Saint Patrick’s Day 2016.
… she took a copy of The God Delusion from her niece’s shelves – a little light reading for her train trip.
As it happens, she hasn’t yet glanced at it, even though we’re now pulling away from New York City. She has put it on her shared table – something to stick her tickets in.
And as we leave Penn Station, here come two young priests (one of whom has just crossed himself as we pick up speed) who ask if they can join UD‘s table.
“Sure,” says UD, “as long as you don’t mind my book.”
One of them looks at it, laughs, and sits down next to UD.
“As long as you,” he says, “don’t mind sitting next to someone delusional.”
Where UD has gummed
up the works by ordering a
ton of salads and baked goods
(at this hour of the morning
you’re only supposed to order
a brioche). UD loves to walk
cluelessly around cities on
sunny mornings, picking up
goodies as she goes.
… to be with her relative who’s recovering from surgery. She will blog all along the way. She will in particular try to say something meaningful about professors who say outrageous things and professors who say outrageous things.
********************
Somewhere north of Philly. I seem to have said what I wanted to say in this post’s comment thread.
… becomes a serious
kick boxer.
All UD
can think about,
looking at her
done up like
this, is how
much we spent
on her teeth.
“I’ve gone door to door,” said Marshall Cohen, the campaign manager for Jamie Raskin, the state senator, “and people ask, ‘What’s your cash on hand?’ ”
… UD encountered, very close up,
a Cooper’s Hawk.
Click on the image for a nice big view.
Home again, home again, jiggity jig.
Heading south in the Quiet Car (having gotten there via the Alewife Greenway, the Red Line T, and South Station), gazing at the moment (we’re stationary) at a black car on the next track on which big white letters say DO NOT HUMP, UD considers how she got herself comfortable in this seat. First she fiddled with chargers; then she put in her ear plugs and listened to Schubert songs (her discovery of Lezhneva’s Im Frühling has her rooting around in Schubert); then she leaned back for a light nap, during which she listened to the Four Horsemen of the New Atheism, Hour Two, kept at a gentle grumbly baritone (UD finds deep male voices deliciously soporific, and the more the merrier).
At one point, Richard Dawkins woke me up and made me laugh:
When [the liturgy] becomes intelligible, the nonsense becomes more transparent. If it’s in Latin, it can survive much better because the nonsense is camouflaged. It’s rather like a camouflaged insect; it can get through the barriers because you can’t see it. When it’s translated into not just English but modern English you can see it for what it is.
Later, Dawkins said that he once listed among the six pieces of music he’d take to a desert island Bach’s Mache dich mein Herze rein, so I switched over to that.
Make yourself pure, my heart
I want to bury Jesus himself within me,
For he now within me
Forever
Shall have his sweet rest.
World, depart from my heart, let Jesus enter!
… of a state of the art brain surgery recovery ICU room – one of her relatives is there. That’s why she took the train up to Boston — to drive each morning through dreary streets to one of the world’s great medical centers and sit quietly while someone she loves tries to pull herself together after a surgeon removed a benign tumor. (The surgeon’s name – Ekkehard – means brave sword…) The room seems to totter under the weight of its technology, much of which, in the form of tubes and drains and cuffs, covers the patient’s body.
Intensivists is the name for the doctors who treat ICU patients, and UD likes this word, thinks it should title a poem about something. Those who deal in the intensities. Specialists in over the top events.
The drama is conducted quietly; technology also means the end of the old hospital of pings and pages – the occasional “code” announcement sounds, but the hallways are subdued, courteous, featuring many lobbies furnished with deep couches and soft lights.
UD, a fictivist, has long said of herself I can handle anything except reality. Poems, novels – these sidlings up to reality have been her vocation.
Yet it is also true that Mama Reality seems unable to leave her unmolested. UD is doing her best with it.
… a big UD favorite, is Julia Lezhneva, singing Rachmaninoff’s Daisies to accompany UD on her train ride up to Boston. I like almost everything Lezhneva performs, but this small song in particular always gets me. And that’s odd, because it’s not the sort of music I generally like — “art” songs, sentimental, with titles like Daisies, drawn-out atonalities… I ask myself why I like this piece so much and here’s my list of possible reasons:
1. There’s a close-to-perfect feel to the performance – one Russian singing another, a perfect match of singer and song in terms of language and sensibility. It’s what a critic would call a “gem.” (Lezhneva won this competition, by the way – youngest singer to do that.)
2. The performance showcases what I find so amazing about Lezhneva – the way her voice always seems part of the score. Know what I mean? She’s so smooth, so inside the music, that there’s a seamless connection between piano and voice. Her sensibility is slightly self-abnegating – she’s no prima donna – and this deepens the sense of her fidelity to the music above all rather than her personal dramatic projection. (This is probably why I’m not put off by the sentimentality of the song.) Yet her voice as instrument is so remarkable that this never means she disappears inside the score.
3. Her voice as instrument? To my ear she has a piercing clarity and accuracy with her notes – not just the basic acrobatic fact of a soprano who can hit something really high, but the smooth ease with which she does that … The way her high notes aren’t like — deep breath! hit that sucker! — (and that’s a feeling I sometimes get with Joyce DiDonato, despite my deep respect for her singing). There’s something sedate and, as I say, undramatic about Lezhneva, which seems just right for this small Rachmaninoff piece – the ability to set a mood and sustain it, explore it a bit, resolve it.
Interestingly, the only Lezhneva stuff I’ve heard/seen that I haven’t liked is her operatic stage stuff. The same gestalt that makes her no Maria Callas makes her… no Maria Callas. There is something neat, self-contained, delicate, bird-like, about Lezhneva, with her modest height, her slight body, her small features, her paleness, her wispy light brown hair — she is the anti-Callas. Her effect is powerful in part because of the contrast between her unremarkable physical presence and the vocal power she generates; quietly faithful to the score, she gives you space to respond and not over-respond. She holds things back, which in my aesthetic experience tends to mean that the power of the expression is heightened.
I guess another way of saying this is that she ain’t very sexy – can’t see her getting much traction with this ditty.
UD might teach at the University of Macau next semester, and if she does… Well, what a typically UDesque introduction to China — There’s ol’ UD, toughing it out on an island whose hyper-opulent spas and casinos “make Las Vegas look like a dump.”
Yes, should UD actually venture out to meet market Leninism in the flesh, it really will be in the flesh – as in the fleshpots of Egypt, Macau being a distillation of every vice the outsized human brain can conceive…
The first few minutes of this YouTube show you the restaurant down the street from UD‘s house. The rest of the clip features two distant acquaintances of UD‘s – her neighbor, Nancy Floreen, and Chris Van Hollen (UD last met up with him at one of Peter Galbraith’s birthday parties).
… excitement chez UD.
Mr UD sleeps in
the shadow of UD‘s
humidifier (she’s
bronchitic).
… of her “fringe and vociferous group,” Women of the Wall. Recall UD, featured here in the Forward (scroll down to her smiling and her holding her prayer shawl), at a rally outside the Israeli embassy on behalf of religious freedom in Israel.
And, well, WOW. We won.
(Your blogueuse.)
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Chelsea Clinton: J’ACCUSE!
Tourism Minister Yariv Levin sharply attacked the American Jewish Reform movement during Sunday’s government hearing on the compromise regarding a non-Orthodox prayer space at the Western Wall, saying that Chelsea Clinton’s wedding to her Jewish partner, officiated by a Reform rabbi and a priest, shows the extent of assimilation among Reform Jews in the United States.
“… [A] man who calls himself a reform rabbi is standing there with a priest and weds Hillary Clinton’s daughter, and no one condemns it, thereby legitimizing it.”