Reason Not To've Died Yet, And To Go On Living....

Listening as I "write" (type) to an Opera Lyrica d'Antonio Vivaldi--Giustino: "L'Ultimo Opera composta dal maestro veneziano per i teatri romani....Il principale interprete (nel ruolo di Ariana) fu il celebre castrato del tempo Francesco Fontana, detto il Farfallino, che si era specializzato nei ruoli femminili.

""L'Opera rappresenta una transizione fra la prima produzione operistica di Vivaldi e le opere della maturità, rappresenta la fase in cui il Vivaldi operistica comincia ad essere apprezzato anche fuori da Venezia. Come molte opere vivaldiane, c'è una preminenza di voci femminili (5 soprani e 2 contralti) che si esibiscono in splendide arie, mentre l'azione drammatica procede attraverso il recitativo (numerosi nell'opera quelli accompagnati)."

And gloriously beautiful it is. More beautiful even than we could have guessed in the 1950's when, as an early, teen-age Vivaldi enthusiast, I had to wonder why Vivaldi's operas--whereof we knew he wrote so many-- were "simply unperformable." Ah, Criticism! Ah, the Informed Opinion of Received Authority!

Well, nowadays Vivaldi's operas are performed--a lot--and we are privileged to observe that as a composer for the (well trained) voice, Vivaldi has few equals (Mozart comes to mind) and no superiors. Endless ravishing tunes! Excellent musical structures (harmony, counterpoint, etc.)!

Faultless psychological characterization! Vivaldi is, in a word, every bit as good a musical technician as Bach--and infinitely better than Bach as a writer of voice-friendly vocal music. I've had to wait fifty years to find this out for sure, but it's been worth the wait....

Actually, having this sublimely beautiful never-heard-before music as a background is pertinent to the astonishing recent literary revelations that have burst upon me, which prompt me to log this day's weblog in the first place. I've been hitting the library hard lately--I have, at present, twenty books on widely diverse topics checked out--everything from Science Fiction, and the second (widely despised, but in my opinion, no less masterly) book by my idol and secret crush (we're the same age, if he's still alive), Charles Nelson, Panthers in the Skins of Men; through a couple of significant lucubrations by Theodor Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, and The Jargon of Authenticity. Adorno is The Enemy, of course--pupil of Berg's, Freudian, utterly pedantic, head-up-his-ass ass. But he's not always entirely wrong (except that there's no indication that he really feels, or likes, music--or that he's capable of understanding any music written before 1800); but, still, 'tis delicious to have him pronouncing, with thunderous fulmination, on the utter ugly, trivial, obnoxious idiocy and worthlessness of My Fair Lady. My sediments exactly. He may have been incapable of feeling music, but he knew enough about it to be hurt by it. So that's fun.

But the aforementioned earth-shaking, heaven-storming astonish'd surprise that is the purpose of today's blog:

Doing some catch-up reading of Christopher Marlowe--Tamburlaine the Great and The Jew of Malta--and reading a wonderful new biography of him by one Park Honan, wherein lay a passing reference to something call'd The Affectionate Shepherd by one Richard Barnfield, "friend of both Shakespeare and Marlowe." Hmmm (quoth I): so I looked it up on the Net and Lo! So I discovered the first--and so far the only--great versifier of male homosexual passion in English. Not "queer." Gay male. Who wrote exquisite Spenserian sonnets--twenty that I've read so far--of perfect-perfect technical form and versification--about being a gay male in a totally clueless heterosexual world. A genius and a martyr. Still misunderstood. Still a martyr. No sooner had rumor of Barnfield been heard in the late 1990's than he was seized upon by the harpies of Postmodernist "Queer Theory" who bore him away and have yet, quite, to relinquish him--though it goes without saying that his pure gay male intelligence is utterly incomprehensible to them.

Waking Dreams--Lagniappes of the Spirit World

By "waking dreams" I mean dreams that I have just before I wake up, and just as I'm waking, so that I remember them, in all their curious detail, for the rest of the day--and sometimes longer. This morning's wake-up dream: I was in Brazil--Southern Brazil, judging by the delicious temperate climate--living with a large upper middle-class family, learning Brazilian Portuguese by total immersion; joining the family on delightful excursions, wonderful neighbourhood parties...Effortlessly, I was learning to dance the Samba, and joining in the singing....But I kept missing things people were saying; such that I hurried first thing to my computer as soon as my eyes were open, to find the Brazilian Portuguese language tutorials, dictionaries, and grammars--to see if I really had been conjugating irregular Portuguese verbs in my sleep.

The Rat that ate the Malt

Weel, 'twas but a step back from the twin flowering of gorgeous Mississippi River side-wheeler steamboats, and lovely, impossible clipper ships in the 1850's, to the justly and curiously named "Baltimore clippers"--and rumors of American blockade-running in the War of 1812--and Lo! The whole incredible, true, wholly improbable and utterly factual history of American smuggling and privateering--and the consequent superiority of American ship-building and navigational and ship-sailing skills--came tumbling out of the Closet of History like an avalanche, stunning, thunder-striking, and overwhelming me. ¿Who knew?

I checked out of the library last night and swiftly read Privateers of '76 by Fred J. Cooke--and I have more books on order, which will take me from the Revolution through the War of 1812 in the history of American privateering (sailing and ship-building)....

The "Wide Awake" 1850's

The biggest shock to me in reading about those seraphically beautiful "extreme clippers" is how extremely evanescent they were in character. "Planned obsolescence" doesn't begin to describe those ships--"Made to self-destruct" is more like it. Most revealing maybe is the construction of the masts. I had thought that masts would have to have been formed of very tall, straight single trees, like the "Norwegian spruce" I think it is Milton mentions as being suitable for a "lofty Amiral." But no. Masts were made in three sections, fidded together with iron "fids"--immense, clumsy tinker toys--and they were meant to come apart under stress--rather than tear the whole ship up, apparently....

Taking Care of Business, Taking Care of Me

My long silence has been fruitful. Today, with little or no thought of blogging about it, I began reading Carl C. Cutler's Greyhounds of the Sea (all about Clipper Ships) and David W. Shaw's Flying Cloud: The true story of America's most famous Clipper Ship and the Woman who guided her (that woman being, as I happen to know, the Captain Josiah Creesy's wife, Eleanor), and I finished reading Colette's Naissance du Jour. And in amongst it all I paid no less than $200 to register as a Medical Marijuana user, in the expectation of receiving, 45 days hence, my Medical Marijuana user and grower's card. Last night, for the first time, I read a new translation of the stunningly homo-erotic Gilgamesh. Since the first of last month, I have had my teeth X-rayed and cleaned at the University of Hawaii Dental Clinic; and last week I had all my cavities filled and fallen-out fillings replaced by a reassuringly competent young (40-year-old) dentist. Over the last couple of months, I have read, in due and disappointing succession, Derek Bickerton's Bastard Tongues, Language and Species, and Adam's Tongue--of my disappointment, more anon. I am also deep in Hinayana and Mahayana Buddhist Sutras, and in an old favorite of mine, the Sermons of Meister Eckhart. Milton would probably be distilling all of the foregoing into the milk of magniloquent blank verse: all I say is that I feel sort of pregnant--but with what I doubt even the great god Anu could predict. It could just be gas pains.