Emerging from the Canyons

More than a week has passed since I've last posted, so I thought I'd try a short entry here so that half of May didn't disappear before I returned to this page. Mostly it's been work--so much to read that I can't really focus on anything else, reading for all sorts of university-related student theses and final projects, programs, deadlines, etc., on top of which there's the lecture course, which, thankfully, spares me the necessity of reading the primary works (though rereading's required), but secondary critical texts are a necessity for those works (like Willa Cather's stories or Robert Lowell's poems, for example) for which I have not previously focused in my teaching or own critical work. Right now, I'm sitting at my mother's kitchen table, with nearly 20 stories to read through carefully for another required responsibility, and will get 20 more when I return to campus on Monday. I wish I could muster the mental agility to slip between these cordilleras of required reading and things like blogging, but I've found, at least of this past fall, when the mountains of work just kept rising like a volcanic cloud, that I couldn't. Well, summer will be here soon--my own work, and this blog, will see a bit more of me as a result.

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One of the students who recently found the blog asked me if I was in New Jersey last week because of my post about the Princeton concert. I wasn't--I've been in Chicago (and this weekend, St. Louis) almost continuously for over a month now--but I did have the opportunity to hear the concert online, and here's what I wrote to Audiologo, whose pieces were superlative. (From my judging, and I'm not just being enthusiastic and celebratory.) I wrote about them:

I listened to the concert via streaming audio! It was so much fun to do so. I was trying to figure out whose pieces were which, since I must have missed the introduction, but the first piece sounded like a dance track [Timbaland Symphony, a mash up of various Timbaland produced cuts with Beethoven's 9th Symphony, which was a response to DJ Dangermouse]; the second a fairly straightforward performance of a classical instrumental score or a new score written in that format [Ravel's Sonatine (which was played marvelously by Francine Kay, also was the pianist on my piece) and you just got Andrea Mazzariello's fall down five times, get up six]; the third a duet (or were there more instruments?) involving a piano and cello (?), again fairly traditional [Shostakovich's Op. 20 piano trio and you only heard Anne Hege's Bedridden Fantasies]; and then I heard the final series of pieces Schubert's Der Doppelgänger], one of which included a performance of "Mary Mac," and then Aurora Micu singing "You are most beautiful," over the piano accompaniment and some electronic background material! Did I get this order correct? I also heard lots of talking between the first two main pieces and the latter two, so I kept hoping that someone would announce the pieces, but I really guessed I missed the intro. It was altogether really exciting, and your piece--and I'm not just saying this because I know you--struck me as the most inventive, daring and beautiful, especially when I considered what you took as your starting point. With the earlier instrumental pieces, I guess I was hoping to hear something more...complex? Something that synthesized some of the many 20th and 21st century strands of composition, non-electronic and electronic/digital. The first one did do this, of course, but yours felt especially fresh and engaging.

(Clarifications courtesy of Audiologo.) So I wasn't there in body, but virtually....

Dreaming on the transverse
              retinas of our discourse
we transcribe through signs towards
              the echoes of their singing...

As Coisas A Esmo (Random Things)

Several quick notes: today is C's birthday; as I had the pleasure of wishing him personally, Happy Birthday!

At Firedoglake, there's a Book Salon featuring Digby (who presides over one of my favorite blogs) and Robert Frank, the author of Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class. (And everyone else who's not obscenely rich, especially people who work for wages everyday.) You can participate in the comments section. I have 1,000 thoughts on this topic, but none are coherent right now, so instead, please visit Firedoglake.

For weeks I've been meaning to link to Audiologo's followup post on the vicissitudes of Black American literary fictionists, which she launches through a discussion of Helen Oyeyemi's The Opposite House, but there is so much great stuff on her blog, from a review of the Shainman Gallery's Color Line show to a link to a post on the Black Documentary Collective's screening of Woodie King's The Segregation of the Greatest Generation at Film Forum, muchos recados sobre Black Rock, and a beautiful riff on Black LGBT theater that invokes the PoMo Afro Homos and finishes by noting the August dates of the Fire! Plays in Development that Matter! And that's just July's posts! Drop in and catch some science!

Once upon a time I took an economics course. Or muddled my way through it. The highlight was listening, alongside 200 or so other students, to the legendary John Kenneth Galbraith dilate on the flawed economic assumptions of the Reagan administration, while the low points were too numerous to stick in my memory. (Well, maybe they weren't so bad, but after reading the words "opportunity cost" and "marginal utility" too many times and struggling to decode the various mathematical graphs, I breathed a hugh sigh of relief when I'd taken the final exam and the winter break arrived.) I learned so little that back in the early 1990s, I was unable to concisely explain junk bonds to my mother, despite the fact that I'd worked at a commercial bank and written economic reports! It's a good thing I got out of that business. Anyways, one of the economists whose work I've been reading of late is George Mason University professor Tyler Cowen, who may be the first member of his profession (along with Alex Taborrok) that I've read comprehensibly explain and graph in economic terms the relationship between artists' production of popular, mass-market artworks and those of a formally avant-garde nature. (Cf. the output of the late filmmaker Michelangelo Antonioni, for example). Cowen writes quite a bit about the economics of culture, globalization, and related topics. His ideological perspective tends, if I can describe it simply, towards the moderate, pro-capitalist libertarian (he has called himself a pluralist and "libertarian with a little l," acknowledging the limits of that perspective), and demonstrates a deep interest and knowledge in the arts and culture, in the broad and micro senses. One example I'd point to is his Reason Online article on protectionism and the French film industry, which not only presents a compelling argument against the French film quota system, but also offers a précis of French film history that I imagine many filmgoers may be unaware of. While I disagree a number of his conclusions, I still enjoy exploring his blog, whose most recent post asks people in India the names of random, deserving individuals there to whom he can send money. He also asks his readers to make "merit-based" donations to India as well. He also suggests skimping on tipping waiters in the US and sending the money to Haiti, ending jail terms for people convicted of marijuana possession and some other reasonable things; then again, Milton Friedman is one of his heroes....