The Exterminators are Coming!

Seriously. Cockroach Control is going to be here in a couple of hours to bait or fog and spray this my 3rd floor here at the W------g H--e. In the more than half a year I've been here, I've seen, in this my studio-haven, exactly two of the Carboniferous (just googled it--I got it right) relicts--and I dealt with them, swiftly and venomously, using the insecticide that I sometimes, since the Horrid Bedbug Infestation, spray around and under my bed and behind the refrigerator....


Trying to listen to Borodin's Symphony #1--I'd expected something somehow less trendily uptodate and pointlessly Frenchified (But there, just a whiff of 'Stranger in Paradise') and more like, I fondly hoped, that first movement of a string quartet of his I heard once long ago as mickey mouse music in a video about something entirely else--and loved. This reminds me, for all the world, of Gershwin/Ravel. And I hate it. Everything on NPR this morning, however, is gawdawful modernity: Huge orchestras with percussion sections like military enclaves. There ought to be a word for the kind of modulation that is always insisting on the augmented fourth or exposed tritone, and for the kind of melodic development which, in a sort of pseudophony, layers (invariably trite, short-breathed, asthmatic) tunes over one another (easy to do with an orchestra that size) like a patisserie millefeuille.  God how I hate it. How I hate it especially in the morning, when all I want is clarity, grace, simplicity.....So, everything on all seven classical music stations being hateful, I've been listening to John Adams' "award-winning" violin concerto (under the NPR rubric: "John Adams Revitalizes the Violin Concerto"): Four minutes into it, it's so horrible, so very unpleasant, such a waste of musicians' time and abilities--I wish it were a live performance, so I could walk out on it. At the ten minute mark, I'm gone, wishing I had heard less.


Ongoing reading of Some Dance to Remember--I should finish it today--reveals the consummate lapidary craft and limpid stylistics of its author, who, among other things, remains (when he wants to be) the world's greatest pornographer: The levels of point de vue in the sexual relations between our hero Ryan O'Hara and his lovers (including, very kinkily, his own natural brother--and not his sister, whom he won't fuck, to her great despite, simply and only because she's a girl) is dazzling, kaleidoscopic.