How the Burns party went

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 8, 2010

I'm just now getting to hear the recordings from the concert on January 30, so I'll write about that later. Yesterday's Burns birthday party was quite pleasant.

My sister, the hostess, read an article from the Manchester Guardian pointing out that the custom started within a few years of Burns' death, when there were still people around who had known Burns. She discussed the history of the 19th century parties where the guests provided the entertainment. At the Burns parties, everybody contributed, whether professional or not. Later, at the parties where Chopin played and George Sand read her works in progress, it was the professionals who performed, but they were doing it in their own social context. Later still, the professionals were asked to perform for other people, and either were paid, or felt they should have been.

There was an animated discussion of the "Question" -- Resolved: that candidates for public office *should* want to stand in the cold outside Fenway Park and shake hands. Everyone agreed that Coakley had not been a good candidate, but none of the political activists in the room wanted to discuss my point that there had been no Get Out the Vote.

People enjoyed my selections from Judith. A friend who has usually played recordings of folksongs he likes this year sang an Irish lullaby from the Clancy Brothers' repertoire, and turned out to have quite a pleasant voice. Someone read a newly discovered poem by Burns, and someone else sang his setting of a lullaby by Yeats. I got a chance to play my Mexican Polka with piano accompaniment. My sister read the whole of the Wordsworth poem on the death of Lord Nelson that President Obama had quoted the last three lines of in his eulogy of Edward Kennedy.

The food and drink were all good. Monte began the procedings by making off with the whole wedge of the most expensive cheese. After that it was mostly humans enjoying the food they'd cooked for each other, including "neaps and tatties"; a casserole with barley, shrimp, and chicken; and lemon squares.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

More Judith

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 7, 2010

I had to spend most of the morning producing the handout for the party, so I'll give you the rest of it today.

I'm reading parts of two sections -- the one I gave you yesterday about Holofernes cutting off the water supply to Bethulia, and the one about the death of Holofernes.

Here's the version in the Apocrypha:

And Holofernes was made merry on her occasion, and drank exceeding much wine, so much as he had never drunk in his life.

And when it was grown late, his servants made haste to their lodgings, and Vagao shut the chamber doors, and went his way.

And they were all overcharged with wine. And Judith was alone in the chamber. But Holofernes lay on his bed, fast asleep, being exceedingly drunk.

And Judith spoke to her maid to stand without before the chamber, and to watch:

And Judith stood before the bed praying with tears, and the motion of her lips in silence,

Saying: Strengthen me, O Lord God of Israel, and in this hour look on the works of my hands, that as thou hast promised, thou mayst raise up Jerusalem thy city: and that I may bring to pass that which I have purposed, having a belief that it might be done by thee.

And when she had said this, she went to the pillar that was at his bed's head, and loosed his sword that hung tied upon it.

And when she had drawn it out, she took him by the hair of his head, and said: Strengthen me, O Lord God, at this hour.

And she struck twice upon his neck, and out off his head, and took off his canopy from the pillars, and rolled away his headless body.

And after a while she went out, and delivered the head of Holofernes to her maid, and bade her put it into her wallet.

The version from the program notes for last June's concert is interrupted by two soliloquies, so I'll give it to you straight, first:

Holofernes was barely able to stand
on his feet, and sleep did overtake him.
Bagoas closed the tent and ordered the others to leave.

Holofernes's strength melts away,
the filthy deeds of lust dilute it,
The bed was in the middle of the chamber,
soft, clean, white.
Entering, Holofernes collapsed upon it,
he began to snore louder than a sea lion,

Judith moved aside the curtains of the bed
while her heart beat fiercely,
She joined hand to hand,
fell to her knees, poured forth tears;
and prayed to herself:
O God,
remove from me all fear, guide my arm
that it accomplish what my mind has plotted!

Now, now I pray, free Your city Jerusalem,
smite the arrogant who elevate themselves,
give peace to the virtuous who humble themselves,
Give me Your power, and deign to assist me.

This she said, then silently she took the sword from the pillar of the bed,
and drew it; with one hand she seized Holofernes's hair,
with the other she smote him.
He groaned, shuddered, lying on his back, then
he expired; he had no strength; from his throat dribbled blood:
thus the hero perished, thus he closed his eyes.

He lay there like a log,
God did help Judith
that her work was not in vain,
she struck him again and took off his head.

I believe these soliloquies are not from the original epic, but are what were called "Agonies" in Croation poetry. The first one is inserted between Judith's prayer and her actually taking the sword in her hands:

[At that moment, the mind of Judith got up and spoke to her soul]

Why are you so sad, my soul, and why are you confusing me...

The soul answered: oh, how greatly you confused my heart...
I have been given to the body to live with it, and the body cheated me...

The mind: My soul, your excuse isn't good,
Because your body is made of earth, and you are made of wisdom...

Therefore I am so surprised that your heart is so petrified...
Overcome your body...

Then the soul said: Woe to me, I hoped to receive from you a consolation, and instead I received even bigger sadness... You know that I have been living on this world for many years... I cannot overcome my body. It is older, cannot move, and cannot do any good...

O, my soul, how bitter are your words, don't lose hope if you are losing your mind, I pray you... weep and fall upon your knees...

And then there's one for Holofernes right after he dies:

[Then, Holofernes's soul stood up and spoke ot his body angrily:]

Where are your lands and vineyards?

Where the pearls and Stones?

Where are your golden rings?

Where all the money that was your god?

Where are the delicious spices, that you prepared and forgot about the poor?
There is no more fowl or wine on your table, now you are the drink of disgusting worms,
that will crumble your body into dust.

It will be God's decision,

do you want to cry in this chaber, where you lie with your nose up?

Your beautiful eyes now stay closed,
your tongue is now silent, speechless.

[Then the evil Holofernes's body, parting from the world, started lamenting in a death rattle:]

Alas, where is my pride,
alas, where is my life?
Alas, where are my friends?

Alas, where are all my riches?

Oh, my dear companions, look at my body which lived with you
not fearing death,

My arms are still here,
but they don't help my soul.
My eyes are closed
and all my arms killed.

Why has God created me?

Cursed be the day when I was born;
cursed the place when I was fed!
Be lost the paths that I crossed!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

The Book of Judith

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 6, 2010

I'm going to a Robert Burns Birthday Party tomorrow, where people read poetry that's impressed them. We'll also song some Burns songs and read some of the standard Burns, but people mostly pick poems that mean something to them no matter who the poet is or when they were written.

I thought over what poetry I've run into this year, and what impressed me most was the Croatian poems based on the Book of Judith that I heard at last year's Boston Early Music Festival.

I'm going to just read a couple of short passages from a Bible translation, and some slightly longer passages from the translation in the BEMF booklet. But I've been looking at some of the information on the internet about the original, and why it's in Apocrypha.

Here's an article about how it's been perceived in several religious traditions, and here's the Wikipedia article, which includes a list of literary, musical, and artistic works based on the story, including the Croation Juditha, which was part of the basis for the concert last June.

My brief summary is that the Rabbis who decided on the Hebrew Canon decided not to include it because it was clearly not a contemporary account. It seems to have been written during the time of the Maccabees, and set during the reign of Nebbuchadnezzar. So it's a historical novel.

One of the aspects of it that struck me last June was the description of the Assyrian atrocities against the civilian population, like this one from chapter 7:

Now Holofernes, in going round about, found that the fountains which supplied them with water, ran through an aqueduct without the city on the south side: and he commanded their aqueduct to he cut off.

Nevertheless there were springs not far from the walls, out of which they were seen secretly to draw water, to refresh themselves a little rather than to drink their fill.

But the children of Ammon and Moab came to Holofernes, saying: The children of Israel trust not in their spears, nor in their arrows, but the mountains are their defense, and the steep hires and precipices guard them.

Wherefore that thou mayst overcome them without joining battle, set guards at the springs that they may not draw water out of them, and thou shalt destroy them without sword, or at least being wearied out they will yield up their city, which they suppose, because it is situate in the mountains, to be impregnable.

And these words pleased Holofernes, and his officers, and he placed all round about a hundred men at every spring.

And when they had kept this watch for full twenty days, the cisterns, and the reserve of waters failed among all the inhabitants of Bethulia, so that there was not within the city, enough to satisfy them, no not for one day, for water was daily given out to the people by measure.

The Croatian version of this is shorter and more vivid:

Holofernes approached Bethulia and diverted the water that flowed into the city.

The water finished, there was thirst in the town,
Nothing to moisten their mouths,
their tongues began to dry out,
their lips to crack, and people waxed pale.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

Bright Star

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 5, 2010

This is one of the best movies I've ever seen about a poet. The people who make movies in general do better with composers -- you're going to need background music anyway. You can actually have background poetry in some cases, as the reading of Ode to a Nightingale over the closing credits of this movie demonstrates, but it's less common. But often they just take some event in the poet's life that could be part of the plot of a movie and write that movie without using anything at all about the poetry.

What makes this a good movie about a poet is that there's ordinary dialog (well-written, but not transcendent), which is then echoed in a recitation of one of the poems (which is transcendent). Keats is making love to Fanny, and says something like "I need a better word for you than bright, or soft." And several scenes later, he's reading her:

BRIGHT star! would I were steadfast as thou art—
   Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
   Like Nature’s patient sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
   Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
   Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—
No—yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
   Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
   Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

I was also really impressed with the costumes. It's the Jane Austen era, set between 1818 and 1821, so you have lots of supposedly authentic BBC examples to compare them with. But these costumes were made by someone who really likes looking at fabric draped over the human body. Apparently the costume designer used actual antique fabrics or copies.

Costume design was the only Academy Award this film was nominated for. I'm not sure all the people nominated for Best Actor and Best Actress were actually better than the two leads in this film. And I haven't yet seen the other films nominated for Best Costume Design, but I liked this one well enough that I'll be rooting for it anyway.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Songs my mother taught me

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 4, 2010

A surprising number of them are under copyright. I thought about it this morning because the BBC had a story that hinged on Kookaburra being under copyright.

Of course, everybody knows about Happy Birthday, largely because of the suit against the Girl Scouts. This is why a family-friendly restaurant I go to sometimes has its staff come out with the lighted cake singing "Happy Birthday" to the tune of the Hallelujah Chorus, instead of the tune the rest of us use.

An example I noticed reading through a fakebook, that I don't know anyone's been sued over is On Top of Spaghetti. (No, my mother didn't teach me that one -- I learned it in the gutter.)

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Report on the February 2, 2010, meeting

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 3, 2010

We played:

Schedule

In February and March, regular dropin meetings will be held, at 7:45 PM at my place.

Walk for Hunger

I have told the Walk for Hunger people that we will be playing again this year on Sunday, May 2.

We won't be having formal rehearsals for this until April, but I'd like to have an idea of who's playing by early March, since who plays determines what we can play.

So you should be thinking about whether you want to do it. In involves committing to most of the time between 11 and 3 on May 2, and to substantially all the Tuesday rehearsals in April.

In addition, you have to be willing to treat the group as a performing group, not as a dropin group. This means arriving at rehearsals in time to be set up and ready to play at the scheduled start of rehearsal. You have to bring the actual instruments you intend to perform on. You have to keep your own copies of the music, in an order that allows you to find a particular piece in a reasonable amount of time.

In return for all that work, you get to play for literally 10's of thousands of people, at a beautiful spot on the banks of the Charles River.

So let me know by the March 2 meeting if you think you'll want to do that.

Posted in Cantabile | Leave a comment

Wolf Hall

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 3, 2010

This book is mostly set between 1527 and 1535 at the court of Henry VIII, while Henry was maneuvering to control the English church and marry Anne Boleyn.

I found it difficult to get into, as did a friend of mine who read it before I did. Eventually it turned out to be as gripping as you would expect a narrative about an interesting period of history with well-drawn characters to be.

Analyzing why this was, I realized that it was the narrative style. Eventually I figured out that it was written in the third person, but completely from the point of view of Thomas Cromwell, so that whenever "he" is used without an obvious antecedent, Cromwell is "he". Some of the time, this is made explicit, but I continued to look backwards for an antecedent all through the book.

I looked up the technical description of various kinds of third-person point of view, and it looks like this one is called "third person limited". Wikipedia gives the Harry Potter books as an example of this technique, so it doesn't always have to make a book hard to read, but I have to admit I thought it was frequently clumsy here.

Aside from that, it was a fascinating book. I had read biographies from the period, but hadn't run across a lot of the details in this one. For instance, I've read lots of things about Thomas More, but hadn't known that he was renowned for his abilities as a torturer. The characterization of London businessmen in terms of whether they had copies of Tyndale's translation of the Bible was interesting. I was intrigued by the description of well-off, heathy people dying of the fever in the course of a morning.

There are also scholarly biographies of the main characters in this book, which are probably better if what you really want to know is more of the history of the time. But if you want a good read with some history from a point of view you might not have run into, this is your book.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment

When Everything Changed

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 2, 2010

I enjoyed reading this book by Gail Collins, who's one of the New York Times columnists I read regularly. It's not so much a comprehensive scholarly history, as a collection of the stories about women's issues in the last century. They're well-told. And even if you lived through it all, you've probably forgotten even some of the good ones.

Of course, if you lived through it, you probably have your own stories that are as good as plenty of these. I kept thinking about the time (probably in the mid-70's) I didn't get a job I was interviewed for, and the person who did get it was a married woman. My mother was incensed, because she thought I should have had priority over someone with a husband to take care of her.

Another good part is that Ms Collins followed up on what happened to the characters in the stories. So a woman who in the 50's was famous for having been able to iron a shirt in 12 minutes was interviewed in the assisted living facility and said she only owned one skirt, because she wears pants everywhere these days. And she gets both Gloria Steinem's and Phyllis Schlafly's reactions to Sarah Palin.

Ebook experience

Most of my ebook reading has been fiction. Terry Pratchett does put footnotes in his fiction, and the most recent one I bought did the right thing about making the footnotes links.

This Adobe epub book does even better and has a link back from the footnote to the place in the text where it occurs. Unfortunately, when you move to the link, it doesn't appear at the top of the screen, so you have to scan the whole page to find the footnote you were looking for.

Another annoyance was that the page numbers (unnecessary, because they're redundant to the Adobe Digital Editions display at the top of the window) obscure some of the text.

The illustrations came out very well. They were all at the end of the book, with no links between them and the text that refers to the same subject. This is probably similar to the dead tree book, but it's a place where an ebook could provide some value added. And flipping between different sections of an ebook is a bit more difficult than with a dead tree book, so publishers should be thinking about these things.

But on the whole, I'm glad I was able to take this out of the library as an ebook, even though I wish someone would crack the Adobe epub format so that I could have read it in more comfort.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

Sent a movie back unwatched

By Laura Conrad | Published: February 1, 2010

I don't usually do that, and it's not that it's a terrible movie.

It's called Hands over the City.It's about urban development politics, which I expected to be interested in, but in this case I just wasn't. I tried twice, and I just couldn't get interested in any of the characters enough to even recognize them when they came back in later scenes.

There is a good scene at the beginning when a building collapses, injuring several people. You expect that kind of European film to have a lot of visual interest even if you don't like the characters, but I think one of the points of this one was how ugly the development was making Naples, and there were an awful lot of ugly shots of skyscrapers.

So I can't really tell you not to watch it, because it could be if I'd persevered there would have been all kinds of catharsis. But I can tell you I found the first 50 minutes or so pretty boring.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Crutches

By Laura Conrad | Published: January 31, 2010

I got a phone call at 8 AM Friday morning.

I was nervous when I realized who it was -- it was the partner of one of the people I was playing the concert with yesterday. The last time I got a call from someone like that the day before the concert, it was the wife of one of the performers saying he had slipped on the ice and was flat on his back in bed and couldn't possibly get to and play a concert the next day.

So I was relieved when it turned out that this call was because my friend wanted to borrow my crutches.

The story was actually somewhat alarming. She's a fairly fit person who climbs mountains and does folk dancing and ride a bicycle for long distances. Two weeks before she'd been to a folk dance weekend and danced 15 hours between Friday night and Sunday afternoon and felt fine during and after.

For a couple of days before, her knee had been bothering her a little, but then all of a sudden she went to leave work, and pushed back the chair, and she couldn't stand on her right leg.

She was glad I didn't mind loaning her the crutches. Until she got them, she wasn't able to move anywhere without assistance. So she had to wake up her partner to go to the bathroom at night. I said that was like having a dog, but she said the dog probably didn't whimper both to and from the bathroom. Actually it's probably easier with the human, because for the dog, you have to put shoes and a coat on to take them out.

Anyway, I reminded her when she was being grateful that she wouldn't have thought to call me if she hadn't been so helpful during the six weeks I was on them -- she regularly called to see if I wanted to come to the supermarket with her, and went to the pharmacy for me, and took me to visit Bonnie.

I was also glad I'd tested getting them out of the closet while I was fit. They had enough ice skates and vacuum cleaners and camping equipment in front of them that I wouldn't have wanted to try to do it standing on one foot. I'll be more careful when I put them back in the closet.

We don't know quite what's going to happen with my friend's knee. She's had an x-ray, and it looks like torn cartilage or maybe other junk in the joint. She has an appointment to see an orthopedist next week.

Crutches aren't so expensive that comfortably off people can't just go buy them, but they do take up enough space in a closet, and reasonably fit people use them seldom enough, that it seems silly for every household to have a pair. I think it's something the socialist model "From each according to his abilities; to each according to his needs" should apply pretty well. So there should probably just be a central supply depot that delivers a pair when you need them, and then you bring them back there when you don't any more.

My rationale for keeping mine after the hip surgery instead of donating them to one of the places that gives them free to poor people, was that when you sprain your ankle, which I had been doing every 3 or 4 years, people tell you it heals faster if you use crutches and keep the weight off of it. I'd never tried that, because of not having the crutches, but I was going to test it out the next time my ankle gave out on me. It hasn't given out since the hip surgery. I hope that's because the physical therapy I got then, which focused more on balance than on strengthening hip muscles, fixed the problem with my ankle, but maybe it's just having crutches in the closet makes it less likely that you sprain your ankle. The same way carrying an umbrella makes it less likely to rain hard.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

  • Serpent Publications home page

    [SerpentPublications.org]

  • Buy Serpent Publications books from lulu.com

    [Buy from the laymusic lulu.com store]

  • Most read posts — last 6 months

  • Most read posts -- ever

  • Google adsense ads


  • Tags

  • Random Quote

    …in Calormen, story-telling (whether the stories are true or made up) is a thing you’re taught, just as English boys and girls are taught essay-writing. The difference is that people want to hear the
    stories, whereas I never heard of anyone who wanted to read the essays.     — C. S. Lewis, The Horse and His Boy

  • Categories

  • Archives