A 21st Century Mozart

". . . in modern conditions Mozart would make a fortune with the products of one side of his genius which he would lose in performances of works of the other side." 

–A Companion to Mozart's Piano Concertos. Arthur Hutchings, p. 160.

Arthur Hutchings' companion to the Mozart concerti is one of those densely perspicacious books in which one can find insight at every page and line. The one-off line I quoted above is one of many you could profitably unfold into a long essay.  At first look it seems a throwaway what-if to tantalize historians: What if Alexander the Great had lived, what if Cicero debated Demosthenes, and so forth. Yet the question is a little deeper, methinks.

You see, Mozart has rather unwisely been made the patron saint of starving artists, especially musicians. In truth, he wasn't the best servant to the Archbishop in Salzburg and afterward he made tidy sums throughout his ten years in Vienna. At the time of his death he was poised to explode on the opera world. So while we may be wrong to see in Mozart the subject of grievous injustice, we can't help and I don't think we're wrong to feel that he was let down. We who greedily lap up the masterpieces he produced-week by-week find unbearable the autocratic constrictions and lowbrow tastes with which he contended. Why should such a rare genius answer to anyone? Yet Mozart, very much the first freelance musician, responded to the demand and especially in the concerti and operas produced works both finely-crafted and appealing.

We should realize instead, from Mozart's experience, that ours is a liberated time. A 21st century Mozart wouldn't have to cater to the whims of a handful of rich patrons or the citizens of one city because the transportation and information revolutions have given every artist a global audience. Can you imagine the demand for Mozart's prolific universal genius? He'd have an opera premiering in New York, a new movie he scored opening every few months, he'd be on tour performing concerti and symphonies, and his serenades would dominate the Top 40. He would have commissions lined up for years and pupils lined up around the corner. Imagine a Mozart masterclass, and a Mozart not wasted teaching Franz "shithead" Sussmayr.

With his popular success Mozart would fund the projects of his heart. No more dense pupils and comissions for mechanical organ. What would we see? What would a mature, unfettered Mozart produce? Would he glory in the esoteric or elevate the everyday? Both, probably. What intimate chamber worlds and celestial symphonies might be. Surely he'd still be outraging the conservatives with his daring harmonies and befuddling the avant-garde with his knowledge of the old ways. I'm sure he'd still be giving cutting criticism of his contemporaries, and I can just see him walking Bimperl along Central Park on the way home to a private chamber recital with family and friends.

I would worry about his education, though. Would Mozart's father have been able to remain his private tutor? Could he have afforded to? Would Leopold have been dragged through the tabloids for exploiting his son? What scandals would have been cooked up in a media frenzy?  We should probably spare ourselves the thought of young Wolferl in a government school classroom of 30.

Aside from the fact that no musical education could replace that from his father, young Wolfgang's interest was almost exclusively musical. Would it have profited him, his family, or anyone, to have dragged him though a "Core Curriculum?" Yuck. Is not the disconnect between the thoughts downright offensive: Mozart and Core Curriculum. How different the associations. If the young Mozart was as attention-deficient as many of his sonatas, might he have been medicated dull as so many other spunky, innocent boys today? We rightly noted the virtues of our liberated culture, but it seems clear the young Mozart was a freer boy and the Mozart family a closer, freer family than most today. What Wolfgang might have gained in the technological revolution from looking at digitized scores of Bach he might have lost early in other ways and early on.

Of lessons we should be wary of drawing too many. It's all too easy to start pointing and wagging fingers at the alleged causes of the artistic lacuna in our society. The solution, however, is no political or social prescription, but the personal one to cultivate him in our lives through his music. Toward this end Mozart can have done no more, having left us his most perfect, universal art. The only appropriate responses, I think, are love and gratitude.

And more music. Especially opera.

–

Amarcord: Ten Frames

Read our review.

click to enlarge

Music of Middle Earth: The March of the Ents

If the success of a romance like The Lord of the Rings in the postmodern 20th century is not surprising enough, consider the love of Tolkien's songs and poems therein. Beloved by Tolkien and Middle Earth aficionados, the songs showcase not only the author's wordsmith craft but also his affection for words. Yet they're no artist's conceit because they add veracity and authenticity to the larger narrative, enshrining the deeds of Middle Earth not just in history but in lore.

Many of Tolkien's songs have been set to music and in this series I would like to compare some interpretations. So to start, The March of the Ents, from The Two Towers.

We come, we come with roll of drum: ta-runda runda runda rom!
We come, we come with horn and drum: ta-runa runa runa rom!
To Isengard! Though Isengard be ringed and barred with doors of stone;
Though Isengard be stong and hard, as cold as stone and bare as bone,
We go, we go, we go to war, to hew the stone and break the door;
For bole and bough are burning now, the furnace roars - we go to war!
To land of gloom with tramp of doom, with roll of drum, we come, we come;
To Isengard with doom we come!
With doom we come, with doom we come!
–The Two Towers. Ch. Treebeard

The March of the Ents. Stephen Olivier. 1981.

Here we have the whole of Tolkien's Entish war song thrummed out by a chorus of basses over a walking bass line. Probably the most faithful to the simple spirit of the story, this version itself derives its considerable effect from simple means.  The deep, earthy basses are a natural fit for the Ents and the bass line, aside from mirroring the march of the Ents, provides a sense of motion under the strophic, hymn-like phrases of the text. The syllabic and almost staccato treatment of the words brings out the hard-hitting consonants of Tolkien's thumping battle hymn. Lastly, the dynamics give a terrible urgency to the fury of the Ents:

For bole and bough are burning now,
the furnace roars - we go to war!

The Ents' Marching Song. The Tolkien Ensemble. 2006.

Here, the drums with their wild rhythms create a scene of primeval danger. The ensemble here remains quite faithful to the text, deriving the rhythms from Tolkien's words. They do, however, insert a dramatic scene voiced by beloved Tolkien enthusiast and performer Christopher Lee in which Sir Christopher, presumably as Treebeard, shouts rousing commands to the marching Ents. This trick opens up the music from a simple song to a scene of action. The following brassy fanfares play up the martial theme until the bass voices return with the text. The opening and Sir Christopher's monologue are the highlights.

Isengard Unleashed. Howard Shore. 2002.

Consistent with the Wagnerian dimensions of Shore's score, the war song of the Ents is nested within the Battle of Helms Deep. Like Olivier's piece, Shore begins with bass rumblings, however he quickly builds to a small rhythmic figure which, in contrast to a simple walking bass, creates a more specifically martial theme. Next, however, Shore makes a radical departure from Tolkien and Olivier and, with both text and music, paints the scene from a third person perspective. No longer do we hear the Ents themselves sing of their tale in the making, no longer a muscular war song, rather we hear high soft voices narrate in the Elvish tongue. Shore paints the image of a people rising from an ancient slumber with a long, melismatic, conjunct line culminating in a crescendo and the entry of a solo boy soprano high above, fulfilling and releasing the musical tension and completing the narrative of the Ents' attack.

Lastly, let us hear from The Professor himself.

Shore's interpretation stands out certain for complexity and for its departure from the text, but I would argue it is quite successful. The version from Olivier and The Tolkien Ensemble are admirably faithful but still vivid and engaging interpretations. Are there any other noteworthy versions or performances we overlooked?

Top Ten: Things Which Annoy Classicists

Classicists are a curious bunch. We come in all shapes and sizes and with all manner of creeds, but generally it's a smart and elitist crowd. We're also rather. . . picky.

Most of us find the following vexing. Utter these at the risk of being denounced on an epic scale. I tried to keep the list focused on the discipline and not academia.


10. "I know Italian/Modern Greek. . .

. . . can't I just pronounce/read it like that?" It's not the ignorance of the cradle of Western Civilization here that galls so much as the unwillingness to invest in learning about it.

9. Fouling up quotations

Quote foreign languages at your own risk. "Arma virumque cana" is an epic fail.

8. Duckworth, Balchazy-Carducci, and Cambridge

Aside from the varying quality of the commentaries, the first two fall apart about an hour into reading and there is no force in the universe which can keep a new Cambridge propped open.

7. Random Translations

It's admirable that you added the $4.99 bargain edition of The Odyssey at checkout, but the Derpy McDerperson translation is not helping anyone or anything. Ask for assistance.

6. Lack of an Apparatus Criticus

You mean we don't have perfect original manuscripts? What?!

Review: Girls [TV]

Directed by Lena Dunham. Episode, "I Get Ideas." 2013.

I'm sick again, and you know what that means: television. I have to admit I did not intend to watch HBO's critic fave Girls, rather I was watching a documentary on WWII when I sat on the remote and flashed the channel to HBO. Well, why not?

I have no recollection of the first thirteen minutes of the show except for some desperately scrawled profanity on my pad. At that point, things got interesting.

Title character Hannah is dating a republican and after much pestering he reads one of her essays. . . and doesn't like it. She can't quite accept this and the problem quickly shifts from her essay to his social political views, which he refuses to discuss. He starts to explain that she doesn't really understand him and when, after their argument, she asks him if he still wants to have sex and he turns her down, we sense he is right. We star to see that Hannah understands neither her boyfriend nor even what she likes about him. Still, it is not Hannah's inability to understand others which seems to form the crux of the show, but her lack of self-understanding.

Indeed it is rather shocking to see such ignorance on display, to hear someone speak with a vocabulary of cliches such a litany of excuses, rationalizations, and diversions. Yet Hannah's delusions do not generate any concrete reactions to her. We don't feel pity because she deserves what she gets, we don't experience fear because her woes seem so easy to fix. Nor does Hannah possess any great charm or quality, like literature's great rogues from Richard III to Alex Delarge, to sweep us off our feet. Hannah is someone you simply want to get it together or go away. Yet she doesn't and in contrast just meanders around engaging in circular conversations which reinforce her self-deception.

An example is also of the most amusing scenes precedes Hannah's breakup when she discusses her boyfriend with a girlfriend. Her friend responds with the advice that as long as their "rising signs are compatible," "the sex is decent," and that he "supports you creatively," all will be well. She adds that republicans and democrats are equally bad and even Bill Clinton ruined our economy by repealing the Glass-Steagall Act. I'm not sure what amused me more, Hannah's befuddled reaction to her friend's apparent erudition or that someone whose intellectual progenitors are Paul Krugman and Miss Cleo is the most informed person on the screen. Humor aside, I felt a tad bad for Hannah here: if only she had a wiser friend.

Unfortunately, the B-stories about her friends don't stand up well on their own, although they do shed more unflattering light on Hannah. Her gay male friend is worried about telling Hannah that he might be straight because she's self-centered enough to ask why he isn't attracted to her. Hannah's other girlfriend gets a job as a hostess and Hannah refuses to admit she couldn't have gotten she same job because she's not pretty or congenial enough. That Hannah's many flaws all center around her lack of self-understanding is significant, but there needs to be a glimmer of recognition or at least a denouement to the plot. As it happens, we may say of this episode what Hannah's boyfriend says of her essay, "Nothing happens. It's just a bunch of stuf that occurs to you."

No conservative could have written a finale more full of liberal stereotypes. An old boyfriend visits Hannah during the night and when he refuses to leave, she responds by calling, albeit hanging up on, 911 services. The police show up anyway and proceed to bring in both the boyfriend to file a report and her for and a previous charge of public urination.

Overall, there's some but not much to recommend Girls. The writers nail the urban hipsterese dialect, an authentic but frustrating touch. Isn't listening to navel-gazing twenty-somethings tiresome enough? The plotting is amateurish and the writers need to work on establishing tone, purpose, and a sense of motion through an economy of dialogue. They also need to integrate the peripheral characters either into the main plot or into an independent B-plot. Of course, I'm judging based on this episode alone, so that might not be a pattern.

There's been much talk about the talent of creator-writer-director Lena Dunham and indeed one wonders whether the unlikeable Hannah Horvath is a work of creation or exhibition. Either way, Girls is the television equivalent of Tracey Emin's My Bed and my reaction is much the same: in the absence not just of purpose but of craft, one can but reply: it's ugly, so what?

Undoubtedly fans of the show will counter, "That's the point." And I shall reply, "Indeed." and wish them well down the existentialist rabbit hole.

Presidential Rhetoric: Grading the Graders

I don't care to read about politics before breakfast, let alone before my tea and shower, but today I stepped out onto the ice and fired up Twitter early in the morn. Naturally, right up in my face popped this Reason blurb of an article in which "experts" graded President Obama's recent inaugural address. I couldn't resist, not only because both alleged experts and laymen habitually overestimate this president's rhetoric, but because any easy praise irks me. It is no small matter to put an idea into someone's head, thus it is no small slight to the craft and its masters to heap undeserved praise on. . . let us say, the inexpert. I'm also in the middle of reading a book on Cicero's Against Verres and thus at this moment not particularly forgiving. So what did I do first?

First, I tried to find out a little about our experts and turned to their bio pages at their respective universities or personal sites, if possible.

1. William Brown, chair of the department of strategic communication and journalism at Regent University
2. Stephen J. Farnsworth, director of the Center for Leadership and Media Studies at the University of Mary Washington
3. Kathleen E. Kendall, research professor of communication at the University of Maryland at College Park
4. Mitchell S. McKinney, professor of communication and director of the Political Communication Institute at the University of Missouri at Columbia
5. Martin J. Medhurst, professor of rhetoric and communication at Baylor University
6. Theodore F. Sheckels, professor of English and communication studies at Randolph-Macon College [No Faculty Bio Available]
7. Gerald R. Shuster, professor of communication at University of Pittsburgh
8. Mary E. Stuckey, professor of communications and political science at Georgia State University
9. Ronald C. White Jr.

Alas, none of this research turned up any clear experts on rhetoric and oratory. There's plenty of writing about politics and "communication" and history, but scarcely any on, well, rhetoric. Forget about brass tacks talk of Greek, Latin, Demosthenes, Cicero, Aristotle, Quintilian. . .

Based on what we can see, these professors do not seem the experts to whom we should turn for a full, systematic, rhetorical analysis. Their views are surely relevant, but hardly definitive.

Only two professors, Martin Medhurst and Gerald R. Schuster, mention on their pages anything which remotely sounds like scholarly discussion of rhetoric. Of these two only Mr. Medhurst has his course descriptions online (It's 2013: Get with the program, universities!) and his course on Presidential Rhetoric seems credible though not necessarily rooted in the fundamentals.

Professor Medhurst seems to bear the most relevant expertise in having edited, "Presidential Speechwriting: From the New Deal to the Reagan Revolution and Beyond," and "Critical Reflections on the Cold War: Linking Rhetoric and History," volumes of mixed quality and relevance to our discussion here. These volumes both focus more on intersection of speech-writing, politics, and policy than fundamental rhetorical analyses. The contributing authors talk the talk of rhetorical analysis, throwing around deliberative and partitio, but there is precious little extended, systematic analysis. The criteria are thrown out and then not followed up. Some articles even betray a clear blindness to the Classics. How can one cite a modern author's view of, "rhetoric as epistemic" without at least a nod to Plato and Gorgias?

Maybe, though, these scholars possess the appropriate expertise by their training even if their scholarly careers are not perfectly attuned to the needs of our present discussion. Alas, their faculty bios do not list their courses and grades.

We have only left to judge them, then, by their contributions to this Inside Higher Ed article.

Second, the professors' own writing is abysmal. Their remarks seem improvised, as if the professors were interviewed, but should we give experts on communication a pass for that? Take a gander at some of these gag-inducing clunkers:

• where citizens are bound to each other as a way of protecting (Farnsworth)
• President Obama’s second inaugural had moments of greatness, on this date of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday, as when he tied his speech closely to King’s "I Have a Dream" speech, both in parallel language and in his theme of equality. (Kendall)
• seemed more confident with a sense of urgency (McKinney)
• signaled that he intends to pursue (Medhurst)
• what Obama hopes will be a sizable majority to pursue (Scheckels)
• balanced persuasion with direction, and hope. (Shuster)
• with and without adherence to focusing (Shuster)
• the overall speech was gracefully done (Stuckey) (N.B. Beware non-adverbial uses of overall. The adjectival use will sink your noun like a stone and the noun makes the reader think of overalls.)
• What makes us exceptional, he told us -- from Seneca Falls, to Selma, to Stonewall, will be an inclusive nation where everyone enjoys (White)

Editor on aisle five! It's a shame one could spill so much red in grading the graders.

Speaking of red, a note to the one at Inside Higher Ed: what Professor Brown gave you was not a rubric.

Lastly, these paragraphs are useless without analysis and examples. I expect, and hope, there exist detailed analyses behind them, but in the absence of such, what good are cliches and summaries? What are we supposed to make of statements like, "the energy seemed lower," or that the speech, "was better," "had references," and was "interesting" and "optimistic." These meaningless phrases are as useless as those other remarks which are mere summaries. 

–

I did not intend to analyze the president's second inaugural the way I did his first, but let's take a little look for fun. [Full Transcript]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. Vice President Biden, Mr. Chief Justice, members of the United States Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow citizens, each time we gather to inaugurate a president, we bear witness to the enduring strength of our Constitution. We affirm the promise of our democracy. We recall that what binds this nation together is not the colors of our skin or the tenets of our faith or the origins of our names. What makes us exceptional, what makes us America is our allegiance to an idea articulated in a declaration made more than two centuries ago. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.

What stands out most is the definition of his own inauguration not only as the fulfillment of the promise of democracy, but also as the source of national unity. He is the first idea in his speech.

A few grammatical observations:

• bear witness is a meaningless archaism to lend dignity to the speech. 
• that what is a relative clause fumble. 
• articulated in a declaration made more than is a giant brick
• made more than two centuries ago would be better supplanted by one vivid adjective

A few logical observations:

• A promise is something is a declaration that something will be done. What is the, "promise of our democracy?" It cannot be that all men are created equal because that is a premise, an assertion, not an activity. This statement is just a pleasantry thrown out there. 
• How does the election of the president recall that all men are created equal? This is not official "question begging" (petitio principii) but some attempt at logic would be, well, persuasive. 

As with his first inaugural, the rhythmic gesture is ponderous and the effect is a leaden opening. There is no manipulation of periodic length to create an ebb and flow of tension. The vocabulary is dull and the verbs are limp and not consistently utilized to energize the speech. 

I would just like to add a few observations about the subsequent paragraphs:

• The beginning of the second paragraph is a most peculiar place to slip into the third person.
• This is not the place for a history lesson.
• How on earth could anyone have chosen the word noted in the following:

Through blood drawn by lash, and blood drawn by sword, we noted that no union founded on the principles of liberty and equality could survive half slave, and half free.

Through repeated bloody violence, we noted? 

Far from an auspicious start.

–

If you enjoyed this essay, you may also enjoy:

• Presidential Rhetoric I: Worthy of Marble?
• Presidential Rhetoric II: John Adams
• Presidential Rhetoric III: Thomas Jefferson
• On Rhetoric and Arguing
• Freedom and Natural Law
• On Law

Movie Review: Amarcord

Directed by Federico Fellini. 1973.

Perhaps with the exception of Mr. Hulot's Holiday, there is no film more effortless to watch than Amarcord. This is all the more striking because Amarcord lacks a traditional plot with conventional scenes and dialogue to move it along. In contrast, the narrative of Amarcord is conveyed through the film's musical and visual rhythms, through a sense of the passage of time. It is an ease of motion, the imperceptibility of its connective tissue, which makes Amarcord a dreamlike whole out of the film's motley bits. This dreamlike passage of time universalizes the film's rich visuals into an overwhelming sense of a sumptuous, joyous, loved life.

In fact the larger-than-life visuals of the film would surely overwhelm a dialogue-heavy, plotted film, distracting with their absurdity. The dreamlike mood liberates the visuals which one can experience as ones own dream. Fellini's great contemporary Andrey Tarkovsy explored similar tone and structure, additionally commenting in his book "Sculpting in Time," that

It is above all through sense of time, through rhythm, that the director reveals his individuality. Rhythm colours a work with stylistic marks. It is not thought up, not composed on an arbitrary, theoretical basis, but comes into being spontaneously in a film, in response to the director's innate awareness of life, his "search for time." –Andrey Tarkovsky [1]

Amarcord's dreamlike sense not just of sight and sound but of motion which makes the Felliniesque style so natural and appealing.

Yet Amarcord still has a nominal narrative: a year in the life of a teenage boy in his coastal Italian hometown. Here too, though, Amarcord is larger than life and though we see the daily goings on of Titta, his family, and the townspeople, it is memory filtered through the gauze of Fellini's own waltzing, voluptuous sense of the world. School, then, consists not in homework and rote drills but in the lioness teaching arithmetic, the flame-haired headmaster, and one of the most ingenious pranks you'll ever see. And in girls. Grossing out, pining after, and lusting at girls.

Politics is the grandiose absurdities of the fascist regime with all of its uniforms, gun-twirling, and stomping around town. One of the film's best moments comes during a party parade when a giant paper mache likeness of Il Duce is raised as the party boys twirl their guns in demonstration of their health and commitment. The scene shifts from the comic proportions of the giant red face to the absurd as without warning one of the boys is being married to his beloved Aldina. . . by the giant face! Again the memories freely coalesce here, the sights, sounds, and emotions blending together into a tide you cannot help be swept up in.

The town too becomes iconic with its square, sight of the annual torching of the winter-witch, and the boulevard down which the town beauties strut and a lone motor-biker sweeps. Then there's the movie theater, sight of many hoped-for encounters, and the storefront of the massively proportioned tobacconist (and a hilariously-placed portrait of Dante.) One of the best moments in town comes when the boys stand outside one of the stores and press their faces to the glass as the owner bemoans that he couldn't get away with offing them once and for all. It's a brief scene but it establishes the town not just as a place but in time. They boys surely must do that every week and, we get the sense, so must have boys for many years, and so they'll continue to.

Yet Amarcord is not about growth or coming of age, but of the ebb and flow of people in life. It's also about remembering, people, places, feelings, with intensity and affection. The film is bookended by scenes of the arrival in town of the "puffballs" which signal the end of winter. This device, as well as Nino Rota's waltzing theme, give Amarcord a rondo-like sense of departure and return. To quote Tarkovsky again, we fall into Fellini's rhythm and become his ally. We eagerly follow him through the vast ivory hotel and we wait for the Rex to pass by the shore. So sure is he of the truth of these fables and so beautifully does he tell them that the fabulous, like a wintertide peacock, ceases to be the impossible and becomes a marvel.

–

[1] Tarkovsky, Andrey. Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art. 1986. p.120

The Heretical Mind

T. S. Eliot famously observed the nature of the heretic as, "a person who seizes upon a truth and pushes it to the point at which it becomes a falsehood." This generalization strikes me as especially perspicacious and indeed indicative of a particular mode of thinking in which one observes events and attributes them all to one, or even a few, central causes. This cause-seeking reasoning is of course useful and fundamental to understanding the natural world, yet it is a potentially myopic approach.

Dr. Jeroen Vanheste in his study of classicism similarly observed that

Theories that consider everything to be a construction or a convention or the expression of a specific ideology, are a radicalization of an intuition that in itself obviously contains some truth. [1]

We are all liable to such a preoccupation and we see the generalizations everywhere when we read the
philosophically-untrained simplifying the world for us. We read of historical slights like "the essence of Greek culture" and political drivel about "the three ways to fix. . ." We see scientists struggle with  what occurred before time and anthropologists and now neuroscientists trying to make sense of human action. The fruits of such thinking often seem to come in the form of prescriptions, and Dom Prosper Guéranger, speaking about antipathy toward the Roman liturgy, observed:

All heretics without exception start out by wishing to return to the customs of the early Church... they prune, they efface, they suppress–everything falls under their hatchet–and while we await a vision of our religion in its pristine purity, we find ourselves encumbered with new formulations, fresh off the press, and incontestably human, for the men who created them are still alive. [2]

All other values, principles, and accidentals are stripped away and replaced by those of the observer, which are usually invisible to him and those of his age. The whole has been destroyed, but what has been revealed and what has simply been lost?

It seems, perhaps, that while both are necessary, learning by observation and learning by deconstruction (all too often "murdering to dissect"), are the lesser and lower, or better, preliminary, forms of learning. The ideal, then, would be learning by creation, no longer looking or digging but learning about the nature of things by purposeful making and being.

Now the creative act surely seems the most radical for it is no small matter to change the world, let alone make one, yet all three approaches change or make, yet only the creative admits to its purpose. Too it is just as systematic, built on rules and laws, and as well fuses past, present, and future just as the overtly fact-seeking sciences seek to contribute to one true knowledge.

The heretical mind is the philosopher as hunter-gatherer. The creative mind is the philosopher as man.

–

[1]Vanheste, Jeroen. Guardians of the Humanist Legacy: The Classicism of T.S. Eliot's Criterion Network and Its Relevance to Our Postmodern World. Brill Academic Pub. 2007. p. 437
[2] Institutions Liturgiques 1.399

A Visit to Strand

I was walking uptown to my bus stop the other day when I realized how much time remained to spare. Happily, I stood not only in the vicinity of but in front of Strand and so I entered. I hadn't been inside for a while and upon realizing this I made haste to the music section. Craning my neck up toward the rafters I began scan the shelves. Nothing new for Mozart. Ooh, something on the Missa Solemnis? Definitely. A whole book on parody in Bach? Gold! So I troubled the clerk for a ladder and making my way up I noticed a serendipitously placed misfile: a book of concerto themes. Not necessary, but charming: mine now.

This went on for some time until I brought my hefty pile toward the register. I plopped it on the counter, beaming with pride as the cashier began to ring up my books. Bloop. Bloop. "Yes, yes, keep blooping!" I greedily chirped to myself. Now I thought I had shopped with great prudence but my purchase qualified me for a free tote. The icing.

Now short on time, I hustled toward the bus stop and on the journey I became aware of the social dimensions of my purchase. From the moment I had stepped outside the bibliophile's enclave of Strand, my bag had identified me as a book man. This experience surprised your humble blogger, who generally endeavors not to serve as a bipedal billboard. Yet there I walked, telling all how I loved books. The bag didn't have a sports team logo or a pricy brand name stenciled on the side, but it said, "Strand," that is, "books." What a powerful statement the word book still makes. I was also seized several times with the urge to strike several specimens of the chattering couture masses with my sack, but that might have been unrelated.

At home I spent a few hours rearranging my bookshelves to accomodate my new wards, embossing them and introducing them to the fold.  I may get a little carried away playing the librarian, entering the titles into a catalogue as I do, but I can't help feeling a custodian to these books and the ideas within.

Movie Review: Metropolitan

Directed by Whit Stillman. 1990.

How easily one can miss the beginning of Metropolitan. Not the first scene, mind you, but the beginning at the credits. Before we meet anyone or see anything at all, we hear with no repeats or emphasis the chorale tune Ein Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott. It's a warm and hopeful but lonely little theme here, undeveloped and unaccompanied, and it's followed up by this jaunty, jazzy tune. The contrast and the transition, or lack thereof, mirror those of Metropolitan's main character, Tom Townsend.

Tom's been an outsider to the Upper Haute Bourgeoisie world since his parents divorced, but one night during the debutante ball season he takes up an invitation to a party. Redheaded, thin, and quiet, he doesn't last long before getting singled out from the chatty and well-fed upper crusters for some questions. It turns out Tom is a bright young man. Exceedingly so, in fact. He's articulate about his radical political ideas and literary tastes, adding to the party's facile chatter with his thoughts on Veblen and Austen, and he's a hit with everyone, if a bit of a sphinx.

The curtain is pulled back on Tom for us in the next scene at his home, a far cry from the capacious, opulent apartment at which he just partied, where in his mismatched skivvies he pours some coffee  with his cereal. He doesn't fit in with his newfound friends and partiers, for sure, but more importantly he doesn't want to. We grow to learn that Tom's more comfortable looking in than living with, but he has to keep going to the deb parties now because the ladies, especially Audrey, are counting on him as an escort. So with a loan from his mother he gets himself a secondhand tux and suits up for the balls.

As her official escort Tom naturally gets to know Audrey and their conversations throw the two into  sharp relief. She answers from the heart, he from the head. She empathizes with Austen's heroines, he thinks they're inauthentic. Tom in fact is taken aback by her empathy for the character and we don't know what to make of his surprise until he admits he hasn't read the book. He prefers criticism to novels, he says. Again, Tom prefers thinking to feeling, looking in over sharing with. Shortly after their conversation, Audrey, fishing for some feedback on Tom, is happy to learn from her friend that he mentioned her. He said she was well-read. Not witty or kind or pretty, or even silly, but well-read, as if he had no opinion of her character at all but only of what she knew. This conversation is mirrored later on when Audrey admits she likes Tom, but in explaining why she describes what he thinks, not who he is.

What is it exactly, then, that keeps bringing Tom and Audrey together? His sociological interest in the goings on of the, "Rat Pack," some sense of duty to escort Audrey, or his obsessive interest in an old flame who frequents the group? As his motive shifts through all three we learn that Audrey has had a crush of her own since college: Tom. Yet Audrey and her escort seem to be drifting apart as Tom reconnects with the college infatuation who inexplicably cut him off. In a moment all the more gutting for its simplicity and subtlety Audrey walks past a bookstore before Christmas and in the window glimpses a set of Jane Austen novels.

Yet Tom can't seem to rekindle his romance with Serena. The deal-breaker falls when Serena admits she didn't save their correspondence. Tom is completely galled by her indifference to having thrown away his letters, clearly feeling that he himself was thrown away. Not quite thrown away, Serena explains, because some girl wanted them: Audrey. What Tom gave away in love Serena tossed aside with indifference and Audrey collected in secret and distant longing.

At last we see in full the many symmetries between Tom and Audrey. Like their taste in books, her evasion of reality is essentially imaginative whereas Tom's is analytical. Audrey prefers the idealized fictions of the author whereas Tom prefers clarifying criticism. She ignores Tom's coldness and imagines feelings for her whereas Tom ignores Serena's coldness and tries to understand why she broke off communication. Her obsession with Tom is positive whereas his with Serena is negative.

Yet there are cracks in Tom's facade. Austen has replaced Spengler on his night table and in a passing moment he wonders whether his idol Fourier wasn't full of it. The guy's ideas didn't work, after all. Tom's learning that his own studied persona of studying others, his radical politics, overall his analytical distance, isn't so satisfying as being with Audrey.

Metropolitan ends with a buddy sojourn in which Tom and the last remaining member of the Rat Pack, now dissolved in the post debs remainder of their lives, journey out to the Hamptons to rescue Audrey from rivalrous rake Rick Von Sloneker. This is handled with good humor and affection for the characters, but one notices as much the absence of the supporting cast. Gone is the pretender, the actor, the leader, the hostess. There's no more bitchy chatter about who's who or endless commentary on the nature of society. There are three friends. Especially for Tom and Audrey, in discovering each other they've discovered themselves and now, debutante balls aside, they really are ready to step out onto life's stage, together.