Lost sound

At the LRB, a great piece by Colm Tóibín on two new books about the eighteenth-century castrati:

The French soprano Emma Calvé wrote in her autobiography about hearing the castrato Domenico Mustafà in 1891: ‘He had an exquisite high tenor voice, truly angelic, neither masculine nor yet feminine in type – deep, subtle, poignant in its vibrant intensity … He had certain curious notes which he called his fourth voice – strange, sexless tones, superhuman, uncanny!’ Another writer wrote of a castrato voice that it was ‘so soft, and ravishingly mellow, that nothing can better represent it than the Flute-stops of some Organs’, which themselves were ‘not unlike the gentle Fallings of Water’.

Nonetheless, as Feldman writes, ‘we still lack access to the sound of the castrato’s voice, save some early recordings of the last castrato.’ It is as though we had the letters of Wordsworth and Coleridge and some reviews of their work, or some wonderful descriptions of Impressionist painting, but not the things themselves – the poems or the paintings.

"Can you cook an egg on a book?"

Meakin Armstrong interviews Etgar Keret at Guernica. Here's a bit that especially caught my eye (I want to read this book):

Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history. About 2,000 years ago, people stopped speaking Hebrew because of the diaspora. So people who went to Rome spoke Latin, people who moved to the US spoke English, people spoke Yiddish, but they didn’t speak Hebrew. They knew the words, but it was a written language—they read prayers, they knew the language well, but it wasn’t spoken. I think the logic behind it would be that you don’t need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.

Then somebody took this frozen language and defrosted it in the microwave of history, and people spontaneously started speaking it. And the thing that happened when people started speaking this language is it was kind of a miracle. If Shakespeare were to come here and hear us speak, he wouldn’t understand a word we were saying, but if Abraham or Isaac took a taxi in Israel, they could communicate with the taxi driver. He’d understand what they are saying because the language didn’t organically change. It was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.

We import words from other languages and we put them in Israeli verb form. Like for cocaine, we say in Hebrew, lesniff. We have many words like this from Russian, from Arabic. What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time.

Bright in its proper station

From Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland:

[O]ne generation of ignorance effaces the whole series of unwritten history. Books are faithful repositories, which may be a while neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction: memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has past away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.

Ogres in passing

Lorien Kite interviews Kazuo Ishiguro at the FT (site registration required):

“About 50 or 60 pages in, maybe slightly more, I thought, well, maybe I’ll show Lorna this,” says Ishiguro. “And she looked at it and said: ‘This is appalling — this won’t do.’ I said: ‘So what’s wrong with it? What should I change?’ She said: ‘You can’t change anything. You’ll just have to start again from scratch; completely from scratch.’”

Ishiguro couldn’t face the job of reconstruction immediately, turning instead to the short-story collection that would be published as Nocturnes in 2009. But when he did return to the Dark Ages, the approach was different. “The first time I had a go at this thing it was a bit like Sir Walter Scott, over-egged with a kind of period vernacular. The second time around I just tried to keep the language as simple as possible. I worked more at taking words from what you or I would say rather than adding things like ‘prithee’ — just by removing prepositions or the odd word here and there, I ended up with something that sounded slightly odd or slightly foreign.”

Sedimentalism

At the LRB, Ferdinand Mount on David Bromwich's Edmund Burke (subscription only):

If politics is a science, then it is a kind of geology. As J.W. Burrow puts it, ‘the common law is not a creation of heroic judges but the slow, anonymous sedimentation of immemorial custom; the constitution is no gift but the continuous self-defining public activity of the nation.’ Burke is a sedimentalist, just as he is, in a non-pejorative sense, a sentimentalist. The sentiments of the people, himself included, are political facts accreted over time, which cannot be ignored or easily overridden in the interests of abstract principles, however desirable. The thought experiment so beloved of philosophers from Hobbes and Locke to John Rawls, of men in the state of nature coming together to conclude a social contract, would have seemed to Burke a sophistical fantasy. Burke foreshadows the 19th century in seeing everything – law, morality, solidarity – as historically evolved, the outcome of experience rather than design.

Defeating Hitler

From Avraham Burg, The Holocaust is Over; We Must Rise From its Ashes, an interesting book recommended by David B.:

Once we decided to accept K. Zetnik's testimony in the Eichmann trial verbatim, without questioning, we exiled ourselves to "another planet" on the Shoah platform, and our lives are a journey between dark planets. As far [as] we are concerned, we live on the Auschwitz planet. All is Shoah and everything is weighed on its scales. The rays of light that reach Israel break as they pass through the prism of crematoria. When it happens to others, we move to the next planet, where there is no room for the other's suffering, no genocides, no atrocities, and no holocausts that are not ours.

We are on the side [of] the Turks in their denial of the Armenian Holocaust, and we are beside the U.S. right-wingers, not knowing anything about America's original nations. We supplied arms to those who perpetuated the massacres in Rwanda and our denial reaches inside the Balkans. Soon after the Eichmann trial concluded, the Israeli government, and society in large, denied Hannah Arendt's argument that the Shoah was a human crime, committed by human beings, made possible by a new type of a murderer, the bureaucrat. The rejection of Arendt's Eichmann Trial was brief and fatal. No, protested the Shoah establishment. The Shoah is unique. It happened only to us; do not contaminate our Shoah with other people's troubles. In this manner Israel isolated itself from profound world processes and became a denier of other peoples' holocausts.

Closing tabs

Trying to get school-related tasks done this last two weeks has been like wading through marmalade - that always happens at the end of the semester. I have two more minor tasks to finish this morning before I can guiltlessly (a) go to midday hot yoga [ED. This did not happen - I was interrupted in my post by the need to visit a friend in the hospital, and we ended up staying with his wife for a bit while she waited for scary tests to be conducted] and (b) write the luxuriantly copious blog post about summer writing thoughts that has been percolating for many days now. But before any of that, I think, some tabs to close....

A good Knausgaard interview by Scott Esposito (scroll down and click the link to open).

It really was bound in human skin! (More here and here.)

Documenting the last living Chinese women whose feet were bound in childhood.

True love

A lifetime supply of donuts.

The blue meth

Dwight Garner on criticism:

By the time I was in high school my English teachers had turned me on to Pauline Kael and Greil Marcus. I loved James Wolcott’s stuff, too. [. . . .] I remember going through the microfilm and microfiche machines, getting a sore neck, just to find Wolcott’s old stuff in the Village Voice and Harper’s. I still have those Wolcott printouts. They’re on those warped old pieces of prehistoric photo-print paper. I’m still a fan.

His stuff just popped off the page. It was the most vivid critical writing I’d ever read. His stuff shouted, the way good art does, “I’m alive.” I felt the same way about Kael and Marcus, among others. These people had things appearing in magazines like Rolling Stone, and in newspapers, and it felt like, to my blinkered perspective at any rate, a golden age.

I reread the work of my favourite critics—Orwell, Agee, Updike, Tynan, Sheed, Macdonald, Kazin and so on—all the time. Just to breathe that air. But there’s nothing like reading a critic in real time. That’s the blue meth. There’s nothing like going to see a film and coming back and inhaling the words of a critic like AO Scott or Stephanie Zacharek, now at the Village Voice. There’s nothing like getting that buzz in your head.

It is a terrible confession, but I just don't feel that buzz - it's partly why I don't like Twitter, I don't want to be peppered with news about things happening right now - I love instead that feeling of immersion in a deep elsewhere, preferably far in the past....

Dope literature

From the TLS archive, a 1938 review of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca:

The conventions of a story of this kind are not the conventions of the so-called realistic novel, and it would be absurd to reproach Miss du Maurier for her fine, careless rapture. In its kind “Rebecca” is extraordinarily bold and confident, eloquent and accomplished to a degree that merits genuine respect. Hundreds of novelists to-day try to write in a similar vein: the few who produce novels as readable as this are household names. It is fair, no doubt, to call this type of fiction “dope”. But it is no good pretending that everybody would read Tolstoy or Proust if there were no dope literature.

I read a lot of Daphne Du Maurier's novels when I was a teenager - I think the one that has most stayed with me is The House on the Strand - which in turn reminds me of another childhood favorite, Anya Seton's Green Darkness....

Linkage

Trying to gear up for a run - have already curtailed notion of a long one, now just need to get myself out the door for something. Residual fatigue is an obstacle, and hay fever season is upon us; also, not as warm as one might think in April - but really all this just means that I am still very tired!

Miscellaneous linkage:

E. L. Konigsburg has died. I loved so many of her books so much, including the iconic Mixed-Up Files, but I think my two absolute favorites must have always been A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver (what an amazing title aside from everything else - though as someone who has recently felt a bit scathed by 1-star Amazon reviews, I feel slightly relieved to see the vitriol being spilled on this lovely book and its title!) and Father's Arcane Daughter, which I am sorry to see has been retitled My Father's Daughter in the reissue - one of the things I loved as a child about Konigsburg's books was that they made no concessions to imagined notions of children's vocabularies!

At the Guardian: Sebald on Rousseau, Wood/Sinclair/Macfarlane/Self on Sebald.

This is uncanny. (Via Charles. Whole site is very compelling.)

Best thing I saw on the internet this week. (Courtesy of my dad.)