Taking Stock

I took the always crowded King Streetcar to work this morning, just as I did this day last year.

Except a lot of things are different, one of those things being that I don't live near the King streetcar anymore. If only that were all that was different.

The Transcontinental is both a pale reflection of my "real" life, and an all-too accurate representation of my inner life. It is full of certain hopes and desires, of ambitions, some realised, most not at all, and it tells a particular story about me, but one that seems not very familiar to my self-conception.

I am happy that so many more people have visited the Transcontinental this year than in previous years, but I am discouraged by the fact that despite the visits, fewer people comment. When one starts to think about this, they start to think about how they can "attract" people here, and I too think often of that.

One of the things I think I need to do is write better. The writing here seems more laboured and yet also lazy, although not because I have posted more. Something is missing.

There is a part of me that wants to do some kind of list, set some kinds of goals here for the next year, but I look at the goals I've set here, like my January 1st, 2007 goal to post every day, and how it, like all the other goals, was not achieved.

So maybe my new year's resolution for the blog is that I'm not going to set any goals, or make any more promises here. I am just going to keep going, and see where things take me, because that approach in other aspects of my life, where I take up those lines of flight, has been enormously productive.

And, as you can see, the site looks completely different. I hope you like that too.

Happy New Year!

Tautological Aphorism V

Mockery is the sincerest form of criticism.

Well what do you know?

I suppose there's hope for me yet!

Small World - Tabling Heine

Earlier today, I was reading Raminagrobis, a wonderful blog that I first encountered via the Varieties. Having read the latest post, I was going to add the blog to my roll. However, I'm working on a paper on Heine, and so wasn't going to do it today.

In Die Harzreise, Heine mentions schoolboys declining "mensa" in the genitive. I was curious to see if he was in any way referring to the ecclesiastical use of the term, as my paper concerns secularization.

So I googled "mensa latin grammar" - and Raminagrobis was the first hit! Turns out he posted on the various cultural differences between latin grammars. Heine's reference made me wonder if mensa isn't also common as an early paradigm in German Latin grammars, and sure enough, page 21 of the Lateinische Grammatik here at google books, the first declension is "mensa" , although this 1837 grammar uses "via" on page 38...

Anyway, and this is certainly no strong counterexample to the cultural differences in noun declensions Raminagrobis cites, but it seems that the shift from "mensa" to "agricola" in German grammars of Latin appears to be a more recent one, as I am pretty sure that Heine here is playing with what would have been common knowledge at the time.

And with that, perhaps the most esoteric blog post I've ever written.

The Smoking Bishop

The thing I most enjoy about Christmas is the sheer variety of traditions that magically appear around this time, most of which either never existed until a few years ago or were long dead until someone with a web page and a 19th Century cookbook resurrected them. So maybe it's not the variety of traditions appeals to me, but the receptiveness to the new through the back door of tradition.


And there's an always fruitful and pleasurable avenue of exploration of the eternal recurrence of holiday traditions - the myriad ways in which one can get soused with warm drinks!

To wit, via the Valve, a link to a holiday drink I had never heard of, but solely on account of the name desperately want to try - the Smoking Bishop.

It sounds like a nice mulled wine, but if this NPR program on the beverage is any indication, the recipe at the Valve may not be the one you want to be going with...Instead, I would suggest you trust the Irishman towards the end of the broadcast segment who modifies it slightly for our modern, naïve tastes, and makes it "taste good"!

Enjoy!

Elliott Carter! Daniel Barenboim! James Levine!

All in one studio - together at last.

What else would prompt me to post three times in one day?

A Transcontinental exclusive!

Elliott Carter, 100 years and still alive despite the fact that he killed classical music for the People

The best part about Eliott Carter's centenary is that, for perhaps the first time ever in modern classical music marketing, the composer we are lionizing today with concerts, retrospectives, symposia, ephemera, salutary compositions, and sombre critical inquiry over the very fate and nature of classical/modern/serious music is the following:

ELLIOTT CARTER IS STILL ALIVE

It's nice to think that he's around to get some kind of bemused enjoyment out of all of this.

And the entire classical blogosphere has typed lauds into their blogs as well, a veritable youtube symphony of praise.

That's pretty much it. Oh yes, and this:

Serialism forever! Tonalität ist tot!

Nuts to you, Sandow and Gann, with your zany post-classical future of classical music wickedness!

Schönberg! Schönberg! Schönberg! (although he too, is dead)

Der Vorleser: The Movie: The Discussion

As a budding germanist, I should probably have some kind of quota for posts which relate to my field of study...barring this, here's an interesting conversation from WNYC between actor Ralph Fiennes and Leonard Lopate about the upcoming movie adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's novel The Reader.

That reminds me - I'm very critical of Canadian media and society what I don't think works, but I rarely, if ever, attempt to offer any solutions.

Listening to WNYC reminds me that I need to address that. To that, I think exactly what Canadian society lacks from a media perspective is, um, WNYC...the big question is how to make that happen...but more on that some other time.

UPDATE: The player isn't working, so here's the direct link!

Utopian Argumentation

This Ads Without Products post reminded me of a something I often see in magazine articles or newspaper profiles about a group with idealistic aims (note how I avoided that other word [see above]).


The trope is as follows: these idealistic people are striving for utopia. But wait - "utopia" means "no place" in the Greek, so therefore, clearly, the ideals of this group or person will never come to pass. Because "utopia" means "no place".

Or maybe you've seen this one: Group X's utopian ideals are misplaced, because there is no such thing as a utopia, because "utopia" means "no place".

There is some interesting interplay between use and definition. Prior to the defining moment, "utopia" or "utopian" is employed as a pejorative, used to mean "pie in the sky", or "fanciful". But inevitably, these pie in the sky ideas, like helping the poor or opposing torture, are refuted via etymology.

So implicit in the common use of the word "utopia" is to make explicit one's belief that a word's etymology governs reality, that etymology functions as a natural law to which we all must submit.

Which is nonsense, isn't it? Maybe I'm being utopian...

Gustav Szathmáry - An Update

(photo from myspace page dedicated to Szathmáry)

It seems that my post on Gustav Szathmáry last May has compelled the Internet to disclose another fragment of this man's life.

When I had done my initial research on his life, I was dismayed to discover that there was no scholarly (or unscholarly) work done on him. It turns out the the little-known firm Cupere Verlag had published a 71-page monograph on our friend and his remarkable life.

Astoundingly, it is available here on the Internet Archive, and no where else on earth.

Written by Dietmar Heinisch, the book is a treasure trove of information about his life, his work, and his affair with the painter Paula Modersohn-Becker.

It also contains reproductions of Szathmáry's stunning images of his friends, including a remarkable photograph of Rainer Maria Rilke (the painting is by Moderson-Becker):


I mentioned in my previous post that someone has created a myspace page in his honour. It has now been updated to include some more of his music. I encourage you to listen!

If only his complete works were available - given all the musicological attention devoted to the schlock of the day, it seems surprising that no work has been done to unearth his music. A tragedy.

I would like to think that my own meagre contribution to disseminating his work was a factor in prompting whomever had a copy of that biography to make it available.

One wonders why there are no copies available in any libraries - perhaps the publisher went bankrupt before it went to press, and poor Herr Heinisch perished in a fiery wreck the very next day.

Perhaps the book sat lost, forgotten in a mouldy box, until the day a young woman in Bremen was sorting through the papers of her recently deceased grandfather, and found this monograph, which he'd purchased at a used bookshop in Erfurt when he was a visiting lecturer there.

Perhaps she, like me, was entranced by his story and the beauty and ingenuity of his work, and so she did what we all do when we find something new and interesting, and googled "Szathmáry".

What did she find? Me! A lone outpost on the Internet, a buoy for our nearly lost Hungarian friend. She was much too shy to contact me, and I do not blame her for this, perhaps her English is not so good.

But I am grateful that she has made this book available so that we may all enjoy it, or at least those of us who speak German. For English speakers, please enjoy the photographs.

I sincerely hope that this latest post will encourage the dialectic of discovery amongst my readership and those out there who know who he is, so that Szathmáry can take his place in the Parthenon of Great Composers.