Sounds & Fury

The Kindle Touch: A Near-Paragon Of An eBook Reader

In November of 2009 we made a plea on S&F to Amazon's Jeff Bezos to price the Kindle eBook reader at $99 rather than the $259 which was the selling price of the Kindle at the time even if he had to sell each unit at a loss as it would hugely profit Amazon overall (and the eBook movement worldwide) for him to do so, and asked whether he was listening. Apparently he was, for we now have the Kindle Touch ("touch" for its touchscreen controls) priced at — mirabile dictu! — $99, and it's a real beauty both in appearance and function.

We've been using the new Kindle Touch with Wi-Fi connectivity (thank you!, Verizon FiOS) for but a few days now but that's more than sufficient time for us to declare that this version of the Kindle is a near-paragon of what an eBook reader should be, never mind that it lacks the ability to reproduce color (for a catalog of its many features and functions check out the page at the above link). The Kindle Touch is beautiful to look at and hold, just the right size, its E Ink display a joy to read, its minimalist button controls philosophy just the right design philosophy for an eBook reader, and its $99 price tag painless (the ads that display themselves when the Kindle Touch is not in use reading the text of an eBook are in no way disruptive). We would only suggest to Mr. Bezos that the Kindle Touch be built with a more powerful processor so that page turns and pop-up screens are instant (as opposed to merely very fast) and screen refreshes invisible. We would also suggest that the Kindle Touch be sold with a slipcase storage case and AC charger as standard equipment — without raising the price, of course — which today must be purchased separately as the Kindle Touch really needs both in regular use.

God bless technology, Amazon, and Jeff Bezos. It's a great time to be alive.

Gee, What A Surprise — Or The Beginning Of The End

In a December 2010 entry titled, "Chutzpah", we wrote the following:

In the event you've been living in a cave isolated from the outside world for the past decade or so, we'd like to call to your attention that it's the year two-thousand-and-ten A.D., Print On Demand (POD) publishing is available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, and the eBook, also available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, has finally come into its own. So, the question is: Why, then, the necessity or need today for book publishing houses? What function do they perform or what service do they provide that an author could not perform or provide himself, or hire experts to perform or provide for him? In short, why are book publishing houses still in business today at all?

Answer: Beats us. Book publishing houses are an anachronism; a relic of the pre-digital past who have — or rather, should have — no place whatsoever in today's book publishing market for new books.

Today, we read this not unexpected revelation.

Sounds to us like the beginning of the end for old-world-style book publishing as far as the general market for new books is concerned, and sounds to us as well the right way to go. We suspect the transition will take almost a generation before it's fully accomplished, but accomplished it will almost certainly be.

Caution! Shameless, Self-Serving Commercial Ahead!

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 9:33 AM Eastern on 24 Jun. See below.]

The spanking new Amazon Kindle edition of my paperback potboiler murder mystery, A Deed of Dreadful Note, is now available in Amazon's online Kindle eBook Store. How much will a copy of this Kindle edition set you back? A whopping $2.99 (I wanted to set the retail price at a neat $1 but Amazon's new pricing schedule won't let me set the price lower than the aforementioned $2.99 [ACD 6/24 - see update below]). The really nifty thing about this Kindle edition of A Deed of Dreadful Note is that you don't have to actually own a Kindle to read it. All you need is your PC or Mac and Amazon's superb Kindle software for computers which can be downloaded for free from Amazon here (Kindle for PC) or here (Kindle for Mac).

Dirt-cheap eBook, perfect for beach reading (Happy summer solstice, everyone!), AND free software. Why, it's the bargain of the bloody century it is. Get yours now!

OK. Commercial break over. As you were. We now return you to our regular scheduled programming.

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Update (9:33 AM Eastern on 24 Jun): Glorioski! I just found out what I have to do in order to sell the Kindle edition of A Deed of Dreadful Note for a list price of $1 and have done the, um, deed. The price change will be reflected on the eBook's Amazon Kindle page within the next 24 hours. My apologies to all those who forked over $2.99 for a copy. Had I the mechanism to give you all a refund for the difference I would do so willingly and with pleasure.

Delicious

This closing graf of a fairly lengthy negative review in The New Criterion by writer Joseph Epstein of a new book by academic Stanley Fish ranks among the most delicious (and devastating) literary coups de grâce we've ever had the pleasure of savoring. Wrote Mr. Epstein:

I seem to have written more than three thousand words without a single kind one for How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One. To remedy this, at least partially, let it be noted that, at 165 pages, index and acknowledgments and biographical note on the author included, it is a short book.

RTWT here.

Shape and Ring

In a review of Stanley Fish's newest book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One, written for the The Book, the online book review section of The New Republic, Simon Blackburn, the Bertrand Russell Professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge, and a Research Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, had this to say:

For Fish a great sentence is like a great athletic performance. It is an example of something done supremely well, so well that it cannot be bettered. Other similar feats will come along, but only to stand alongside it. What exactly is done in such a performance? There is no single answer, indeed no finite answer since there is no limit to the things that can be done with words. But it is what Conrad called the “shape and ring” of sentences, the perfect adaptation of form to achievement, that Fish wants to share.

It is wrong to think that the sentence is a mere slave, whose function is to bear content, which, while being the really important thing, is also something that could equally have been borne by another. Change the shape and ring, and you change everything. The balance, the alliterations, the variation, the melody, the lights glimmering in the words, can work together to transform even an ugly thought into something iridescent....

[...]

Do shape and ring matter? Perfection always matters. Without the sensitivity Fish admires, we would not only have no great literature. We would also have had no Gettysburg address, no Churchill, and no Martin Luther King, Jr. If we cannot move peoples’ souls, we cannot move their ways of living either: “Let me write the songs of a nation, and I care not who writes its laws.”

Quite right — all of it.

RTWT here.

The Book

It may seem strange for an atheist Jew such as we to confess a love for the King James version of the Old and New Testaments of the Christian Bible, but that would be a myopic view of the matter as the King James Bible is as much a work of literature as it is a religious text. Writer and author Ann Wroe, obituaries and briefings editor of The Economist and author of Being Shelley, has a lovely piece in the current issue of Intelligent Life titled "In The Beginning Was The Sound" that has much to say about the King James Bible as literature.

Like many Catholics, I came late to the King James Bible. I was schooled in the flat Knox version, and knew the beautiful, musical Latin Vulgate well before I was introduced to biblical beauty in my own tongue. I was around 20, sitting in St John’s College Chapel in Oxford in the glow of late winter candlelight, though that fond memory may be embellished a little. A reading from the King James was given at Evensong. The effect was extraordinary: as if I had suddenly found, in the house of language I had loved and explored all my life, a hidden central chamber whose pillars and vaulting, rhythm and strength had given shape to everything around them.

RTWT here.

(Our thanks to ArtsJournal for the link.)

Chutzpah

In the event you've been living in a cave isolated from the outside world for the past decade or so, we'd like to call to your attention that it's the year two-thousand-and-ten A.D., Print On Demand (POD) publishing is available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, and the eBook, also available to anyone with a book to publish at little to no cost, has finally come into its own. So, the question is: Why, then, the necessity or need today for book publishing houses? What function do they perform or what service do they provide that an author could not perform or provide himself, or hire experts to perform or provide for him? In short, why are book publishing houses still in business today at all?

Answer: Beats us. Book publishing houses are an anachronism; a relic of the pre-digital past who have — or rather, should have — no place whatsoever in today's book publishing market for new books. And yet one reads articles such as this one bemoaning the lessening power and influence of book publishing houses and the rise in power of brick-and-mortar book mega-stores and online book retailers with bewildering regularity.

What happens when an industry concerned with the production of culture [the commercial book publishing industry] is beholden to a company with the sole goal of underselling competitors [Amazon.com]? Amazon is indisputably the king of books, but the issue remains, as Charlie Winton, CEO of the independent publisher Counterpoint Press puts it, "what kind of king they’re going to be." A vital publishing industry must be able take chances with new authors and with books that don’t have obvious mass-market appeal. When mega-retailers have all the power in the industry, consumers benefit from low prices, but the effect on the future of literature — on what books can be published successfully — is far more in doubt.

Excuse us? What kind of lunatic reasoning is that? "[T]he effect on the future of literature — on what books can be published successfully — is far more in doubt"(!)?

No, you purblind flack. What's in doubt is the future of book publishing houses, not literature or books. Books, literature, and authors will do just fine — flourish, even — without irrelevant middlemen like book publishing houses who while eyeing foremost their own bottom line (not "the production of culture") make decisions on which books should or should not be published, and then take a hefty cut of authors' earnings for the privilege of being published by them.

Talk about irrelevancy. Talk about chutzpah!

A Sneaking, Sinking Suspicion

In a previous S&F entry, we expressed our surprise that eBook readers' seeming preferred method of reading eBooks was not via Amazon's Kindle or its imitators, but via a regular old laptop computer. On learning that, we were provoked to investigate further whereupon we learned that Amazon offers a for-free application for Windows computers called Kindle For PC which permits one to employ one's PC to download and read any Kindle eBook on one's laptop (or desktop) computer. We immediately downloaded the application to try it out, and it operates just as advertised and beautifully.

Uh-oh, we thought. We're in big trouble now. Heretofore, when we saw a book we wanted to buy, we placed it immediately in our Amazon to-buy "basket", and when finances permitted, ordered it to be shipped along with whatever else was in the to-buy basket needed to make up a total order of at least $25 so that shipping would be free.

You see the problem. Now, when we see a book we'd like to buy, the first thing we do is look to see whether it's available as a Kindle eBook. If it is, we simply click on the book's Amazon page, and within a matter of seconds it's on our laptop ready to read. We're embarrassed to tell you just how many Kindle eBooks we've already purchased and how just much we've already spent that we really couldn't afford to spend so we won't. Instead, we'll simply tell you about a Kindle eBook we just downloaded titled, A Tear At The Edge Of Creation: A Radical New Vision For Life In An Imperfect Universe by theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser (it's also available in traditional hardcover and paperback editions). We've had time to read only the Introduction and already we hate the guy. His writing is both lucid and lovely, but his premise, Oh!, his premise!

A true believer in unification [as was Kepler, Newton, Faraday, Einstein, Heisenberg, and Schrödinger], I spent my Ph.D. years, and many more, searching for a theory of Nature that reflected the belief that all is [ultimately] one. [...] Echoing the teachings of Pythagoras and Plato, this idea carries with it an implicit aesthetic judgment that such theories are more beautiful, and, as the poet John Keats wrote in 1819, that "beauty is truth." And yet, as we investigate the experimental evidence for unification ... we find very little hard data supporting [it]. [...] Slowly, my thoughts converged into an aesthetic based on imperfection rather than perfection. [...] [I]t's time for science to let go of the old aesthetic that espouses perfection as beauty and beauty as truth.

See now why we hate the guy? And why exactly do we hate him? Because we've the sneaking, sinking suspicion he may actually be right.

Unexpected

As constant readers of S&F are aware, we've been a champion of the eBook almost from Day One, and predicted (accurately as it turned out) that eBooks would take off like a rocket in the marketplace when a mass-market-paperback-sized eBook reader with a true ink-on-paper-like screen display could be produced to sell at a reasonable price. We need not recount here that with Amazon's Kindle with its E Ink technology, that prediction has been fulfilled spectacularly. Imagine our surprise, then, on reading this:

Amazon’s Kindle has become the breakthrough e-reader since it was introduced only three years ago, fueling a nearly $1 billion business that Forrester Research says will triple in the next five years.

But it is edged out by the humble laptop as the e-reader of choice, according to a Forrester survey released Monday. Laptop users could very well be reading Kindle editions on a computer using software provided by Amazon, and may be motivated to merely avoid a third device.... Laptops only slightly trump the Kindle, 35 percent to 32 percent. Coming in third was the iPhone, with 15 percent, followed by a Sony e-reader (12 percent), netbooks (10 percent) and the Barnes & Noble Nook (9 percent). Also at 9 percent was the iPad.

RTWT here.

"Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues" — A Brief Heads-Up

When we placed our order for Alex Ross's new book, Listen to This, we did so with some trepidation as we knew the book was an anthology of Ross's work as classical music critic for The New Yorker, and we noted instantly that the title of the book was also the title of a lengthy and very personal piece Ross wrote for The New Yorker in 2004 which piece made us crazy and was the impetus for the very first entry written explicitly for and posted to S&F (there were two entries posted before it, but those two entries were carried over from a predecessor blog to "seed" S&F). When the book arrived several days ago and we saw that Chapter 1 was none other than that 2004 piece, which in the preface to the book Ross calls "a kind of memoir turned manifesto", we expected the worst — viz., that it had its place as the book's lede chapter to serve to make explicit the underlying criteria used to determine which of Ross's New Yorker pieces were to be included in this anthology by virtue of their at least sympathy with certain ideas promoted in that 2004 piece.

Rather than be made crazy again right off the bat by rereading that 2004 piece (expanded for the book) or by reading (or rereading, as the case may be) any of the other included Ross New Yorker pieces — which pieces, remember, we suspected were chosen for inclusion because they were all, tacitly at least, sympathetic to certain ideas promoted in that 2004 piece — we instead turned immediately to Chapter 2, "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues", a lengthy original essay Ross wrote specifically for the book and which therefore perhaps dealt with matters entirely of its own which fell outside any belonging to that lede chapter.

And indeed it did. It's an essay both brilliant and brilliantly written although it requires a certain measure of reader attention neither required nor demanded by any of the book's other chapters, which chapters, we not so incidentally later discovered, do NOT take their cue from the book's lede chapter as we initially feared, and are all a joy to read (or reread, as the case may be), the book's lede chapter occupying that slot, we now understand, so that the reader of the book will be given a clear idea of the critical and personal position the book's author takes in relation to the subjects of the book's other chapters the totality of which subjects amazes by the breadth and depth of Ross's research and knowledge, the trenchant quality of his insights, and the catholicity of his tastes, not to even speak of the evocative lucidity of his prose.

But it's "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues" we want to talk a bit about here. In that essay, Ross presents "a whirlwind history of music" that traces the path followed by "two ... elemental patterns: the old dance [form] known as the chaconne [using the later and now more prevalent French spelling] and a pair of bass lines associated with lament," which path "leads from Renaissance madrigals to Led Zeppelin by way of Monteverdi, Purcell, and Bach."

Sounds suspiciously like the ground plan for an academic musicological treatise, does it not, and we all know just how deadly tortuous and prolix is the standard academic treatise where the imperative has always been: never use 1000 words to express what you have to say if you can manage 10,000.

Ross, however, is writing neither for academics nor musicologists, at least not primarily, but for intelligent civilians with an interest in and/or love of music, and so says what he has to say using largely nontechnical language that’s as informative as it's evocative, all in conformance to that golden rule of all well-made things: the Goldilocks Principle (not too much, not too little, but just right).

The chapter quite naturally begins by explaining just what a chacona is — or more correctly, what it began as:

[A] sexily swirling dance that hypnotized all who heard it. [...] It is in triple time, with a stress on the second beat.... Players in the chacona band lay down an ostinato — a motif, bass line, or chord progression that repeats in an insistent fashion. Other instruments add variations, the wilder the better. [...] The result is a little sonic tornado that spins in circles while hurtling forward.

Ross then explains the basso lamento — "motifs of weeping and longing [that] bring out profound continuities in musical history" — which consists of,

a [four- or six-note] repeating bass line that descends the interval of a fourth, sometimes following the steps of the minor mode [four notes] ... and sometimes inching down the chromatic scale [six notes].

Ross makes all of this clear to us sonically by the use of audio clips accessed on the Listen to This Audio Guide; a nineteen-page collection of audio and video samples keyed to the book by chapter title and page number, and put together by Ross himself. For readers not familiar with the repertoire pertinent to this chapter, it's an invaluable aid, and we found ourself consulting it often once the discussion entered the realms of walking blues and of Led Zeppelin.

Ross then spends the remaining thirty pages of this musically rich chapter tracing the careers of the chaconne and basso lamento throughout the history of Western music "from Renaissance madrigals to Led Zeppelin by way of Monteverdi, Purcell, and Bach," and a fascinating journey it is, too; one you owe it to yourselves not to miss taking part in if only as an outside observer going along for the ride. We assure you that you could have no better tour guide than the author of this superlative chapter and of this excellent book.

Perspective

We're at present reading, The Second World War: A Complete History, by celebrated historian Martin Gilbert, and finding that history to be almost physically painful merely to read about. The appalling magnitude of the loss of life, both of active combatants and of civilians, many thousands of the latter, most of them Jews, losing their lives as the result of systematic, coldblooded, non-combat-related slaughter, and the unspeakable, by-directive brutality and atrocities perpetrated most particularly by the Nazis, and as well by other Axis powers and their partners, are, even today, almost unimaginable and make the consequences of the present wars in Afghanistan and Iraq seem but products of a mere street brawl as seem the wars themselves, and we've read only so far as the six-years-war's first year-and-a-half — i.e., up through April 1941, two months before the escalated by-directive atrocities and brutalities, including the systematic, coldblooded, non-combat-related slaughter of hundreds of thousands more of Jews, beginning with the Nazi invasion of Russia (in which the invading Nazis were joined by Finland, Romania, Hungary, and Albania), and before the beginning of the systematic operation of the Nazi death camps, and many months before the U.S. entered the war. Unimaginable today as well are the courage, perseverance, and resourcefulness of the British people in the face of the relentless, heavy German bombings of their cities in the war's first year that over a period of just a few months took the lives of tens of thousands of innocent, noncombatant British civilians.

Reading this minutely detailed history of the war (we were tempted to write, The War) is giving us a renewed perspective on what war and its costs in terms of human suffering, physical destruction, and the destruction of human life really mean. It almost makes us grateful for the existence of nuclear weapons which all but guarantee that no such war could ever again take place on such a scale, for, as all nations are aware, even the fanatic Islamist theocracies, such a war on such a scale today would, once begun, end quickly absent both conquerors and the conquered as all that would remain after but a few weeks or months would be the burned and broken bones of the dead inhabiting a now denuded and lifeless planet.

The Tyranny Of The Singer

As some of you may have surmised on the evidence of this S&F entry, we are at present engaged in reading The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, edited and translated by Berlioz biographer David Cairns. It's our first time reading this autobiography, begun by Berlioz when in his mid-forties, and a most informative, revealing, engaging, and thoroughly delightful read it is. (Berlioz, it turns out, was a regular and expert humorist. Who knew?)

We’ve just finished reading Berlioz's chronicling of his one-and-a-half years spent living in Italy as a 28-year-old Prix de Rome first prize winner, a section of the Memoirs that concludes with a savage assessment of the musical proclivities and sensibilities of the Italians; an assessment with which we found ourself nodding in agreement at almost every sentence. That savage assessment concludes with the following summation:

What are undoubtedly more common in Italy than anywhere else are good voices, voices that are not only full and incisive but agile and flexible as well. But the prevalence of voices lending themselves naturally to vocalization and the public's instinctive love of glitter and display react on each other. Hence the mania for fioriture which debases the finest melodies; hence those convenient vocal formulas which make all Italian phrases sound alike; hence that eternal device of the final cadence, which leaves the singer free to embroider at will but maddens many listeners by its perfunctoriness and dreadful inevitability; hence the constant tendency to break into buffo style which lurks even in the tenderest scenes of pathos; hence, in short, all those abuses which have made of melody, harmony, tempo, rhythm, orchestration, modulation, plot, staging, poetry, the poet, and the composer the abject slaves and playthings of the singer.

My oh my. How familiar does all that sound. Who would have imagined that all this time we've been echoing — albeit unwittingly and totally ignorant of the precedent — the assessment of a Frenchman on something other than matters culinary.

The Reluctant Medical Student

On arriving in Paris...with my fellow-student Alphonse Robert, I gave myself up wholly to studying for the [medical] career which had been thrust upon me, and loyally kept the promise I had given my father on leaving. It was soon put to a severe test when Robert, having announced one morning that he had bought a "subject" (a corpse), took me for the first time to the dissecting-room at the Hospice de la Pitié. At the sight of that terrible charnel-house — the dissected limbs, the grinning faces and gaping skulls, the bloody quagmire underfoot and the atrocious smell it gave off, the swarms of sparrows wrangling over scraps of lung, the rats in their corner gnawing the bleeding vertebrae — such a feeling of revulsion possessed me that I leapt through the window of the dissecting-room and fled for home as though Death and all his hideous train were at my heels. The shock of that first impression lasted for twenty-four hours. I did not want to hear another word about anatomy, dissection or medicine, and I meditated a hundred mad schemes of escape from the future that hung over me.

Robert lavished his eloquence in a vain attempt to argue away my disgust and demonstrate the absurdity of my plans. In the end he got me to agree to make another effort. For the second time I accompanied him to the hospital and we entered the house of the dead. How strange! The objects which before had filled me with extreme horror had absolutely no effect upon me now. I felt nothing but a cold distaste; I was already as hardened to the scene as any seasoned medical student. The crisis was passed. I found I actually enjoyed groping about in a poor fellow's chest and feeding the winged inhabitants of that delightful place their ration of lung. "Hallo!", Robert cried, laughing. "You're getting civilized. 'Thou giv'st the little birds their daily bread.'" "'And o'er all nature's realm my bounty spread,'" I retorted, tossing a shoulder-blade to a large rat staring at me with famished eyes.

So I went on with my anatomy course, feeling no enthusiasm, but stoically resigned.

[...]

I was on my way to becoming just another student, destined to add one more obscure name to the lamentable catalogue of bad doctors, when one evening I went to the Opéra. They were giving The Danaïds, by Salieri. The pomp and brilliance of the spectacle, the massive sonority of orchestra and chorus, the inspired pathos of Mme Branchu, her extraordinary voice, the rugged grandeur of Dérivis, Hypermnestra's aria, in which I discerned, imitated by Salieri, all the characteristics of Gluck's style as I had conceived it from the pieces from his Orphée in my father's library, and finally the tremendous bacchanal and the sad, voluptuous ballet music that Spontini added to his old compatriot's score, disturbed and exalted me to an extent that I will not attempt to describe. It was though a young man possessing all the instincts of a sailor, but knowing only the boats on the lakes of his native mountains, were suddenly to find himself on board a three-decker ship on the open sea. I hardly slept that night, and the anatomy lesson next morning suffered accordingly.

[...]

The following week I went to the Opéra again. This time I saw Méhul's Stratonice, and Nina, the ballet devised and composed by Persuis.

[...]

Notwithstanding all these distractions and the hours I spent every evening brooding over the melancholy discrepancy between my studies and my inclinations, I persisted in this double life for some time longer, without much benefit to my medical career and without being able to extend my meager knowledge of music. I had given my word and I was holding to it. But when I learnt that the library of the Conservatoire with its wealth of scores was open to the public, the desire to go there and study the works of Gluck, for which I already had an instinctive passion but which were not then being performed at the Opéra, was too strong for me. Once admitted to that sanctuary, I never left it. It was the death-blow to my medical career. The dissecting-room was abandoned for good.

—Hector Berlioz, from, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, edited and translated by David Cairns

Perhaps Jeff Bezos Was Listening

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 11:24 PM Eastern on 3 Aug. See below.]

In a November 2009 S&F entry titled, "Jeff Bezos, Are You Listening?", we suggested that Amazon had made a cardinal error in the marketing of their Kindle eBook reader. We wrote, in part (for the full rationale behind this, see the above linked article):

In marketing the Kindle, Amazon has taken the position they're now in the eBook reader business; ergo, the Kindle's retail price of $259 per unit.

But that's exactly the wrong position for Amazon to have taken, and a cardinal error in their marketing of the Kindle. Amazon should all but give the thing away for nothing because, uniquely for Amazon, they're really not in the eBook reader business, but in the eBook business as that's where the money is, and you can't sell a Kindle eBook to someone who has no Kindle eBook reader. If Amazon sold the Kindle for, say, $99 (or not much more than that) even if it cost double that to manufacture, they'd be way ahead of the game as at $99 per unit every book reader in the world could afford, and most would buy, a Kindle, and then the eBook revolution would, finally, after a number of false starts, be off and running, and the floodgates would be opened for Amazon to rack up millions upon millions of dollars in sales of Kindle eBooks — year, after year, after year, ad infinitum (well, for a really long time, at any rate).

Well, it appears that Mr. Bezos may actually have been listening as witness this newest state-of-the-art release of the Kindle priced at a mere $139.

We're sold. Our pre-order is in.

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Update (11:24 PM Eastern on 3 Aug): Oh dear. We just investigated this wireless business for the first time in preparation for delivery of our new Kindle, and discovered we've no access to the necessary wireless "hotspots", as they're called, and so had to cancel our order. Damn shame.

Opera As Drama

We came to appreciate opera relatively late in life — in our early 30's, to be more precise — our musical preoccupation prior to that time being concerned mostly with so-called "absolute music" (i.e., instrumental music) in all its forms the only exceptions being the Bach cantatas, the oratorios of Handel, and the Elijah of Mendelssohn. Even the mature operas of our beloved Mozart were not objects of our interest given their mostly Italian-form structures, much less the extravagant and Germanic operas and music-dramas of Richard Wagner whom we thought a vulgarian of the first water.

How time and experience doth change one's perceptions, even radically so!

Once we became hooked on dramma per musica as an artform (our damascene conversion chronicled here), we knew we had lots of catching up to do, and so devoted the next ten years or so to reading about and listening to opera of all sorts, especially opera of the Italian persuasion simply because it was clearly the most popular sort among devoted operagoers of longstanding, and also because it was the sort of opera we were least in sympathy with; viz., grossly melodramatic and sentimental, both dramatically and musically.

As we became more familiar with the artform generally, we quite naturally began forming certain ideas and theories about it of our own. Most of these were arrived at unsystematically and therefore were somewhat fuzzy and mildly inchoate until we happened upon an extraordinary book that, in substance, articulated authoritatively much of our self-arrived-at thinking concerning opera as an artform (which is not to say we agreed with all the book had to say; we didn't and don't): Joseph Kerman's seminal work, Opera as Drama; a slender volume (some 225 pages or so depending on the edition) that today remains for us the most valuable single volume on opera as an artform extant.

An excerpt (from the chapter entitled, "Drama and the Alternative"):

Drama requires not only the presentation of action, but an insight into its quality by means of response to action. Only the presentation of such quality justifies the dramatic endeavor; and in the best dramas, the response seems imaginative, true, illuminating, and fully attached to the action. Monteverdi's Orfeo centers on a vision which is projected powerfully for four acts; then no element of the action suggested itself — or, let us say, no element that was possible under the theatrical conventions of the day — to consummate and complete the drama. The same is true of Gluck's Orfeo. These are not perfect works, but for all their imperfections they are more meaningful than the technical successes of others.

Another, subtler kind of dramatic failure results when the guiding idea proves intractable to the necessities of dramatic form.... [N]evertheless, a few extraordinary dramas have overcome limitations of this sort. Tristan und Isolde, I have suggested, is such a one. [Debussy's] Pelléas et Mélisande and [Berg's] Wozzeck, on the other hand, seem to me pieces which struggle on the whole unsuccessfully with essentially undramatic material — though the struggle creates a strong semblance of drama, and the genuineness of the composer's response is never in doubt. They are works of power and sensitivity, works of genius, even if we are bound to mind the misemployment of the dramatic form.

Quite different is a piece in which the response, the quality of the action, is insensitive or simply sham all the way. The more shrewdly consistent the action and the style, the more exasperating such a piece becomes. In the deepest sense, the operas of [Richard] Strauss and Puccini are undramatic, for their imaginative realm is a realm of emotional cant. They are unable to match any action, however promising, with anything but the empty form of drama. And the form is always there. Alarmingly precise, alarmingly false.

Kerman's Opera as Drama is a book that should be required reading for all who've more than a passing interest in opera as an artform. It will repay hundreds of times over one's time spent reading it closely.

For Whom The Bell Tolls

The Wall Street Journal today published an article entitled, "'Vanity' Press Goes Digital". Although the article focuses on eBooks (The New Big Thing — finally!), everything it says can be applied to self-published, Print On Demand (POD), ink-on-paper traditional books as well, as we outlined in some detail several years ago in these two 2007 S&F posts titled, "It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe", and "It's A Whole New Publishing World Out There — Maybe, Pt. 2". The material stigma attached to self-published books (a stigma made explicit by labeling such books "vanity published") is fast disappearing as the quotes around the word "Vanity" in the title of the WSJ piece subtly acknowledges. It's perfectly clear to us, as it was three years ago, that the traditional book publisher is today not only mostly unnecessary for any book author who doesn't mind taking matters into his own hands entirely (or into his own hands with the additional help of expert hired hands in the fields of PR and advertising) thereby reaping the maximum profits from his writing, but is a veritable impediment — a remnant of a bygone era, which remnant is on the verge of having outlived its usefulness except for the most specialized of book publishing projects.

Some months ago, we sent an eMail to a prominent literary agent who maintains a blog whereon she answers candidly and without pulling any punches even the most basic or most touchy questions eMailed to her by her readers about literary agents and about the publishing biz generally. That eMail read:

Given the absolute ease today of self-publishing a POD book the physical product of which is absolutely indistinguishable from the physical product put out by any major house, and given the amount of non-writing work commercial publishers today expect an author to perform in the peddling of a published book, what irreplaceable service does a commercial publisher provide an ordinary (i.e., non-celebrity) author today for its 85%-90% cut of the book's sales price beyond the stroking of the author's ego and vanity by the prestige of being published by a commercial house? I've of course asked myself the same question, and no matter how I twist it, the answer I come up with is none. Nada. Zero. Zip. Bupkiss. I guarantee you that anything you come back at me with, I'll be able to come up with an alternate way to accomplish the same end, and just as effectively, even when economies of scale are taken into consideration.

Your thoughts, please, as I suspect I must be missing something.

That eMail never made it onto that agent's blog, nor was it even so much as acknowledged.

Surprise! — or, rather, no surprise at all.

It's time the commercial book publishing industry stopped asking itself for whom the bell tolls. Manifestly, my dear dinosaur, it tolls for thee.

Flash! Wagner Not A Nazi!

In an article written for the Brit Telegraph, political columnist Simon Heffer tells us not to be afraid of Wagner, as Wagner was no Nazi ("Don't be afraid of Wagner. He's not a Nazi"). We doubt that assurance will put at ease the minds of those determined to link Wagner the man with Hitler and the Nazis no matter the absurdity of such a linking given that Wagner died six years before Hitler was born, or lay to rest the uninformed, in-error notion that Wagner's prose writings mark him as a veritable proto-Nazi and so a direct influence on Hitler and the Nazis in that regard. Still, it's encouraging, especially these days, to see in print in a respectable periodical the debunking of such ideas. Even more encouraging is it to read a categorical debunking of that persistent, tendentious, bone-headed, even half-lunatic notion that Wagner's virulent anti-Semitism found its way into his stage works. Writes Mr. Heffer:

There is an enormous literature on Wagner, much of it interesting, some of it utter garbage. Michael Tanner, the opera critic of The Spectator and a man whose knowledge and understanding of the Master and his works are probably unsurpassed this side of Bayreuth, has just added to the corpus. His Faber Pocket Guide to Wagner [not yet available on this side of the pond] wears his immense erudition lightly, and as such is probably the best introduction ever written to this most complex of composers.

Dr Tanner tells the story of Wagner's life; he summarises the plots of the operas and comments on them; he gives an immensely valuable discography (valuable because his own knowledge of the recordings verges on the omniscient, and his judgment is quite exemplary); and he deals, head on, with the question not just of Wagner's anti-Semitism, but of his "links" with the Nazis. Indeed, it is that chapter that constitutes one of the finest and most important pieces of writing on the composer that I have ever read: not least because it should serve to close down an utterly pointless and futile debate about Wagner that has poisoned the study and appreciation of his works for decades.

When I described as "garbage" some of the stuff written about Wagner in recent years, it was some of this line of thought that I had in mind. Dr Tanner is perhaps nearer the mark when he calls it "deranged". There is no doubt that Wagner was anti-Semitic, and a particularly revolting aspect of his character it was too. [...] However, it is a considerable step from [this fact] to the assertions made by some writers that every unsavoury character in the operas is clearly Jewish, that there are "messages" about the general shockingness of Jews that Wagner was seeking to transmit through his operas (which he was so bad at doing, as Dr Tanner points out, that it took until the 1990s for certain geniuses to pick them up)....

Just so. In July 2004, in response to some particularly "deranged" comments on this matter from one Daniel Leeson — a former IBM executive, professional classical musician, one of the world's acknowledged scholarly authorities on all things Mozartian, and a man who should have known better — we wrote in part (the full article, "A Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Waste", can be read here):

It's...clear that those [slanderous, racist anti-Semitic] "subtleties" of which Leeson became aware [in Die Meistersinger] would never have been perceived by him as racist anti-Semitic coding had he not worked backwards from his knowledge of the popular association of Wagner's name with Hitler and the Nazis, his knowledge of Wagner's notorious and justified reputation as a rabid anti-Semite ... and his knowledge of Wagner's virulent anti-Semitic prose writings, an anti-Semitism most repulsively prominent in Wagner's twice-published article, Das Judenthum in der Musik (Judaism in Music). If some other composer had written Die Meistersinger using the very same text the entire imbecile anti-Semitic coding business would never have been so much as even imagined — not by Leeson, not by even the fevered brain of the most devout PC academic.

Can one find anti-Semitic overtones and references in the text and characterizations in Die Meistersinger, or in any other of Wagner's operas, for that matter? If one is so disposed, one most assuredly can. One can find pretty much anything one is looking for in Wagner's stage works, an ineluctable consequence of their at-bottom archetypal nature. Archetypes are essentially empty matrices that can be filled-in and fleshed-out in their particulars in multiple ways and at multiple levels by the filler-in-ers and flesher-out-ers, and so if one is determined to find anti-Semitic content in the filling-in and fleshing-out, one can be absolutely assured of not being disappointed. That archetypal quality is not a flaw in Wagner's stage works but their very genius, and a principal source of their timelessness, universality, and astonishing resonant power.

[...]

Soberly considered, Leeson's and certain others' "analysis" of the alleged racist anti-Semitic coding in Die Meistersinger as well as other of Wagner's stage works adds up to nothing more than a manifest and classic case of the obscenity being in the mind of the beholder not the beheld which is itself guilty only of being too deep and too rich for its own good. The proof of that is that it required the assiduous "researches" of a small band of Wagner-hating zealots to "discover" the nefarious and pernicious coding in Die Meistersinger, and this not until after almost 150 years of the opera's constant public exposure, prior to which time the supposed evil coding was not even so much as suspected.

It's long past time that this ugly, tendentious, and utterly blockheaded notion died an ignoble death. Our appreciation and kudos go to Mr. Heffer and, on Mr. Heffer's word, to Dr. Tanner for helping it along to it's richly deserved end.

New Music And Writers On Music

Several days after posting our mini-rant, "Manifesto (A Mini-Rant)", trashing the "music" of composers Steve Reich and Terry Riley (and, glancingly, the non-opera music of Philip Glass along with works by Cage, Babbitt, and Stockhausen which "music" we even more glancingly trashed) the several-times edited concluding sentence of which read:

They're [i.e., the "minimalist" works of Reich and Riley are] tedious, mind-numbing bores — clear reactionary responses to the complicated (posing as complex) musical gibberish produced by Modernist-era, avant-garde charlatans such as Cage, Babbitt, and Stockhausen and their ilk, and, pace Alex Ross and other well-informed appreciators of the 20th-century's musical avant-garde, taking them seriously as music is something that ought not to be encouraged,

it occurred to us that perhaps it was high time we read rather than virtually skip over completely, as we did the first time round, the "Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists" chapter of Alex Ross's, The Rest Is Noise, to see what he had to say there.

And so we finally did, and were struck afresh by Ross's almost preternatural skill in non-judgmentally (as in, no ax to grind) describing music and its context in words in such a way that one feels it an almost imperative to actually hear that which he's describing. It's not for nothing that Ross and The Rest Is Noise received the almost universal accolades of the critical press, and were the recipients of several prestigious awards (that the Pulitzer was not among them will forever be a blot against its awards committee).

Did what Ross have to say in this chapter (or anywhere else in the book, for that matter) change our mind about the "music" of Reich and Riley (and the non-opera music of Glass)? It did not. But that's quite beside the point, isn't it, the point being that had we not already done so we would have felt all but compelled to hear this "music" never mind how tedious and mind-numbing the reality of it proved to be for us. Would that more writers on music possessed and displayed in their writings Ross's extraordinary skill, for if they did it seems to us that much so-called New Music that truly deserves multiple hearings would not languish for want of it.

Attention!, Serious Lovers Of Classical Music

Alarmed, even appalled, at what he sees as a time "when music has become almost arbitrary and composers refuse to be bound by any rules and principles, detesting the very name of school and law like death itself," a universally admired composer, conductor, and teacher writes in the forward to his new book on composition:

Some people will perhaps wonder why I have undertaken to write about music, there being so many works by outstanding men who have treated the subject most thoroughly and learnedly; and more especially why I should be doing so just at this time when music has become almost arbitrary and composers refuse to be bound by any rules and principles, detesting the very name of school and law like death itself. To such I want to make my purpose clear. There have certainly been many authors famous for their teaching and competence who have left an abundance of works on the theory of music, but on the practice of writing music they have said very little, and this little is not easily understood. Generally, they have been content to give a few examples, and never have they felt the need of inventing a simple method by which the novice can progress gradually, ascending step by step, to attain mastery in this art. I shall not be deterred by the most ardent haters of school, nor by the corruptness of the times.

Medicine is given to the sick, and not those who are in good health. However, my efforts do not tend — nor do I credit myself with the strength — to stem the course of a torrent rushing precipitously beyond its bounds. I do not believe that I can call back composers from the unrestrained insanity of their writing to normal standards. Let each follow his own counsel. My object is to help young persons who want to learn.

Hardly surprising these sentiments in our present era of what might be described plausibly as one of near musical anarchy. Except that these sentiments were not written in our present era, but in the 1720's by one Johann Joseph Fux in the Forward to his enduring 1725 classic, Gradus ad Parnassum, reprinted in an edited English translation of the work from the Latin by Alfred Mann titled, The Study of Counterpoint: from Johann Joseph Fux's Gradus ad Parnassum.

We're at present engaged in our first perusal of this classic text which informed the likes of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Hindemith as, curiously, it was not among the texts used in theory classes where we attended conservatory. Written in the form of a dialogue between the master, "Aloysius" (Fux's stand-in for his beloved Palestrina), and his student, "Josephus", the instruction is charming, lucid, hugely illuminating, and — believe it or not — easy to grasp. Based on what we've so far read, we recommend this book to the attention of every serious lover of classical music who can read music but is unfamiliar with this work. It promises to repay many times over the time spent in reading and study.

Jeff Bezos, Are You Listening?

We have for years on S&F been a big fan of the idea of the eBook, but always tempered our enthusiasm with the proviso that the eBook was pretty much a non-starter commercially until the day when the proper display technology became widely available. With the introduction of E Ink technology as used in Amazon's Kindle as well as others, that day has, in large part, arrived (there are a few problems that need to be worked out, such as display speed and a lack of colors other than grays and black).

Predictably, the Kindle has taken off, and has been counted a success. But to our way of thinking, Amazon has made a cardinal error in the marketing of the Kindle, and consequently its success is but a fraction of what it could and should have been. Had any other entity come up with the Kindle, that cardinal error would not have been an error at all, but simply sound business practice. Given its unique position, however, for Amazon it's an error that's costing them millions of dollars — perhaps even tens of millions — in lost sales per year, and, worse, is impeding the growth of the eBook market, and the real beginning of the eBook revolution.

And the cardinal error?

For that, let's look back a bit at another successful invention, and the stroke of marketing genius that made it a spectacular financial success: the safety razor.

In 1904, inventor and entrepreneur King Camp Gillette was granted a patent on his invention of a razor that used a disposable razor blade. The razor consisted of two parts: the razor blade "holder", and the perfectly sharp disposable razor blade itself which, after a number of shaves had dulled it somewhat, was simply thrown away and replaced with a perfectly sharp new disposable razor blade.

And the stroke of marketing genius that made that invention a spectacular financial success?

Gillette saw, if not immediately, that the money to be made from his invention was not by sales of the razor blade "holder", but by sales of the disposable razor blade itself the sales of which over the years would number in the thousands for each razor blade "holder" in use. Accordingly, Gillette decided to all but give away the razor blade "holder", for he understood he was not in the razor blade "holder" business, but in the business of selling disposable razor blades.

Back to Amazon.

In marketing the Kindle, Amazon has taken the position they're now in the eBook reader business; ergo, the Kindle's retail price of $259 per unit.

But that's exactly the wrong position for Amazon to have taken, and a cardinal error in their marketing of the Kindle. Amazon should all but give the thing away for nothing because, uniquely for Amazon, they're really not in the eBook reader business, but in the eBook business as that's where the money is, and you can't sell a Kindle eBook to someone who has no Kindle eBook reader. If Amazon sold the Kindle for, say, $99 (or not much more than that) even if it cost double that to manufacture, they'd be way ahead of the game as at $99 per unit every book reader in the world could afford, and most would buy, a Kindle, and then the eBook revolution would, finally, after a number of false starts, be off and running, and the floodgates would be opened for Amazon to rack up millions upon millions of dollars in sales of Kindle eBooks — year, after year, after year, ad infinitum (well, for a really long time, at any rate).

We truly want a Kindle, but at $259 it's just too dear for our limited pocketbook. But a Kindle at $99? We'd buy it in a heartbeat, and dozens of Kindle eBooks per year to fill it.

Jeff Bezos, are you listening?