The ruins of the church where the First Council of Nicaea met may have been found . . . under a lake.
Has the podcast bubble burst? “Panoply, the podcasting unit set up by Slate magazine, recently laid off most of its staff and says it will now become just a distributor of podcasts rather than the creator of them—despite what appeared to be strong support for its existing podcasts. And on Wednesday, BuzzFeed announced it was also laying off staff at its podcasting unit—the company said it will continue to do podcasts, but won’t have a dedicated team the way it used to, and will now mostly use freelancers rather than staff. Audible, the audio arm of retail giant Amazon, also laid off some staff from its podcasting unit recently.”
The magic of literary maps: “Robert Louis Stevenson drew it in the summer of 1881 to entertain his 12-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, while on a rainy family holiday in Scotland. It depicts a rough-coasted island of woods, peaks, swamps and coves. A few place names are marked, which speak of adventure and disaster: Spyeglass Hill, Graves, Skeleton Island. The penmanship is deft, confident – at the island’s southern end is an intricate compass rose, and the sketch of a galleon at full sail. Figures signal the depth in fathoms of the surrounding sea, and there are warnings to mariners: ‘Strong tide here’, ‘Foul ground’. In the heart of the island is a blood-red cross, by which is scrawled the legend ‘Bulk of treasure here’.”
Breaking: Caravaggio died of sepsis, not syphilis.
Is American life dominated by fear or just fearmongering? John Wilson reviews Martha Nussbaum’s The Monarchy of Fear: “Does the road to becoming a Trump voter, and to all manner of other instances of ‘the monarchy of fear’ in our lives, really begin in the nightmarish helplessness of our infant selves, as Nussbaum argues at length?”
Carl Jung’s work has endured thanks in part to New Age publishers and the self-help industry. But is it worth reading? Joseph Bottum argues it is: Jung was a polymath of extraordinary breadth. But more important is the depth of his intellect. From the psychology of the unconscious to the Book of Job, he showed a power to concentrate and bring enormous amounts of thought to a topic. His notions of, say, the collective unconscious and universal archetypes are what draw to him some of the gooier contemporary writers, just as his interest in personality attracted the dubious allies of Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers. But the ideas themselves, in the nuance of Jung’s original accounts, are not ruined as a result.”
If you are interested in rare books, I recommend you read Jeremy Dibbell’s weekly round-up of rare book news, book history, and the latest in digital archives at PhiloBiblos. He posts links every Sunday. This Sunday he recommended a piece by Sarah Hovde, who tells the story of hunting down the author of a book of cartoons based on quotations from Shakespeare.
Essay of the Day:
The title of this essay by Simon Reynolds is “How Auto-Tune Revolutionized the Sound of Popular Music,” but it could easily have been “How Auto-Tune Ruined” pop music:
“It happened exactly 36 seconds into the song—a glimpse of the shape of pop to come, a feel of the fabric of the future we now inhabit. The phrase ‘I can’t break through’ turned crystalline, like the singer suddenly disappeared behind frosted glass. That sparkly special effect reappeared in the next verse, but this time a robotic warble wobbled, ‘So sa-a-a-ad that you’re leaving.’
“The song, of course, was Cher’s ‘Believe,’ a worldwide smash on its October 1998 release. And what we were really ‘leaving’ was the 20th century.
“The pitch-correction technology Auto-Tune had been on the market for about a year before ‘Believe’ hit the charts, but its previous appearances had been discreet, as its makers, Antares Audio Technologies, intended. ‘Believe’ was the first record where the effect drew attention to itself: The glow-and-flutter of Cher’s voice at key points in the song announced its own technological artifice—a blend of posthuman perfection and angelic transcendence ideal for the vague religiosity of the chorus, “Do you believe in life after love?”
“The song’s producers, Mark Taylor and Brian Rawling, tried to keep secret the source of their magic trick, even coming up with a cover story that identified the machine as a brand of vocoder pedal, that robotic-sounding analog-era effect widely used in disco and funk. But the truth seeped out. Soon overtly Auto-Tuned vocals were cropping up all over the sonic landscape, in R&B and dancehall, pop, house, and even country.
“Right from the start, it always felt like a gimmick, something forever on the brink of falling from public favor. But Auto-Tune proved to be the fad that just wouldn’t fade. Its use is now more entrenched than ever. Despite all the premature expectations of its imminent demise, Auto-Tune’s potential as a creative tool turned out to be wider and wilder than anybody could ever have dreamt back when ‘Believe’ topped the charts in 23 countries.
* * *
“What follows is the story of the life of Auto-Tune—its unexpected staying power, its global penetration, its freakily persistent power to thrill listeners. Few innovations in sound-production have been simultaneously so reviled and so revolutionary. Epoch-defining or epoch-defacing, Auto-Tune is indisputably the sound of the 21st century so far. Its imprint is the date-stamp that detractors claim will make recordings from this era sound dated. But it seems far more likely to become a trigger for fond nostalgia: how we’ll remember these strange times we’re living through.”
Photo: Ansembourg rose garden
Poem: Clive James, “Occupation Gone” (Excerpt from The River and the Sky)
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