Household Opera

Re-entry link post

Hello again, blogosphere! I'm back from my almost-two-weeks-in-the-UK mostly-vacation, having richly enjoyed nearly every minute of it.* There will be more of a travel narrative before long, with pictures; right now, I'm still catching up after a couple of mostly internet-less weeks. Which means it's time for a quick link-roundup post of things seen here, there, and yon.

• The Tenured Radical and Historiann discuss Terry Castle's The Professor and Other Writings, which I read earlier this summer and highly recommend: part 1, part 2, part 3.**
• The University of Michigan Library now includes contact information for relevant subject specialists among patrons' search results. I don't know if that would be possible to implement in MPOW's catalog (having a shared catalog with two other schools would probably make it hard to point people to the right librarian), but it's a very cool idea.
• Today's XKCD absolutely nails what's wrong with pretty much every college and university web site I've ever seen.
• "Academic Prose: A Brief Rant," by Kevin Dettmar, also had me nodding in simultaneously pained and delighted recognition (delighted because, as with XKCD's take on university web sites, it's a pleasure to see someone say it so well):

[L]et's say that the author wants to use the theoretical system developed by one thinker to read through the oeuvre of this one particular band. Let's pretend it's Marxism (it's not) and Bow Wow Wow (it's not). So we sit down to get a Marxist reading of Bow Wow Wow (oh boy!), and the essay falls into two-and-one-half parts. The first, tiny part—one short paragraph, actually—sets up the argument, and ends with a sentence that says, in effect: "We'll return to Bow Wow Wow, but first, we've got to look at Marx." The essay then spends fully half of its pages in a fairly perfunctory and, as it turns out, entirely unnecessary explication of Marx; then we get to Bow Wow Wow.

But here's the thing: what the writer has to say about "Bow Wow Wow" doesn't require Marx. Not. In. The. Least. At least, no more than the Marx that anyone with a high-school education already knows. The "Marx" (who, again, ain't really Marx) is really there as the writer’s big brother, as in, "You'd better shut up, or my big brother will beat the snot out of you."

That last sentence is my favorite. And it reminded me why I'm very glad I no longer have to go around brandishing my big brothers every time I want to make an argument.

• On a related note, I really must read Andrew Hacker and Claudia Dreifus's Higher Education? after reading this interview with them at the Atlantic.
• On an altogether different note...From McSweeneys: This Is Just To Say That I'm Tired of Sharing an Apartment with William Carlos Williams.
• I think my wardrobe needs a "Some people are gay. Get over it!" t-shirt.

* With the exception of three hours of milling about at the Carlisle train station after my train from Edinburgh to Oxenholme was stopped and they had to hire buses at the last minute. But at least nothing like that happened with any of my flights.

** Speaking of pained recognition, I cannot resist quoting a paragraph from the title essay, "The Professor":

Thus the Crazed Good Student in me revved up to warp speed: she whose deepest, maddest wish was to astound her teachers with her unprecedented brilliance (and thus win their love) and stun fellow students into a state of admiring, if not joyful, subordination. Why I thought trouncing my classmates in every academic task set before us would prompt affection in them for me is beyond me. (True or False? The delusion that doing well in school will win me love has disfigured my life. Discuss in 5-7 pages.) (Terry Castle, The Professor and Other Writings, 209-210)

That, right there? Was me at age 22. I wasn't quite that competitive, but "The delusion that doing well in school will win me love has disfigured my life" could have been my motto all through grad school and for some time after. Which is why I was immensely grateful when I read that sentence: someone else had managed to put into words just how damaging certain assumptions (probably shared by every bright young thing heading off to an academic career) can be.

In which I consider getting ink

A semi-frivolous post, because I have a few weightier posts turning over in my head, but I've been too quiet here of late...

Several of my friends from Facebook and the blogosphere were passing around links to amazing science-themed and literary tattoos over the summer.* Which got me thinking. I've been intrigued by the idea of getting a tattoo for ages. (In grad school the first time around, one of my classmates had a tattoo of a heart on her shoulder surrounded by a scroll that read "Amor Vincit Omnia." Just like Chaucer's Prioress, if the Prioress had been into tattoos instead of brooches.) But since it represents a lifelong commitment of the sort that can't be undone without leaving a scar, I've always hesitated over what kind of image I'd want to put on my skin permanently.

So, straw poll: Of the following tattoo ideas, which do you like best?

• An Edward Gorey illustration. I've considered a fantod under a glass bell, the Doubtful Guest, or possibly the Osbick Bird. I'd go for Neville who died of ennui, except I think that one would be bad luck.
• One of Leonard Baskin's Gehenna Press pressmarks, especially this one. I'm stealing this idea from a colleague at Swarthmore (hi, Anne!).**
• Something in ancient Greek, because dead languages were one of my first intellectual loves, and I think it would be neat to have, say, this fragment from Sappho, or this one, running along my arm.*** (Alternately, I could also go for Latin and choose something scabrous and filthy from Catullus. Or maybe the first stanza of Horace's Soracte Ode, which I love.)
• The opening bars of the Aria from Bach's Goldberg Variations.
• A pair of old-fashioned opera glasses, just because.
• S.R. Ranganathan's Five Laws of Library Science rendered in some cool-looking font.
• Something out of the work of Rene Magritte or Giorgio De Chirico, my favorite Surrealists. Maybe the girl with the hoop from Melancholy and Mystery of a Street.
• Giulio Camillo's memory theater, though I think it's probably too elaborate to be turned into a tattoo.
• Other (expound in the comments if you've got an idea).

Yes, I know: if I actually end up with any of these designs, I'll be the nerdiest tattooed lady ever. And I will wear that title with pride.

* I absolutely love the Vesalius skeleton tattoo.

** Alas, I could never top this printing-history tattoo, which manages to allude to Aldus Manutius and the Kelmscott Press as well as Baskin, and is pretty much the coolest thing I've ever seen in the tattoo department.

*** I admit to being partially inspired by Willow's dream of painting Sappho's Ode to Aphrodite on Tara's back in the Season 4 Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Restless." My inner classics geek was thrilled that they took the effort to get the poem right.

Back-to-blogging link roundup

Sorry for the unannounced blog hiatus. There wasn't really a reason for it; I was just severely lacking in inspiration there for a while. Now I've got a backup of things I've been meaning to post about, which means it's time for a massive link dump:

• Last weekend's Amazon.com "glitch" (a.k.a. #amazonfail) that resulted in lots and lots of GLBT-related books and books on sexuality being suddenly deranked, thus making them much harder to find, is still rippling through the blogosphere. It seems to have been a combination of human error, screwed-up metadata, and PR people who apparently didn't think it was important to explain what was going on. (The last is the part that irked me the most. It's like a textbook example of How Not to Respond to People's Legitimate Concerns.) I've been bookmarking commentaries from Mary Hodder, Chris Forster, Clay Shirky, and Sarah Warn, among others.
• Neuroscientists think we might someday be able to edit memories. Could we actually wind up living in the world of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? And would we want to?
• Summarize an opera plot in 140 characters or less, win a prize! Here are the guidelines. And here are my entries for Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, Bellini's Norma, and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore.
• A remarkably elegant map of web trends laid out like a subway map. I want this on a poster for my office wall.
• "Listening to College Writers" by Anne-Marie Harvey, an essay I wish I'd read when I was teaching first-year writing.
• Literal poetic feet: iamb and trochee foot tattoos (via Emily Lloyd).
• Tweenbots: an art and technology project featuring small, adorable robots designed to solicit help from passersby. There's something fascinating about the video footage of random New Yorkers steering the robot on its way and guiding it around obstacles.

This is not an April Fool's Day post

...but it is rather silly, in its own way. Consider:

First there was the Facebook Hamlet, at McSweeney's.

Then there was the Facebook Aeneid ("Dido changed her relationship status to Married. Aeneas changed his relationship status to It's Complicated.") and the Facebook Pride and Prejudice.* And the college class that reenacted Romeo and Juliet on Facebook and used the Friend Wheel to graph the connections between characters in the play.

And now there's the Facebook Haggadah. No, really. If you're among the five people who haven't seen it yet, go read it. It's fantastic.

Is this the beginning of a whole new subgenre of humor? And, specifically: why Facebook? Parodic retellings of the canon are nothing new, but what is it about Facebook that invites them? Is it the way it foregrounds relationships (especially their beginnings and endings)? Or is it the contrast between Facebook's telegraphic style and the text being parodied? Or something else?

I find Facebook kind of annoying a lot of the time, but this trend toward using its format to retell the classics almost makes up for the deluge of applications and invitations that greet me every time I log in.

* I want to do a Facebook Emma, myself. "Emma Woodhouse posted an album: Pictures of my family and my new best friend Harriet Smith." "10 of your friends are attending the event Exploring Party at Box Hill." And that game of anagrams could very easily turn into a game of Lexulous or the like, don't you think?

Inauguration link roundup

So where were you yesterday for President Obama's inauguration? I was at work, but we had a bunch of viewing rooms all over campus set aside for the occasion. I wound up in one of the library viewing rooms with several coworkers, commenting from time to time but mostly just sitting and watching history unfold. Then I went back to the reference desk, rather more red-eyed and less cynical than I usually am in the middle of the day on a Tuesday in January. I'm sure at some point I'll go back to feeling like everything is just the same as it always was and ever will be, but not, I think, just yet.

A few inauguration-related things I noticed around the web:

• masses of people live-Twittering the ceremony
• an amazing satellite photograph of the Mall, from Popular Science (the people look like swarms of ants!)
• a giant mosaic of newspaper front pages from yesterday, via Boing Boing
• an open letter on the Dreaded Gay Agenda, by the Tenured Radical
• Inaugural Words: a word-cloud visualization of presidential addresses, from the New York Times
• ...and there's now a Facebook page (!) for Aretha Franklin's inaugural hat. (Which I loved. It's not easy to carry off a hat with a giant bow, but she rocked it.)

As a friend of mine said over IM yesterday: Happy new era!

Il tarocco dell'opera

At various points, I've had friends who did Tarot readings, and who could occasionally be prevailed upon to read my cards. I've always found the Tarot iconography interesting to think about, even though I'm a terribly amateurish reader myself. Last year I was amused to come across both a Knitting Tarot deck and an Edward Gorey Tarot. All of which is by way of introduction to the topic of this post, namely: for quite a while I've been wondering if anyone has ever assembled an opera-themed Tarot deck, with cards representing characters and scenes from the entire operatic repertoire. This deck is the closest thing I've found to what I'm thinking of, but it's not all opera-related.

A few of the cards suggest obvious possibilities: Parsifal for the Fool, Sarastro for the Magician, Norma for the High Priestess, various versions of Mephistopheles for the Devil (though, personally, I'd choose Nick Shadow from The Rake's Progress). One could take one's pick of couples for both the Lovers and the Two of Cupss. The Chariot makes me think of Aida because of the Egyptianness of the imagery in the Rider-Waite deck. And so on. (I confess myself stumped by the Hanged Man.)

Just now, Googling "opera tarot," I found this discussion thread at the Aeclectic Tarot forum, and saw that other people have had the same thought, with all sorts of clever ideas for cards I hadn't even thought of. (The Nine of Swords as Lucia's mad scene? The Brindisi from Act 1 of La Traviata for the Three of Cups? Excellent.) But I don't think anyone's actually produced such a deck, all the same.

Anyway, this is one of the things I ponder when I'm in a speculating state of mind. Fellow operaphiles, care to weigh in?

Verbal drag

[It's not just NaNoWriMo this month, it's also NaBloPoMo. While I suspect I won't manage to post something here every day, I do feel the urge to stretch my writing muscles a bit. Amazing what a bit of peer pressure can do. So here's a quick post, part of my effort to write more.]

I just came across the GenderAnalyzer, a site that, when given the URL of any blog, will predict the gender of the blog author. (I'm not sure how it would react to multi-author blogs. Must experiment.) According to the GenderAnalyzer's front page, the analysis is done by "a text classifier hosted over at uClassify.com ... trained on 2000 blogs written by men and women." I promptly plugged in this blog's URL, and got the reply "We think http://householdopera.typepad.com/ is written by a man." I've got two X chromosomes that say otherwise!

There's also a poll on the site asking users about the accuracy of the results. So far, of the 2500 or so people who've replied, about 56% say it was correct. So it's slightly better than flipping a coin, but not by much. Then again, the Gender Genie told me the same thing about my blog, and I once took the Spark Gender Test and was told I'm "definitely a man." Apparently, I'm in drag on the interwebs without even trying, which, for me, is a pleasing thought. (Can you tell I also score in the "Gender Outlaw" range on Kate Bornstein's Gender Aptitude Test?)

Fellow bloggers, care to comment on your results?

Halloween link roundup

• Stunning jack-o-lanterns on Flickr. My particular favorites are Cthulhu Pumpkin and Zombie Pumpkin. I'm also liking the recurring pumpkin cannibalism theme. (And then there are the jack-o-lanterns for Obama.)
• Creepy story recommendations from About Last Night, here, here, and here.
• Speaking of stories, a perennial favorite: the ghost stories of M.R. James. His Ghost Stories of an Antiquary are also available as a free audiobook download from Librivox. (I like this recording so much that it's got a permanent spot on my iPod.)
• War of the Worlds 2.0: an experiment in collaborative fiction on Twitter, modeled on Orson Welles' classic "War of the Worlds" radio broadcast. (Hat tip to my friend Amanda French, who mentioned it—where else?—on Twitter.) Here's how to participate.
• I think I'm going to go see my local theater company's production of a certain gory, violent Scottish play tomorrow night. Happy Halloween!

The quotation effect

The other night, wanting something to read, I asked my Twitter friends if they could recommend any poems they liked. One of them suggested Conrad Aiken's "Morning Song of Senlin," which I'd never read before but was very glad to have pointed out to me. At the end of the first stanza I was stopped short by the lines

Stars in the purple dusk above the rooftops
Pale in the saffron mist and seem to die
And I myself upon a swiftly tilting planet
Stand before a glass and tie my tie...

"Oh," I thought, "so that's where Madeleine L'Engle got that title." And that got me thinking about the belated quotation effect: the odd jolt when you realize that a line you've already heard or read is actually a quotation from something you're just now reading. The Belated Quotation Effect kicks in, for instance, when one realizes at one's first performance of Hamlet (or one's first viewing of Casablanca) that that's where all those famous lines come from; or when one suddenly identifies Act 3 of Die Walküre as the music behind Elmer Fudd's "Kill the wabbit, kill the wabbit!"

In college, during my classics-major phase, I took a course on Petronius's Satyricon. One day in class, we translated section 48, which contains a line we all recognized: "Nam Sibyllam quidem Cumis ego ipse oculis meis vidi in ampulla pendere, et cum illi pueri dicerent: Σίβυλλα τί θέλεις; respondebat illa: ἀποθανεῖν θέλω"—a line best known as the epigraph to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land." We all stopped and wondered out loud whether that line about the Sibyl hanging in her cage would sound half so eerie if it weren't for Eliot's quotation of it, and our association of it with "The Waste Land." And I don't think it would. But it's impossible to read it now without thinking of Eliot.

The thing about the Belated Quotation Effect is that it makes for a sort of reversal of chronology: Text A was created first, and Text B, which quotes Text A, came afterward. But if you encounter Text B first, something funny happens to your perception of both. The quotation keeps some of the flavor of wherever you've heard it quoted. The earlier author can seem almost to be quoting the later one, rather than the other way around.* And it's the anachronistic effect that interests me.

No real conclusions to this ongoing train of thought, except to say "Isn't intertextuality neat?" Have any of you noticed the Belated Quotation Effect?

* Harold Bloom says something similar in The Anxiety of Influence, and, although most of what I've read of Bloom's work makes me break out in hives of annoyance, I do think it's an interesting idea.

Gratuitiously cute alpaca post

Because I just can't take any more anxiety about the state of the economy, I'm going to blog about fluffy animals today. Well, that and because I went to see some fluffy animals this afternoon. Specifically, alpacas.

This weekend is National Alpaca Open House weekend, an event I'd never heard of until some of my fellow New London knitters suggested a trip to the nearest alpaca farm—Six Paca Farm, a few miles north of here. (I didn't even know there were alpaca farmers in the area, but apparently people raise alpacas all over the country.) Three of us braved intermittently heavy rain and went off to check out the farm. Most of the herd was hanging out indoors, and the few that were outside were a bit bedraggled from the rain, but I did get a couple of shots of one curious young alpaca. Here he is in close-up:

Being knitters, of course, we had to check out the farm's yarn shop, and we all came away with unbelievably soft yarn and roving. I've never bought yarn after meeting the animals that provided it before. Somehow alpacas are more endearing than sheep (plus, fluffier—not that you could tell on a day like today).

And, finally, an unrelated group of alpacas, and alas not my video, but I can't resist: Star Wars Alpacas on YouTube (via Cute Overload!, which has been distracting me from the increasingly grim news of late).

We now return to your regularly scheduled blog after today's Interlude of Adorableness.