ye readers and lurkers

I've just realized this odd little enterprise has come stumbling over the threshold of a year. Lautlos, wie ein Sanduhr, to nick a phrase. When I started this thing it was mostly to distract myself from other, more onerous things. Never did think anyone would find it, let alone read it, so to everyone who's stopped in, those who brought some conversation and those just checking out the scene, thanks for making it a whole lot less inert than it otherwise would have been.

"Yo" in the valleys but "Hoit" in the hills

The Grey Lady reports on the completion of the Dictionary of American Regional English, just in time for the social media-driven de-regionalizing to begin, seems to us. Moreover, vis à vis the accuracy of the Twitter-generated soda/pop/Coke map, linguistic field research indicates cargo-cult usage of "pop" in and around the Finger Lakes Region of upstate New York, whereas in the land-locked West Thirdfloorian Republic, in cases where Coke is the specific referent, "St. Jerome's Bugjuice". (Mutually understood in the East Thirdfloorian Republic, but not common usage there.)

Update: Criminals, gypsies, women, food, social diseases...they got it all:  the Urban Dictionary of 1811 is up on Gutenberg.

the revolution will be HD-cast

Lucy over at Opera Obsession has a thought-provoking meditation on opera and audience.  Having lived through a few decades of the Imminent Demise of Opera™, it always seemed like mine would be the demographic cohort destined to kill the lights and slam the door on the way out (if there turned out to be enough of us, which was doubtful). Now people who probably weren't born yet when I was hearing my first dire predictions are trading tweets about how much it sucks to be missing the Khovanshchina prima.  That's the prima I'm listening to right now, leisurely on a Monday night, not in some hard-won, barricade-defended Saturday afternoon NPR ghetto.  Kewl :-)

On the other hand, I was just listening to a Met broadcast from 2005, and the degree to which Margaret Juntwait has changed her game is quite striking.  Back then, of course, she was replacing the magisterial Peter Allen, and she was a solo act. I kind of preferred it to the Juntwait & Berger (or Siff) Show.  Yes, I suppose it's a more, uh, user-friendly presentation now.  But, frankly, nothing blows the atmosphere faster than two bright-voiced people brightly chatting about the auto da fe that just happened in Don Carlo or the kid about to go over the cliff in Peter Grimes.  And what will they do with those Carmelite nuns next year? Gives me the willies just thinking about it.

Oh wait, one thing does blow the atmosphere faster, and that's interviewing the singers at intermission.  Remember that absolutely drop dead awesome exposition of Billy Budd John Culshaw did for some intermission back in...Probably not, I think it must still have been the Carter (Trudeau/Thatcher/Schmidt/d'Estaing) Administration(s). Not all intermissions were like that, and I grant that Boris Goldovsky could be kinda freaky.  But you learned a lot, and it wasn't about where Anna Netrebko bought her frock.

Can intermissions be made user-friendly, not to say informative, without being like an interview with ARod? Maybe not. Lucy writes of being an evangelist for opera. I was, once, too. But not long ago I decided it was no longer warranted. Now people can find their own way just fine into some iteration of the opera house without anybody having to Virgil them. Above all, they want no details, smooth or spikey, to come between them and the surface experience: they don't want to know how Iago starts that riot just by sliding off the beat or how Isolde, at a mere suggestion, makes the hunting horns morph into the sound of the fountain right there, and suddenly, despite your better judgement, you're in her world, not Brangäne's. 

Which means what they don't want is to know exactly why this stuff really is as amazing as it is.

This is an unstated doctrine of the Gelb revolution, and I know it to be true.

Does it matter?  

weapons of combat and literature

These just in at the Thirdfloorian Library: William Golding's Rites of Passage and Caroline Alexander's The War That Killed Achilles, onto the pile, with no particular agenda in mind.

In progress, China Miéville's Kraken; Romola, George Eliot's stab at writing really (as opposed to slightly) historical fiction, wherein it's like she was so out of her comfort zone that she had to hang obscure literary references on every sentence, but this is no doubt pleasing and a gig to the writers of footnotes; and Russell Shorto's history of Nieuw Amsterdam (as Nuevo York used to be known).

In other news, John Le Carré thinks Spooks (that's MI-5 in Americanistanian) is crap.  Apparently he means this as negative criticism, which would seem to indicate that he's missing the point.  Its crapness is part of its charm, Mr. Cornwell, which is something that could never be said about Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.  Whatever, it's popular in West Thirdflooria, and this has nothing to do with the fact that the Thirdfloorian Security Services really are all hopelessly beautiful incognito people who live in fantastically posh but appropriately non-descript dwellings and work in offices that are the height of style but wouldn't stand out in an Architectural Digest line-up or anything -- nor does it have anything to do with the precedent set by legendary American tv shows of yore wherein vice cops wore Armani on the job and, even better, a guy and his spotless (even in winter!) black Jag never failed to find an unmetered parking spot on the street in New York City no matter how instantaneous the need -- but much more to do with its being both hilariously right-wing and crankily anti-American at the same time.  We just find that refreshing, somehow. Granted we're only half way through season 3. Things could change.

Lastly there's this item on a recent faculty appointment at Trinity College Dublin.  I'm all for "applicants should note that anyone found guilty of academic misconduct or weakness in the face of the enemy will be crucified as an example to the others."  In spite of the risk -- and surely all who have made it past Intro to Literary Theory know that the Gods of Discourse favor boldness and a good broad-axe -- it's certainly better than a Philology degree at Miskatonic University, where doctoral degree candidates can look forward not only to having their very souls devoured by the Undead God of the diabolist Esquimaux before they're even interviewed for a tenure track position, but also their student loans paid for by the blood of their descendants, yea, unto the thirteenth generation, curse the gold-giver.