Because he believes in everything and nothing

Cairo waits for the sun to set and the moon to shrink before it opens like a mussel shell and reveals its beauty in a play of silhouettes. Scattered high above the invisible squalor, the summer stars bespeak a better creation. Strips of indigo separate the coping of the houses. It is as if he is sinking deeper into molten lead at every step. Is that what always makes him take to the road again — this temporary blindness? In soft, green mannered England, everything is book-like, open. How can a country be so unmysterious? Here row upon row of heavy, wooden-worked balconies seem to interlace, while every alley suggests a dead end. The dimmest of oil lamps wrest everything he can see from the thick embrace of the night: passages, stairs with golden light falling over their steps. Not a line is straight; in these latitudes, the arch is preferred, even worshipped. The curve, it is universally acknowledged, buttresses faith more firmly than the right angle. Especially when elegantly inscribed with sacred quotations.

– Iliya Troyanov, The Collector of Worlds, trans. William Hobson, pp 205-6.

The “he” in question is adventurer-author Sir Richard Francis Burton, preparing, at this point in the novel, for his famous venture on the pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina, forbidden to non-Muslims.

Genius, panic

A conversation with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks; read to the end for what I am confident is the best correction in tomorrow’s New York Times.

One of these things is not like the others

GalleyCat reports:

Over at Details magazine, a short poetry quiz urges discerning readers to connect celebrities with their enigmatic verses. The wide range of styles includes work by popular poets like Jewel, Michael Jackson, Suzanne Somers, and William Butler Yeats. . . . “Celebrity Poetry [is] a much-maligned and misunderstood American literary genre that’s enjoying a bit of extra attention right now, thanks to the rediscovered cosmic versifications of Michael Jackson…. Lyrical musings have put MJ in the company of poetic luminaries like Leonard Cohen, Rosie O’Donnell, Billy Corgan, Jewel, Mr. Spock, and Suzanne Somers.”

I confess I haven’t checked the facts. Who would dare?

A texture of imagined architectures over the ambiguous derogations of the senses

They would like to control again the possibility, the nuptial valency offered to another, to the husband (in this case): the brother-in-law or son-in-law given them by the demos. And the gamic unit whose possession they claim implies, at the same time, an economic quantum. She was a splendid girl, and there was a coffer of jewels; former and latter ripened by the years: by the slow, tacit years. She was a girl with a little box; and they, the Valdarenas, had entrusted her husband with the key: and the right to make use of it, clickety-click; the sacrosanct use. And Christ’s coadjutor, at the church of the Santi Quattro, had blessed the pact. With a wealth of asperges in nomine Domini: without too much splashing, however. She, beneath her orange-blossom crown, within her veil, had bowed her head. So let him give back, back what was wrongly taken, this fool of a husband, this traveler in textiles. How had he used her beauty? Or how wasted it? such gentle beauty? and the cash? the grand old cash, equally beautiful? Where had he stashed it away, the loot? Those gold pieces with the Gentleman King’s ugly face on them? Those nicely round, bright yellow pieces of the days before this Puppet in Palazzo Chigi, yelling from his balcony like an old-clothes man. She had forty-four of them, Liliana had, forty-four gold marengos: which went clink-clank in a little bag of pink silk, a bag her grandmother had sent wedding sweets in. And they weighed more than a pair of kidneys at Christmas.

– Carlo Emilio Gadda, That Awful Mess on the Via Merulana, trans. William Weaver, p. 116.

I once sat around a table in the Florentine countryside packing the obligatory white sugared almonds into tulle wrappers for the wedding of my friends G and C.

Would you like to go to Pondicherry?

Do you find the phrase “the verdant selvage of Michigan” intriguing? Do you engage in any ritualistic behavior? Do you favor the toad over the frog? If someone asks you, “What on earth makes the least sense to you?” can you answer? Do you have a favorite dinosaur, and do you trust that the popular images of dinosaurs bear any resemblance to what they really looked like, and do you have any idea how dinosaur scientists think they know, from bones alone, what the damned things looked like?

– Padgett Powell, The Interrogative Mood, p. 56. Don’t miss the excellent cover.

Early Music this weekend

It’s a busy weekend: too busy, in that everything’s happening at once. Sunday at 2:00 there’s the “Sunday at the Met” program on Watteau, Music, and Theater, with a talk by the admirable Georgia Cowart and music by Robert Mealy & friends. That starts at 2:00. The real crunch is at 4:00, when Stile Antico sings at Corpus Christi, Sinfonia Praetorius plays and sings German early Baroque repertory at Immanuel Lutheran Church (Lex & 87th), and my friends Amy Bartram and Ekko Jennings perform lute songs of Campion and Pilkington at St. Peter’s Church in Chelsea.

On top of all this there’s my friend Nick’s orchestra, the Brooklyn Symphony, opening their season at the Church of St. Ann & the Holy Trinity (downtown Brooklyn) with Mozart, Wagner, and Tchaikowsky at 3:00, also on Sunday.

I’m going to try to do the Museum thing and then race down to Amy’s recital. I can never go to her weekday midday concerts so this is a rare opportunity. But the others are highly recommendable as well, maybe more obvious for those without my particular connections. Enjoy!

Finally, Blue Heron

For anyone who might read this who hasn’t received the personal pitch: I really think that this Sunday’s performance by Blue Heron is going to be one of the hot Renaissance sacred music concerts of the season. Yeah, yeah, I hear the snickering, but hey. You have your offbeat enthusiasm and I and my early music posse have ours, okay?

My friend Janet asked the very fair question: Why do I think it’s going to be so good? I said: Previous listening and my deep respect for the director. And that’s it. I’ve heard them and I heard excellent voices, but more than that, sensitive understanding of the music. I had the chance to sing under Scott Metcalfe, the director, for a week, and — let me put it this way: I’d gladly have worked on that same piece for another week just to feel and hear it getting better and better every hour.

So that’s my recommendation for the week. Four o’clock Sunday at St. Ignatius of Antioch Church on 87th St. and West End Avenue. But if you don’t like vocal music, or something, Parthenia performs Jacobean viol music at Corpus Christi for Music Before 1800 at the same time and that’ll be good too.

The Streetsingers will perform early, one o’clock in Grand Central, for anyone who wants even more Renaissance a cappella. The acoustics in the station are pretty amazing, but I don’t think you’ll be confused about relative quality.

Music events coming up and Open House New York

The holiday weekend looks to be kind of quiet for early music. (Go to Open House New York events instead.) I’ll be at shapenote in Brooklyn on Sunday (2:00 at St. Paul’s Church, Carroll Gardens). Next week, however, the Streetsingers’ subset is performing at Grand Army Plaza on Saturday 10/17 at noon (weather permitting — we’ve already been rescheduled once because of threatened rain), and the whole group on Sunday 10/18 somewhere. And Sunday afternoon (10/18) is the Blue Heron concert at St. Ignatius of Antioch. More on that soon, but it’s going to be great.

They also serve, 10/9

A.O. Scott on Couples Retreat.

An R-rated version of this mess would be only more gratingly dishonest as it tried to hide its weak sentimentality behind a fig leaf of vulgarity.

“Couples Retreat” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). People wear bathing suits and talk about sex.

Like fire!

My friend Lisa Peet is my most faithful, perhaps my only faithful, reader, but in other ways she shows excellent taste. She’s just started a sparky new litblog called Like Fire and I recommend you hop over there and check it out, if for nothing else than to admire Lisa’s talent for finding a witty image for her comments. Time to update the blogroll.