I just had a lovely visit at a boxing day party, where I caught up with old friends from grade school and their parents and generally made merry. There is an inimitable comfort in seeing friends from childhood -- people who knew you before you'd made any decisions or mistakes or realized what you were good at or what you wanted to do with your life. It is tempting to stay here in Belmont this week to be with them, in lieu of my journey to Philadelphia for a reunion with college friends. I have to admit feeling exhausted by the idea of a six-hour train ride, alone, or alone with a book, I guess. My father got me a fantastic book for Christmas: Musicophilia
by Oliver Sacks, which I began reading yesterday and look forward to continuing.
In other news, I have one New Year's resolution that I think is achievable and interesting and worth a bit of effort: I would like to make of practice of turning down plastic bags when I make purchases at grocery stores, drug stores, or other venues. I think accepting an occasional plastic bag will be acceptable within this exercise -- I will allow for unexpected purchases and contradiction of self, and also acknowledge that I cannot save the world through personal virtue. This seems like a relatively easy contribution to the world order and generally a good idea. And conveniently, I just got two free canvas bags from Cardullos, courtesy of speakers at our recent conference who didn't want to carry their gift bags onto return flights as carry-ons.
Monday, December 24, 2007
Zizek
Here is a delightful op-ed written by a philosopher I've always considered to be a bit incomprehensible. Actually, I must give Slavoj Zizek partial credit for my decision that I just wasn't meant to be a literary theorist. Reading "Contigency, Hegemony, Universality," the book he cowrote with Ernesto Laclau and Judith Butler, reduced me to tears of frustration at least once and quite probably more than once.
If Zizek could write his books the way he writes his op-eds, I think he and I could be friends. Here is something lighter, and written on the subject of a piece of music I consider to be absolutely sublime:
‘Ode to Joy,’ Followed by Chaos and Despair
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Published: December 24, 2007
London
LAST week, European Union leaders put an end to a decade of diplomatic wrangling and signed the Treaty of Lisbon, which outlined a complete overhaul of the organization, including the creation of a permanent post of European Union president to represent Europe on the world stage. During the ceremony at Lisbon’s grandiose Jerónimos Monastery, a choir performed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the background. While the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, first performed in 1824, may seem an innocuous choice for the official anthem of the European Union (it was declared such in 1972), it actually tells much more than one would expect about Europe’s predicament today.
The “Ode to Joy” is more than just a universally popular piece of classical music that has become something of a cliché during the holiday season (especially, oddly, in Japan, where it has achieved cult status). It has also been, for more than a century, what literary theorists call an “empty signifier” — a symbol that can stand for anything.
In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared it to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.
In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood.
There is, however, a weird imbalance in this piece of music. In the middle of the movement, after we hear the main melody (the “joy” theme) in three orchestral and three vocal variations, something unexpected happens that has bothered critics for the last 180 years: at Bar 331, the tone changes totally, and, instead of the solemn hymnic progression, the same “joy” theme is repeated in the “marcia turca” ( or Turkish march) style, a conceit borrowed from military music for wind and percussion instruments that 18th-century European armies adopted from the Turkish janissaries.
The mode then becomes one of a carnivalesque parade, a mocking spectacle — critics have even compared the sounds of the bassoons and bass drum that accompany the beginning of the marcia turca to flatulence. After this point, such critics feel, everything goes wrong, the simple solemn dignity of the first part of the movement is never recovered.
But what if these critics are only partly correct — what if things do not go wrong only with the entrance of the marcia turca? What if they go wrong from the very beginning? Perhaps one should accept that there is something of an insipid fake in the very “Ode to Joy,” so that the chaos that enters after Bar 331 is a kind of the “return of the repressed,” a symptom of what was errant from the beginning.
If this is the case, we should thus shift the entire perspective and perceive the marcia as a return to normality that cuts short the display of preposterous portentousness of what precedes it — it is the moment the music brings us back to earth, as if saying: “You want to celebrate the brotherhood of men? Here they are, the real humanity ...”
And does the same not hold for Europe today? The second stanza of Friedrich Schiller’s poem that is set to the music in “Ode to Joy,” coming on the heels of a chorus that invites the world’s “millions” to “be embraced,” ominously ends: “But he who cannot rejoice, let him steal weeping away.” With this in mind, one recent paradox of the marcia turca is difficult to miss: as Europe makes the final adjustments to its continental solidarity in Lisbon, the Turks, despite their hopes, are outside the embrace.
So, when in the forthcoming days we hear again and again the “Ode to Joy,” it would be appropriate to remember what comes after this triumphant melody. Before succumbing to the warm sentiment of how we are all one big family, I think my fellow Europeans should spare a thought for all those who cannot rejoice with us, all those who are forced to “steal weeping away.” It is, perhaps, the only way we’ll put an end to the rioting and car burnings and other forms of the Turkish march we now see in our very own cities.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of “The Parallax View.”
If Zizek could write his books the way he writes his op-eds, I think he and I could be friends. Here is something lighter, and written on the subject of a piece of music I consider to be absolutely sublime:
‘Ode to Joy,’ Followed by Chaos and Despair
By SLAVOJ ZIZEK
Published: December 24, 2007
London
LAST week, European Union leaders put an end to a decade of diplomatic wrangling and signed the Treaty of Lisbon, which outlined a complete overhaul of the organization, including the creation of a permanent post of European Union president to represent Europe on the world stage. During the ceremony at Lisbon’s grandiose Jerónimos Monastery, a choir performed Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” in the background. While the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, first performed in 1824, may seem an innocuous choice for the official anthem of the European Union (it was declared such in 1972), it actually tells much more than one would expect about Europe’s predicament today.
The “Ode to Joy” is more than just a universally popular piece of classical music that has become something of a cliché during the holiday season (especially, oddly, in Japan, where it has achieved cult status). It has also been, for more than a century, what literary theorists call an “empty signifier” — a symbol that can stand for anything.
In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared it to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.
In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood.
There is, however, a weird imbalance in this piece of music. In the middle of the movement, after we hear the main melody (the “joy” theme) in three orchestral and three vocal variations, something unexpected happens that has bothered critics for the last 180 years: at Bar 331, the tone changes totally, and, instead of the solemn hymnic progression, the same “joy” theme is repeated in the “marcia turca” ( or Turkish march) style, a conceit borrowed from military music for wind and percussion instruments that 18th-century European armies adopted from the Turkish janissaries.
The mode then becomes one of a carnivalesque parade, a mocking spectacle — critics have even compared the sounds of the bassoons and bass drum that accompany the beginning of the marcia turca to flatulence. After this point, such critics feel, everything goes wrong, the simple solemn dignity of the first part of the movement is never recovered.
But what if these critics are only partly correct — what if things do not go wrong only with the entrance of the marcia turca? What if they go wrong from the very beginning? Perhaps one should accept that there is something of an insipid fake in the very “Ode to Joy,” so that the chaos that enters after Bar 331 is a kind of the “return of the repressed,” a symptom of what was errant from the beginning.
If this is the case, we should thus shift the entire perspective and perceive the marcia as a return to normality that cuts short the display of preposterous portentousness of what precedes it — it is the moment the music brings us back to earth, as if saying: “You want to celebrate the brotherhood of men? Here they are, the real humanity ...”
And does the same not hold for Europe today? The second stanza of Friedrich Schiller’s poem that is set to the music in “Ode to Joy,” coming on the heels of a chorus that invites the world’s “millions” to “be embraced,” ominously ends: “But he who cannot rejoice, let him steal weeping away.” With this in mind, one recent paradox of the marcia turca is difficult to miss: as Europe makes the final adjustments to its continental solidarity in Lisbon, the Turks, despite their hopes, are outside the embrace.
So, when in the forthcoming days we hear again and again the “Ode to Joy,” it would be appropriate to remember what comes after this triumphant melody. Before succumbing to the warm sentiment of how we are all one big family, I think my fellow Europeans should spare a thought for all those who cannot rejoice with us, all those who are forced to “steal weeping away.” It is, perhaps, the only way we’ll put an end to the rioting and car burnings and other forms of the Turkish march we now see in our very own cities.
Slavoj Zizek, the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, is the author, most recently, of “The Parallax View.”
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
It's a wonderful life
Goodness! I'm in such an exciting chapter of my life, and my mind is wrestling over how much is prudent to describe here, on the internet, the information highway. I'm in a position now to take a tremendous risk that has the potential for great rewards...It's job related, and a move that would have seemed entirely out of the question a year ago, to a more cautious version of myself. Most psychologists agree that one's personality constantly evolves, and that principle feels so true to me in this moment: I feel braver and more optimistic about life now than I think I ever have been. Gosh! I wish I could write more. I have already exceeded the bounds of discretion and will probably redact this tomorrow. If I can pull this plan off, I will describe it later. Otherwise, I will save it for my fiction writing.
My enthusiasm for life today was also inspired by a holiday card I received from a college friend, someone I have seen only twice in the last four years but who I will always feel close to. To whom I will always feel close? Hmmm. No way to say that that is both grammatically and stylistically sound. Anyway: my friend told me that I deserved good things and expressed her conviction that they would come to me and wished me a merry christmas. And I know she meant all of those things so deeply and it made me grin ear to ear and miss her so much. What a lovely card.
I hereby resolve to send out holiday cards next year. I did buy a box of cards this year, but I only sent out three of them -- one to my grandparents, and two to old mission friends. I think I will postmark two more tomorrow, inspired by K. It is so delightful to get a snail-mail card with a snail-mail stamp and a hand-written message. On the rare occasions that I travel, I always, always send postcards because I appreciate getting a postcard so much...But the holiday card operation, I need to do that.
My enthusiasm for life today was also inspired by a holiday card I received from a college friend, someone I have seen only twice in the last four years but who I will always feel close to. To whom I will always feel close? Hmmm. No way to say that that is both grammatically and stylistically sound. Anyway: my friend told me that I deserved good things and expressed her conviction that they would come to me and wished me a merry christmas. And I know she meant all of those things so deeply and it made me grin ear to ear and miss her so much. What a lovely card.
I hereby resolve to send out holiday cards next year. I did buy a box of cards this year, but I only sent out three of them -- one to my grandparents, and two to old mission friends. I think I will postmark two more tomorrow, inspired by K. It is so delightful to get a snail-mail card with a snail-mail stamp and a hand-written message. On the rare occasions that I travel, I always, always send postcards because I appreciate getting a postcard so much...But the holiday card operation, I need to do that.
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Snowbound
Inspired by the weather, here is a poem for my dad, by Robert Hayden.
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
Robert Hayden
Sunday, December 9, 2007
On food
You know, maybe I should start one of those foodie blogs. My cooking and eating adventures happen in spurts, though, punctuated by long periods of eating only chili and peanut butter sandwiches and cereal. One of things that has surprised me about adulthood is the amount of thought goes into what one eats, regardless of whether one cooks. There are always logistics to deal with when it comes to food -- where to buy it, how long it will stay fresh, how to eat healthfully, how to coordinate schedules with someone else for a meal. Even if you have a personal chef, I suppose there would be some amount of thinking involved in all of this. I vacillate between resenting that this silly body of mine needs nourishment at all and enjoying cookbooks, meals, and new tastes.
But ah, the gustatory and culinary pleasures of this weekend! Last night I went to Tacos Lupita just outside of Porter Square -- the Ecuadoran hole-in-the-wall that makes its own corn tortillas. It's a typical taqueria with nothing particularly healthy on the menu -- burritos, tacos, gorditas, and tortas and remarkably low prices. But their tortillas! Even the higher-end Mexican restaurants in the area don't make their own tortillas, and I don't think I've had a homemade tortilla since I was in Houston. Muy delicioso! I can't believe I've never been there before, and I will certainly be visiting again.
Last night's wonderful meal was followed up with an evening of cooking tonight. Our menu from tonight, with commentary:
- Salmon broiled with a mix of minced shallots, diced tomatoes, and herbs, sprinkled with goat cheese. My two emendations for future use of this recipe: substitute fresh tomatoes for canned ones (note bene: the cookbook we drew this from was entitled "the fifteen-minute gourmet"); add goat cheese post-cooking instead of pre-cooking.
- Garlic mashed potatoes! This required a few steps I don't normally put into mashed potatoes: blending the potatoes in a blender, which really has a different effect that using a potato masher; boiling the garlic and then blending it in a blender, and adding a raw egg yolk to the hot potatoes. The recipe called for a mixer and food processor, but G didn't have either; in fact, the potato-peeler that we bought at Market Basket was a revelation to him. He made a good sou chef, nevertheless. I also edited out the heavy cream, since the recipe was already on the unhealthy side with four tablespoons of butter, and since only five tablespoons of the stuff would be needed and what would I do with the remainder of a pint of heavy cream? Our substitutions and omissions were quite successful, I think. I will probably leave out the raw egg yolk next time because of food safety concerns. Does an egg yolk really cook when it is added to hot potatoes? Hmmm. I feel like Julia Lukin wouldn't lead me astray, but you never know with these fancy chefs.
- Steamed spinach with salt and pepper (we were too tired for anything fancier, and truth be told, the spinach was frozen. but it was still good. :)
- Chevre spread on dried apricot halves; an invention because we were hungry while we cooked. G asked: are you sure they go to together? but then conceded that the idea was genius.
I wish I had time to report, also, on my MFA visit of today! But goodness, I should go to bed.
But ah, the gustatory and culinary pleasures of this weekend! Last night I went to Tacos Lupita just outside of Porter Square -- the Ecuadoran hole-in-the-wall that makes its own corn tortillas. It's a typical taqueria with nothing particularly healthy on the menu -- burritos, tacos, gorditas, and tortas and remarkably low prices. But their tortillas! Even the higher-end Mexican restaurants in the area don't make their own tortillas, and I don't think I've had a homemade tortilla since I was in Houston. Muy delicioso! I can't believe I've never been there before, and I will certainly be visiting again.
Last night's wonderful meal was followed up with an evening of cooking tonight. Our menu from tonight, with commentary:
- Salmon broiled with a mix of minced shallots, diced tomatoes, and herbs, sprinkled with goat cheese. My two emendations for future use of this recipe: substitute fresh tomatoes for canned ones (note bene: the cookbook we drew this from was entitled "the fifteen-minute gourmet"); add goat cheese post-cooking instead of pre-cooking.
- Garlic mashed potatoes! This required a few steps I don't normally put into mashed potatoes: blending the potatoes in a blender, which really has a different effect that using a potato masher; boiling the garlic and then blending it in a blender, and adding a raw egg yolk to the hot potatoes. The recipe called for a mixer and food processor, but G didn't have either; in fact, the potato-peeler that we bought at Market Basket was a revelation to him. He made a good sou chef, nevertheless. I also edited out the heavy cream, since the recipe was already on the unhealthy side with four tablespoons of butter, and since only five tablespoons of the stuff would be needed and what would I do with the remainder of a pint of heavy cream? Our substitutions and omissions were quite successful, I think. I will probably leave out the raw egg yolk next time because of food safety concerns. Does an egg yolk really cook when it is added to hot potatoes? Hmmm. I feel like Julia Lukin wouldn't lead me astray, but you never know with these fancy chefs.
- Steamed spinach with salt and pepper (we were too tired for anything fancier, and truth be told, the spinach was frozen. but it was still good. :)
- Chevre spread on dried apricot halves; an invention because we were hungry while we cooked. G asked: are you sure they go to together? but then conceded that the idea was genius.
I wish I had time to report, also, on my MFA visit of today! But goodness, I should go to bed.
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