another smoking gun

From Daniel Deronda, one of those rare but crucial Schiller references that make geek life worth living:

"...But you know her, Mirah -- you can always say something descriptive. What do you think of Mrs. Grandcourt?"
     "I think she is like the Princess of Eboli in Don Carlos," said Mirah, with a quick intensity. She was pursuing an association in her own mind not intelligible to her hearers -- an association with a certain actress as well as the part she represented.
     "Your comparison is a riddle for me, my dear," said Mrs. Meyrick, smiling.


Yeah, that pretty much sums up every conversation I ever had with a VicLit professor.

pitchers & catchers

So while we're rifling through stacks of virtual papers trying to find the George Eliot money quote on Don Carlos the play (and like most things encountered in graduate lit classes, it may have been only a dream), this might be a good time to point out that the next free Met webcast is Don Carlo the opera, this Friday at 7pm Eastern, at the usual place.  (That's the opener with Vargas, Frittoli, Smirnova, Hvorostovsky, Furlanetto, Halfvarson, and Maazel on the mound in the pit, for anyone keeping a scorecard.)

wheelhouse

"'But this young man -- what do you think would be the best thing we could do for him...? He should be put in a position where his qualities could be more telling.'

Esther...was rather wickedly amused and scornful at Harold's misconceptions and ill-placed intentions of patronage.

'You are hopelessly in the dark,' she said, with a light laugh and toss of her head. 'What would you offer Felix Holt? a place in the Excise? You might as well think of offering it to John the Baptist.'"

- Felix Holt, the Radical ch. 43

return to the wheelhouse

three weeks

George Eliot weighs in

"The opera is a great, great product -- pity we can't always have fine Weltgeschichtliche dramatic motives wedded with fine music instead of trivialities or hideousnesses. Perhaps this last is too strong a word for anything except the Traviata. Rigoletto is unpleasant but it is a superlatively fine tragedy in the Nemesis. I think I don't know a finer." -- letter to Sara Hennell, 11 July 1863.

What Would George Eliot Do?

The "I could've told them that for fifty bucks" Quote of the Day:

Dr. Oatley and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in 2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective.

So much for sola fide, we must now be Justified through Science. And don't get me wrong, I like science, and I have no problem with spending huge amounts of cash to develop complex narratives about all sorts of things.  But so driven by Wall Street Mentality are we that it seems we now have to prove scientifically the market value of every bit of cultural activity we have been actively devaluing for decades. By the way, singing is now good for you.

Nevertheless, speaking as a tiresome pedant myself, let me point out that the deal with Casaubon is not that he's a tiresome pedant ("Ma'am, step away from the Cliff Notes."), but that he has so heroically dedicated his life to reinventing the wheel.

ping

Alex Ross posts a quote from Miss Evans -- okay she'd have been referring to herself as Mrs Lewes by then -- on the problem of judging new music by its criticism. If memory serves, she herself thought the third act of Tannhäuser dragged, when in fact we now know it is the first.

Es war einmal...

As the Humanities are further marginalized in our increasingly market-driven semblance of a culture, and as defenses of what remains continue to be anæmic and dismissable by the Powers That Be, it's heartening to have occasional things like this published where people not in the choir can see them. 

Then there's this, which I find fantastically intriguing after having tangled for six months with the Medical Industrial Complex and its inability to understand that the practice of medicine is fundamentally narrative-driven. Needs no ghost come from the grave to tell us this.  Or, in the common parlance, Duh.

And just look at all the George Eliot on that reading list. What, you mean women actually wrote about domestic violence and substance abuse before 1970? There's a shock. Next week: joblessness, poverty and heroin addiction with Mrs. Gaskell.