Reckoning

So the other day I was on a long lunch buying a new, say, widget and, after a detailed discussion on current trends in widget design, fell to talking about Widget Guy's nefarious past as a Physical Anthropology undergraduate on a Romano-Dacian tomb excavation in Serbia back in probably the 80's. How we got on that subject I have no idea, but it led in turn to a discussion of the now-defunct Classics program at the uni we both attended, and the fact that, although we both work in jobs that -- on paper -- have little to do with what we studied as Humanities undergrads, we still actually value the work we did there. More to the point, and an exponentially more important point it is, neither of us consider our education to have ended just because at some stage we got handed nicely printed sheets of vellum. Then other customers came in, and he had to get back to work and I had to get back to the Borg Cube.

The Borg Cube is an interesting case study in that it is filled with people who are either Accountants by training or they are not. Those who are not fall generally into two categories: those who have college degrees in something interesting and those who have none. Of the three other people in my immediate pod, two are high school graduates and one has degrees in Economics and Public Administration. Over the wall is someone with a degree in Piano Performance. There's a bass player down the aisle, and in the aisle nearest
 the windows is an honest-to-God self-confessed English Major. (Over beyond the atrium is a guy who has the Opera News cover with Ambrogio Maestri pinned up on his wall -- I haven't figured out his deal yet.)

They don't teach Platonic solids in Accounting either.

Then there's my buddy, we'll call him K. He's got an Accounting degree, and he's a news junkie. We spend what our bosses probably think is an inordinate amount of time talking politics, and those conversations are fun and interesting and wide-ranging. So when I got back to the Cube, I told him about this conversation I had with Widget Guy. Interestingly, the thing that I found cool -- the fact that this conversation about archaeological excavations had cropped up in such an unexpected place at an unexpected time -- was what he thought was funny. As in "Hahahaha! a guy who majored in Anthropology is selling widgets! How pathetic! Isn't that hilarious and totally justifies every [lame-assed] notion ever floated in the mainstream press about 'useless degrees'!" Of course, attendant on this is a subtextual "Yay me for being smart enough to choose Accounting! At least I'm not that guy!"

Except, K, you are that guy. Which is to say not Widget Guy, but the Mythical Creature that looms so huge and pale in your imagination, standing in a corner with a sign around its neck that says Widget Guy: Humanities Major. Let's examine:

Widget Guy has two lives: one where he has started, grown, and maintained a successful business for at least the last decade, and one where he's kept up with developments in Physical Anthropology (and there have been a lot since he walked off the podium with a sheepskin, so this isn't just reading the latest outdated Missing Link Discovery! Weekly Report on Yahoo News).

K, on the other hand, has one life, comprised almost entirely of work and family. And much of what he experiences with family he grouses about later at work. We can only hope he grouses about work to family on the flip side, because fair is fair.

Conclusion: K, you don't get out enough.

Widget Guy is naturally gregarious, which is a benefit when working in retail, particularly in an independent business where the owner is doing most of the customer service and all of the business networking.

K is also naturally gregarious, which is not a benefit when you're supposed to be hunkered down in your Borg subcube doing Borg subwork.

Conclusion: K, you are trapped in a tiny cube.

Widget Guy has kids. One is in an Architecture program at a major tech school. The other is looking at Classics programs at the dreaded Expensive Liberal Arts Colleges. Widget Guy doesn't seem worried about them. He says that Classics Department chairs have made a point of asking him, the parent, if he supports his kid's interest in majoring in Classics. Of course he does. Why? Because in his other life he is not Widget Guy but Romano-Dacian Tomb Excavation Guy.

K also has kids. K worries a lot about them. They're out of college, struggling as kids in their twenties usually do. He's not sure they've chosen wisely or well in their college careers, and he wonders how long he will have to support them.

Conclusion: K, not only are you trapped in a cube, but you have convinced yourself you cannot afford to leave. Ever.

So while we allow the public discourse on higher education to make bogus and weirdly manichaean divisions between the Marketable and the Non-marketable, maybe we should also recognize that we are tending to confuse the concept of Education with the concept of Training. Education is about developing habits of mind. Training is about learning how to do a job. K's inherent assumption, the thing that made him laugh, is as common to the Borg Cube as it is elsewhere: that Humanities people are losers who wasted their college education in frivolous pursuit of useless knowledge, while the smart ones had the foresight to dedicate their undergraduate careers to something perceived to be useful, practical, lucrative (maybe), and...finite.

What's the bottom line, then? Consider the examples above, then extrapolate. If the educational agenda you promote results in the collective habit of mind being able to reckon only in terms of Profit and Loss, what more does that create than a culture of impoverishment?

St Jerome sez: Whatever you do, it will surely end in Hell, so smoke 'em if you got 'em.

Orfeo in Shetland

Since these are the days for traffic between this place and the other. I will only point out possible causal relationship, in this version, between instrument and outcome. Also the cool linguistic fragment in the refrain, which is thought to be Norn.

via Mudcat

KING ORFEO

Der lived a king inta da aste
Scowan urla grun
Der lived a lady in der wast
Whar giorten han grun oarlac

Dis king he has a hunting gaen
He's left his Lady Isabel alane

"Oh I wis ye'd never gaen away
For at your hame is dol an wae

"For da king of Ferrie we his daert
Has pierced your lady to da hert"

Axe Age: Sequentia ~ The Rheingold Curse @ Ozawa Hall

 So while Mother Nature, with the able assistance of All Humankind, celebrates the Woody Guthrie centenary with weather to remind us what those Dust Bowl songs are all about, and while we water discreetly the Thirdfloorian tomato plants from the bucket under the drippy shower head and the neighborhood rodents eat the impatiens (and even I'm beginning to think they look so green and tasty) and thoughts turn all Frank Herbertish...Well, could be worse. Those moron Trojans are about to drag that ugly horse thing through the gates of the city. Not that that wouldn't serve as an apt metaphor -- "irrational exuberance", as they used to say in the financial sector, back when they were thought to have gotten over it -- but thankfully there are other venues for that vein of commentary. Still, wouldn't it be funny if it turned out we're all Agamemnon?

 No.

But while we're on the epic subject of Epic subjects...

The disclaimer up front should be that the Thirdfloorian delegation is a sucker for anything that brings that Old Norse textbook down off the shelf (I was wanting the infinitive of "grat", which they do a lot of both in The Rheingold Curse and also in Scottish muckle sangs, including one of our recent enthusiasm). And I'm a fan of Benjamin Bagby's theoretical Beowulf reconstruction, not just for its historical/performative element but also because it's fun. (Especially the part where Grendel noms the Ring-Danes, which has a certain appeal for any Godzilla movie-loving ten year old. Which I was, once.) The Rheingold Curse is, likewise, a theoretical reconstruction, involving a lot of philological rooting around in Icelandic print and sound archives and the archaeological record of northern Europe, with an ear out for current trad sources like Icelandic rimur and Faroese chain dance ballads, presumably like this one (Regin Smiður being the rough equivalent of Mime):



The end result is a selection of poems that together tell the story with which any Wagnerite will be reasonably familiar: a prophecy, a hero, a gold hoard, a ring, dwarves and dragons, a valkyrie, a guy with a hall and a sister, betrayal, revenge, murder. Plus House of Atreus style infanticide/cannibalism. Also, a snake pit (incl. commentary on proper heroic comportment when confronted with same) which Wagner should totally have left in.

Sequentia scored the piece for three voices, reconstructed Germanic lyre, medieval fiddle (very much on the hardingfele end of the fiddle spectrum), wooden flute, bone flute, and frame drum.  It begins with the high pitch of the bone flute (sounding something like a willow flute) and a calling of the listeners to order that's not far off a kulning. Then it's the creation story, with pre-creation one-voiced and creation two. Once the Ask & Embla preamble is done, the real story begins, and ends -- you know how it goes -- as it began, with two-voiced prophecy and a bone flute.

 I'd love to talk about the details more, but I don't trust my memory at ten days' remove, and here's where we run into something fantastically rare in this on-demand world of ours: the inaccessibility of an out-of-print recording. If you really want an experience from the Days of Yore, never mind the mead hall...

It's Record Store Day!

harbingers of heat: Tanglewood 2012

That's heat as in "wouldn't it be nice if we had some". But never mind. It will be February already in a little over two hours, and you know what that means: packets of tomato seeds on the kitchen counter and summer schedules tossed in over the transom. 

Tanglewood's a bit thin on the vocal side this year, but what there is is La Damnation de Faust with Susan Graham, Paul Groves, and Willard White on July 28th; Gerald Finley doing a recital on August 2nd, then Mozart arias and Ravel's Don Quichotte à Dulcinée the following night; Karina Gauvin pops in for a Bach cantata on August 22nd; the 25th has Falla's La Vida Breve with a long list of people I'm too lazy to type, but here are the details, and the 26th has a Beethoven 9 with Meredith Arwady, Frank Lopardo and John Relyea on August 26th. Frankly, if it weren't for the people involved, it would all be a bit zzzzzzzzzzzzz....

On the other hand, Sequentia brings The Rheingold Curse, in Old Norse with English supertitles, to Ozawa Hall on July 12. It's where the cool kids will be.

I suggested rebranding it "Nano-Classics"...

Two Quotes of the Day, from Mary Beard in the NYRB:

"What I have stressed so far is our engagement with our predecessors through their engagement with the classics. The slightly different spin on that would be to say that it would be impossible now to understand Dante without Virgil, John Stuart Mill without Plato, Donna Tartt without Euripides, Rattigan without Aeschylus. I’m not sure if this amounts to a prediction about the future; but I would say that if we were to amputate the classics from the modern world, it would mean more than closing down some university departments and consigning Latin grammar to the scrap heap. It would mean bleeding wounds in the body of Western culture—and a dark future of misunderstanding."

[Though she says she doesn't think this will happen. I'm not so sure, meself.]

"...The overall strength of the classics is not to be measured by exactly how many young people know Latin and Greek from high school or university. It is better measured by asking how many believe that there should be people in the world who do know Latin and Greek, how many people think that there is an expertise in that worth taking seriously—and ultimately paying for."

Read the full commentary here.

It may be worth noting that the year before SUNY Albany famously axed Classics, it had more than seventy Latin 101 students, up from twelve when I took it in the 90's. Whatev. Curse the gold-giver.