Wordsmithy

Lake Superior State University has released its latest installment of the banned words list.

Setting aside the strangeness of these kinds of newspaper pieces, where they talk about these kinds of lists as having some kind of authority, when the authority actually comes from the newspaper article claiming it as authoritative….uh, anyway, it is a cute piece, making its way around the world, a cheap and effective piece of PR for a smallish university in the AmericanSault.

Looking over the list, I was unmoved until I saw “wordsmithing”. My Oxford Concise lists wordsmithing, and I can readily see some nice places for it, when one wishes to allude to the practice of writing. There is something nice about the tactile sense this term evokes if one were to look at something I had written and said to me, “Yes, Andrew, you’re quite the wordsmith”.

But we never hear that, do we? No, “wordsmith”, verb or noun, has become a replacement term for good old value neutral “writing”. And as a professional hack writer, I hear and see this godforsaken word all the time.

Why do I hate it so? For the same reasons I like it, actually. The people who use this word are typically people who haven’t a clue about good or bad writing. So when they ask me to wordsmith something, they are not paying me a compliment except in the cheapest possible way.

Perhaps I’m strange, but I prefer to earn compliments rather than have them dished out to me by someone who went to some management workshop where they heard this word, this touchy feely allusion to the art of writing,when, for the most part in the corporate world, well-crafted writing is pilloried as “wordy” or “too sophisticated”.

The rub: The people who use wordsmithing in my experience are the same people who obsess over the malignancy that is the plain language movement and its wordsmithed cousin, clear language. In other words, fancy turns of phrase are alright top-down, but the rabble need active voiced single-syllable tracts, or how will they ever learn the language? How will they ever understand us, the educated elite?

I despise this mindset. If we wish people to learn “our” language, then isn’t the surest path to learning it cramming English language learners full of vocabulary? I know I’ve digressed terribly from my initial point about the banned words, but this list, and the plain language movement, are all expressions of power, and of who wields it.

These kinds of lists are all about finding words in new sites, places that do not always suit them. And this sounds a lot like Wittgenstein, doesn't it?

A Fresh Start

Could I really post every day? I see all these people who do, and I'm certainly not one of them. The pair who let me see that blogging could be an honourable pastime have tapered off their own work, Conrad, I suspect, to focus on his studies, and Gawain because his blog was a victim of its own success.

Myself, never having had either of their successes in the blogosphere, I have secretly enjoyed the near anonymity my esoteric and occasional posting strategy has garnered. I too check my stats, and discover that half the visits I receive in a day are from me!

As I have said before, one of the things I find difficult is the anonymity of my posting. So starting today, I'm going to post under my own name. Well, most of it. And I'll get a photo up there, at some point. I am one of those people who doesn't like to put things up halfways, which I've come to realise is an excuse to never put anything up at all.

On that note, here's to at least 366 more posts this year.

O Soave Fanciulla

There is that time, when one is in their 20's, still drunk in the freshness of adulthood, when every thought seems hard like a diamond, and every passion seems inexhaustable and timeless...listen to this:

The first time I went to see La Boheme was in 1995. I was still a music student in Calgary, and utterly devoted to German opera. Wagner and Strauss and Mozart (I know) represented to me what opera was for, with most italian opera being high on style and low on substance.

So I walked out of the first act, and I ran into one of my music professors. He asked me what I thought, and I said something to the effect that Boheme was beautifully set but the story obvious and not terribly interesting.

My professor, a man whose walls in his home were covered in books and CDs and records, a man, to say the least, of great learning, a consumate scholar, a man with a reputation at the University for being too academic for those in music performance, you know, the real musicians, who just wanted to play, turns to me and says, "Some day you will watch that first act without the eyes of youth, and when you do, you will see what it is you cannot, a sentiment which only comes with age."

Nothing worse can be said to a 20 year old than that they are to young to understand something. To paraphrase Robert Lowell, this comment stuck like a fishbone in my consciouness. My age? How dare he? Me age? I was an adult for crying out loud! It said so on my driver's licence. I could buy beer.

But I forgot. Until 3 months ago, as I sat watching Bravo and the clip above came on. And I sat there, in my home, my kids upstairs, my wife sitting there next to me, and suddenly what he had said made sense. The question I then ask those of you who happen upon this is - do you?

Or if not that one, how about this one?



Perhaps it is that I had not loved like that before, or that I could not love like that yet, but I completely understand what my professor was telling me, and I now understand why Puccini, despite the dramatic flaccidity of his work, still beats out nearly everyone else. I understand why, to many, he is opera.

It is because no one before him ensnared so completely that first moment of true love.

Merry Christmas.

Mailer vs. McLuhan

I know I'm not really doing much here, but I thought I would offer up this bit of counterpoint to Conrad Roth's post on Norman Mailer. To keep things provincial, the video I'm offering up is from the CBC.

To be honest, I've never really known much about Mailer, and although I'm looking at my battered copy of The Guttenberg Galaxy, its dereliction is an artifact of its past before it got to me, protected now from ever again being touched by human hands. Nevertheless, when I found this a number of months ago, I quite enjoyed it, although I don't really know why.

This video strikes me as a kind of Catcher in the Rye for one's intellectual development. I suspect if I'd seen this 10 years ago, I would have been astounded by their profundity. Now, well....look, it's two guys talking like this on CBC Television. That alone, given CBC television's mandate is now to become a low-budget NBC makes it worth the half hour it will forever steal from you.

So, please enjoy two of the 20th Century's Greatest Minds, or two posturing public pseudo-intellectuals whose hot air and obfuscation managed to float down from the ivory tower and into the mass culture of their day.

UPDATE: Phil Ford at Dial "M" for Musicology has a very nice piece on Mailer, and also nicely tears apart Roger Kimball's Mailer article in the New Criterion. Read it here.

Floating World

One of the funny things about new technology is that often there's far more to do with a gadget than its "purpose". Take the cell phone for instance. I suppose we could argue that the phone component constitutes the essence of the, uh, phone, but think of all the other things we've got cell phones doing now, like taking pictures.

I discovered this feature on my new phone while at this Royal Ontario Museum exhibition during the summer. So I was snapping away, when, unsurprisingly, I was informed I could not take pictures in this gallery, it being the Garfield Weston gallery, and therefore, like most spaces in the ROM, off limits to photography.

However, what's unusual about this encounter is that I was not asked to smash the phone with a hammer, or delete the photos. So here they are, at least until William Thorsell or some ROM staffer asks me to take them down.

I should also mention that this ROM post is an appetizer to my food review of their new high-end restaurant, C5, an amouse-bouche of my growing ambivalence to what is, and will remain, a wonderful museum. However, I have to do a few things before that review appears, like stop calling myself Otto van Karajanstein, because I just don't think it's fair to knock people down when they can't see you.

Umami

I know I should be putting more up here, but life....life! Please, one day.

In the interim, I post this youtube video of a monkey throwing poop at an old lady. No seriously, the exact opposite of that.

This is a kind of response to Gawain's post yesterday about the mysteriousness of singing. Watching Fischer-Dieskau puts this performance over the top. Between enjoyment and chills, a sickening sense of doom....simply unbelievable.

And Gerald Moore's hands! My God!

Sadness

Learning that he has died.

So I will listen to him today and enjoy the sheer beauty of the voice, a voice that forced me to stop the car when Bella figlia dell'amore once came on the radio and then head to the local CD store and buy the recording of Rigoletto he performed in along with Sherrill Milnes and Joan Sutherland.

One thing I must ask - why all the incessant comparisons to Domingo in his obituary? Their necessity strikes me as odd, despite the obviousness of the comparison.

But no matter.

Friday Night Videos - Ballerina on a Boat

Here's a delightful piece of Russian animation, with music by Alfred Schnittke. Enjoy! And I promise there will be more next week.

And I'm off to the cottage, to enjoy the rural splendour and take in three musical theatre productions!

Cavalli's Ipermestra

I managed to catch the Utrecht Early Music Festival’s production of Cavalli’s Ipermestra on Norwegian Radio (Thanks again to Operacast for making the world of opera so easily accessible).

Did any of my readers hear this marvelous work?

It was a beautiful performance, and one hopes that it was not only captured in audio, but in video as well - you can take a look at some performance stills over at Wim Trompert's site, the prduction's director.

Interestingly, one of the reviewer's on that site mentions that the Florentines would have expected something much larger, but it seems that Cavalli himself used an uncharacteristically small orchestra and singing cast for this performance.

According to Jan Glover (Proceedings of the Royal Musical Association, Vol. 102. (1975 - 1976), pp. 67-82) this period of Italian opera was characterized by a certain economy, and it was interesting to listen to the production, noting how little there was in the way of aria, and how they would simply emerge from the recitative, only to fall back into them, without much of the sharp division one is used to.

Can I make a bold claim that we don't see this kind of musical drama again until Wagner? As I've written before, Cavalli stands on the edge of the full separation of drama and music that was to occur in Baroque opera, that sharp division between recitative and aria. Ipermestra, to my ear, stands very much in between, and in contrast to some of Cavalli's other work, seems less fragmented, and more fluid in its handling of the dramatic and emotional material.

Need I mention also that Cavalli wrote wonderfully for the voice? It is always so easy to understand what the singers are on about with Cavalli, but he doesn't spare any beauty for the sake of clarity.

Again, I hope that someone will fully wake up to Cavalli's rich and varied musical dramas, and we'll see more regular stagings of his work.

Go West, Young Divi

How is that that Calgary is the New Opera capital of Canada?

An anecdote. I was in Fidelio's (one of Calgary's lost departed classical music stores) in Mount Royal Village, rooting through their selection of 18th Century Romanian operas when I overheard the shop's owner speaking to this woman about the upcoming opera season.

She was outraged at the upcoming season, and had cancelled her subscription. The reason? Calgary Opera was staging Benjamin Britten's Albert Herring. She had heard that Britten had been born in the 20th Century, and was deeply offended by this point, fearing that her ears and her nerves would perhaps never recover from the dissonance should would have to squirm through during a performance of 20th Century opera!

Just so she lived up to the stereotype I was quickly constructing in my head, she leaned over the counter, and, looking side to side, mentioned quietly, but not too quietly, that Britten was a homosexual.

Yes Virginia, Benjamin Britten was a homosexual. Now I wondered at the time, feeling as she did about homosexual composers, what she did whenever Tchaikovsky ever made it onto the radio? Did she shun Schubert too, fearing his melodies would draw her into a life of all-night partying and snappy dressing?

I digress. But there was a larger point. She had said her other friends had also cancelled their subscriptions in vile, ignorant protest, a work that, had they bothered to investigate, has all the drama and controversy of Gilbert and Sullivan.

But to my youngish music school ears, this was horrifying. These people really do exist, people who hold a gun to the heads of arts organizations and demand they perform the same three songs on their organ grinder or else the monkey gets what's coming to him, and it ain't a banana.

It was one of the many things that stuck in my mind about Calgary, about the kind of people who went to concerts, and my prospects when it came to being a musician in this kind of environment. So I left, for the vastly better developed artistic shores of Toronto.

Cue the present. Boy am I glad that people like me don't live in Calgary anymore. There's a ton going on out there, and many of the people I went to school with are gainfully employed as musicians in Calgary. I made a terrible mistake thinking the woman above represented Calgarians and culture.

In fact, being into opera or classical music is like being a liberal in Alberta - there are lots out there, you just can't bring it up in polite conversation, rather like being a conservative in Toronto.

Which brings me to my main point - why is Calgary Opera Canada's largest producer and developer of new Canadian opera? From the early 1990's, where staging Albert Herring was a risky decision, to staging Frobisher, Calgary Opera’s third new opera commission in the last five years?

If I were a journalist, I would interview Calgary Opera's current General Director, the delightfully named W.R. (Bob) McPhee - could his there be a more apt name for a Calgary impresario? The man and his team are doing something right.

But I'm not, so we'll just have to wonder why Toronto's own COC has done little in the way of new opera over the years, or why our own new opera company here in Toronto, Tapestry New Opera Works, has done some phenomenal work, but have struggled financially? And despite the fact that this supposed to be a big theatre town.

Perhaps, had he lived, this is something Richard Bradshaw was going to explore. One can only hope that his successor will take up the next challenge in building opera in Canada - the creation of an indigenous opera repertoire, similar to what's going on in Finland.

What's going on in Finland? Well, it's really hard to say, because all the stuff about the finnish opera boom is in....Finnish.

But new opera there is big. Perhaps all we need here in Canada is a Janacek-like figure, a highly gifted composer with a theatrical bent who speaks powerfully to the Canadian condition.

Well, I think we already have him. But he will likely never work with the COC again, after they produced one of his other works from the Partia cycle. Or perhaps people will awake to him and we'll stage his entire Patria cycle on a regular basis here in Canada.

Perhaps, Calgary's the perfect place for the real start of this boom. Indeed, "Calgary" and "boom" go hand in hand, and so again, Toronto will catch play catch up, and we'll then pretend that it started here all along. Plus ça change...

But you, faithful reader, you will know who really got things going, when people sit on the subway here and argue about the latest production of Barney's Version...you get the picture.