Sounds & Fury

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.

A Delicious Halloween Scare Of The Literary Sort

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

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

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

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

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

Trust me.

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

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

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

Jeez!

Alex Does Google

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

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

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

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

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

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

[...]

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

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

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

It all sounds perfectly reasonable to us.

RTWT here.

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

Dead In The Water

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

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

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

Not in this life.

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

Uh-huh. Right.

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

All too true, I’m afraid.

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

From The Inbox

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

A reader writes laconically (and in toto):

Nothing to say about “Noise”?

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

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