The Aliens of Ancient Rome

This is a micro-review of Harald Voetmann’s 2010 novel Awake, beautifully translated from the Danish (but not till 2021) by Johanne Sorgenfri Ottosen.

Awake is short … but regardless, I almost gave up on it because it was so … disgusting in places! For the strong of stomach, here’s an example:

A fat, ruddy savage stomps around in the sand in the costume of the goddess Diana with an amber wig and a woman’s breast stitched onto the left side of his saffron tunic. He slices open the belly of a pregnant sow with a spear. She’s howling and trying to flee. The contents flop out and trail after her in the sand, and yes, I can make out the young; a tiny bloody squirming clump that will be alive a few more moments.

But I’m glad I persisted, because it might be the most convincing and evocative rendering of an ancient society (in all its alien-ness and sometimes disgusting-ness) that I have ever come across.

This novel (historically based) is told in several “voices”: Pliny the Elder, who among much else, wrote the Naturalis Historia (perhaps the first encylopedia ever written); Pliny the Younger, also an author, and the Elder’s nephew and adopted son; and a slave called Diocles. An additional voice consists of passages from the Naturalis Historia itself.

Both Plinys are associated with the volcanic disaster that buried Pompeii in 79 CE. The Elder perished attempting to rescue a friend and his family. The Younger wrote two letters to the historian Tacitus, describing the eruption.

There’s a long review of Awake in the New York Review of Books, 11/2/23. (This is one example of my finding out about books via the NYRB)

If you end up enjoying Awake, you’ll be pleased to know that it’s the first of a trilogy. The second volume (also recently translated) is called Sublunar. As for the third (presumably still only in Danish) … I haven’t tracked this down as of this writing. Voetmann still seems a bit under the radar, I mean he doesn’t even have an (English) Wikipedia article yet!

Spoiler-free searching, for e-readers

Having a sieve-like memory, one thing I like about e-readers is that if you’re reading a novel, and forget, say, a character’s name, you can search on that name for its first appearance, where the character is (usually) properly introduced.

However …

What if, in your search, you inadvertently land on a chapter heading (in initial table of contents) that gives away a crucial future development?

Or, what if, in your search, you inadvertently get a “hit” that is ahead of where you’re at in the text, which also gives away a crucial future development?

These most undesirable outcomes furnish the rationale for my proposal, which I will call “spoiler-free search”. Here’s the idea: The reader would be able to set up parameters, so as to restrict the search “window” as follows:

BEGINNING OF SEARCH WINDOW: Start the search at beginning of the actual narrative. (That would usually be the beginning of Chapter I … after the table of contents, introduction, etc)

END OF SEARCH WINDOW: End the search at the point you have reached in your reading progress.

With the two above restrictions in place, the reader will only get those search “hits” that occur in the part of the book that they have already read. No unwelcome “giveaways”!

Like my idea? Comments welcome. Of course, if you are aware of such a spoiler-free search capability built into any e-reader or e-reading program out there, please let me know.

Reading Evangeline out loud, in Canada

For quite a few years now, reading aloud with other people has been a pleasurable — as well as educational — part of my life. Every week, I join several other folks over Zoom, to take turns reading some classic literary work to each other. [If you would like to join us, look for the “Shakespeare Night” sessions in the Meetup group called “Hack Manhattan”. Note that, despite our group’s title, we read many things in addition to Shakespeare.]

Another manifestation of this, is the tradition my wife and I have of reading aloud on long car trips. Sometimes we just choose a book for its general interest (e.g. Huckleberry Finn). But last year, when we planned a driving trip through parts of Atlantic Canada, my reading choice was more “targeted”.

Reading througn my guidebook in advance, I noticed a text box entitled “Acadian Deportation”. Until recent years, I was never much interested in history, so I had not been aware of this terrible part of Canada’s past. The Acadians were descendants of French settlers.  In what has been described as an ethnic cleansing, many of them were forcibly deported from Canada, by the British, during the mid-18th century,  About 11,500 Acadians were expelled; of these, around one-third died from disease and drowning. (In perhaps the only ray of light in this situation, Spain — which controlled Louisiana at the time — invited some of the Acadians to settle there, where they became known as Cajuns.)

My travel guide also mentioned that the US poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote an epic poem about the Acadian expulsion called Evangeline (1847). This rang a vague bell in my head, but I have to admit that my main association with Longfellow, until then, was a bearded gentleman in the “Authors” card game that I played when I was a kid.  (And oh yes, didn’t he write that Hiawatha, with its strange drumbeat rhythms?  So familiar in one way, yet probably never read by me.)

Nevertheless, I decided to put Evangeline into my iPhone, so that on our (often long) drives in Canada, my spouse and I could read through this work aloud. (In practice, since — long guilty story short — my wife turned out to be “the” driver, I was the one to actually do the reading.)

It turned out that Evangeline is really a long poem, and we didn’t actually finish the reading process till returning, some weeks later, from a visit to our daughter and granddaughter in Connecticut. Evangeline turned out not to be not the easiest thing in the world for me to take in. There is undeniablty a sentimentality, and a religiosity, that strike me as old-fashioned.

But there were several substantial pluses for me. I learned that the form of Evangeline is a real tour de force. It is the most familiar — and perhaps the most successful — example of “dactylic hexameter” in English. Longfellow used as his model the line structure of Greek and Roman classical poetry … which certainly does not come naturally to the English language!  He writes using six three-syllable “feet” per line, first syllable accented (would have been “long” in classical times), with a two-part foot sometimes taking the place of a three-part foot. Here is an example from the beginning of the poem … an accent mark has been placed after the first syllable of each foot:

THIS’ is the for’est prime’val. The mur’muring pi’nes and the hem’locks,
Bear’ded with moss’, and in’ garments green’, indistinct’ in the twi’light,
Stand’ like Dru’ids of eld’, with voi’ces sad’ and prophet’ic,
Stand’ like harp’ers hoar’, with beards’ that rest’ on their bos’oms.
Loud’ from its rock’y caverns, the deep’-voiced neigh’boring o’cean
Speaks’, and in acc’ents discon’solate an’swers the wail’ of the for’est.

The Acadian tragedy is told through the particular example of a (fictional) couple, Evangeline and Gabriel, who are separated by the expulsion, and who search for each other through the course of the poem. (I will not “spoil” the story by revealing the ending!)

Evangeline, through its popularity, has over the years raised public consciousness of the plight of the Acadians. It did the same for my wife and myself; not just through the poem alone, but by means of the extra reading and discussion that it encouraged. I still cannot quite accept Evangeline in the totally comfortable way that I’m able to do with much other classic literature. But I think that I’ve expanded my literary horizons by immersing myself in it.

Although we didn’t make it there on our trip, here is a photo of the Grand-Pré National Historic Site, in Nova Scotia.  Grand-Pré was the site of the first Acadian expulsions, and, in the poem, the village where Evangeline and Gabriel lived.  Below we see the memorial church, and a statue of Evangeline:

Later this year, my wife and I are planning an RV drive from Seattle, Washington to Anchorage, Alaska. Granted, we’re only driving one way, but even without side trips to Banff etc, we are talking about 2,260 miles here. I’m already thinking about what appropriate reading aloud we could do. Certainly, Robert Service and Jack London come to mind.  Any other ideas?

 

Son of the Ancient Mariner

I think there is now some new display there. But as of mid-November, the steps leading out of NYC’s Union Square subway station, onto 14th Street, had quite a literary cast:

I especially noted the name of Mary Wollstonecraft, since I had been reading her Frankenstein at that time. Her full name is Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, since she married the famous poet Percy Shelley. I will call her Mary Shelley (or abbreviate it as MS), since that’s what Wikipedia does, and also because it is shorter.  🙂

There seems to be no contemporary portrait of the young MS. Here is Reginald Easton’s “idealized portrait”, made after MS’s death:

You will note that Edgar Allan Poe’s name appears just above Mary Shelley’s. That is appropriate, since Poe, who of course wrote similarly chilling tales, came after MS chronologically. Poe was only 9 years old when Frankenstein came out in 1818. MS, herself, was just 20 years old at the time … having begun the book as a teenager of 18. (How many novels of such significance were written by authors who were that young?)

(Now, in retrospect, I think the name on the steps — since there is no “Shelley” — might well have been that of MS’s mother (confusingly, also Mary Wollstonecraft), an early feminist, who like her daughter was a writer (1759-1787)).

Though I don’t think I made a conscious connection, I happened to pick up Frankenstein a bit before Halloween. It turned out to be a book with rich rewards for me. I happen to think it’s a great novel, in its own right. But it also resonated with a number of literary experiences I’ve had over the years …

To begin with, Frankenstein is (you might be surprised to hear) an epistolary novel … at least in its formal construction (which, to be sure, you might forget about in the midst of the action). The outermost “frame” is a series of letters from Captain Walton (who is exploring northern waters) to his sister. Within that is Dr. Frankenstein’s narrative. And within that is the narrative of the Creature that Frankenstein has made.

Some of the earliest famous English novels, e.g. Richardson’s Clarissa (1749) were in epistolary form. (See my Clarissa review elsewhere on this site, dripping with guilt for my never having truly finished this monstrously long work.) The shell-like technique of narrative-within-narrative was later used by Emily Brontë in her masterpiece Wuthering Heights (1847).  (I wonder if she was inspired by the structure of Frankenstein?)

More specifically, MS drew, for her novel, on her European journeys. She travelled on the Rhine River, and obviously heard about the nearby Frankenstein Castle, where the alchemist Johann Konrad Dippel (1673-1734) claimed to have created the “elixir of life”.

She also visited Geneva, Switzerland … this area furnished the setting for much of the book.

On the science front, MS was aware of the discovery by Luigi Galvani, in 1780, that a dead frog’s leg will twich when stimulated by an electrical spark. This “galvanism” was “new and astonishing” to Dr. Frankenstein, and evidently helped him in making his Creature. (But note, movie fans: there are no flying sparks — or even laboratory scenes — in the original book, which, though having much action, is perhaps more a “novel of ideas” than you might imagine.)

What hit home the most to me (probably due to my recent reading) is the influence of literary Romanticism on Frankenstein. The word “Romanticism” perhaps evokes tales of “romance” in the sense of love stories … but I think this really misses the mark. Part of literary Romanticism is “Gothic” horror fiction, with Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) typically given as the pioneering work.

A very explicit homage to literary Romanticism in Frankenstein comes from its debt to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous narrative poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Early in the novel, in Capt. Walton’s second letter to his sister, he writes:

I am going to unexplored regions, to “the land of mist and snow,” but I shall kill no albatross; therefore do not be alarmed for my safety or if I should come back to you as worn and woeful as the “Ancient Mariner.” You will smile at my allusion, but I will disclose a secret. I have often attributed my attachment to, my passionate enthusiasm for, the dangerous mysteries of ocean to that production of the most imaginative of modern poets.

Here is an appropriately frozen illustration (by Gustave Doré) from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

Mariner was first published in a collection called Lyrical Ballads (1798), which included poems by Coleridge and William Wordsworth.  Lyrical Ballads is now considered the real start of the English Romantic movement in literature. (Note that — modestly — the authors’ names are not given on the title page nor anywhere else in the book. Perhaps MS was influenced by this modest gesture, in not including her name on Frankenstein’s title page, of the first edition?)

Also in Lyrical Ballads is Wordsworth’s poem “Tintern Abbey”, of which this excerpt is quoted in Frankenstein:

… The sounding cataract
Haunted him like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to him
An appetite; a feeling, and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, or any interest
Unborrow’d from the eye.

(The “him” was originally “me” in both places above, but Dr. Frankenstein makes this change to honor his friend Clerval, who had met a sad fate …)

We see here the love of nature, unmediated by thought. Lyrical Ballads also celebrates the interest and worth of plain rural folk … a theme echoed in Frankenstein, where the Creature starts his wanderings over the earth by staying at a farmhouse with country people. (Staying, that is, until his physical ugliness horrifies and alienates the family.)

But Frankenstein also has literary roots that go back much farther into the past. In an episode of the novel that seems more symbolic than literally plausible, the Creature, as he walks through the forest, finds a briefcase containing three books: Milton’s Paradise Lost, a volume of Plutarch’s Lives, and Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther. Much later on, he (repenting) will compare himself to Milton’s Lucifer:

When I run over the frightful catalogue of my sins, I cannot believe that I am the same creature whose thoughts were once filled with sublime and transcendent visions of the beauty and the majesty of goodness. But it is even so; the fallen angel becomes a malignant devil. Yet even that enemy of God and man had friends and associates in his desolation; I am alone.

And note the Paradise Lost quotation on the title page.

I am not sure of the relevance of the Plutarch (help, anybody?) … but Werther (1774), by the 24-year-old Goethe, is a “Sturm und Drang” novel that was influential for the future Romantic movement.

Going even farther back, there is Dante’s Inferno, where Satan, in the deepest level of Hell, is eternally trapped in ice … here pictured in another Doré illustration:

MS is surely invoking this tradition, by setting the North Pole as the place where the Creature, at the end of the story, is drawn.

Finally, we enter the realm of mythology. The subtitle of Frankenstein is “The Modern Prometheus”. Prometheus, defying the other gods, steals fire from them, to give to humanity. Like Prometheus, Dr. Frankenstein meets a dire fate, for venturing to bring to mankind a tool that it should not have: the means to create life from inanimate material.

Perhaps not too far off, I will visit (or revisit) some of the many adaptations of Frankenstein, notably the cinematic treatments (of which Wikipedia says there are 73, including the famous 1931 Boris Karloff version). I will be surprised if any of these retellings are as thought-provoking, or as resonant with literary history as the original novel. For now, I will leave you with my favorite quotation from Frankenstein — a novel which, bereft of actual lightning bolts as it may be, still crackles aplenty with its own kind of energy:

“You are my creator, but I am your master: obey!”

Legends and Pals

I’m currently in a Zoom reading-out-loud group. We are making our way through Dante’s Divine Comedy.  A couple of weeks ago, we were in the midst of Purgatorio, the second of its three parts.  I was just sitting in front of my laptop, minding my own business, when all of a sudden, in Canto XI, a familiar name penetrated into my head:

In painting Cimabue thought he held
the field, and now it’s Giotto they acclaim-
the former only keeps a shadowed fame.

That’s the Mandelbaum translation. Or, in the original Italian,

Credette Cimabue ne la pittura
tener lo campo, e ora ha Giotto il grido,
sì che la fama di colui è scura:

It turns out that Dante (c1265-1321) and Giotto (c1267-1337) seem to have been friends. Doing a bit of googling, I found out that there is a fresco in Florence where Giotto returns Dante’s verbal portrait by his own painterly one, placing his friend — in an even higher realm — on the wall of the chapel where Paradise is depicted:

(Some scholars quibble about whether the central figure in red is really Dante, or indeed whether Giotto really painted this fresco at all. But we won’t let them spoil our fun, will we?)

As Talking Heads would have it, “Heaven is the place where nothing ever happens”. I don’t know whether this is true. But it is comforting to see that Dante, with book under arm, is well equipped to spend some agreeable time, no matter what might be happening around him. (Or not.)

 

Novel History

Maybe my case is not that unusual?  But when I was in school (thru high school), I believe that I only took history classes when I had to. I don’t think I really got any pleasure out of them. I recall paging through review books, to get the lowdown on main events, so that I would do respectably on the tests. In English, at least I recall one teacher (in junior high) who kind of gave off sparks, and got me interested. But in history, nary a one do I remember.

In college, as you might guess, I was not inspired to take any history classes at all. But since then, I now realize I’ve creepingly worked my way into an interest in — and a reading acquaintance — with history. I still, even now, don’t think of my self as “reading history”. (I am, rather, a novel addict.) But here (roughly chronologically) are some ways in which I’ve managed to learn a bit about the past, with interest …

Books on the history of certain major technological advancements. I’m especially thinking of David McCullough. I know I’ve read his The Great Bridge, and The Path Between the Seas, about the construction of the Brooklyn Bridge and the Panama Canal, respectively. I’ve also read books by others on the creation of the transcontinental railroad, and the first trans-Atlantic telephone cables. (The latter being Voice Across the Sea, by Arthur C. Clarke, who this time is not writing science fiction.)

What one might call “popular history”. I’m thinking right now of the writers Barbara Tuchman (e.g. The Guns of August, on the start of World War I) and Collins-Lapierre (Freedom at Midnight, about the Indian independence movement).

Various readings about the history of mathematics. I’m especially interested in the work of Archimedes, who figured out such matters as the area between a parabola and a straight line, with methods that can be hard to understand today, but which were in some ways as powerful as calculus, which didn’t emerge until almost 2,000 years later.

The New York Review of Books is my favorite periodical.  (Yes, even including the New York Times.)  I have been recently catching up on several months of past issues.  (I used to allot this journal to my subway reading, but for obvious reasons that option was not a good one during the past year.)  Here, from the April 5, 2018 issue, is an example of their coverage of books of history: one about George Washington’s relationship with Native Americans.  (Spoiler: “[Washington] was the only prominent founder to invest his enormous prestige in a just solution to America’s Native American dilemma”.)

 

Unconventional views of history. I’m particularly thinking of David Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, which presents events not from the “winner’s” perspective — the way one usually gets history — but from the point of view of those downtrodden over the centuries: Native Americans, Blacks, women …

Podcasts. My favorite podcast is the ongoing History of the English Language.  This non-trivial endeavor began in 2016, and now comprises 146 hour-long episodes, not to mention “bonus episodes” (for Patreon contributors), stand-alone audiobooks, etc. The creator/narrator, Kevin Stroud,  takes the broad view, demonstrating how developments in the English language cannot be understood without investigating political, economic,and social developments. True to my affinity for “non-standard” history, Mr. Stroud does not even have a degree in linguistics! He is only driven by curiosity, dedication … and an obvious love for his subject.

I have just recently come upon Mike Duncan’s podcast, The History of Rome. Begun in 2007, this project was completed in 2012, after 179 episodes running a total of 73 hours. I hope my interest in this will hold … in that case I have a lot of enjoyable listening ahead of me.

Heather Cox Richardson is an historian. On her Facebook page (and also, some days after their Facebook appearance, posted to YouTube) she makes two one-hour videos every week. Tuesday is devoted to current political events in USA. On Thursdays she speaks about topics in American history, particularly as they relate to our present situation.

Recent example of HCR’s video talks:  On March 11, 2021, a fascinating discussion of how the Republican and Democratic parties have essentially reversed roles policy-wise, since the time of Lincoln (who, as you possibly might find surprising , was a Republican).

HCR is one of the only people, for whom I would say that their videos are more interesting to me than their prose output. (I normally avoid informational videos as much as I can, since — despite YouTube, for example, allowing one to speed them up — I get impatient, and would usually much rather scan through a written document, pausing where I want/need to pick up information.)

My last category, books about history by writers who are primarily novelists, consists (at least so far) of only one book: Son of the Morning Star, by Evan Connell. I read this some years ago, and it has managed to “haunt” me, so that I just gave it another read recently (an unusual event, since I’m typically eager to go on to the next book). I believe that it is quite unusual for a novelist to write a history book. (Note that I am not talking about an “historical novel” here, but rather bona-fide historical non-fiction.)

The special quality of this book starts, for me, with its title. This is the story of George Armstrong Custer, known especially of course for his “Last Stand” at the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876). Custer was, after his death and the loss of all his men in that battle, originally greatly admired, as a tragic fallen hero. But as Connell says, nowadays his “stock sells for nothing”.  Nevertheless, Connell chooses to name his book so as to cast a romantic kind of glow upon him. (“Son of the Morning Star” was a name conferred upon Custer by the Arikara Indians, apparently from the appearance of Venus at dawn, during a battle in which Custer figured.)

Connell, while I believe sticking to facts, nevertheless takes liberties with his narration that conventional historians would normally not allow themselves to do. He dwells on apparently minor figures for pages at a time, just because he finds them interesting. (As do I.) He digresses to discuss Native American artistic practices:

A gunshot was represented by fan-shaped lines diverging from the muzzle, just as European artists tried to represent a shot, except that this symbol might appear without the gun — indicating that a shot had been fired at a certain time or place. Similarly, a club or a bow or a whip might be shown in contact with an enemy although the owner might be some distance away, meaning that this weapon did at one time strike the foe.
They had no concept of perspective and almost never attempted to foreshorten. In a trail of hoofprints passing out of sight the farthest would be as large as the closest for the very good reason that whether a horse is close to you or far away his hoofprints will be the same size.

Connell pauses to muse on the images that we have of Frederick Benteen, an officer in command of a battalion at Little Bighorn:

In not a single photograph does he look formidable, not even very military. He appears placid, gentle, benevolent, with feminine lips and prematurely white hair. Only after contemplating that orotund face for a while does one begin to perceive something rather less accommodating. Embedded in that fleshy face are the expressionless agate eyes of a killer. One might compare them to the eyes of John Wesley Hardin or Billy the Kid. Now, this sinister absence of expression could be nothing more than a result of myopia, a condition afflicting him after the Oklahoma winter campaign of 1868-9 when he lent his protective goggles to a regimental surgeon. Still, in Civil War photographs he has almost that same look.

Connell does not bind himself to the chronological narrative of the typical historian. For instance, he begins his book with the shock of the first revelation of the Little Bighorn battle to the outside world.  Initial assumptions had to be soon reversed:

… a party of at least sixty United States cavalrymen — or what resembled cavalry, proceeding by twos, with a guidon flying — rode into view. A second cavalry unit then merged with the first and Lt. Roe understood that they were hostile Indians dressed in Army clothing.

About this time Lt. Bradley returned from the other side of the river to say that the dark objects on the hillside thought to be buffalo skins were, in fact, dead horses. What had been mistaken for skinned buffalo carcasses were the naked bodies of Custer’s men. Bradley had counted 197 dead soldiers.

I would be grateful to find out about other works of history, written by authors who normally are novelists. At least up to now, history books by conventional historians just do not seem to do it for me …

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WELL —  now that I have put all my sources for historical information down in one place — maybe I have been able to compensate just a bit, for neglecting the normal, formal history book?

How the novelist helped his heroine

In May, 2018 my wife and I were on vacation in Spain. We took an easy side-trip to Gibraltar, to spend the day. I (momentarily) mastered my acrophobia to take a cable-car to the top of the storied Rock, which had great views … along with the famous monkey residents (barbary macaques).

Descended from the Top of the Rock, I also encountered the to-be-expected tourist items, but the inevitable fish-and-chips, accompanied with John Smith’s Ale, were really not so hard to endure. 🙂 There was also the iconic Veddy British “pillar box”:

Being the literary character that I am, I recalled the famous (in certain circles) linkage to one of my very fave novelists, Anthony Trollope.  Trollope’s day job was with the Post Office.  In 1854 he recommended that pillar boxes be installed in the Channel Islands.  They were the first mailboxes in Britain.  By the next year they had spread to London.  No longer need one make a trek to the post office to mail a letter.

I recently finished Trollope’s novel The Duke’s Children (1880).  (I have now concluded my traversal of his “Palliser” novels.) 

One of the plot threads concerns Lady Mary, the Duke’s daughter, who is in love with a gentleman — Frank Tregear by name — whose station in life, the Duke feels, is beneath her.  He has forbidden the couple to see each other.  Lady Mary is, at one point, staying with the Countess, Lady Cantrip, who has been charged by the Duke with the challenging task of keeping an eye on her, where her romantic life is concerned.  

Though she knows the practice would be frowned upon, Mary has not actually promised not to write to Tregear.  When he writes to her, she can not resist replying.  And, in Chapter XXIV:

The next morning Lady Mary showed [Lady Cantrip] a copy of the reply which she had already sent to her lover.

Dear Frank,
You may be quite sure that I shall never give you up. I will not write more at present because papa does not wish me to do so. I shall show papa your letter and my answer.
Your own most affectionate
Mary.

“Has it gone?” asked the Countess.
“I put it myself into the pillar letter-box.” Then Lady Cantrip felt that she had to deal with a very self-willed young lady indeed.

So … if Trollope had not (in so-called “real life”) advocated for the pillar-box, who knows what might — or might not — have happened?  Would Mary have been able to navigate her way to the actual brick-and-mortar post office, unescorted as she would likely have had to be?  Who knows?  They do say “Amor vincit omnia” … but isn’t it nice that the Trollope with the day job was able to give Mary a helping hand?

A toe of the elephant

Intrepid readers of this blog may recall that some years back, I wrote a review of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain.  I was very impressed.  If I may quote myself:

I ended up thinking this was one of the most worthwhile novels I’d ever read … and perhaps the most intellectually challenging, to boot.

I just recently finished my second Mann — Doctor Faustus.  (I mainly used the Lowe-Porter English translation, but often consulted the German original.  See my blog post “Dual language e-reader” for details on how I do this.)  This work likewise made a deep impression on me.  Most memorably, since I’m a classical musician, I was very struck with Mann’s knowledge in this area … in some respects perhaps exceeding even mine.  🙂  (Since Adrian Leverkühn, Mann’s protagonist, is a composer, there is ample opportunity for musical discussions.)  I actually can’t think of any other novel which is so intelligent in its treatment of classical music.  In my reading notes, I jotted down a list of music-related passages which I intend to follow up on …

And then (as in The Magic Mountain) there is the parade of philosophical ideas.  And various literary references.  Since I feel overwhelmed when I think of even summarizing all of this, I will discourse upon only one toe of the elephant at hand.  I hope you will not feel too much like one of the famous blind men in the tale … but you do know how you can go about remedying that situation.  🙂

The hero-composer Leverkühn is, we see, at one point occupied by the project of setting, for marionette theatre (!), a selection of stories from Gesta Romanorum.  (In one of the novel’s correspondences with reality, the orchestration for this piece matches that of Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du Soldat.) Of course you can get details in the Wikipedia article on Gesta, but to summarize, this work (hitherto unknown to me) was a collection of stories, in Latin, compiled in about the year 1300.  (The title, Deeds of the Romans, is misleading, since only some of the tales originate in classical Rome.)  Surmised to have been put together by a clergy-person as a manual for preachers, it is ostensibly produced for moral instruction.    Gesta was a best-seller in its time.  Very shortly, below, you will get an idea of why …

Mann includes in Chapter 31 of Doctor Faustus, Tale XXVIII of the Gesta, which I will reproduce below as he renders it (in my Lowe-Porter translation).  This story especially caught my attention, since I am currently in a reading (out loud) group that is wending its way through Giovanni Boccaccio’s own collection of tales, The Decameron (ca. 1353).  As Mann suggests, Boccaccio very likely found inspiration for some of his often-raunchy stories in the piously-framed Gesta.

If you intend to read the following narrative aloud, please remove youngsters, and those with delicate sensibilities, from the room before proceeding further!  You have been warned …

There is for instance the fundamentally unmoral fable, anticipating the Decameron, “of the godless guile of old women,” wherein an accomplice of guilty passion, under a mask of sanctity succeeds in persuading a noble and even exceptionally decent and honourable wife, while her confiding husband is gone on a journey, that she is sinfully minded to a youth who is consumed with desire for her. The witch makes her little bitch [dog!] fast for two days, and then gives it bread spread with mustard to eat, which causes the little animal to shed copious tears. Then she takes it to the virtuous lady, who receives her respectfully, since everybody supposes she is a saint. But when the lady looks at the weeping little bitch and asks in surprise what causes its tears, the old woman behaves as though she would rather not answer. When pressed to speak, she confesses that this little dog is actually her own all-too-chaste daughter, who by reason of the unbending denial of her favour to a young man on fire for her had driven him to his death; and now, in punishment therefor, she has been turned into this shape and of course constantly weeps tears of despair over her doggish estate. Telling these deliberate lies, the procuress weeps too, but the lady is horrified at the thought of the similarity of her own case with that of the little dog and tells the old woman of the youth who suffers for her. Thereupon the woman puts it seriously before her what an irretrievable pity it would be if she too were to be turned into a little dog; and is then commissioned to fetch the groaning suitor that in God’s name he may cool his lust, so that the two at the instance of a godless trick celebrate the sweetest adultery.

Oh yes, one more tiny detail.  Mann just happens to omit the Moralizacio, the moral lesson that the Gesta places after the story proper (or shall we say the story improper?).  Evidently this is supposed to make everything just peachy …

My beloved, the knight [the husband] is Christ; the wife is the soul, to which God gave free will. It is invited to the feast of carnal pleasures, where a youth — that is, the vanity or the world — becomes enamoured of it. The old woman is the devil ; the dog, the hope of a long life, and the presumptuous belief of God’s clemency, which lead us to deceive and soothe the soul.

Of course Boccaccio spins his spicy Decameron tales with no such moral lessons to come in as the Deus Ex Machina at the end.  Which is why the Church tried to ban the work.  (It was too popular though, so a “corrected”, i.e. expurgated edition was created instead, which the Church tried to fob off on the populace at large.)

I now have learned that the Gesta Romanorum tales have echoed down through the centuries, not only influencing Boccaccio, but being re-presented in works of Chaucer and Shakespeare, to name only the two most world-class names.  Thanks to Herr Mann for this engrossing, thought-provoking novel, which among so much else, yields such rich pathways into the literary past!

 

Playing LIVE chamber music on the internet (Jamulus)

New 27may2021 “Getting Jamulus to Work for String Players”, by Patrick Early

Click HERE to view this PDF (dated November 2020).  This should not be the first place you go, to read about Jamulus!  But — if you can be tolerant of the academic-sounding tone — here is a well-researched and fact-fllled document.  I finally got information, here, about how useful an (expensive!) Thunderbolt audio interface is, in terms of reduced latency.  (Only about 5 ms worth, according to Mr. Early.)  And hmm, maybe I should be using a microphone that attaches to my violin or viola?!

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You may not see my buddies, but I can hear them …

Any questions on the material below, please feel free to contact me (Tom) at email address:  frethoa AT aol DOT com .
You may also “Leave a Reply” at the bottom of this page.

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Want some motivation?  Check out the Concordia String Quartet playing together at the same time, but each in their own home!  (Note: the video was added later; Jamulus is an audio-only product.)

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Jamulus for Chamber Musicians — Written by my internet string quartet, an illustrated guide to getting started.  Read this first!

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(New 05aug2020) Don’t have a Jamulus-savvy friend available at the moment, but would like to check out your setup?  Read:   Trying Jamulus on your own first

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Not specifically for classical musicians.  But here are two excellent introductory videos by John Punshon.  These are actually recordings of Zoom (well, its lookalike Jitsi) sessions:

• Jamulus Technical Essentials I
• Jamulus Technical Essentials II

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Online rehearsals with Jamulus — In this video, violist Konrad of the Vierimpuls string quartet explains their setup for optimum internet playing.  Worth watching, but do not feel you need such fancy hardware, in order to have fun!

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If you want to get a bit more serious about internet music-making, Sweetwater is a well-respected online audio equipment dealer.  Your humble correspondent purchased a microphone and audio interface from them.  It is easy to talk to a real, knowledgeable person on the phone!  They made sure that I had the correct cables and accessories to connect everything together.  They even followed up after the sale, with messages asking if I had any questions or issues.

And no, (regrettably) I am not getting any compensation from Sweetwater for this endorsement …

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If you want to explore the official Jamulus presence on the Web, HERE is a good place to start.  There are links to:

• Jamulus documentation
• Discussion forums.  Many helpful folks hang out here.
• Sourceforge.net, the host for the Jamulus project.  Here is where you can download, for free, the latest version of Jamulus (Windows, Mac, Linux).  Note that Jamulus is updated frequently, so keep an eye on this page for the latest and greatest.
• The source code, at Github (for those with that extra measure of geekiness)

Note the useful Software Manual .

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Remote Live Music-Making With Jamulus — a writeup from the standpoint of a chorus. But like the author says, most of it applicable to instrumental groups. (My only demur is his attitude of “Embrace the latency”.) Along with Jamulus, he discusses other approaches, including JamKazam and Jacktrip. But as you’ll see, he concludes (as I do) that Jamulus is the best approach for “remote live music making”.

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Facebook Jamulus pages:

• Jamulus (official group)
• Jamulus World Jam
• Jamulus Choral Community

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New 28feb2021  Digital Audio & Video 101 for Musicians

Not specifically Jamulus.  BUT … Sampling rate?  dB?  Bit Depth?  HERE is Chris Whittaker — Music Director of Washington Heights Chamber Orchestra — with a demystifying intro to digital audio matters.  (And video matters too, for that matter.)

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Idiots Guide to Installing Jamulus Server on Amazon AWS Lightsail Ubuntu instance

Here is a nice dose of tech speak — but made as easy as possible under the circumstances.  🙂

Why would you want to install your own (i.e. “private”) Jamulus server?  After all, there are plenty of public ones available …

• To try and minimize latency (delay), especially if you’re in a remote area
• To make reliable, good audio recordings of your sessions.  (The recording is done by the server.  Each musician has their own track, enabling you to create the optimum balance of volume when you combine the tracks later.)
• To avoid having people popping by and listening in on your sessions.  (But who knows … maybe the next Jamulizer popping by your quartet session might be a violist, who would like to make a five-some to play quintets?)

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Here is my current (15jul2020) setup.  After a few sessions with basic equipment, I decided to invest a significant — but low in terms of other audio equipment out there! — amount of less than $300.  (I already had the Bose QC-35 headphones.)  So, to go with my Windows 10 laptop, I acquired an AKG P120 microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett Solo audio interface (plus required accessories).  I now get much better sound than I did from the laptop’s microphone.  The “Overall Delay”, while better than before, still tends to run on the high side (about 50 ms).  Though good sessions are possible with this delay, I’d still like to find a way to cut it down!

Not Jamulus-related … but I already had an iPad Pro, so I decided to digitize my sheet music.  I don’t have a big printed chamber-music library; therefore, much of what I play is downloaded from IMSLP in any case.  On my iPad, I use the terrific forScore app.  I bought a PageFlip Firefly pedal (partly visible beneath the black chair holding the iPad), so I could make hands-free page turns.  I am now saving the hassle and expense of printing the music.  Plus, I no longer need a music stand, stand light, tuner, or metronome (the last two being built into forScore).

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What a Dame

As some of you may know, I’m a devoted reader of crime/mystery/detective books.  Among their authors, Agatha Christie stands, for me, not only tallest, but somehow in … a class by herself.  Of course the plots are devilish.  But along with that — and despite that — her narration just has the most natural quality, with Humour at every turn.   Before she was Agatha Christie, here is Agatha Mary Clarissa Miller …

My particular problem, however, is that … I have a MOST challenged memory, when it comes to keeping track of what is going on in a mystery book.  So, like all Christies, the first time I read Lord Edgware Dies, I was just totally at sea.

I have just finished reading it again, for the second time.  (Or perhaps the third?)  In a way, it was even more fun, because I remembered enough not to feel completely flummoxed, yet still was fuzzy on a good part of the goings on.

Oh, here is how the book looked upon its American introduction, in magazine installments Dickens-style.  Thirteen For Dinner (or for the book, Thirteen At Dinner) was the original American title.  M. Poirot is so proud of les moustaches!