Once again, thanks to Network Radio,

I'm listening to the wizardry of Yo Yo Ma, this time performing a Bach cello suite (No. 3 in C), the same as what, in my humble opinion, Rostropovich and Casals, severally, made such ugly, Romantic hash of:  Yo Yo Ma is (contrarily) purest delight:  effortless, flawless technique of course; but also--in a manner inconceivable to musicians formed in the century between 1850 and 1950--delicately articulate, diamond-etched precision of ornamentation, with no aging-soprano-like wobble or scoop.  Welcome back, Yo Yo!

Yesterday morning, also thanks ¡Thank Allah! to Network Radio, I heard, for the first ever in my life, a concerto grosso (a happy marriage of barococo English and Italian compositional styles if ever I've heard one), by one, heretofore unheard of, Charles Avison (pronounced 'Ay-vi-sun, 1709-1770).  Whom Googling, I discovered a great number of fascinating--nay, utterly riveting--facts about; and about the whole of English life, and, particularly, musical life in the 18th century:

¿Where to begin? 

item:  One knows that London and the Universities at Oxford and Cambridge do not represent the whole of artistic and scholarly life in England.  One has read, for example, a couple of works of great scholarly worth (one in the Cognitive Sciences, one in World History), written by graduates of, and professors at (as I recall), the University of Bristol (though it may have been Sheffield, or Birmingham); which were notable, as much for the curious, occasionally non-standard (seemingly, inadvertently and inappropriately colloquial) diction of their authors, as for their impeccable research and learning: rather like, though not as extreme as, the ghastly jauntiness of J.K. Rowlings' prose, and very much reminiscent of the insufferably class-shadowed speech and manners portrayed in popular English television "comedy."  The Queen, we understand, finds Benny Hill unspeakably funny; we find him simply unspeakable.  One could go on, explaining how it is that, as an American (and, perforce, a Transcendentalist), I loathe and repudiate every suggestion of the "essential humanness" or "objective reality" of Class; including, most particularly, the abject insistence on it to be found in Marxism, neo-Marxism, and Postmodernism--and, curiously, in political "Conservatism."  But for these purposes, let us just note that the Provincialism with which Class is frequently, snobbishly conflated, is in fact a quite distinct phenomenon; and can have more to do with the excellence of local character than with its too-hastily supposed inferiority to national or metropolitan standards of arts and letters.  Mouthful that, but it had to be said.

Yo Yo Ma,

despite his fine playing of the two Haydn cello concertos, ceased to be a favorite of mine after his disastrous 'cellified re-do of the Mozart Kegel trio, and some rankly inauthentic Vivaldi (despite, I think, performing it on period instruments). But, having just heard (on Internet Radio) his and Emmanuel Ax's ¡magical! rendition of the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata, I am prepared to re-embrace him.  I go back and forth with 'cellists.  Never forgetting that il beato Luigi Boccherini was one--meseemeth that, like Greaseball Tenors, they're always taking liberties (¡with Bach and Mozart!)--quite unpardonable liberties.  [Phil and I were talking a couple of weeks ago about the late, great (big, fat) Luciano Pavarotti, and Phil was saying that--say what I might about his Greasy rendition of non-Romantic, non-Italian music--within his elephantine two square yards* of Verdi, Boïto, and Puccini, Pavarotti was a god.  And I agreed. "But still," I said, "why can't Greaseballs sing Mozart?"  And Phil, chuckling, said, "I think you just answered your own question."]  Speaking of two such Greaser-like violoncellists, Mstislav Rostropovitch and Pablo Casals--was anything ever more slurpily, droolingly inappropriate than these two's hyper-romantic versions of the Bach 'cello suites? And just think of the reverse alchemy of what Casals, as conductor, did to the Mozart Sinfonia Concertante (K. 364)! turning purest gold into dullest lead.

*  Pun:  referring to Jane Austen's "two square inches of ivory" (Latin elephantinus = ivory).

Let Me 'Splain Something to You, Lucy....

Whenever I poop (once or twice a day usually--but even if I have the squirts and it's oftener) I always wash my butthole with soap and water immediately afterward. If I have a bidet, I'll use it; if I don't, I'll either run a short bath or step into the shower. And then, of course, I wash my hands. I never, ever,

don't wash my anus the instant after defecating. On occasion, when the only accessible source of water for washing my butthole directly after pooping has been a a nearby creek, and it has been winter, and the creek has been frozen over, I have knocked a hole in the ice and washed my nether orifice in the running ice-water, using snow for soap.

Imagine then my (own, special, particular) dismay, horror and disgust at reading a protracted account of defecation, replete with olfactory images, which occupies the first several pages of James Joyce's Ulysses; at the end of which, fulfilled (or satisfyingly evacuated), our hero wipes his ass with a newspaper, flushes (No, I guess, on second thought, you don't flush a privy), and walks out into the fine, broad Irish morning--not without evincing a certain fatuous, galumphing Irish whumsy, but--without so much as for a moment even thinking about washing his poop-smeared Judaeo-Hibernian hands. And thus, Lucy, I consider myself, blessedly, henceforth and forever, quits with James Joyce's nauseous, all-imbuing coprophilia, and will not read a jot nor a tittle more about it; neither of the odious onanism of Leopold Bloom, nor of the revolting lewd reveries of Molly Bloom, his wife.

And So I Trust You See, Lucy,

that in matters of Taste and its opposite, Disgust, I count my private rule of life, which keeps me always sweet-smelling, and prevents my ever leaving skid-marks in my shorts, as the measure by which, proudly, and, as may be, disdainfully, I judge all persons and all things whatsoever; wholly to agree with, or totally, and with prejudice, to dismiss. De gustibus, necque disgustibus, non disputandem est. The whole world, I think, may be divided between those who know what a bidet is for, and use it (or whatever bidet-substitute is available) religiously--and those who don't. The former are human; the latter are much less than human. The singular thing is, that bidet-users (or bottom-washers, whichever you prefer) are seldom as distinctly aware of their own natural, civilized superiority (being clean, and not stinking, is, to those who are so and don't, a matter of simple normality, rather than of superiority); while cheesy poop-bottoms, who never wash themselves just when they need to, are, consequently, always self-consciously preoccupied with an obsessive, social constructionist identification of themselves with the class they think themselves born into, and with the end product of their own digestion. When, however, a normally civilized bottom-washer is forced to realize that there are people for whom "fecal play" has a literal meaning and real significance--as when attempting to read Ulysses--in the horrified disbelief of his revulsion, he is likely not to perceive, or to dismiss as unworthy of his notice, the fact that such scurrility is both philosophy and pleasure, enjoyment and sense, to wallowers in the Freudian sty. Only think of the palpable delight and fascination that dogs find in every new pile of excrement, and you may understand the embodied principle and the example-in-nature of what pleases and interests cheese-butts in the works of James Joyce. And, dog-like, they just don't get it when others are not so well-pleased or as fascinated by fecal matter as they are--or are even revolted by it. Disgust itself, which marks the human from the sub-human, is not something that they can understand, and they are at pains--sometimes great pains--to explain it away, or to explain how it can be "gotten over," and, presumably, thereby to grant themselves, in their touching dog-like way, fully human status. Thus we have The Hydra's Tale: Imagining Disgust by Robert Rawdon Wilson:

As you might expect, that such a book, with such a title, in the Modern Age, would be--The Hydra's Tale is, from what I can tell by (hastily, one eye closed) skimming through it, a very disgusting book, full of contemptible indecency and appallingly inadvertent revelations of the author about himself; but what interests us here is Wilson's reflections on defecation in Ulysses:

"Joyce's Ulysses contains a number of descriptions of human excretion, but it is not, I suppose, scatological in any marked way. [Does scatology have another definition than 'containing a number of descriptions of...excretion'?] It is difficult today to imagine anyone reading Ulysses for pornography [What?], although this is, it seems, how it was once read both by those seeking thrills [We may conclude from this, I think, that Wilson finds it thrilling.] and by those finding only the 'disgust of the original philistines.' [I'm at a loss as to the meaning of this. I'd have thought that the 'original Philistines' would have a capital 'P.']...Bloom begins his day by defecating in a privy in the garden of his house [which] indicates how complex the act of defecation may be once it has been transformed into a textual representation...[Ah, Postmodernism!]

[Follows then Joyce's long, horrifyingly detailed description of same]

Wilson resumes, "I first read Ulysses when I was eighteen. The scatological interests of adolescence [Just a goddamned minute. Whose "adolescence" is that? I goddamnit hate it when slimeasses like Wilson gratuitously impute "scatological interests" like their own only, that we know of, to "adolescence"!] still alive in my mind, I was struck by this passage, and by the startlingly graphic description of a man playing with his st**l....I read the passage out loud to a friend, a young man perhaps a year or two older than I, and it made him sick. He gagged and was barely able to control his vomit. 'Well,' you will say [actually, not], 'that is mild stuff, not in the same league of scatology as, say, the Marquis de Sade, Thomas Pynchon or even David Foster Wallace....' And, of course, I...agree [with myself]. It is mild....If Joyce was intrigued [?!] by defecation...then I can only say, so what? [Well, so, for one thing, knowing that a writer is 'intrigued by (say, "has an anxious, prurient, dog-like seriousness about, or 'scatological interest' in") defecation' entirely absolves us from having to read about it. It doesn't mean that fart jokes can't be funny--I can't think of any off-hand, but I concede the possibility. And I think I've never read anything so hilarious as the poop-stories of Rabelais and Don Basile. But seriously to be "intrigued by defecation" is to be reduced and deliberately confined to a nasty, unreflecting, sub-human condition of the sort imputed to us by Viennese "depth" psychologists: fraudulent, profitless and unspeakably dull.]

"What interests me is the way Joyce writes this simple passage...as a way to originate his character, Leopold Bloom. It introduces a trait, anality [That is a trait?], that will emerge during the novel's development as a significant characteristic [Did you notice, Lucy, that somehow I already knew that? Can you guess how I knew it?]....Bloom...eats...mutton kidneys which gave his palate a tang of...urine. Bloom...stinks, with unwashed underwear [What'd I say?], with decay and dissolution. He is the image of a human person [as I've already said, I challenge that] trying not wholly successfully [indeed] to transcend excrement....Eventually, the reader learns that he sleeps head-to-bum with Molly [Oh my God!--I did not know when I started typing this that it was leading up to a rapturous description of Molly Bloom's nasty ass]....Joyce's...description of Bloom's [b.m.] is a[n] act of characterization.

"Now," says Wilson, reverting to a truly disgusting, evidently formative episode in his own life, described in the first part of this book, which I am not even going to summarize, "I want to return to Georgie once more....Even to read Joyce's description of Bloom's morning b.m. has been, and might still be, overwhelmingly aversive [Tell me!] for many readers....However...fictional accounts of disgust work on the mind differently [from] in-the-world encounters with disgusting things [as I examine the bizarre delicacy and impersonality of Wilson's phraseology, I am convinced that what he means by 'in-the-world encounters with disgusting things' is his own personal practice of coprophagy--which, I think he means to assert, is different from his literary philosophy of 'scatological interest,' and not detectable behind it. Of course, he's wrong on both counts: Eating shit and waxing philosophical about it are conceptually identical--and nothing is easier to detect, once you know where to look, or to point your nose.]....[And now the Coup de Snob]....Ordinary North Americans who hate the NEH or the Brooklynn Museum of Art for having mounted the Sensation exhibition, often seem to loathe representations even more than their in-the-world...."[Your choice. The text breaks off at this point.]

Sweetie, it all depends on how graphic those purely fictional accounts are. And I'd like to bring back that friend of yours who nearly puked on you when you read the nauseous description of Bloom's b.m. to him--who didn't find it at all "mild." When he started retching, begging you not to continue, did you desist? Apparently not. Did you say to him, non-plussed, "But this is mild, mild!"--You really can't help talking about the quality of shit itself, can you? Did he say to you, "Oh, shut up, you swine!"? But you did not shut up--Did he cease therewith to be your friend? Is his sudden, appalled dislike of you and your "scatological interests"--sharp rap on the snout as it must have been for you then--now more easily and complacently borne, that you (almost explicitly dare to) dismiss it as "ignorant philistinism"? That something is not so pungent as the excremental "Divine Marquis," of course, is no very positive recommendation of it. Thomas Pynchon I've read a little about in Wikipedia, and in Harold Bloom's demented puffery of him; and I've determined never, ever, to read anything by him, even if I'm trapped overnight in airport with his collected works at hand. I'll read the labels on shampoo bottles instead. Do you dare to imply that I'm missing something?--Eat it. And David Foster Wallace? Well, frankly--apart from your long excerpts from whatever that book was about some adolescent boy playing with his own jism--(I think that's what it was) I've never heard of him. But--I don't think you noticed--the kid was not playing with his own shit. Did you get that? With his own ejaculate, which is described, as I recall, as "smelling sweet." Not with his own stinky shit, like your Mr. Bloom. And that's a whole lesser level of gross-out, if indeed it's a gross-out at all. Maybe it's not so for you, Dog-man Wilson, with your (ahem) "scatological interests," but those more fully human, I assure you, will find it so.

Orhan Pamuk's ISTANBUL

New reading, on the recommendation of Jean W.  She's quite the Turkish specialist, having lived I know not how long in Turkey, speaks and writes Turkish, still keeps up with Turkish friends.  So how's Istanbul?  Well, I haven't had to use my famous un-reading technique--though it does skirt a number of topics and issues ranging from Ewwwww to Ick:  Turkish officialdom; the last days of the Ottoman Empire; beating of schoolchildren; compulsory military service; climate of fear and repression (taken to be normal). I'm only half-way through; it could get lots worse (as I know from reading Turkish history), so I'm breathing like one who expects at any moment to be grossed out--taking deep breaths and holding them--but, so far, reading every word, not (as in Panic Mode) a word per page.  But every now and then in Pamuk's prose, thrillingly, coldly, oddly good-humored though rather sad, the Despotic Beast reveals itself, in a metallic rustle, a protracted sibilance, a startlingly unblinking Gorgonian gaze.   

Having Lost Control of ¡Tunes!

I'm listening this morning, will-nilly, to whatever it wants to send me.  So far it hasn't been too bad.  First it was Mendelssohn's 'Italian" Symphony; then it was one Kraft's cello concerto; now it's one Franz Anton Hoffmeister's double clarinet concerto.  Vulgar, of course (not the Mendelssohn--though Bob Farrar hated it.  Despised it, I should probably say, for its feckless, inconsequential doubling of parts--but Hoffmeister quickly becomes saccharine/insufferable),--so (quickly!) back to the all-baroque station, and the first Bach orchestral suite, whilst I reflect on what it is that unser lieber Hoffmeister (May 12, 1755--Februrary 9, 1812) can't, and won't even try to, do.  

   First of all, as I once heard Princess Michael say of herself, "I didn't ekssaktly come from no-vere!"  Ahl-zó!  F. A. Hoffmeister was a music publisher and a very popular composer.   In his former capacity he was the personal friend as well as the publisher ("second only to Artaria") of (count 'em): Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Clementi, Albrechtsberger, Dittersdorf, and Vanhal. This is important, because Constanze and her new husband Nissen probably gave Hoffmeister access to the considerable corpus of incomplete and fragmentary clarinet/basset horn music that Wölferl would likely have turned into at least one double concerto--had he, of course, lived--in the manner of the single clarinet quintet and concerto, K's. 581 and 622.  There is, à ce propos, a delicious fragment for clarinet, basset horn and string quartet, which shows how this might have been realized.  At any rate, putative privileged access to Mozart's working-sketches and fragments is, in my opinion, the likely germ of this annoyingly Mozart-like, and yet unlike, double-clarinet concerto.  What it lacks is proportion (our concertante group never shuts up--in the way so characteristic of, and fatal to, Romantic music) and charm (not a single tune of interest or distinction); otherwise it burbles and gurgles along quite fetchingly.

The Queen's Alman

Up listening to what I read once somewhere was 'our Dread Sovereign's' favorite Alman, Orlando Gibbon's 'The Queen's Alman.'  Which, on a time, I have played myself, and not much worse (I complacently note) than this full-voiced virginals version.  

Speaking of whom (Elizabeth Tudor), I often muse on the strange encounter I had once with one of her official 'diplomatic' portraits, in, of all places, a 'Museo Pinacoteca' in Siena.  I was with my Renaissance Art class on one of our not infrequent field trips to see repositories of mostly pre-Renaissance (pre-perspective) art, of which there is an overwhelming lot in Italy (They don't throw anything away, seemingly).  When you see room after room filled with pre-perspective art, the cumulative effect on your seeing-habit is much the same as seeing a lot of post-perspective ("modern") art:  Without your being aware of it, you abandon your "normal" view of a painting as an approximation of a photograph, or as a window onto or into something.  Instead, what you begin to notice first in paintings are their over-all patterns and color-masses, which give you their immediate sense; and then, as you approach, you become aware of isolated fragments, groupings and details within the paintings, from which, by reflection and ratiocination, you derive their significance.  You can, and do, go back and forth between sense and significance in non-perspective painting, but you never have the constant, unconsciously arrogant "self-evidence" of perspective.  So, when our class walked from the rooms containing pre-Renaissance religious painting into the first of the rooms containing late 15th century painting, I said rather loudly, "E poi, hanno imparato a disegnare!"  Which won snarky snickers from my classmates, and a rueful chuckle from our instructor.   What was funny-odd though, was that re-entering the "rational modern" world of automatic perspectival vision--while it brought everything into focus, and seemed to dispell the cobwebs at the edge of one's perceptions--it did not evoke a sensation of "beauty" so much as one of ease and comfort; rather like opening the windows of a room that without your noticing it has got stuffy.

But back to il ritratto ufficiale e diplomatico di Elisabetta I di Inglaterra.  So, having "progressed" yet once again to, and through, the clear splendors of perspectival painting, the thirteen or fourteen young persons, and me, of the Renaissance Art class of the Università per Stranieri di Siena were filing down the broad backstairs of the Museo Pinacoteca, headed out--and there, on a landing about halfway down, suddenly staring out at me was one of Queen Bess's official diplomatic portraits; one of dozens that were made to pattern, with only the face painted in "live" (apparently after an original considered a good likeness), and handed out to envoys all over Europe.  I've seen three or four, and most biographies of Elizabeth have one in the illustrations; it's a three-quarters "head-shot" that clearly shows the striking resemblance between her and her grandfather Henry VII:  What a face!  even in its official, death-mask guise, there's no mistaking it.  And there was no title, nothing in the catalog; it was called simply "ritratto di una donna inglese."  But anybody who knows Elizabeth, and her grandfather, knows who it is.

Vers Rinaires

Being sworn, as a conscientious humanist, to look up all the unfamiliar words and phrases in a work I'm reading for the first time, I was obliged to discover, if I could, what it meant that our nasty-but-fun (so very like our very own author in so many ways), eponymous hero (of Bel Ami) Georges Duroy was told to go and "tirer les vers du nez" of a prospective interviewee (noting carefully that as long ago as the first decade of the 3rd Republic, anglicisme [indeed, américanisme] had so far corrupted the noble purity of the French language that interviewer had become the normal way of saying tenir une entrevue avec).  This opened a virtual (or veritable) can of worms, so to speak, leading ultimately to an 18th century French treatise on the various kinds of worms which in the Siècle des Lumières inhabited the human body--"nose worms" being but a fraction of them. Whew.  Or whoa.  What I doubt, from all I have looked up and read about, is that  rhinal ascariasis was so embarrassing to its victims that a long interrogation by the doctor was necessary to elicit information from them about it.  Maybe it should have been.  But from further investigation, reading that invaluable source "Straight Dope," I have learned that ascariasis (infection with round worms) afflicts an estimated 25% of mankind--as much as 90% in sanitationless 3rd-world countries.  Mostly it is transmitted by eating dirt contaminated by the feces of other human victims of ascariasis.  Probably not just the dirt, but unwashed fruits and vegetables which have somehow come in contact with such dirt.  

Reading, Re-Reading, and Un-Reading

These are three different, differently enjoyable, ways of of reading books.  The first two kinds of reading, reading and re-reading, are among the greatest pleasures of which man is capable. Just now I'm experiencing the ineffable joy of reading Guy de Maupassant's Bel Ami for the first time--to think I've gone this long not having read it!  The artistic/musical comparison that occurs to me is Mozart's second great "viola" quintet in G Minor, Köchel 516 (the first, equivalent to the first great viola quintet in C Major, Köchel 515, being Boule de Suif).  It has a certain everything-that-the-author-can-think-of richness that maybe not even Pierre et Jean (D Major, Köchel 593) equals--nothing ever will, quite.  And pleasure it will be to see how far and long this silly business of comparing things alike only in their excellence can be carried. Reading is what I mostly do in Spanish and Italian history and literature.

Re-reading is what I mostly do in French and English literature.  Sitting down with a volume of Milton, Pope, Shakespeare;  Racine, Molière, Voltaire (not Voltaire's letters, of course--that's reading!)--is, generally speaking, delicious re-reading.   Paradise Lost, The Rape of the Lock, Twelfth Night; Andromaque, Le Misanthrope, Zadig--maybe just get better and better, every time I re-read them.  So do Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, P.G. Wodehouse; Flaubert, Mérimée,--de Maupassant.

Un-Reading is what I do with that vast corpus of more or less fashionable horseshit, which if I read it straight, as if it weren't horseshit, I wouldn't enjoy at all:  Lesbian porn--Lesbian anything (with the exception of Sappho only because I happen to love and to have memorized Catullus' translation:  "Ille mi par esse deo videtur/ Ille si fas est divos superare/ Qui sedens adversus identidem te/ Spectat et audit dulce ridentem./ Nam simul te, Lesbia, adspexi,/ Nihil est super me!"); Viennese "depth" psychologists; Gramsci, Althusser, Foucault, (Judith) Butler, Heidegger, Sartre, Rousseau, the comte de Sade, James Joyce, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Hitler, Earnest Hemingway, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, William Burroughs, Erica Jong; Berg, Schoenberg and their apologists; any and all postmodernists and social constructionists. Essentially (pun intended) what I do when I un-read, is skim superciliously and sneeringly, with the intention of understanding as little of what I'm reading as possible.  In this way, I have "read" whole chapters of Lesbian romance and sadomasochistic heterosexual pornography without retaining the conscious recollection of so much as a single thought, phrase, or lewd expression.  Un-reading is how I've "read," for example, Justine ou les 120 Jours de Sodome, without actually having read it at all--if anyone knows a better way to "read" the nasty crap excreted by the "Divine Marquis" I'd be pleased to hear of it.  It's not very much fun, but it gets me through it--and sometimes I find things that, in a twisted sort of way, are funny, in the way that pompous, fatuous, absurd drivel can be sometimes: Heidegger and Butler, for example, are chock-full of howlers ; sentences that get funnier and funnier the more you re-read them.  Ms. Butler did not win that Bad Writing prize for nothing.  And then, in the end, it's always best--even if you don't actually read such nasty twaddle--to know, in a general, totally non-specific way, that it's there.