Welcome to this week’s Watch/Listen/Read post where Adam and I (and this week’s writers if they choose to,) share with you what we’ve been watching, listening to, and reading during the week. If you would like to write for us but are feeling uneasy about sending in a work of fiction, poetry, etc., contributing to this column might be a good way to start! Check out our recommendations and join the conversation in the comments below.
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Erika Writes:
Leonard Cohen auf Yiddisch
My week started (literally) with a message to Adam that said, “Not even 9:30 and you’ve made me ugly cry already?” I had made a Facebook post featuring a gorgeous Yiddish version of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” and he responded with this song. I’m not sure if he was proud or bemused at my reaction, or something else; it’s hard to tell in Facebook messenger sometimes.
#ShakespeareSunday
I’m a fan of the #ShakespeareSunday meme on Twitter, and the theme for last Sunday was “moods.” For some reason, I decided that I would look to Love’s Labour’s Lost for a quote. I ended up distracted and forgetting to post something, but I have been making my way through the play, which I haven’t read in a long time. I’m enjoying it much more than I did last time. I’ve really fallen in love with reading Shakespeare again in the last year, and while Love’s Labour’s Lost may not be the best of the comedies, or even my favorite, I’ve been having fun with it. (You can find me on Twitter at @WhatTheMamaSaw and more about the #ShakespeareSunday at @HollowCrownFans, Don’t forget to follow @2RulesOfWriting while you’re there, too.) I’ve continued to keep my reading light this week with Jenny Lawson’s second book, Furiously Happy. She’s kept her own blog as The Bloggess since 2007, where she talks about her life with chronic illness (mental and physical) and family. Ten years ago she wrote one of my two favorite internet humor blog posts about Beyonce the giant metal chicken. (The other one I refer to often is Jelly Jesus. Both are among the posts I go to when I just need to laugh about something.) Furiously Happy has perhaps one of the most important things I’ve read in a long time–the essay “Pretend You’re Good at It.” It’s not laugh-out-loud funny like many of her other essays are, and I didn’t laugh out loud while reading it, drawing unwanted attention to myself the way I had when I was on an airplane, reading her book Let’s Pretend This Never Happened. But in this essay, she talks about the advice she gets from Neil Gaiman to “Pretend you’re good at it,” which is advice I can embrace, especially when she explains why it’s different from and better than “fake it til you make it.”
Watching This and That on Youtube
I’ve had so much writing to do this week–revisions, new content, yet another attempt at a short story (I’m pretty sure this one will be impossible just like previous attempts but I’m going to pretend I’m good at it,) that I haven’t watched a lot of things. A lot of little things here and there on YouTube–Good Mythical Morning and it’s spinoffs (Good Mythical More and Mythical Kitchen,) and Vlogmas features from channels I subscribe to. I watched a few things from CompanyMan and from Defunctland. I’ve got a list of things to catch up on–episodes of Call the Midwife, Great British Baking Show Holidays and School of Chocolate, which I’ll get to eventually. I did watch Taare Zameen Par again last night when I was feeling overwhelmed and just needed to let go. Adam had been trying to get me to watch this movie for months, and when we both needed a break one night a few weeks ago we decided to take advantage of Teleparty and have a movie night together. It’s one of his favorites, and I’m sure anything I say will fail to adequately express how amazing this movie is. It’s a multiple box of tissues kind of film.
Who can resist this for a little cheer though?
Lots of Writing means Lots of Listening
With all the writing, there’s been a lot of listening this week. I’m very much in the holiday headspace still, but I’ve also had some other interesting things to listen to this week. Adam’s mother invited me to a fascinating talk about Oliver Sacks, which left me thinking a lot about narrative nonfiction, which I write a lot of. I also spent time watching this talk from PFLAG about librarians working to protect access to books by queer and Black authors. I have very strong opinions about access to books and wrote about that for Banned Books Week
I really enjoy some of the period-instrument-orchestras like Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and Netherlands Bach Society, where the music is performed on instruments authentic to the era of the pieces, and in the styles the composer would have been familiar with. I was particularly taken by recording yesterday from Netherlands Bach Society of CPE Bach’s Violin Sonata in f minor.
Closing out the week, as I’ve tried to get things done today, I’ve pulled out my viola music playlist. There are a lot of things Adam knows a lot about, but he still hasn’t learned that viola music is the beautiful, curvy smart woman who gets ignored because she just doesn’t fit the traditional definition of attractive, but when you do finally talk to her, you’re left wondering why you ignored her for so long and if you go to bed with her, you may well find your eyes popping out of your head like a cartoon character.
Christina Cordero gets it. Check out her performance of this Viola Concerto in D Major by Carl Stamitz. Maybe one day Adam will, too.
Adam Writes:
Erika has just informed me of the #ShakespeareSunday trend. I feel like I’m always the last to know about these things. It can be difficult to feel “in the loop” as a neuro-atypical person, and this is one of the ways that can manifest.
Wheel of Time Read-through
I’ve been continuing my journey through Wheel of Time (the books; not the show). I did watch an episode or two of the show and was turned off by it (and then it was turned off by me). It isn’t just that I was burned by Game of Thrones which provided three fairly good seasons but lasted for six. And it isn’t just that I hate Amazon (though it is certainly that). It’s that a series like The Wheel of Time only works because it gives its characters time to get to know each other.
WoT was written starting in the late 80s, and, like sitcoms of that era, there are a lot of episodes seemingly about nothing that serve mainly to give the characters time to bond with each other. A show, especially a show with expensive production values, will necessarily speed us through such moments, or reduce them down to the fewest possible number of lines in order to fit the sprawling sweep and scope of an eight-hundred-page book into something approximating a ten- or twelve-episode season-arc. Even if the show deliberately takes time to show such episodes, they will show one out of three at most. It will be like adapting cookies for mass-production by taking out those expensive chocolate chips. Hard pass.
I did follow the news leading up to the debut of the show, and was amused and saddened by all of the quibbling over whether it was true to the novels to have some of the main characters played by PoC actors. If you go back into Book 1, the text does indeed refer to two of the main characters, Egweyne and Nynaeve, as “dark-complexioned.” That’s an ambiguous phrase and the actors they cast for those roles are well within the parameters of the phrase. It reminds me of another phrase “tall, dark, and handsome,” which, according to the plain meaning, should refer to someone like Charles Barkley, but more commonly refers to someone like Tom Ellis, who plays Lucifer on the eponymous show. In other words, the phrase refers to someone who is tall(er than average), dark(er than the average white person and with dark hair to boot) and, yes, no denying that Tom Ellis is easy on the eyes.
So one thing I’m thinking about lately is: Can we reliably tell what a writer means by a phrase like “dark-complexioned”? I think not, because such things are relative. I also think that those supposedly race-swapped actors are excellent, and it’s not their fault I’m uninterested in watching this show. Wheel of Time is actually a surprisingly progressive series of books, given how popular it became. The plain text of the narration studiously avoids describing sexual acts, but that does not mean it lacks queer characters, trans and gender-non-conforming characters, and intricate discussions of racism, sexism, and much else of interest.
Why am I getting Irritated by Classical Music Performances?
I find I have a querulous temper with regards to the things that usually please me (to say nothing of things that usually displease me like an Amazon TV show). I was listening to different versions of Bach’s 2nd Partita for Solo Violin and… I didn’t like the phrasing on any of them. The first movement sounded rushed on all of the recordings I listened to (with one exception, see below). These were really competent violinists. Some of them I’ve seen in concert. All of them have made me cry with the beauty of their playing. Some of them are experts in the Baroque style. And today they just sounded… off. Here is a violinist who actually takes the proper amount of time, including pauses between phrases, in the slow first movement.
When that happens, is it the artist or is it me? Or both? Is my impatience with life in general sharpening my ear to things that are missing from the music? Things that I don’t normally get bothered by but that are there whether they bother me or not? Or am I lashing out at shadows, trying to find something external to be irritated by when the source of the irritation is internal?
You’ll notice I have not asked whether I have the right, to say nothing of the temerity, to find fault with the playing of Shunsuke Sato or Itzhak Perlman. As well ask if I should read a book I don’t like because it was written by Dostoevsky. I stopped reading Demons (sometimes called The Possessed)on page 600 or so because I was just… done waiting for it to become a book I would somehow enjoy reading. So no. It’s not that. I reserve the right to have my thoughts and feelings about the art I take in, and for those thoughts and feelings to be less than charitable from time to time. But I still want to know why.
Tangential Thoughts on the Stradivarius Scam
I think it’s important to criticize the things we care about. I’ve talked loudly and often about the fact that I think the cult of Stradivarius is not only meaningless but detrimental. I am referring to the idea that Stradivari violins are sufficiently better than other violins that they deserve to be out of the price-range of all but the most successful touring soloists (and yet if you don’t have one you must not be that good). It is surprisingly difficult, given the supposedly manifest blessings that God bestowed uniquely upon Antonio Stradivari and almost no other violin maker ever, to tell the difference between a talented player using a Stradivari versus a using well-crafted modern violin. And hearing that someone plays a Stradivari (or a Guarneri–they were contemporaries in the 18th century) tends to turn the brain off. If you hear that someone is playing a Stradivari, you think: “Oh, they must be good.” Well, yes. But why should one of the best players in the world be playing a loaner-instrument as if they were still in fifth grade? I would also like to know if someone who is loaned a Stradivarius violin by a bank has to sign a code of conduct. If a person who plays a famous violin were to embrace a counter-cultural cause, what would the bank say? Has a player ever had their violin taken away because of breaking some written or unwritten rule?
Ultimately, such ideas, conspiracy theory or not, are beside the point. The point is that a typical handmade violin costs tens of thousands of dollars, while a typical Stradivari violin costs millions. A typical handmade violin is owned at considerable expense by the violinist themselves, while a typical Stradivari is owned by a bank or other supposedly philanthropic family and loaned to a famous player. Is it such a radical thought that a musician shouldn’t have to say “thank you” to a Mellon or a Morgan every time they pick up their instrument? Is this conversation relevant to our lives as readers and writers? Somewhat, yes. The point is to distrust the idea that the instrument is too important a part in how the artist makes art. A great artist-or even a good one can create the stuff of miracles. A piano that is in tune sounds sonorous and gorgeous. A piano that is out of tune can sound intimate and friendly. A concert-hall gives a grand sound. A friend’s living room allows you to interact with the people who are listening to you play. One is not better than the other just because it is more expensive.
That’s all. The idea that we need expensive materials in order to create art undermines our faith in the abilities of artists. And anything that undermines that faith gets tossed out with the other trash. You are worth more than your materials.
What do you think? have you ever heard an appreciable difference between a Stradivari and a more modern handmade violin or cello? Have you listened to/read/watched any of the pieces discussed above? We’d love to hear your opinions!
