A night at the opera

This past weekend I had the wonderful experience of attending a performance of Mozart's Don Giovanni at Indiana University. My experience of opera is rather slight, my musical interests having been almost entirely elsewhere, so I went to the opera as one might travel to another country, with unguarded curiosity as to what it's like over there. It was delightful over there. Tito Capobianco's direction added some smart bits of stage business as the story moved from sexual comedy to the darkly supernatural close. The orchestra, conducted by David Effron, had a beautiful sound, particularly the strings. And the singers ranged from very good to excellent. The three performances that most impressed me: Austin Kness' Don Giovanni, a cocky narcissist sans qualms; Alan Dunbar's Leporello, a servant living through his master's conquests; and Siân Davies' Donna Anna, one of the Furies who pursue DG for his wrongdoing.

If you're lucky enough to live near a university with a music program, try a student opera. You too might like it over there.

(Thanks, Martha and Gary!)

Don Giovanni, Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

Words from Robert Fitzgerald

Why care about an old work in a dead language that no one reads, or at least no one of those who, glancing at their Rolex watches, guide us into the future? Well, I love the future myself and expect everything of it: better artists than Homer, better works of art than The Odyssey. The prospect of looking back at our planet from the moon seems to me to promise a marvelous enlargement of our views.¹ But let us hold fast to what is good, hoping that if we do anything any good those who come after us will pay us the same compliment. If the world was given to us to explore and master, here is a tale, a play, a song about that endeavor long ago, by no means neglecting self-mastery, which in a sense is the whole point. Electronic brains may help us to use our heads but will not excuse us from that duty, and as to our hearts -- cardiograms cannot diagnose what may be most ill about them, or confirm what may be best. The faithful woman and the versatile brave man, the wakeful intelligence open to inspiration or grace -- these are still exemplary for our kind, as they always were and always will be. Nor do I suppose that the pleasure of hearing a story in words has quite gone out. Even movies and TV make use of words. The Odyssey at all events was made for your pleasure, in Homer’s words and in mine.

¹ This enlargement has now occurred, making everyone realize with a new pang not only the beauty of our blue planet but, by contrast with lunar and extra-lunar desolations, its bounty and fantasy of life.

That's the final paragraph of Robert Fitzgerald’s 1962 postscript to his translation of The Odyssey. The footnote is from 1969.

I wish Fitzgerald had written "the versatile brave man and woman," as Penelope too is both versatile and brave (as Fitzgerald of course knew). Replace the Rolex watches with Blackberries, substitute "the Internet" for "movies and TV," and Fitzgerald’s words seem as timely now as when he wrote them. This paragraph is for me a good explanation of why one might value and learn from ancient works of the imagination.

Deep purple

Purple blankets, purple cloaks: A student asked a good question. Why, in the Odyssey, is it always purple? The word in Homer's Greek is πορφύρεος, porphureos. Lesley Adkins and Roy A. Adkins explain:

Vegetable dyes were common, but the highly prized and expensive purple dye came from two species of sea snail (purpura and murex brandaris), which were native to the coasts of Syria and Phoenicia. (Handbook to Life in Ancient Greece, Oxford UP, 1997)

Purple was the color of majesty. Thus the expression "born to the purple" and the phrase "purple mountain majesties" in "America the Beautiful" (which I've heard, since grade school, as "purple mountains' majesty"). And it's fitting that purple should be the favorite color of the artist once again known as Prince.

Jackass

Greg Boardman, owner of the Lorraine Theatre in Hoopeston, Illinois, shut down for two weeks rather than show Jackass 2:

"The movies are so bad and I don't need the money . . . I just didn't think I should use my high-quality facilities to show people vomiting on screen," said Boardman, whose theaters boast a high-tech, eight-channel digital sound system. . . .

"There are enough theaters carrying movies like Jackass that if people want to see them they can . . . The problem now is that there are too few good movies, movies that transplant you to another place," Boardman said in a telephone interview.

Greg Boardman also owns Boardman's Art Theatre in Champaign, Illinois, the best place to see a movie (or film) that I know.

Links
U.S. theater owner shuts down rather than screening "drivel" (International Herald Tribune)
Boardman's Art Theatre
Lorraine Theatre

Telegram

Madeleine

From Merrian-Webster's Word of the Day:

madeleine \MAD-uh-lun\ noun
1 : a small rich shell-shaped cake
*2 : one that evokes a memory

Example sentence:
The crack of the bat and the sight of his son running the bases were madeleines for Tom, calling up memories of the great times he had playing the game in his youth.

Did you know?
The madeleine is said to have been named after a 19th-century French cook named Madeleine Paumier, but it was the French author Marcel Proust who immortalized the pastry in his 1913 book Swann's Way, the first volume of his seven-part novel Remembrance of Things Past [À la recherche du temps perdu]. In that work, a taste of tea-soaked cake evokes a surge of memory and nostalgia. As more and more readers chewed on the profound mnemonic power attributed to a mere morsel of cake, the word "madeleine" itself became a designation for anything that evokes a memory.

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.

The madeleine passage in Proust begins

For many years, already, everything about Combray that was not the theater and drama of my bedtime had ceased to exist for me, when one day in winter, as I returned home, my mother, seeing that I was cold, suggested that, contrary to my habit, I have a little tea. I refused at first and then, I do not know why, changed my mind. She sent for one of those squat, plump cakes called petites madeleines that look as though they have been molded in the grooved valve of a scallop shell. And soon, mechanically, oppressed by the gloomy day and the prospect of another sad day to follow, I carried to my lips a spoonful of the tea in which I had let soften a bit of madeleine. But at the very instant when the mouthful of tea mixed with cake crumbs touched my palate, I quivered, attentive to the extraordinary thing that was happening inside me.

From Swann's Way, translated by Lydia Davis (New York: Viking, 2002), 45

What was happening? You'll just have to read Swann's Way.

The Way the Cookie Crumbles, Edmund Levin reverse-engineers Proust's madeleine (from Slate)

Related posts
Other Proust posts, via Pinboard

"[L]ike oxygen"

Izzat Ghafouri Baban is a trumpeter in the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra:

"I can't practice in my house because I'm surrounded by husseiniyas," Mr. Baban, 41, said, referring to Shiite mosques that are named after the martyred grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. "Imagine if somebody hears there's a musician in my home. They'd think I'm against religion."

He squeezes in practice by arriving at the rehearsal hall two hours before his colleagues.

"The only thing that keeps us happy is when we see each other," said Mr. Baban, a stumpy man with gray hair and a grin as wide as a tuba's bell. "It's the happiest moment in our lives."

Ali Nasser is a trombonist:

Mr. Nasser, perhaps even more than others, has proved his dedication to music. A baker in the southern city of Nasiriya, he drives or takes a taxi to rehearsals. That is a four- to six-hour drive each way, and soaring gasoline prices mean the trip sucks up half of his income. Even worse, the road runs through the "Triangle of Death," an area infested with insurgents, militiamen and criminal gangs. Gunmen once shot dead passengers in a taxi just a few cars ahead of him.

"My wife says: 'Please don't go. Life is very bad in Baghdad. There's a lot of death in Baghdad,'" he said. "She tries to prevent me from coming, but I have to come. We can't survive without music. It's like oxygen.”

From a New York Times article on the Iraqi National Symphony Orchestra

Link: And the Orchestra Plays On, Echoing Iraq's Stuggles

Post-it Note post

For students: twenty uses for a Post-it Note

1. Mark your place in a book. It seems so obvious, yet relatively few students seem to do it. When your professor picks up with the poem or short story or chapter of the day, you'll be on the same page.

2. Mark the beginning and ending points for a reading assignment: immediate feedback on your progress.

3. Mark selected readings in an anthology.

4. Mark the notes or glossary at the back of a book for easy repeat access.

5. Mark passages in a library book.

6. Keep several Post-its on the inside cover of a datebook, planner, or notebook: now you're prepared to leave a note anywhere.

7. When you sit down to work, make a small-scale to-do list on a Post-it and stick it to your desktop.

8. Leave a Post-it on your alarm clock or inside doorknob as a reminder.

9. Avoid fines and late fees: put Post-its with due dates on library books and DVD rentals.

10. When there's no Scotch tape, cut the sticky edge from a Post-it to use as fake tape.

11. Use the sticky edge as a temporary label for a folder.

12. Fold the sticky edge into a hinge to hold a piece of paper or a postcard on a wall.

13. Wrap the sticky edge around a cable to identify it.

14. Use the sticky edge to clean between the keys of your computer keyboard.

15. Jot down less familiar keyboard shortcuts on a Post-it to keep by your computer.

16. Which way does the envelope go when you feed it into the printer? Draw a diagram on a Post-it and stick it on your printer.

17. If you drive an older car that doesn’t remind you that you've left your headlights on, use a Post-it as a reminder. When you put your lights on in the daytime, stick a Post-it note on the driver's side window (in a spot where it won't impede your vision. When you leave your car, you'll see the note and remember why it's there.

18. Keep a Post-it on the refrigerator and jot down what you need from the supermarket.

19. When you go to the supermarket, remove the Post-it from the fridge and stick it on your wallet. At the store, stick the note to the handle of your cart and have both hands free for shopping. Toss the note when you leave the store.

20. Splurge! Use a whole pad of Post-its to make a flip book. (Thanks to my son Ben for this last tip.)

[The photograph above is of my Penguin paperback of Marcel Proust’s The Guermantes Way, the third volume of In Search of Lost Time.]

Teaching, sitting, standing

For a long time I fell into the habit when teaching of sitting on the edge of the "teacher's desk" at the front of the classroom. Last semester I decided to make a change -- to honor, in a modest way, the memory of the best teacher I ever had. Twenty-odd years ago, when I was an M.A. student and graduate assistant, Jim Doyle, whom I've written about elsewhere on this blog, asked if I'd like to teach one of his classes (on "Lycidas"). I sat behind a very large and very wooden desk with Douglas Bush's edition of Milton and a cup of coffee and somehow talked about the poem. "It was very good," Jim said afterwards, but he advised me to stand: "Some people do better sitting; some people do better standing. You would do better standing." I can still hear these words as very likely exact. In "Spring" 2006 (that is, January 2006), I started standing while teaching. With the exception of a small seminar, during which I almost always sat, I've been standing while teaching ever since.

Thinking about Jim Doyle's words makes me recall how little useful guidance I received when I began teaching. The only institutional effort to address the graduate assistant's role as instructor came in the form of a workshop about writing instruction that devolved into an arch discussion among professors of what color ink to use when "marking" (that oddly primitive word) papers. One professor's suggestion was to switch colors from paper to paper, to keep students guessing -- a pretty clear indication of how seriously he took this whole business of thinking about how to teach writing. With no clear model of what I was supposed to be doing, I resolved simply to give my students their money's worth and mark their essays as fully as possible. I would mark everything, and thereby really help them with their writing. I cringe when I think of it. My students recognized, at least, my dedication.

Back in the day, I was quite grateful for Jim's plain, pragmatic advice. I'm not sure when I moved away from it and began sitting on desks. That casual-looking posture is less comfortable than it might appear -- getting down to write words on the blackboard (which is still black, not green or white) or reaching across the desk for a supplementary book can be slightly ungainly, the desktop being almost as great an impediment to easy movement as the stools upon which folksingers once perched.

So I'm standing again, with notes (which I only occasionally use) on a lectern and a book in hand, sometimes behind the lectern, sometimes moving around the front of the room. It occurs to me that instead of falling into a habit, I've made my posture when teaching intentional. Standing when I'm teaching makes me think of Jim Doyle -- not a bad idea for anyone who teaches.

Jedi Concentrate

A nice aid to concentration: Dana Hanna's Jedi Concentrate, a freeware Windows application that dims everything but the currently active window (hit Ctrl-/, F12, or Win-J). As its creator explains, "The purpose is to dim everything on all of your monitors when you need to get to work." I've been looking for a program along these lines for several months and am very happy to find it. Jedi Concentrate is one result of Hanna's An App A Day project -- writing one application a day for thirty days.

This open-source application has already been improved by another programmer, Joe Chrzanowski, who added -- within a day of the program's release -- options for screen opacity and fade speed. Keep that in mind when Microsoft warns that open-source software is an unreliable, unworkable model.

I found Jedi Concentrate via Lifehacker, always a great source for useful stuff.

[2020: This app disappeared some time ago.]