On Reading Aloud

I've always loved reading aloud to others, and being read to aloud.

So it was wonderful when my nieces were small and had an endless appetite for this form of social interaction.  Of course, sometimes they insisted on hearing their favorite stories over and over.  While some books hold up better than others to such repetition, any near-memorized book presents opportunities for the grown-up to feel like a comic genius:  Playing it completely straight, as if you were merely reading the words on the page, you slip in one clearly incorrect word.  I remember doing this with the marvelous Sendak counting book, One Was Johnny, and the irksome Magic Tree House series.

I also remember a longish car ride with Suzie, perhaps while we were flatmates in 1999.  She was driving, so I offered to read aloud from her Barbara Kingsolver book (possibly Pigs in Heaven or The Poisonwood Bible).  The possibility had apparently never occurred to her before, but she was utterly delighted.  True fact: That was actually the only time I've ever read anything by Kingsolver.

And these days, from time to time, my beloved reads to me from his work in progress.

Botticelli Triptych: Matinee at Lincoln Center

After picking out four concerts this season, I'm now deemed a subscriber to the NY Philharmonic.  This has, unexpectedly, resulted in some genuinely useful loot: a well-designed roomy packable shopping bag and a metrocard holder which helps guard against the twin dangers of folding and demagnetization.

I took some gambles on music that sounded cool. The Bluebeard's Castle program was certainly very interesting, especially after taking Signum's Folkloric Transformations class.

But my absolute favorite so far was the matinee on January 4, featuring:

• Brahms: Piano Quintet in F minor, Op. 34 (1862-64)
• Respighi: Trittico botticelliano (1927)
• Haydn: Symphony No. 96 in D major, Miracle (1791)

The quintet consisted of pianist Jeffrey Kahane and "four Principal musicians from the Orchestra: Concertmaster Frank Huang; Principal Associate Concertmaster Sheryl Staples; Principal Viola Cynthia Phelps; and Principal Cello Carter Brey." Each of them holds a named Chair position, which I've omitted from the quote.  Both women wore eye-catching outfits, much as female vocal soloists do – elegant, brightly colored gowns.  

So I was interested to see, when the four were re-absorbed into the orchestra for the remainder of the program, that the women changed back into their regular orchestra outfits to blend in.  

I really loved the Respighi piece, reflecting three paintings by my favorite artist.  It was absolutely beautiful.  La Primavera is in allegro vivace; L'adorazione dei Magi is andante lento; and La nascita di Venere is in allegro moderato.  

Unfortunately, my few scribbles on the music are mostly indecipherable, and I waited too long to remember the details that particularly struck me at the time.  But apparently the 3rd movement of the Brahms quintet (scherzo allegro) reminded me a bit of the Pink Panther theme for some reason, and some other point in the concert inspired the notation "almost galloping."

It was followed by a Q&A session which was pretty good, though they didn't call on me.  My question would have been: If you could choose any work to test the acoustics of the renovated concert hall, what would it be?  (I'd still like to know the answer!)  It would have been more interesting, I think, than the last question they took from the audience, which was basically an extended version of "Don't you know that Boston Symphony Hall is the best concert hall that has ever existed in the history of the universe, and why aren't you just copying them?"

Now that I think of it, there was one other non-musical thing that struck me quite forcibly during the first piece; but I'm not sure I want to memorialize it here.  Without a writing, it will probably slip away into the ether, but so be it.  

When No One Steps Up

It's easy to distinguish the hero from the rest of the crowd when he's the only one brave enough to step forward to accept a high-stakes one-on-one challenge.

But how to characterize the crowd's silence, when no one accepts OR declines outright?  Here are some tentative initial thoughts on examples in a few versions of the story of Guy of Warwick and in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

(The earliest Anglo-Norman lay, Gui de Warewic, apparently was written shortly before 1204.  I haven't found the actual text yet, so I'm not sure what if anything it says about the incident.)

In Guy of Warwick (stanzas) in the Auchinleck Manuscript (est. between c. 1331 - 1340), we get a simile -- the nobles are as silent as men who shaved their crowns (i.e. as silent as monks):

[S]til seten erls & barouns          9801
As men hadde schauen her crounes;Nouȝt on answere nold.

Likewise, in the "first or 14th-century version" of the Romance of Guy of Warwick, on a summer's day, when the king asks for a champion to fight the Danes' giant in single combat:

They stode all styll, and lokyd down,
As a man had shavyn ther crown.      10395

Here, although the king recognizes this silence as cowardice, I'm not sure the narrator says so in his own voice.

From Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (probably mid-to-late 14th C and perhaps as early as 1348), during Arthur's Christmas revels:

Þerfore to answare watz arȝe mony aþel freke,
And al stouned at his steuen and stonstil seten
In a swoghe sylence þurȝ þe sale riche;
As al were slypped vpon slepe so slaked hor lotez
in hyȝe--
I deme hit not al for doute,
Bot sum for cortaysye--
Bot let hym þat al schulde loute
Cast vnto þat wyȝe.

So the Gawain poet uses a different simile - they are as silent as if they were asleep!  And the narrator pretty much calls them out on being too afraid to speak up, though it's slyly couched as if he were speaking in their defense.  But the narrator deems 'not al' of them were afraid; some may have been being courteously deferential.

In the "second or 15th-century version" of the Romance of Guy of Warwick:

All they sate stone stylle:
A worde þey spake nodur gode nor ylle.      10028
Nodur erle nor knyȝt, þat was þere,
Durste speke a worde for pewre fere.

Here, they were still as stones (the simile is apparently already fossilized into a conventional phrase, it would seem).  If I understand correctly, the narrator doesn't mince words: it's pure fear that keeps them silent.

Mixed Feelings

"It had always been a notion of [Sam's] that the kindness of dear Mr. Frodo was of such a high degree that it must imply a fair measure of blindness. Of course, he also firmly held the incompatible belief that Mr. Frodo was the wisest person in the world (with the possible exception of Old Mr. Bilbo and of Gandalf)."

-- Tolkien,  LotR at IV.3.

The sailors "regarded [Dr Maturin] as a very valuable creature, but as one unaccountable for his actions outside the sickbay or the cockpit, being brutally ignorant of everything to do with the sea -- could scarely tell the difference between port and starboard, right and wrong -- almost an innocent, as one might say.  A gentleman to be boasted of, being a genuine physician as well as the boldest hand with a saw in the fleet, but to be concealed from view as much as possible, when in company with other ships."
-- O'Brian, Desolation Island p. 101.

Hamlet and the Loss of Fathers

Claudius on filial grief (I.ii):

'Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet,
To give these mourning duties to your father:
But, you must know, your father lost a father;
That father lost, lost his, and the survivor bound
In filial obligation for some term
To do obsequious sorrow...

But of course, when he says "your father lost a father," he is also speaking quite literally of his own father.  He thus could have made this personal -- e.g., "your father and I lost a father" -- acknowledging his own past share in such grief.  Instead, he seeks refuge in the cold, impersonal, generic pattern of death, its inevitability, as if to distance himself from his own personal involvement in this particular and not-so-inevitable death.

* * *

And this focus on the inexorable workings of time (death comes to us all) suddenly reminds me of Macbeth, on receiving the news of his wife's death (V.v):

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time...

Her death, too, has been hastened by human hand -- albeit her own.