Inevitable Washington beckoned, and resistance became more and more futile as the store of years grew less; for the world contains no other spot than Washington where education can be pursued from every side. Even more vigorously than in the nineteenth century, Washington taught in the twenty-first, with no other school approaching it for variety of direction and energy of mind.
N.B.:
[Reiterating a personal note: I am looking for a new job. Besides being the Managing Editor of this fine newsletter in my spare time, I’ve worked in data governance for the past few years, mostly overseeing the construction and management of a data catalog. I also have experience in journalism and majored in math and classics at Notre Dame. (All this to say that I’ve done a variety of things and am open to just about anything.) I live in New York City but am willing to move elsewhere. If you are interested in hiring me or know anyone who might be, please reach out. Thank you. —Steve]
April’s D.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Tuesday, April 22 to discuss the question “Is curiosity dangerous?”
And the N.Y.C. Salon will meet on the evening of Friday, April 25 to discuss the same question.
Links:
In our sister publication on the Hudson, Philip Clark on Mahan Esfahani, harpsichordist:
The momentum Landowska initiated was carried forward by three midcentury Czech composers—Bohuslav Martinů, Hans Krása, and Viktor Kalabis—who wrote significant works for the instrument. Elisabeth Chojnacka, a Polish harpsichordist, enlisted pieces from some of the most dynamic postwar composers: Iannis Xenakis, György Ligeti, Maurice Ohana, Franco Donatoni, and Górecki. Ligeti’s Continuum transformed the instrument into a mechanism churning and mulching together crisscrossing lines, counterpoint getting busier and busier until the weave of lines appear to collapse in on themselves. Xenakis scattered around swarms of notes, punctuated by frenzied walls of noise.
A parallel trend began during the 1950s and stepped up a gear into the 1960s. During this period, rather than looking forward, musicians like John Eliot Gardiner, Frans Brüggen, Trevor Pinnock, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, and Reinhard Goebel began to play on instruments made in the Baroque era, or designed to sound like they had been. They worked in smaller groups, as opposed to a full orchestra, with the aim of recreating the countless nuances of articulation, tempo, and rhythm of the source material. The harpsichord sat at the heart of that project. Its place in history, on this view, is as a “museum” instrument. Esfahani, on the other hand, has always preferred to play it as if its best days might lie ahead.
[I personally would like there to be a middle ground between the rather prissy Baroque instrument and its imitators and the murderous typewriter that is the twentieth-century harpsichord. (I kid because I love, although I am pretty sure that Continuum is in fact what it sounds like to get murdered by a typewriter; previous jokes on the subject in WRB—Apr. 10, 2024.) Even the pop world can’t decide what the harpsichord signifies; what do “Walk Away Renee” and “The Real Slim Shady” have in common besides dragging it out?
Steve Larkin, harpsichord enthusiast, will tell you what it signifies, though: being too cool for the piano.—Steve]
Reviews:
In the Journal, Barbara Spindel reviews a book about proposed spelling reforms (Enough Is Enuf: Our Failed Attempts to Make English Easier to Spell, by Gabe Henry, April 15):
In the early twentieth century, the industrialist Andrew Carnegie provided the seed money for the Simplified Spelling Board, which, unlike the Spelling Reform Association, was committed to subtracting letters from the alphabet rather than adding them. (His wish list included “thru,” “tho” and “lookt.”) In 1906 President Theodore Roosevelt ordered the federal government to conform to the spellings advocated by the board, and the press, Mr. Henry reports, had “a field day.” (The book reproduces several political cartoons mocking Roosevelt’s action.) In response, Congress voted to maintain standard orthography, and an embarrassed TR, whom some reporters had begun calling “Ruzevelt,” abandoned the cause. Meanwhile, after fruitlessly bankrolling the project for years to the tune of $200,000 (the equivalent of over $6.3 million today), Carnegie bitterly wrote of his board that “a more useless body of men never came into association.” He fumed, in his preferred orthography, “I think I hav been patient long enuf.”
[“Lookt”—what was wrong with “look’d,” or “lookd,” which Milton uses in a few places? (Tired of attempts at spelling reform. Return to seventeenth-century orthography.) I’ve always thought of spelling reform as a very nineteenth-century impulse—all that standardization. Even in something like “Enoch Soames,” which I read recently, Beerbohm’s English of the future has undergone a phonetic spelling reform. But it introduces new problems; Max Beerbohm cannot make out what “labud” is in the future author’s description of his “labud sattire.” —Steve]
In ,
reviews Austin Kelley’s new novel (The Fact Checker, April 15):“As a checker, you don’t choose what you check. You check everything. That’s the calling.” Kelley’s narrator-protagonist thinks of his job as a vocation. The novel’s first line warns us that his career is short-lived: “It may seem odd, if not idiotic, that the story that took up so much of my time and energy, the story that was ultimately the end for me, was about food, not terrorism.”
Kelley, like McInerney, once checked facts for the New Yorker, although he doesn’t seem to harbor as much of a grudge as his predecessor does against their former department. In this novel, the fact-checking department is an ascetic cadre: “We were quiet. We were careful.” Although he had often to “badger people about details, sometimes irrelevant details,” he “knew from experience that some details, irrelevant in themselves, become more significant when they pile up.”
[The rest of today’s WRB has even more links to the best and most interesting writing from the past few days, as well as Upcoming books, What we’re reading, and going deeper on the state of criticism and other niche interests of mine in Critical notes. Today, from my desk and the desks of other WRB contributors:
Poetry is not intimidating. It’s also good
The French influence on English poetry
Hannah on a Poem by May Sarton about geese
If you’re interested in any of that, and if you want to support the WRB in making the lifelong task of literacy not take anyone’s entire day, please subscribe below.
And if you’re already a subscriber, thank you very much; I appreciate it. Why not share the WRB with your friends and acquaintances? We depend on the good will of our readers, and we depend on their word of mouth to grow; nothing is as effective at bringing new readers into the fold as a recommendation from a friend.
—Steve]
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