The suicidal subject matter is far from uplifting and it is unlikely to become a World Cup theme tune any time soon.
Yet none of these things appear to have dented public affection for the lovelorn lament When I am Laid in Earth, by the English composer Henry Purcell, which has triumphed against the odds to to be named the nation’s favourite aria.
The 321-year-old composition was the surprise winner of a poll for Radio 3, beating far better known compositions by Mozart, Wagner and Puccini. The aria features at the end of the opera Dido and Aeneas, Purcell’s only fully sung stage work and one of the earliest English operas.
It is a tragic lament, sung by Dido, Queen of Carthage, who flings herself on a funeral pyre after being abandoned by the Trojan Prince Aeneas. “Remember me,” sings the heartbroken queen, to the lover who has left her. “But ah, forget my fate.” She then commits suicide in despair…
UD, a Purcell fanatic, ain’t surprised. She plays and sings it all the time. Stately, with Purcell’s genius for putting English words to flowing and expressive tune, the piece concludes with Remember me! — a command that, for UD, has all the power of this mememormee at the end of Finnegans Wake:
And it’s old and old it’s sad and old it’s sad and weary I go back to you, my cold father, my coldmad father, my cold mad feary father, and I rush, my only, into your arms. I see them rising! So. Avelaval. My leaves have drifted from me. All. But one clings still. I’ll bear it on me. To remind me of. Lff! So soft this morning, ours. Yes. Carry me along, taddy, like you done through the toy fair! If I seen him bearing down on me now under whitespread wings like he’d come from Arkangels, I sink I’d die down over his feet, humbly dumbly, only to washup. First. We pass through grass behush the bush to. Whish! A gull. Gulls. Far calls. Coming, far! End here. Us then. Finn, again! Take. Bussoftlhee, mememormee! Till thousendsthee. Lps. The keys to. Given! A way a lone a last a loved a long the
Jurgen Habermas is in Ireland to receive the James Joyce Award.
An Irish journalist covers his address at University College Dublin and summarizes his view of the public intellectual.
The intellectual’s sole remaining ability in an age when television has reinforced an iconic turn from word to image is an “avantgardistic instinct for relevances”, he writes in a book of recent essays published last year, Europe, The Faltering Project. “They have to be able to get worked up about critical developments while others are still absorbed in business as usual”. That includes a mistrustful sensitivity about any damage to the normative foundations of politics, or threats to its mental resources. More positively it requires “the sense for what is lacking and ‘could be otherwise’ ”, including “a spark of imagination in conceiving of alternatives” and “a modicum of the courage required for polarising, provoking, and pamphleteering”.
Along similar lines, there’s this, from a review of Christopher Hitchens’ memoir:
In 1987 Russell Jacoby published a mournful elegy to untamed public intellectuals. He argued that the unruly, iconoclastic thinkers that had dominated the New York intellectual scene well into the 1950s were a disappearing species. They had a literary cast of mind; they knew how to write about large scale questions in a way accessible to an educated public without obfuscating their texts with unintelligible academic lingo. They were not domesticated by the perks of academia, think tanks and public grants. They were irreverent and value driven.
Well, there is good news. The above is a perfect description of Christopher Hitchens. Gifted with a phenomenal memory, with the ability to form sentences that give the reader the pleasures of linguistic precision combined with watching a good knock-out punch, Hitchens is exactly the untamed public intellectual that Jacoby mourned.
A Boston University professor of music is about to retire.
From BU Today:
… [Joel Sheveloff] reflects on nearly half a century as not just a teacher, but a thorn in the side of the administration and a beloved but incorrigible nudge. With his gravelly, Mailer-esque voice and old-fashioned suspenders, Sheveloff has a way of wresting control of a room and holding forth on just about anything. He may grouse about everything from his department’s curriculum to the traffic on the BU Bridge, but if he criticizes his students at all, it is with affectionate bemusement. He likes them.
They like him back: “I was in Dr. Sheveloff’s class in 1973, and I remember him to this day as one of those rare people who inspire your life on all levels,” writes an alum on Ratemyprofessors.com. “Of course his knowledge is awesome,” writes a student, “but what makes Dr. Shev one of the best is his insight. He understands the paradoxes of the human condition and how music expresses the full range of this experience.” And from another student: “Professor Sheveloff is hilarious. He makes each lecture immensely enjoyable by joking, dancing around, and just creating a pleasant class atmosphere.”
… All of Sheveloff’s complaints are major, from whether BU’s orchestra and choir directors should be full-time (they are now, he says, thanks to him) to an increase in course credits from three to four (“they make the candy bar smaller and charge you more for it”) to what he believes is the pandemic misinterpretation of Bach’s Musical Offering.
… His passion for, and encyclopedic knowledge of, the Cole Porter, Duke Ellington, and Rogers and Hart songbooks are part of what fueled his friendship with John Daverio (CFA’75,’76, GRS’83), a CFA music professor and renowned Schumann expert, who drowned in the Charles River in 2003, at the age of 48. The loss devastated Sheveloff, who spoke in a eulogy for Daverio of how “for more than a quarter of a century, John and I discussed issues, shared intimacies, and otherwise interacted by employing strategically placed song lines in our dialogue. We both enjoyed finding relevant lines — this game belonged to the two of us.”
… When it comes to J. S. Bach, Sheveloff serves up a feast of superlatives. Bach, he asserts, is “our Shakespeare, our Pushkin, the greatest mind ever to write music.”
As he expounds on a quirky meter in a passage from Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6, the Pathetique, an assistant pops her head in the room to tell Sheveloff he has a phone call from his wife, whom he refers to as “She who must be obeyed.” He’s been married 48 years. “Feels like 75,” he says.
… Where they once scrawled in spiral notebooks, students now sit in class tapping away at laptops. “Students think they can get anything they need from Google,” he says, an arm swiping the air in the universal sign for oy vey. “My colleagues are concerned about kids sitting in class e-mailing and looking at Facebook. In my class I say, go ahead — I’m not your mother.” …
I went to American Fork, Utah, today, where Wayne Booth, my graduate school mentor at the University of Chicago, grew up, in a fervent Mormon family.
Although a few historic buildings survive on Main Street, I can’t imagine Booth would recognize much from his past. Utah’s Wasatch Front is booming – it’s one of the fastest-growing places in the United States, right up there with Nevada – and what strikes you as you drive through Provo, Orem, American Fork, and other towns are the many large new houses on the plateau, and the astounding, gorgeous, up-close masses of mountains all around them.
The mountains – some high enough to show snow at their peaks – press in so tightly that you can study, from your car, rock faces and waterfalls and shadows.
If I abstracted from the houses, and from the upscale commercial strips, I could imagine Booth in a very small, sublimely hedged in place — hedged in geographically, and hedged in culturally.
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Booth evokes the apartness of American Fork in the ‘twenties and ‘thirties in an essay he wrote in 1998, when he was 77 years old. In it, he quotes from a journal he kept in his twenties, when he was already a skeptical Mormon (though still engaged in missionary work). In a kind of dialogue with his younger self, he explains the nature of his rebellion against his church.
Until I was far into my teens, I was an utterly unquestioning Mormon. My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles were all visibly, audibly, aggressively devout–all except one uncle, a smoker, a “black sheep.” For our family, non-Mormons were beyond the pale–to be tolerated, of course, even treated kindly if they behaved themselves, viewed perhaps as potential converts, but never courted or married, and never even visited socially. They were certainly not destined, like us, to enter the celestial kingdom. We knew that in the next life those lost souls would not even be allowed to come near us, as we all continued our eternal progression, pursuing knowledge and righteousness–concepts that when defined correctly turned out to be the same thing.
What I remember as most important to me was that in heaven the non-Mormon or non-devout males down there in the lower kingdoms would have no hope for what I had a strong hope for, if I kept my nose clean: becoming the god of another world, accompanied by a pious female helpmate. Meanwhile, here and now, non-Mormons were so far beneath us that it was dangerous even to get near them. I remember feeling scared to walk too close to the one non-Mormon church in my home town, American Fork, Utah. I would always cross the road and walk on the other side, to avoid contamination, and I was thankful that we lived in another ward, far from that wicked place.
In short, until my first questioning began at about fourteen, I was a 100 percent devotee of what might be called an exclusivist, or particularist, anti-ecumenical version of Mormonism. That boy, the very young Wayne Booth, would perhaps these days be called by non-Mormons a fundamentalist (the word wasn’t in our vocabulary, I’m quite sure). Born and reared in the pre-Darwinian nineteenth century, as you might say, he was for about fifteen years unaware of what had been happening to western thought from long before he was born.
Ignorance, clannishness, grandiosity, and a visceral shrinking from your inferiors – Booth describes his young self as well on its way, in its attitudes, toward the ultra-orthodox of Israel, about whose escalating withdrawal from and violence against that country I’ve been reading and posting lately.**
Later in the essay, Booth writes that he still considers himself a Mormon, though a very non-standard one; and he says:
I have been discouraged by the difficulties in the way of intellectual improvement among my people. The Mormon ideology is so firmly rooted in superstition that it seems impossible ever to separate the two: despite all my apologetics, one is simply not a Mormon unless one believes in the literal divinity of the Book of Mormon…
The young Booth begins to sense there must be much more – to himself, to other people, and to the world. His inchoate notion of the complexity and dynamism of human beings draws him to James Joyce’s Ulysses:
Meanwhile, as the idiosyncratic mission drags on, the self-divided missionary takes refuge many hours each week in literature and music, sometimes with conscious reference to religious problems but often simply lost in the joys of art.
But almost every day he wrestles with religious questions. He says that he has discovered that every person is “a walking bundle of ineffability, a bit like God himself,” by which he apparently means that the existential richness of each person finally escapes any attempt at description: forget about conceptual problems, essentially irresolvable, and revel in the riches God’s world offers you. He reads Ulysses–can you picture it, reader, that young missionary, moving from orthodox testimony meetings to James Joyce’s night-town scenes and back to the meetings? — the “most clever, most intellectual, most sophisticated book I’ve ever read!”
Molly Bloom is, I suppose, testifying; but she’s most unorthodox… And I guess the key here is “richness” – that endless, wild novel full of characters full of contradictions, wary of the traps of communal life and history and grandiosity, must have taken the protected young Booth on quite a ride.
Booth’s discovery of Henri Bergson deepens his sense of the intense, fluid energy of each self, an energy orthodox religion may deny or contain or twist.
[Bergson argues that there’s] an original vital impetus–élan vital–which is consciousness or “life” pushing upward against materiality (which naturally is descending). Through intuition and not through intellect we can discover this élan vital. There is no limit in time to the impetus; it may even transcend death. It is a becoming–as is all movement–and the aim of philosophy should be to turn inward toward this becoming in order to apprehend, “in order to follow its present results.”
His love of William Blake (Stephen Dedalus loves him too) deepens his understanding of the sources of repression:
He falls in love with Blake’s “London,” memorizes it, and quotes it entirely in the journal, commenting on the mind-forged manacles that he feels still binding him:
In every cry of every man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.
Here Booth intuits his own implication in his dilemma, as well as the possibility that, in a free exercise of his own vitality, he might overcome it.
Booth concludes by describing the passionate and indeed spiritual contingency in which he would live the rest of his life:
One could say that without quite knowing it, the young man was discovering the pluralist religion that sparks my life now: the passion for furthering multiple, always partial understandings of a world, a cosmos, a God, that/who somehow deserves to be understood and commands that we both try to understand “It” and live according to Its standards–even while It remains beyond any one formula.
A novel like Ulysses doesn’t merely acknowledge the partial understandings with which we’ll always be grappling; it celebrates that limitation as the sacred key, if you’d like, to our humanity. It is what makes us loved, and loving: this recognition – about ourselves, about others – that at any given moment in time (June 16, 1904, say) we’re struggling, often heroically, to overcome our past, to maintain our balance and compassion in the present, and to project a survivable future. “My primary interest . . . is to get closer to reality,” writes Wayne Booth in 1942. He comes to realize that nothing’s realer than fiction.
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** From a recent column in Ha’aretz:
[T]he culture wars have led to the point where Israel is currently on the verge of falling apart as a country. The events surrounding the refusal of Haredi parents in Immanuel to have their daughters study with Mizrahi girls must be seen as what they are. The Haredi community has staged the imprisonments of these parents into a grand event of martyrdom for the Torah. For them Israel’s legal system simply has no legitimacy.
Paradoxically, not only Ashkenazi Haredim think this way – the Haredi state of mind was made fully explicit by Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, Shas’ spiritual leader, who condemned the High Court of Justice for intervening. He said that the offended Mizrahi parents should not have turned to arka’ot – the term traditionally used by Jews to designate the courts of the gentile countries in which Jews lived. It was seen as a betrayal of Jews by Jews to turn to these courts instead of a rabbinical court. Add to this that some Haredim used terms like the Chelmnitzky pogroms and ‘inquisition’ to describe these events. This rhetoric shows the depth of the chasm between the Haredim and the rest of the country.
De facto, approximately one million Jews – Haredim and part of the settler community – have ceased accepting the authority of the state.
… has a Y on it. A big white Y. For Young. Brigham Young. Also some inspiring rhythmic music has just started up. I assume it’s BYU’s fight song, but Mr UD’s on the phone with La Kid right now and I can’t ask him.
The hills are alive with the sound of Mormons.
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UPDATE: No, not the fight song.
2010 will mark the 14th year of the NIKE Football Training Camps. These camps have produced such alums as Carson Palmer, Matt Forte, Darnell Dockett and Clay Matthews.
The NIKE Football Training Camps are designed to help elite high school players with college potential advance their football and training knowledge in order to maximize their ability. Participants are taught position-specific and athletic performance drills designed by some of the top NFL football players and sports performance specialists in America, and it is all FREE for the athletes.
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We leave for Park City this afternoon.
… after her long Bloomsday night at Guapo’s Restaurant.
So long that she left before the thing was over. It’s still going on even as I blog. But — hot city, hot restaurant. Had to get some air.
Here are notes on the experience, direct and unedited from UD‘s journal of the event…
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16 June 2010
Bloomsday 2010. Did not drink enough (only had a sip of Nalewka) to get through this four-hour thing (I’m reading from Lestrygonians and Sirens), so must start in on that when I get to Guapo’s.
Maybe the booze will lighten this rather tense, heavy feeling I’ve got. Feel as though instead of being in my life, doing one thing, then another, flowflowflow, I’m a bit blocked. My strange silent days in an empty house outside of which immense summer storms rage (La Kid’s vacationing at the Outer Banks, Mr UD‘s at a conference in Utah , the dog is in the kennel) are pleasant, but the very placidity of it makes this – joining humanity around the Tenleytown metro – quite a wrench. Heart pounds, rear feels plugged.
… I’m very conscious of my essential absurdity. (Other people don’t seem to have this problem.) I expect other people to perceive this absurdity and laugh at it. This makes me nervous.
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Upstairs at Guapo’s. Every seat is taken! Margaritas and chips all around, and everyone’s leafing through their copy of Ulysses.
Throughout the event, the 1967 black and white film of Ulysses plays silently on a screen behind the readers. It was a good idea to do this — The fumbling sincerity of that account of the book has a sweetness that lightens the night.
And here’s Courtney, once my student, now my friend, who drove in from Baltimore for this. She’s brought another friend with her. I’m very moved that Courtney’s gone to this trouble.
The readers preceding me are all fine, but as always there’s the accent problem. We’re Americans, and if we try to be Irish we’ll be ridiculous… On the other hand, our hard American edges aren’t right for this lilting prose…
And one of the readers is doing Molly’s voice wrong — has her as a rasping harridan. Molly’s a singer, and a good one, and must have a pleasant speaking voice as well.
One of the readers, when he finishes, goes around to all the tables handing out a ten-question Bloomsday quiz. First question: When was Ulysses allowed to be published in Ireland? Damned if I know.
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I feel very warm, although my table mates assure me that it’s air conditioned up here. Booze does that to me. Also nerves.
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My turn! Hoopsa girlagirl! Hoopsa!
I drag my bones up to the mike – some readers sit, some stand… I decide to stand! What the hell! Go all out! In order to get through Sirens I have to sing M’appari as Simon Dedalus would have! I have to fart loudly and repeatedly! Let’s let it rip!
The crowd was quiet for me, so that was a good sign right there. And I did do accents a little – softened my hard American voice into a vaguely British/Irish something… And I went ahead and sang out that way high COME! at the end of Simon’s performance. Held it for a long time, too, and that seemed to work…
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The audience applauded a lot when I finished, and one guy even called out Bravo, which made my plugged-up heavy feeling go completely away …
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UPDATE:
**** UD CHOSEN FIRST RUNNER-UP AFTER BIG LOCALLY FAMOUS DUDE. *****
From an email UD just got from her colleague, Christopher Griffin, who stayed at the event until the end:
Dear Margaret:
Well done on your vivid dramatic reading of “Sirens.” After you left, there were some missing readers, so Robert Aubry Davis filled in for two of them. When we got to “Penelope,” the reader was missing, so the MC called for Margaret Soltan. When you did not respond, Rebecca Boggs came up and did a fantastic reading.
The winner was Robert Aubry Davis, so he came up to pick some prizes. The first runner-up was
you, but since you were not present, Coilin Owens was the next runner-up, so he picked a prize. I figured that you deserved a token, so I went up saying that I represented you and would like to pick an item for you. So I picked the best of what was left, which was a picture of Joyce’s face on Ireland. I will drop it off to your mailbox or office door sometime next week.
