by mundane, humdrum and everyday activities as by life-changing events.

[...]

As part of this [study], we invited visitors to our website, telegraph.co.uk, to provide details of dreams that were fresh in their mind, so that they could be analysed by Dr Erin Wamsley, a colleague of Dr Stickgold.

Almost 300 people were prepared to fill in a detailed online questionnaire and the responses were described as "of good quality" she says. The overall findings, she reveals, "do not fit neatly with the psychoanalytic/Freudian presumption that early life experiences are a primary source of dream content".

In fact, they are much more likely to be shaped by events of the past week than a childhood trauma. "Overall, mundane, unimportant events were as likely to be identified as more significant life events – a TV commercial they had seen, or something boring that a friend said to them," says Dr Wamsley.

Indeed, even among these recent events, we failed to dwell on the most interesting in our dreams. "Contrary to the folk-psychological belief that we dream only of the most important events in our lives, the memory sources identified by participants were not necessarily events of any significance to the dreamer," explains Dr Wamsley.

"One fifth of all memory sources were described as 'not at all important' to the dreamer, while approximately half, 47 per cent, were described as being less important than an average waking event."

A classic example of a hundrum experience invading our sleep was the participant who dreamt of being at a school music lesson in which Art Garfunkel was a guest teacher, addressing his class with an Irish accent.

"He asked the class (who were all females whom I remember from years ago) to each individually sing Sound of Silence, but to make it as original and individual as possible. Though nervous, I also felt very giggly, too, mainly owing to the fact that Art Garfunkel was wearing loose white shorts (which he had borrowed from his wife), and every time he bent over, or uncrossed his legs, he exposed a mass of pubic hair."

While Freud would not doubt have seized on this as signalling a repressed childhood memory, the more prosaic explanation was that the dreamer had, earlier in the day, watched a Simon and Garfunkel video.

But this is precisely what Freud established in his landmark seminal work; viz., that the material of the manifest dream content — i.e., that part of a dream that makes itself immediately perceptible to our consciousness — is always presented in terms of an innocuous experience or experiences of the past 24-48 hours, but that that material is itself never the psychologically significant content of the dream which is contained in what Freud termed the latent dream content, but is always the product of what Freud called the "dream work", the complex and intricate cloaking (distorting) mechanism that prevents the dream’s raw, “dangerous” latent content from reaching our conscious mind directly.

Neither Mr. Highfield nor, apparently, Harvard’s researcher, Dr. Wamsley, made any distinction whatsoever between a dream’s manifest and latent content which is tantamount to a fundamental rewriting of what Freud wrote — a rewriting that ignores entirely a central pillar of Freud’s argument — and then proceeded to disagree with and criticize the substance of that rewriting as if that rewriting was what Freud himself actually wrote.

Why are we not surprised.

A Sad If Sobering Bit Of Reading For The New Year

Bryan Appleyard of The Sunday Times provides us a sad if sobering bit of reading to launch the new year:

Something happened in 2007, something ended. Old gods stumbled and fell. New ones sprang up. But they sprang up in their thousands. That’s the point these days.

Technology, hype and the sheer profligacy of the arts when confronted with a large, hungry and wealthy audience have created a climate of excess — just too many artists, too much money, too many works and too much noise. Who knows who, now, is great? Even if greatness existed, how would we find it? Do we want greatness, or would we simply prefer choice?

RTWT here.

Happy New Year!, everyone.

A Bit Of Noise On, The Rest Is Noise: The Book — Part Deux

[Note: This post has been edited as of 5:56 PM Eastern on 6 Dec to correct some minor errors and infelicities of expression, and for clarity.]

We’ve now finished reading The Rest Is Noise, and what we had to say in this post about Part I holds true for Parts II and III. By book’s end we in fact found ourselves even more awed by Mr. Ross’s depth and breadth of learning, and our admiration for and pleasure in his lapidary prose only increased the more familiar and intimate we became with it. We’ve also come to admire his music-historian evenhandedness and open-mindedness, most especially in the chapters covering the avant-garde of the fifties and beyond for much of the “music” of which we’ve little, if any, good to say. (Yes, we felt constrained to insert those nasty scare-quotes as we’ve no compelling reason to be music-historian evenhanded or open-minded in our assessment, such as it is.)

Although we can’t imagine anyone with an interest in classical music not buying a copy of The Rest Is Noise, if you’ve no intention of buying the book, we urge you to at least hie yourself to your local public library and read the chapter titled, “’Grimes! Grimes!’: The Passion of Benjamin Britten” which is perhaps the most beautifully written and deeply felt chapter in the entire book. Britten’s Peter Grimes is one of our most cherished works in the entire literature, and Ross does it full justice in this chapter even though we found ourselves at odds with parts of his reading of this everywhere ambiguous work. It’s testimony to the persuasive power of Ross’s prose and to his insightful and learned analysis that we’ve determined to give the work a fresh, new hearing with Ross’s ears, so to speak. Who knows? After we’re done, we might find ourselves in perfect agreement with what he had to say — or not. Either way, makes no difference. The point is, what he had to say all but compels us to revisit the work with new ears, and that, after all, is the most important thing, isn’t it. The same could be said for all the music Ross discusses in this book no matter whether that music is known to the reader or not. Which brings us to our final comment on The Rest Is Noise.

If ever a book cried out for companion CDs, The Rest Is Noise is it. Why no such CDs (or high-bit-rate MP3 downloads) were prepared for or offered with the hardcover edition of this book is a mystery too impenetrable for our meager mind to unravel. At best, it seems an egregious oversight; at worst, a monumental marketing stupidity. That Mr. Ross has up on his blog, The Rest Is Noise, brief, standard-bit-rate MP3 samples (or links to same) of some of the music discussed in each chapter is no fully satisfactory answer and no fully satisfactory solution although it certainly beats having nothing. Farrar, Straus and Giroux needs to hop on the stick PDQ to correct this oversight or this stupidity as the case may be.

Better late than never, as the old saw goes.

A Bit Of Noise On, The Rest Is Noise: The Book

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:10 AM Eastern on 6 Dec. See below.]

At this late date there’s little of critical value to be said about Alex Ross’s splendid book, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, that hasn’t already been said by those better qualified than we to pass critical judgment. We received our copy of the book only two days ago and started reading almost as soon as we unpacked it from its Amazon carton, and, with interruptions, have so far managed to read only to page 212, the end of Part I of this three-part, 624-page volume. Even so, we feel compelled to express our awe of Mr. Ross’s depth and breadth of learning, and our enormous pleasure in his trademark lapidary prose — prose that’s image-rich and richly suggestive while simultaneously remaining perfectly lucid even when dealing with matters technical — before anything we have to say becomes so passé that one could with justice conclude that, like Rip Van Winkle, we’ve been asleep for twenty years. And what we have to say so far is that any objections one might feel constrained to lodge against Mr. Ross’s maiden book-writing effort (as opposed to honest disagreement with some of what he has to say, or remonstrations concerning what he failed to say) can be but mere quibbles and perhaps not even worth the mentioning.*

The Rest Is Noise was chosen by The New York Times as one of the 10 Best Books of 2007 — one of the ten best books, period; not merely one of the ten best in category.

Based on our impressions so far, we’re not in the least surprised.

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* Worth the mentioning or not, herewith our quibbles (so far).

QUIBBLE 1: The book’s opening chapter, "The Golden Age", opens with the premiere of Strauss’s Salome; a right and proper fanfare to usher in the tale of the music of the 20th century. But with the book’s detailed description of the opera itself and the audience’s reaction at the premiere performance, it goes on far too long before setting forth the Wagnerian prelude to that tale (recounted in the chapter's following subsection, “Richard I and III”); a prelude absent which Salome would not have been possible. Better it would have been had the book’s opening fanfare ended with the page-six sentence, “Then silence descended, the clarinet played a softly slithering scale, and the curtain went up,” followed by “Richard I and III”, and then a transition back to the detailed description of the opera itself and the audience’s reaction at the premiere performance.

QUIBBLE 2: A clear lapsus calami, certainly, but jarring nevertheless, is the page-seven sentence, “First, the notes C-sharp and G are separated by the interval known as the tritone, one step [sic] narrower than the perfect fifth.” The tritone interval is, of course, a half-step narrower than a perfect fifth.

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Update (6:10 AM Eastern on 6 Dec): Part Deux of this review can be read here.

The Day Of The Digital Book

Read this January 2006 blog post. Then peruse this product page for the details of this just announced device (see Amazon's front page for the actual announcement), and view all the embedded videos. Except for special editions and books of the coffee table sort, The Day Of The Digital Book and the beginning of the death of the paper-and-ink book has arrived — almost. All that’s needed now is a small physical refinement (the device needs a retractable or fold-back cover), and a price tag of $39.00 instead of the current $399.00. Not that far off as soon as Amazon and their partner publishers — which include at the very start every major publisher in the US and some small presses as well — finally understand they’re in the book-selling business, not the electronic hardware business. If they’re really smart about this, they’ll even sell the device at a loss if they have to. Think Gillette and the safety razor.