Household Opera

A #Reverb10 photo post: Moment

I've been neglecting the blog again. Too many things I might blog about (fun with productivity tools; gender in social networks; the latest outcroppings of my commonplace book project; when all else fails, random favorite poems), too little time. But a bunch of people I know in the blogo/Twitterspheres are doing Reverb 10, and I've been playing along as I write my daily 750Words brain-dump. Most of what I'm writing probably won't see the light of day; it's too personal for my blog standards. But we'll see.

Today's prompt was "Moment": Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

While it may be cheating a bit to post photos when specifically prompted to write a description — particularly when the photo doesn't really do either the view or the moment justice — this was a really damn fine moment, and I don't want to forget it.

I took this picture during the all-too-short Lake District segment of the Great UK Trip this summer, while standing next to the Castlerigg Stone Circle outside Keswick. The sun was just coming out after two days of rain and overcast, and it hit this valley just so. I stood there slack-jawed, staring at it for the longest time, surrounded by grazing sheep and picture-taking fellow tourists in equal numbers.

I could probably say any number of things about how my sense of landscape aesthetics has been conditioned by the same Romantics whose Lake District footsteps I'd been treading in. But mostly I couldn't shake the sense that I had, somehow, always known this place, and that my imagination had lived there for years, even though I'd never been to England or seen that view reproduced anywhere. At any rate, it lives there now:

There are some places that you just love at first sight, you know? Even if you only see them from a distance on a long walk where sooner or later you have to head off in the opposite direction. But someday I'm going back, and staying for much longer, and climbing those knobby hillsides every day. And if I ever develop a yearning for a quiet rural life, this is where I'm going when I retire.

On walkability, part 3: Things I learned in the UK

I've been meaning to get back to the walkability series (part 1; part 2) for a while, particularly after my walking-intensive summer vacation. Here are a few things I noticed on the great Scotland-to-England journey of 2010:

1. Street usability

One of the things that impressed me a lot about London, during my three days there, was the level of usability built into street infrastructure. Clearly, someone has been thinking about making the streets of London pedestrian-friendly. Consider, for instance, curbside signage:

UK traffic is on the opposite side of the road from many other countries, and if you're visiting from one of those countries, it's all too easy to forget which way to look as you step into an intersection into oncoming traffic. So in a lot of places, you see these directional signs painted right next to the curb. I particularly appreciated the arrows, as I am one of those people who can't tell right from left without stopping to think about it.

The other thing I appreciated immensely: not only do the "You Are Here" map kiosks in central London offer detailed maps, the maps are oriented so that whichever direction you face as you're looking at the kiosk is the direction that points upward on the map. This made map-reading so intuitive (how many times have you squinted at a dot on a map kiosk and tried to figure out which of a confusing tangle of streets is the one right in front of you?) that I wondered why this isn't the standard practice everywhere. (I'm looking at you, Boston, City of Total Disorientation.)

2. Intersection density

A while back, I came across a blog post about a study that found intersection density—the number of street intersections per square mile, typically much higher in older, denser cities than in newer suburbs—to have a surprisingly high impact on overall walkability. It's one of those things that aren't immediately obvious but make a lot of sense when you think about them. The greater the number of intersections, the more possible routes there are, the less often pedestrians will have to take the long way around, and the easier it is to vary one's route and avoid boredom.

Old Town in Edinburgh is full of tiny narrow alleys, or "closes," that break up longer blocks of buildings and increase the overall number of intersections quite a bit. Some of them are wide enough that they're open to car traffic; others are for foot traffic only; and some consist of a flight of stairs, sometimes sheltered by the upper storeys of adjacent buildings and sometimes open. They have wonderful names, too: World's End Close, Writer's Close, Sugarhouse Close. This is Fleshmarket Close (there's also a Fishmarket Close nearby):

One caveat: I don't know how safe the closes are after dark; I wasn't out all that late while I was there. But during the day, I loved having a set of built-in shortcuts all over the city.

3. Walking culture

It's not that people don't hike for fun in the States. But the UK has much more of a culture of recreational walking,* with a whole history of walkers' associations and disputes over public rights of way. My time in the Lake District, an especially popular walking destination, made that clear: every town I visited had a tourist center that offered directions and sold Ordance Survey Explorer maps and Kendal Mint Cake, the hill-walker's favorite snack. Outdoor stores were everywhere, peddling breathable clothing, sturdy boots, compasses, and mountaineering equipment. And I kept meeting fellow walkers of all ages everywhere.

The big cities I visited had spaces for taking a rural walk as well: Edinburgh's Holyrood Park, with scores of people strolling the paths and bluffs, and Hampstead Heath in London, which on a sunny July afternoon was full of wanderers and picnickers. Recreational walking seemed there to be more about enjoying the surroundings than about getting Serious Exercise, although there's certainly some of that as well. (Rebecca Solnit makes much the same point in Wanderlust: A History of Walking, which I'm currently reading.)

Most of all, I loved that I could walk right to the edge of a town like Grasmere or Keswick and keep going, on side roads or paths through fields, up the side of a fell or all around a lake, and on for as many miles as my feet could take me. Whereas on this side of the pond, if you want to go for a long semi-rural walk—at least in my part of the US—you generally have to drive there first.

* See this post on the walking habits of Wilkie Collins on one of my new favorite blogs, Steamboats are ruining everything. While visiting New York, Collins found that his daily walks puzzled the natives:

Biographer Catherine Peters reports that during an 1873 book tour of America, Collins was dismayed to discover that Americans did not carry walking-sticks and did not like to go on walks. From New York, Collins wrote home to a friend of his chagrin:

I . . . thought nothing of a daily constitutional from my hotel in Union-square to Central Park and back. Half a dozen times on my way, friends in carriages would stop and beg me to jump in. I always declined, and I really believe that they regarded my walking exploits as a piece of English eccentricity.

I've had the exact same experience more times than I can count, only with much shorter distances than Collins' five-mile Union Square to Central Park stroll.

My UK trip, in pictures

So here is the blog post about what I did on my summer vacation, complete with pictures. (In another life I was somebody's aunt who brought out the slide projector at every family dinner.) The full(ish) set is up on Flickr if you're curious.

First stop: Edinburgh, for Material Cultures 2010, which was one of the best academic conferences I've been to in recent memory: a nice mix of historians, literature scholars, librarians (I wasn't the only one!), independent scholars, and the occasional bookseller; a lovely atmosphere of friendliness; excellent keynotes and really interesting papers; and, not least of all, food, drink, and dancing. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

First there was sightseeing on a rainy Scottish summer day:

Greyfriars Kirkyard and the Castle.

Then there was conferencing:

Old College and Playfair Library, University of Edinburgh.

There was also a dinner with Scottish country dancing, which was great fun; and a whisky tasting, which was followed by haggis at Greyfriars Bobby's Bar. (Verdict: not bad, though I could've done with a bit less mashed potato.)

And I sneaked away from the last conference session or so to climb Arthur's Seat:

 

Then it was on to the Lake District, which gave me a whole new appreciation for the earlier generation of Romantic poets. I mean, wouldn't this make you want to write poetry too?

And now it's all in my head, for moments when I'm in vacant or in pensive mood. (That was the lovely thing about this trip. So much fuel for the imagination, which I hadn't even realized was getting pinched and starved from neglect.)

I didn't quite make it all the way up Helm Crag. But I promised myself I'd go back someday and try again.

My favorite walk was near Keswick: first the Castlerigg Stone Circle, then a stroll through the fields and woods back into town:

(I think I loved the view in the second of these three pictures best of all. It's hard to say why—and it might have just been the sun finally coming out, and the feeling of discovering something I hadn't been primed for by a guidebook—but that valley is going to stay with me for a very long time. More images for the inward eye. It's really hard to talk about these landscapes without coming over all Wordsworthian.)

And then I went to London, where, on top of all the other marvelous things about three days in London, I got to see a couple of friends from whom I'm usually separated by several time zones in different directions. There were visits to the Lambeth Palace Library, the Tate Britain, and the British Library's excellent map exhibition.

There was an excursion to the Keats House near Hampstead Heath.

There was a Sunday morning at St. Paul's Cathedral...
where we heard Mozart's Great Mass in C Minor. Which, even with the soloists facing away from where we were sitting, was as magnificent as you might imagine.

There was a splendid blogger meetup with Lady P and Krista, during which we went for a stroll along Fleet Street, then stumbled across Samuel Pepys' birthplace (at which all of us shrieked a little bit), then went for a ride on a London bus...

...and then went in search of William Blake's house in South Molton Lane, only to discover that it's now a waxing salon.

We consoled ourselves with insanely extravagant cocktails in the bar of Claridge's Hotel, which, as Lady P put it, is the kind of place where Bertie Wooster might pop in at any moment for lunch with one of his aunts.

I kept trying to superimpose, onto the London in front of me, pretty much every canonical work of British literature I'd ever read with a London setting or by an author who lived in London: trying to imagine John Donne haunting the Inns of Court, for instance, or Mrs. Dalloway making her way up Bond Street. Or all the 17th- and 18th-century booksellers in St. Paul's Churchyard. It didn't always work; as with Helm Crag, I'll just have to try it again someday not too far off.

And then I went home, only to wake at 5 a.m. the morning after, wondering what continent I was on. I'm already plotting how soon I can go back, and which of the places I didn't get to see on this trip I can manage the next time.

Of wanderlust and long-distance walking

The topic of "life lists" came up at my knitting group yesterday, and I realized that inasmuch as I have a life list, it's more of a travel list than anything else. Yes, I suppose I'd like to go bungee jumping or hang gliding or skydiving at least once, but I don't think my life will be incomplete if I don't check those particular experiences off. And there are a lot of things I'd like to learn — it would be lovely to revive my Italian, and maybe learn another dead language or two just for the hell of it, and I'd really like to learn to play the cello at some point in the nearish future — but really, a lot of my non-career-related personal goals boil down to "travel through a bunch of interesting places, preferably on foot." I don't particularly care about climbing X, Y, and Z famous mountains; I just want to go off on an epically long walk.

Blame it on John Keats. I read a couple of biographies of him at an impressionable age, and decided early on that I wanted to recreate his and Charles Brown's 1818 walking tour of northern England, Scotland, and Ireland (documented with gorgeous photographs in Carol Kyros Walker's Walking North with Keats, another book I came across when I was in the middle of my early Keats phase). Lately the long-walk impulse has returned, in spades. Some months ago I read an article on the Camino de Santiago, which convinced me that a long-distance hike across the northern end of Spain should be high on the Things To Do Before I Die list. (Give me my scallop-shell of quiet!) And then there's been the planning for my travels in Scotland and England this summer, which won't be long enough for any really extended walks, but will at least allow me to spend a couple of days in the Lake District tracing Keatsian and Wordsworthian and Coleridgean footsteps.

Then I found the National Trust Book of Long Walks in England, Scotland, and Wales on an expedition to the Book Barn a few weeks ago, which gave me even more British itineraries to dream about. (The length of the Welsh border! Hadrian's Wall! As much of the Scottish Highlands as I can possibly tramp across!) I've just put in an interlibrary loan request for John Hillaby's Journey Through Britain, which narrates an even longer walk, from Land's End to John O' Groats. I don't think I'll ever have the time to do something like that, but at the very least, I can read about it.

And that's just a couple of countries in Europe. There's a whole world out there. Readers, do any of you share the long-walk wanderlust? And if so, where would you go, if you had the funds and the time?

Things to do in Edinburgh when you're conferencing

In a somewhat startling and immensely welcome turn of events, I just found out that my conference paper proposal was accepted, which means that, God willing and the crick don't rise, I'm bound for Edinburgh this summer. I'm thrilled, not just because the conference looks marvelous, but also because I've never been in the UK, and this will be the biggest trip I've ever planned. Given all of that, I'm going to combine the three days of the conference with a bit of a vacation before and after. I haven't set any dates yet, but I'll most likely fly through London and take a train to Edinburgh and back. I'd like to spend at least a couple of days in London and at least a couple of non-conference days in Edinburgh, for starters. I might make a stopover somewhere on my way back to London.

And this is where I ask you all for suggestions for things I absolutely must see. I'm already thinking that I can't pass up the Edinburgh Castle, Arthur's Seat, or the Palace of Holyroodhouse. There are more things in London that I want to see than can possibly fit into just a few days, so I'm resigned to not seeing all of them this time around; the British Museum and Library are a must, though, and I may try to work in a bit of operagoing at Covent Garden before the conference begins.

Other possibilities:

• Stop between Edinburgh and London at Kendal, and spend a day or two walking in the Lake District.
• Alternatively, stop between Edinburgh and London at York. Ascend the medieval city walls, and maybe take a side trip to the North York Moors. Or Whitby, for the Dracula connection.
• I wouldn't at all mind stopping to hike along part of Hadrian's wall, either.

I'd love to go to the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, and the Aldeburgh Festival, but I think both of those things will have to wait. Likewise, there won't be time for my fantasy recreation of John Keats's 1818 walking tour (though I can certainly make time to visit the house where he lived in Hampstead). But I still want to do as much as I can in a week and a half.

So: further suggestions for a bibliophilic opera fan who enjoys a good walk? And if any of you can recommend footwear suitable for tromping all over the British Isles that doesn't scream "American tourist in sneakers," I'd be much obliged.

The convergence of film and opera, or, What I did on my summer vacation

I'm back from my Santa Fe trip, which was just about the ideal vacation. (I only wish I'd been there longer than a long weekend. Next time. And there'll definitely be a next time.) Two eminently enjoyable nights at the opera, in the open air with the mountains in the distance; two magnificent sopranos;* excitingly unfamiliar architecture and landscapes everywhere; excellent New Mexican and Spanish food; a little Georgia O'Keeffe; lots of walking around; the fortuitous discovery of a good used bookstore; and more sunshine than I've seen in New England for ages. How beautiful is Santa Fe? Well, see for yourselves; I took pictures.

I ended up spending a lot of the trip thinking about the convergence of opera and the movies. I'd been looking forward to The Letter, the second opera I saw, for more than a year — ever since last spring's blogger meetup and Met HD broadcast expedition with Terry Teachout, who wrote the libretto and who's been blogging the whole process of writing the opera with composer Paul Moravec. The Letter was originally a short story by Somerset Maugham, which he then adapted into a play, which was made into a movie starring Bette Davis. The visual vocabulary of this production was explicitly and deliberately cinematic and film-noirish. (Some of the musical vocabulary sounded cinematic, too; once or twice I thought of the score of Vertigo.) At one point, Patricia Racette puts on a broad-brimmed hat and a white trench coat straight out of the ending of Casablanca. And, like the movie, the opera starts with six gunshots and a dead guy on the veranda.

It was both intriguing and at times quite startling to see film conventions and operatic conventions collide. Especially because film conventions tend to be so visual and camera-oriented — the close-up, the blackout, the flashback, and so on — and operatic conventions are so closely associated with the stage; even the chorus is a holdover from ancient Greek drama (as interpreted by sixteenth-century Florentines). The overall effect is to defamiliarize both sets of conventions. There are surging strings in the scene between the adulterous lovers, but there are soaring voices as well. There are flashbacks and cinematic lighting, but there's also a stage set that's constantly being shifted before our eyes. And Patricia Racette's character in The Letter is very much in the film noir femme fatale mold, until she starts singing arias — and suddenly she takes on the kind of inner life you get from intensely operatic music, but not so much in actual film noir, where the femme fatale character is usually a) tough as nails and b) something of a cipher. But the worlds of opera and film noir seemed quite close to each other by the end of the evening.

The interesting thing was that I had some of the same thoughts about La Traviata on my first night in Santa Fe, in large part because the director emphasized Violetta's distance from polite society by playing up the "wild party" aspects of Act 1 and Act 3. Noticing that the costumes were vaguely late 19th-century except that all the women's dresses were slit up the front to allow for can-can style leg-flashing, I thought "Hey, they're borrowing from Moulin Rouge!" And then I thought "Well, that's appropriate, since Moulin Rouge borrowed most of the plot of La Traviata." Later on I recalled that Baz Luhrmann is also a theater director who's done a fair amount of opera. All of which made the chorus's little performance-within-a-performance at the beginning of Act 3 ("E Piquillo un bel gagliardo") seem even more metatheatrical.

I'm not surprised that opera and film might converge, especially in the age of opera on DVD and movie broadcasts like the Met's, which have the added benefit of highlighting the acting chops of singers who can act for the camera. I'm sure there are purists on both sides who won't like that idea, but as for me? I'm a fan of both film and opera, and I have a thing for hybridity, not to mention that eminently 21st-century genre, the mashup.** And I say, long may it last; I can't wait to see what's next to emerge from the collision.

* I love Patricia Racette, who got to act up a storm in this production. I love Natalie Dessay even more. Some of the reviewers have been saying her voice isn't big enough for Violetta; I can see that, but in the end, if it's not already obvious from this post, it's the theatricality of opera that draws me as much as the music does. And I don't think I'll ever forget the way she laid Violetta's soul completely bare for us, bit by bit, at the end of Act 1, or the devastatingly quiet remoteness of her "Addio del passato." (I had to take advantage of the prolonged applause afterward to blow my nose honkingly a few times.)

** One of the books I was reading on the plane was Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. 'Nuff said.