The Washington Examiner is still a terrible publication run by terrible people, but it’s cool that they’re writing profiles of DC poets.Anne Becker is the new poet-in-residence at the Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center.
A nice, online resource for women writers.
The owner of Grove Press, a famous publisher of dirty minded literature has died.
Weekend Reading – Living The Swinging Single Life In DC
Forty percent of Washington, DC households have just one occupant.The Hirshhorn Museum
Concert Note – Sunday, February 12th At The National Gallery
I’m feeling lazy, so I’m basically just going to transcribe my notes from that night. It was a series of performances by the Cavatina Duo, a guitar and flute duo. Enjoy.
J.S. Bach
Sonata for Flute and Basso Continuo in E Major
Listening to the opening sonate by Bach made me wish I’d spent more time browsing eighteenth century paintings of nymphs, satyrs, and idyllic forest gods and heroes. My personal highlight was the third of the four movements, the ‘Siciliano.’ A slow dance, it made me wish I had a partner with me and space in which to dance (though I have little knowledge of the forms of eighteenth century dances except that gleaned from BBC miniseries). The frenetic fourth and final movement suffered from the comparison to the ‘Siciliano,’ though intellectually, I understand that a defining feature of baroque music is those changes in mood and tone within a single composition (though not to the extent of the desperate, unnerving, and glorious mood swings of a Mahler symphony).
Astor Piazzolla
Adios Nonino
Flute Etude No. 1
I discovered Piazzolla via an album of his tango music performed by the inimitable Kronos Quartet (who I had the good luck to see live in Atlanta, performing Philip Glass’ score to the original Dracula with Bela Lugosi – and you probably didn’t know the 1931 movie was actually produced without any musical score, did you?). These pieces were not tangos, but the sensibility was still there. They had the bad luck to follow Bach, which is a hard act to follow. The first composition had some interesting experiments with dissonance and tempo and, in place, I swear sounded like music you’d expect to find in a James Bond movie.
The second composition, the etude, even more than the first, sounded like it could have been from a movie score, especially the more romantic bits (romantic in sentiment, I mean).
Miroslav Tadic
Four Macadeonian Pieces for alto flute and guitar
For some reason, the Macedonian pieces made me think of the mythic west or perhaps of the multicultural, nouveau western sensibility of Firefly. With Piazzolla acting as a palate cleanser after Bach, I was in a much better place to enjoy this music. Also, I watched some Firefly on Netflix when I got home.
Unfortunately, the flutist developed a painful sounding cough during the third of the four pieces, which was mostly a work for solo flute. Luckily, she got better.
Vojislav Ivanovic
Cafe Pieces for solo guitar
Fortunately for the poor flutist, the first works after intermission were for solo guitar. Romantic and lovely, they were also slight compared to what preceded them, so that I found it hard to lose myself in the music.
Toru Takemitsu
Toward the Sea
The Night
Moby Dick
Cape Cod
They shifted the order of things, one suspects in order to give her throat a little time to before diving into the song for solo flute by Debussy. But since they jumped ahead to a short song cycle by Takemitsu and since it was the thought of listening to his compositions that really drove me to come out, I can hardly complain.
There had been some clapping after each song or movement earlier, but there was silence after each of Takemitsu’s (except for the final one, of course). His melancholy silences silenced the audience.
Claude Debussy
Syrinx for solo flute
The flutist described the Debussy song as the first significant work for solo flute of the twentieth century. No doubt, even more than in the Bach sonata, you could hear the god Pan for whom it was written (or rather, the character of Pan in a now forgotten dramatic poem, if you want to be picky). A dying Pan, too, making one think of the dying god chronicled in Frazer’s The Golden Bough.
Alan Thomas
Variations on The Carnival in Venice
The final piece was specifically written for the duo. It also suffered from following a far superior composition. It was pretty and romantic but… well, you know. Debussy was writing for the death of a love sick god. Plus, I enjoy French impressionist music. I will say though that this final piece could have been written for Pan in heaven, reunited in death with his music and nymphs, and I’m okay with that.
The Gaming Table
I saw The Gaming Table performed at the Folger Shakespeare Library on Friday. I went into the Restoration comedy (which are usually bawdy, funny works) with high hopes that weren’t disappointed.
The Gaming Table is actually less dirty than other Restoration comedies you might have seen. Perhaps the filthiest remark was a woman talking about needing to examine a ‘worm’ while ‘on her back.’ And if you can’t figure out what the means, you should ask your parents if you’re old enough to be online yet.
When watching an older piece, it’s always interesting to see how the social restrictions of the time are incorporated – the Hayes Code of the early eighteenth century, if you will.
One of the leads was a widow, and while it was dropped in passing and never brought up again, in light of what I just referred to as that period’s ‘Hayes Code,’ it was an important item to drop. Not in terms of the plot, but in terms of keeping a PG-13 rating, so to speak. While very deliberately never explicitly said, one can’t help but feel that the female lead is sexually intimate with some of her admirers. By making her a widow, while the hint it scandalous, a widow will not suffer the same ostracization within society as a never married woman might for her flirtations. No one expects a widow to be a virgin. In fact, because women were actually considered more sexually voracious and libidinous than men, a widow, who, by definition, knows what she’s missing, is almost expected to be lusty. That’s why the lusty widow is such a common comic trope.
Leaving aside my historical observations, the play was funny and very well acted across the fairly large main cast and all the characters were pleasantly three dimensional. Four stars.
Liberal Theology: A Radical Vision
Peter Hodgson’s Liberal Theology: A Radical Vision was something I felt that I just had to read after seeing a copy in the bookstore at the National 
Cathedral. It was exactly the sort of thing I was looking for – a liberal, socially progressive view of christology. And kind of short. That was important, too.
The book is a reminder of just how non-radical a liberal vision of christian theology actually is, once you start to think about it. It only seems radical because of the way it has been hijacked by the right (religion as having been hijacked by the right – such a cliched statement as this point, but it’s just so damn accurate).
Around half way through the book, the author, Peter Hodgson, made a point that very much struck me as what the right is missing: tragedy.
Bear with me here.
Yes, you hear a lot of doom and gloom (especially now, as the economy improves, the right is very focused on a ‘it’s midnight in America’ message) and a lot of talk of sin, declining values, damnation. All that good stuff.
But not about ‘tragedy’ as Miguel de Unamuno wrote about. About tragedy as an essential part of the human condition.
If you’re not a fan of theology, you can replace concepts like ‘original sin’ with ‘the tragic aspect of the human condition.’
By accepting tragedy as something essential in our existence on this too, too solid earth, then you are more aware of human suffering as not just a product of sin, not just as something to be worked through en route to grace, but as something deserving on compassion not just in the hereafter but in the here and now.
And that’s missing from the conservative view.
Hodgson is also, clearly, a HUGE fan of Hegel. Much of his theology seems to derive from readings of Hegel. Almost makes me want to go back and take another crack at reading my old buddy Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (GW to his homies). Almost. ‘Cause he’s really freaking difficult and boring. He makes Kant and Heidegger’s ouevre read the kids’ picture books in dentists’ offices.
Monday Morning Staff Meeting – DC Edition
Arts Advocacy Day
I”m a little dubious of this, but it’s in Washington, DC on April 16th and 17th and you can register here.
Childhood’s End
Years ago, I read Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama. It was very, very good. But I never got around to reading anything else by him nor felt much driven to do so. Wasn’t my style. When it comes to science fiction, I like my space opera and that’s just not Clarke’s thing.
But Childhood’s End kept coming up as being one of those books one really ought to read if one read much sci fi at all. So I picked it up for something like $1 at a library book sale around the corner from my home here in DC and finally got around to reading it the other week.
Clarke writes what one might call sociological science fiction. He’s not particular interested in individual characters and their relationships with each other, so far as I can tell, except as necessary to move the sociological (or anthropological, if you prefer) questions that really interest him.
Childhood’s End does present an interesting scenario. A highly advanced alien race shepherds the human race as we move towards our next stage of evolution, which is essentially a group mind, living, depending on how you look at it, either outside of space-time or within space-time but able to experience it as a whole. The aliens are actually unable to make that evolutionary leap themselves. They are rather like a people who have knowledge of heaven and who can show others the way, but will never be able to reach it themselves. So once one gets through all the stuff before the final 20% or so, a kind of melancholia permeates it all (increased by presenting to view of the last human, watching his former fellow humans become something else while he stays behind, so to speak).
Childhood’s End is not on my top ten or top twenty-five list for science fiction. It might be in my top hundred. I don’t know because I’m far too lazy to figure out a top one hundred list. But it’s good.
Yusef Komunyakaa
It was a great concept. The measured, yet musical poet Yusef Komunyakaa reading his poetry in correspondence to the photography/painting exhibit, Snapshots.
Except that it’s at the Phillips Collection. Which is in Dupont Circle. And it started at 6:30 pm.
Have you ever tried to get from anywhere outside the city into Dupont Circle before 7:30 pm on a weeknight?
Needless to say, I was late and missed at least one third of the reading.
Komunyakaa, fortunately, is a great reader. Relaxing, deeply felt.
He dresses like a jazz musician (the black cap, camel hair jacket) and his writing has a very melancholy quality. During the question and answer session, he described his style as based around observation, ‘but not clinical, detached,’ he said. But for me, it was the word ‘melancholy’ (which he didn’t use) that kept coming to mind.
Years ago, I’d bought a copy of his Talking Dirty to the Gods and I brought that for him to sign. He was personable and chatty, but not excessively so. If this event had taken place at the Folger Shakespeare Library, it would have been perfect.
the coffee philosopher 