Reviews and News:
Victorian women translating Greek: “Ranging from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s 1833 translation of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon to a performance of Sophocles’ Antigone at Spelman in 1933,” Yopie Prins “follows the stories of various women’s love and despair over the Greek language, its presence in their writing early and late, as they fall out of the Greek and into their English, letting Greek shape their poetic meters and the very alphabet of their thoughts.”
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A day in the life of a Hollywood dialect coach: “After 11 years of coaching, Bay has found a consistent approach. Within the first five minutes of the first session, she is likely to tell you to stand up, put away your notebook and run through a set of physical gestures tied to vowels. ‘Now, we’re going to be like 5-year-olds,’ Bay might say. And: ‘Remember how acting takes your whole body? So does speech.’”
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Does Congress do anything? Yes, and, according to David Mayhew, it does it rather well. “Congress is the messiest of our governing institutions, David Mayhew explains in his masterful tour d’horizon of its impacts throughout American history. Weighing in at only 116 widely-spaced pages of text plus 40 pages of footnotes, it can be read in one enormously profitable sitting. Mayhew, an emeritus politics professor at Yale and perhaps the country’s leading specialist on Congress, explains that Congress’s characteristic ‘inconstancy, incoherence, and particularism’ are a virtue in the sense of being more-or-less inevitable features of its vital function: providing responsiveness and accountability in a balancing act with an executive power that is tidier and more Weberian-rational but is also potentially more dangerous to democracy. Mayhew, tackles a pivotal question: how well does Congress actually perform this function? His answer is that it does rather well — at least when compared with earlier periods of American history and with its international counterparts in both parliamentary and presidential systems.”
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Sven Birkerts on writing: “I believe we make our way forward in writing by way of negation, by the gradual but steady shedding of what no longer serves. A big part of the process involves deploying the inner critic, paying attention to what I’m doing as I’m doing it and then reacting, incorporating the reaction. My responses to my own expression are my signals, my indicators. Yes, no, yes, no … This is a complicated affair, for there are, I believe, endless ways to say the same essential thing wrong — not as one really means it — and maybe only one way to say it right. This might be what Coleridge meant when he defined poetry as ‘the best words in the best order.’…For me, the most accurate means of judging is by these hair-trigger reactions to my expression. So often I’ve come to in the writer’s dark wood, to find I am sickened by the look and sound of myself on the page. Not the what of the prose, but the how. And ‘sickened’ is not misplaced, for my response is almost visceral — it’s like I’m registering an odor or a taste that is distinctly ‘off.’ This can be the smallest thing — a hint of posturing in the verbs, a stiffness of diction or what feels like a false humility or an unearned archness…At these times, I’ve learned, it’s not a matter of the minor fix, but a systemic change. But how does one do this? Changing the way you say something amounts to inwardly changing your perception, your affect. Which is, as I’ve said, the thing that can’t be willed.”
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Ella Fitzgerald at 100: “Fitzgerald was ideal for both the grittier jazz clubs and the European concert stage, not something we can say about many singers. She always channeled the blues and bop—bop owing so much to the blues, only sped up to metronome-busting degrees—but with a fringe of operatic stylings. Not so much in technique, but in manner, poise, dignity. Chops, too.”
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Recovering Reagan: “Olsen offers us a new understanding of Reagan as a politician and thinker anchored in the real problems of everyday Americans.”
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Essay of the Day:
Robert R. Reilly writes about the return of the sacred in classical music for Future Symphony Institute. The “tyranny” of atonality is “gone”:
“If you have heard of the ‘new spirituality’ in music, it is most likely on account of one of these three somewhat unlikely composers who have met with astonishing success over the past several decades: the late Henryk Górecki from Poland, Arvo Pärt from Estonia, and the late John Tavener from England. Though their styles are very unlike, they do
share some striking similarities: they, like John Adams, all once composed under the spell of Schoenberg’s 12-tone method and were considered in the avant-garde; all subsequently renounced it (as Pärt said, ‘The sterile democracy between the notes has killed in us every lively feeling’); and all are, or were, devout Christians, two of them having converted to the Russian Orthodox faith, the other having adhered to his Catholic faith throughout his life.
“Anyone who has tracked the self-destruction of music over the past half century has to be astonished at the outpouring of such explicitly religious music and at its enormously popular reception. Can the recovery of music be, at least partially, a product of faith, in fact of Christian faith? A short time ago, such a question would have produced snickers in the concert hall, howls in the academy, and guffaws among the critics. In fact, it still might. In a New York Times review, a critic condescended to call the works of the three composers nothing but ‘Feel-Good Mysticism.’ However, the possibility gains some plausibility when one looks back at the source of the problem in Schoenberg himself and to a mysterious episode that brought what he thought would be his greatest achievement to a creative halt.”
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Photos: Silk Way Rally
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Poem: Ange Mlinko, “Two Poems”
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