Despite the heat, the show goes on

I’ve just returned from the Ash Lawn Opera Festival expedition filled with the sort of contentment one only gets from eating a good dinner outdoors in enjoyable company, listening to promising young sopranos sing of love turned to suicidal despair, and wallowing unabashedly in melodramatic emotion. In other words, it was a great evening. My companions and I agreed afterward that we hoped the evening’s Cio-Cio-San has a full-time career ahead of her (and I liked the Suzuki quite a bit as well, but then, I’m a sucker for mezzos of all descriptions, as regular readers will have undoubtedly guessed).

Also, Ash Lawn — which was James Monroe’s estate, and is now run by the College of William and Mary — is scenic in the extreme, laid out with an eighteenth-century landscaper’s fondness for perspectives. You get a view of the fields around Monticello and all the neighboring vineyards along the way there. And, after sunset, bats come out and occasionally swoop and flutter past the stage.

If only it hadn’t been the hottest evening of the summer — one can only imagine how hot it must have been for the singers, who held up very well, considering they must have been roasting in their costumes. Everyone flocked to the concession stand for ice water at intermission, sweating profusely all the way. No matter. It was worth it.

Used book trade meets hide-and-seek

BookCrossing, a site for free, random book exchange, looks like a lot of fun. The idea is that you tag one of your books with a label that directs the finder to the Bookcrossing site, release the book into the wild, and then post a message indicating where you left it. Then the next person to find it makes a journal entry about it, and so on. I like the idea of book exchange via deliberately "losing" books where they can be found by unknown passersby; I also like the way the site builds on these serendipitous connections between readers.

Currently there are only a few people releasing books in the Charlottesville area. I think I’ll sign up and see if I can add a some books to the tally. Maybe I’ll release my copy of I Capture the Castle, which I found at the Jefferson-Madison Library book sale complete with a previous reader’s one-word review ("Wonderful!") on a sticky note inside the cover. It seems fitting to pass it on to the next person. If I can stand to let it go, that is.

Adding “Metropolitan Opera archivist” to list of dream jobs

This is amazing: the Metropolitan Opera now has a huge database of information on every performance since 1883. And don’t miss the "Sights and Sounds of the Met" historical timeline either. (Via infoshare.)

[P.S.: speaking of opera, I’m going to the Ash Lawn Opera Festival‘s production of Madama Butterfly next week. First live performance I’ve been to in ages! Hoorah!]

Gratuitous feline cuteness

In case you’re suffering from a deficit of kitten pictures: The Daily Kitten. Because sometimes, one just wants to look at cute fluffy kittens. (Via Feministe.)

Personal anthology: Anne Carson

Bane’s adaptation of the newly-discovered Sappho poem (and her earlier post about translating Horace’s Soracte ode) has made me think about both classical Greek and Latin poetry and the practice of free translation.* While thinking, I remembered Anne Carson’s adaptation of Catullus 50 in Men in the Off Hours:

Hesterno Licini Die Otiosi (Yesterday Licinius At Our Ease)

Catullus addresses Licinius with affection.

I guess around sunset we started to drink.
And lay on the floor writing lines
For songs that cold
Night smell coming in
The window I left about four went
Home.
Opened the fridge.
Closed it lay down got up.
Lay down.
Lay.
Turned.
Not morning yet.
I just want to talk to you.
Why does love happen?
So then I grew old and died and wrote this.
Be careful it’s worldsharp.

This is part of "Catullus: Carmina," a series of Catullus adaptations in Men in the Off Hours. I love the way the hyperbole in it keeps bumping up against real longing and a sadness that isn’t exactly there in the original. But when one goes back to Catullus’s poem afterward, one starts to notice the ominous quality of that final reference to Nemesis, tongue-in-cheek though the rest of the poem is. My other favorite free-translation in the sequence is "Caeli Lesbia Nostra Lesbia Illa (Our Lesbia That Lesbia)," based on #58, one of Catullus’s more disgruntled breaking-up-with-Lesbia poems:

Nuns coated with silver were not so naked
As our night interviews.
Now what plum is your tongue
In?

None of this is about staying close to the text, obviously. The goal is something different, more like riffing and improvising. (I would also quote from Carson’s Autobiography of Red, which I adore, but a friend borrowed my copy some time back and still has it.) I want to try it; it’s been too long since I translated anything.

* And also because, one chapter into the Italian version of Harry Potter, I’m already being startled by what happens to characters’ names. Harry Potter is still Harry Potter and the Dursleys are still the Dursleys, but Albus Dumbledore inexplicably becomes "Albus Silente" and Minerva McGonagall’s last name is rendered as "McGranitt." Mystifying.

Pottering around

Department of "Reading list decisions destined to interfere with each other":

1. I decided to catch up on my reading of all the Harry Potter books (I stopped after volume 2, fell out of sync with everyone else on the planet, and am now thinking that I want to catch up, but not to read them out of sequence).

2. I also decided to work on my Italian reading comprehension by reading something a bit less daunting than Calvino in the original. (Though Invisible Cities isn’t that hard to read, if only because I’ve read the English translation so many times.) So I recently ordered the Italian translation of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, and am learning boatloads of new vocabulary already. Can’t wait to see how they translate the quasi-Latin of the spells once Harry gets to Hogwarts.

Given 1) and 2), I’m not sure whether I’ll end up trying to read the entire series in Italian, or pick up where I left off in English while eventually circling back to Harry Potter e la Camera dei Segreti, Harry Potter e il Prigionero di Azkaban, eccetera. (The latter, I think.) It should be interesting, either way.

And speaking of things Rowling-related, wolf angel and I have the same Meyers-Briggs profile, and like her, I’m perplexed by the character that the quiz-makers at Pirate Monkeys chose to exemplify us INTPs:

Pirate Monkey's Harry Potter Personality Quiz
Harry Potter Personality Quiz
by Pirate Monkeys Inc.

I may be reclusive at times, but I’m no Dark Lord!

Saturday opera blogging redux

I haven’t been very communicative lately, not just here but with everyone.  Between the exhausting heat (we had several days during which going outside was like stepping directly into a furnace), the gloom about current affairs that’s been seeping into so many of the conversations I’ve been in lately, and the way it’s finally starting to catch up with me that my father is really gone, I’ve not had the energy to say much.

But then some days, like this one, the heat gives way to cool rainy weather, and the world still seems a mess, but a mess worth living in. I’m spending the afternoon catching up on parterre box’s "Unnatural Acts of Opera" podcasts, and have been listening to a 1974 performance of Norma with Montserrat Caballé, with bonus clips of Caballé as Isolde. Just the thing for a day like this. If I concentrate hard enough, I can imagine the trees outside my window as a sacred grove. (Though the pouring rain does spoil the effect a bit.)

This kind of thing is why I’m fascinated by classification

There is, however, a whole universe of easily overlooked and forgotten things that remain unclassified. Once noticed, these Very Small Objects seem to exist in every niche and corner in staggering numbers and varieties. We encounter these objects every day hidden in plain sight. They fill our pockets, cabinets, and corners. They populate our environments and make our machines work.

The Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects is part art exhibit, part taxonomy. I’m greatly taken with the classification chart with its nomenclature for small objects that are (among other things): found under a spider’s web; meant to accumulate in corners; primarily intended to be eaten; of no apparent purpose or function; having the shape of an orange; crunchy; or resembling nothing but themselves. (One half-expects "that from a long distance look like flies" to show up in the system somewhere.)

Via librarian.net.

Blog at your own risk

Like a whole bunch of others, I found this Chronicle article ("Bloggers Need Not Apply," by "Ivan Tribble," 7/8/05) … puzzling, at best. Professor Tribble, who’s served on a search committee that didn’t hire several blogging candidates, wonders why anyone applying for an academic position would keep a blog:

The pertinent question for bloggers is simply, Why? What is the purpose
of broadcasting one’s unfiltered thoughts to the whole wired world?
It’s not hard to imagine legitimate, constructive applications for such
a forum. But it’s also not hard to find examples of the worst kinds of
uses.

A blog easily becomes a therapeutic outlet, a place to vent
petty gripes and frustrations stemming from congested traffic, rude
sales clerks, or unpleasant national news. It becomes an open diary or
confessional booth, where inward thoughts are publicly aired.

Worst of all, for professional academics, it’s a publishing
medium with no vetting process, no review board, and no editor.

The article concludes, "Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial
interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we
got to know ‘the real them’ — better than we wanted, enough to
conclude we didn’t want to know more."

Hmm. I don’t think I’d want to join Professor Tribble’s department, even if I were still looking for academic jobs. It sounds like people who have interests outside their jobs, or even people who admit to having personal lives, aren’t all that welcome there. (And I’m not even going to say anything about the way Professor Tribble dubs the candidate with the personal blog "Shrill.") What bothers me about this article — apart from the way the search committee seems to think it’s fine to hire a candidate without knowing "the real them" only to discover, too late, that they don’t like "the real them" — is the way Professor Tribble’s disapproval of the few examples of legitimately Bad Blogging Behavior (the candidate who misrepresents his research, for instance) drifts into a general disapproval of the sharing of any "inward thoughts" with the reading public.

Blogging during a job search is a risky business. I’m fully aware that potential employers are probably going to Google me, and they may well end up here. That knowledge is always in my head when I’m composing new entries; I revise a lot, I try to stay away from excessively personal topics, I worry about whether my political posts are too ranty and whether my jokier posts are too silly.* People I know from professional contexts do read this blog from time to time (hello, all of you!) and have had nice things to say about it so far (thanks!). But I’m still wary of what should and shouldn’t be said in the presence of people who currently work with me or may do so in the future. And I’m all right with that. After all, "don’t forget that you have an audience composed of actual people rather than imaginary phantoms" was one of the main principles I tried to teach my students when I taught college writing.

But the idea that candidates, during the job search, should avoid giving any impression of a personality or outside interests or opinions — that seems a little on the absurd side. To answer Professor Tribble’s initial "why?" question: for me, at least, blogging is a 21st-century variation on the 18th-century salon. It’s conversation, sometimes very intellectual, sometimes not; it’s a social activity, but one that’s mediated through the written word. It’s not the same thing as publishing in a peer-reviewed journal, nor should it be. It’s an opportunity to test out new thoughts, but in a forum where others are present to discuss, join in, go off on tangents, be snarky or serious, and make connections to what other people are saying. And if being interested in carrying on that kind of conversation disqualifies me in the eyes of potential employers, I might not be a good "fit" for them, and vice versa, in the first place.

(See also Timothy Burke, Dorothea Salo, Ancrene Wiseass, and Matthew Kirschenbaum.)

* Perhaps job-seeking bloggers need someone like the Colonel from Monty Python’s Flying Circus to indicate when things are getting too silly?

London

I try to imagine someone who understands, at a gut level, that there are people, innocent
people, innocent in the worst way, that sleepy innocence of going to
work, down into the station with your child’s hand in yours, or leaving
the end of a shift, or standing up from your desk and stretching,
thinking of a cup of coffee, the bathroom, until you look out the
window. I wonder if it’s possible to understand this, to be
these people, and then commit this kind of crime. Should I pity the
person who does this? (James Wright: "I do not pity the dead, I pity
the dying.")

"on london," Nyarlathotep’s Miscellany, 7/8/05

 

I’ve never been to London, though I do feel a certain kinship to it even so. I was trying to find the words to write something about the bombings on Thursday, and I couldn’t, so I’m sending you to Nyarly’s post instead, because she says it better than I can.