Charcoal chicken soup base

The sidebar of this blog promises an occasional “failed recipe”, and today I am making good on the promise.  Last night I set out to turn the ravaged carcass of a roasted chicken into a delicious chicken stock soup base.  My recipe goes like this:

• Put the leftover chicken bones, fat, and gristle into a reasonably large pot.  (If you’ve already thrown the chicken bones into the garbage, fish them out again.  They’ll be fine.)
• Add to the pot an assortment of seasonings: peppercorns, sliced onions, a few cloves of garlic, and some chopped celery, for instance.
• Add 6 or 8 cups of water, depending on how much stock you’d like to make.
• Turn the heat to maximum, and leave the pot on the stove for an hour or more.
• When the kitchen fills with smoke, remove the pot from the heat.  Allow a few minutes for it to cool.  While waiting, you might open some windows and use a towel to waft the fumes away from the smoke alarm.

You should be left with a thoroughly charred chicken carcass embedded in a thick black layer of now unidentifiable food matter.  Use a chisel to dislodge the chicken, and throw it out.

Good work.

Using this recipe means that you have a nasty cleaning job ahead of you, since the black paste, although it can be slowly scraped out, leaves a residue that resists even the most vigorous scrubbing.  To clean it, use a mixture of vinegar and baking soda: pour them into the pot and leave them for eight or ten hours.  Then scrub.  It should clean up nicely.

Gilbert: The Second World War

The Second World War
A Complete History
Martin Gilbert (Henry Holt, 1989)
864 p.  First reading.

What I have learned of the Second World War in my life has been picked up through casual references, novels, films, and newspaper articles, and this haphazard instruction has resulted, not surprisingly, in an incomplete picture, with significant gaps, and ambiguities in the chronology.  It thought it high time that I read a solid history of the war in order to tidy up my understanding.  I have actually selected about a half dozen WWII books as a reading project, and this is the first.

I could not have picked a better book as a starting point.  Gilbert, the great biographer of Churchill, begins with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939 and proceeds week by week, and often day by day, through the entire course of the conflict.  He strives for a comprehensive overview, covering military strategy, civilian life, resistance fighting, intelligence networks, and the whole geographical sweep of the war on land, in air, and at sea.

The scale of the death and destruction in this war almost defies imagination.  Everyone knows that the Germans killed six million Jews, but we sometimes forget that an additional three million Polish civilians and at least seven million Russian civilians were killed, and that the total death toll of the conflict, military and civilian, was in excess of fifty million lives.  The Allies, with about a million lives lost between the United States, Britain, and the Commonwealth, got off comparatively easily.  On each page of this book the death toll mounts into the thousands, tens of thousands, and sometimes hundreds of thousands.  It is difficult reading.  It is evident, too, that Gilbert has a humane purpose in writing, for in addition to narrating the “big” events of the war he frequently narrows the scope to focus on individuals, often civilians, who suffered terribly at the hands of their foes, or at the hands of their own governments.  And indeed it is important to remember these people.

A few scattered thoughts on various topics:

• intelligence.  Throughout the war the British and Americans had the intelligence advantage, and this had a significant impact on the conduct and outcome of the war.  Early in the conflict the British began to read the German Enigma messages, and they later added other sources, both German and Japanese, to their portfolio.  They made good use of this high-level intelligence.  They also devised clever counter-intelligence diversions to disguise their intended plans, especially in advance of the invasions of Sicily and Normandy, that duped the Germans.  I would love to read a good book about Bletchley Park, where the code-breakers were working; if you know of one, please leave a comment.
• resistance.  One sometimes hears French valour dismissed on account of the Gallic readiness to wave the white flag.  It is true that the French military collapsed quickly when the Germans advanced, but we do well to remember that a French resistance did arise, and there were civilians who risked their lives to carry out espionage and sabotage operations against the Germans.  Moreover, this was true not only in France but throughout the area occupied by Germany, and in the course of time these guerrilla tactics caused significant difficulties for the Germans.
• assassinating Hitler.  I have sometimes wondered why Hitler was not assassinated.  It seems that many lives could have been saved if the man most responsible for the conflict had been killed.  I was surprised to learn, therefore, that there were numerous attempts made to kill him.  In 1939 a bomb planted near a podium at which he was speaking went off several minutes after he had left. (Imagine what might have happened if he had been removed at that early stage in the war.)  Again in 1942 a bomb was placed on his private airplane, but it had a faulty detonator.  And in 1944 a bomb did detonate in his bunker, but by chance he escaped injury.  Those responsible were killed.  I believe that there were other assassination attempts as well.
• German anti-Semitism.  Underneath much of the Nazi evil was a frankly bizarre racial ideology which put the Aryans at the top and the Jews, evidently, at the bottom.  Where did this ideology come from?  I know that some have tried to pin it on “Christian” anti-Semitism, but that falls far short of being an adequate explanation.  Hitler seems to have believed that he had a duty to eliminate, not just the Jews, but anyone who was “unfit”: the sick, the mentally unstable, the old. (Germany had an active war-time euthanasia program.)  I would like to know in particular the extent to which the stated justification for the doctrine of Aryan supremacy was “scientific”.
• brutality.  The brutality of the Germans, and especially of the SS, is infamous.  It seem to me that in addition to being wicked this was also counter-productive.  They put huge resources into rounding up, transporting, and killing people behind the lines, resources that might have been used on the front.  The vicious character of these actions also turned many people against Hitler and the German leadership.  As the tide of war turned and Germany began to lose ground, the slaughter of civilians never let up.  It was almost as though Hitler was waging two wars, and he was determined to win one even if he must lose the other. Japan also treated civilians and prisoners-of-war brutally, often capturing them only to kill them directly.  They apparently had a deep-seated contempt for anyone who would not fight to the death.  Instances of brutality against prisoners-of-war did occur among the Allies, but they were comparatively rare and were usually punished.
• aerial bombing of civilians.  In the British Commonwealth we tend to remember the German bombing of London (and other cities) as one of the principal outrages perpetrated directly upon civilians.  But we must also remember that the Allies bombed German cities too, and not only in order to disrupt industrial activity.  The number of German civilians killed by Allied bombs far surpassed the number killed during the Blitz: on one occasion, a firestorm created by incendiary bombs killed 40000 inhabitants of Hamburg in a single night.  These were shameful episodes in the Allied war effort.
• Hitler’s strategic mistakes.  It seems to me that two principal strategic errors contributed to the downfall of the German war effort.  The first was that Hitler underestimated the strength of his Russian adversary (I imagine it is tempting to underestimate your foe when he belongs to an inferior race), and consequently began his campaign in Russia too late in the year.  The error was small — German troops approached to within 20 miles of Moscow before the onset of winter halted them — but it was enough.  Second, Hitler declared war on the United States in 1941 after Pearl Harbor.  At first the Americans had declared war only on Japan, and had intended to leave the European war to Europeans.  When Hitler made his declaration, Churchill reportedly sighed with relief, for he knew then that Germany would ultimately lose.
• public knowledge of the Holocaust.  Who knew what, and when, about the systematic, large-scale killing of Jews?  The German leadership spoke in euphemisms about those who were being transported to concentration camps and gas chambers: they were being “deported” or “resettled”, or they had been selected for “special treatment”, and so on.  Even the Allied leadership, who were reading the top-secret German communication channels, seem to have been unaware of what was really happening.  Only in 1943 and 1944, when a few people managed to escape from Auschwitz, did news begin to leak out in the underground press, and even then it must have been subject to some doubt by those who heard it.  The first aerial photographs of Auschwitz were not gathered by the Allies until mid-1944, when the invasion of Normandy was underway, and even then they were collected accidentally and were not remarked upon.  As the Allies closed in on Berlin, the Nazis tried to destroy the evidence of their gas chambers and camps.  This secrecy is obviously very important to consider when we try to assess the moral responsibility of those who might have done something to hinder the killing.

Ring resources

Those who have been following my “Great moments in opera” posts recently will know that I have been working my way through Wagner’s operas, and might have guessed where I was heading: the Ring cycle.  Yes, it’s true.  Over the next month or so, I hope to listen to the entire cycle again.  I have only heard it once before, and that was now over five years ago, so the time seems ripe to revisit it.

The Ring is so big and convoluted, and so musically complex, that I am fortifying myself with a number of canes and crutches to help me through.  So far I have assembled the following:

• The Metropolitan Opera productions on DVD, conducted by James Levine.
• Der Ring des Nibelungen: An Introduction: Deryck Cooke’s audio guide to the principal leitmotifs of the Ring cycle.
• The Golden Ring: A documentary about the making of Georg Solti’s famous Ring recordings.
• Kobbé’s Complete Opera Book: This guide devotes about 70 pages to discussing the plot and music of the Ring.
• George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite, consisting of essays about the Ring.

I know that huge barrels of ink have been spilled over these operas, and it is a fool’s errand to try to read too much of it.  If anyone knows, however, of a particularly good book on the topic, I ‘d be interested to hear about it in the comments.  Thanks.

Great moments in opera: Der Fliegende Holländer

Over the past month or so I have been working my way through most of Wagner’s pre-Ring operas.  I am intending to tackle the Ring itself soon, but before I do I thought I would back-up, to 1843, and hear the first of his operas that has entered the standard repertoire: Der Fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman).  This opera is a much more traditional work than were his later ones: it has tuneful melodies that could pass for arias, rousing choruses, and the leitmotif technique, while present, does not dominate the music.

The story is about a mysterious Dutchman doomed to sail the seas to all eternity unless he can find a woman who will love him until death.   There are few eligible women on the high seas, so every seven years he is permitted a space of shore leave in order to try his luck with the local ladies.  As the opera begins his ship approaches a Norwegian coastal village where there lives a young woman of romantic temperament, Senta, who knows the Dutchman’s legend and who believes that she could be the one to rescue him.   There is, however, another young man, Eric, who loves Senta.  When the Dutchman learns this, he returns to his ship in despair and sails away.  Senta, unwilling to lose his love, throws herself from a cliff and into the sea.  As the curtain falls, the two lovers, Senta and the Dutchman, are seen ascending into heaven.  All of this takes about 2-1/2 hours in performance.

In Act II Senta sings a dramatic song, colloquially called “Senta’s Ballad”, in which she recounts for the other women of the village the legend of the Dutchman. Here it is, sung by Lisbeth Balslev in a Bayreuth production, and with English subtitles.

My other favourite section of this opera is the Act II duet between Senta and the Dutchman, Wirst du des Vaters Wahl nicht schelten, in which Senta declares her love and her desire to save the Dutchman from his curse.  Here it is in a 1983 Paris production, with Jose Van Dam singing the Dutchman and Dunja Vejzovic singing Senta. The subtitles are in French, but the English translation can be found here (scroll down).  The person who enters near the end of this clip is Senta’s father.

The recording to which I listened this week was this one, with Giuseppe Sinopoli conducting a good group of singers.  Not having heard the opera before it is hard for me to know how it compares to other recordings, but I enjoyed it.  I tried but failed to borrow a DVD of the opera, so I was not able to view a staging.

Musil: The Man without Qualities

This was written in 2006, before this web log existed.  During the past week I have been thinking again about this book, and I thought that perhaps this Book Note, flawed though it is, might benefit from a little fresh air.

The Man Without Qualities (1921-1942)
Robert Musil (Vintage, 1995)
2 vols; 1806 p.  First reading.

On short lists of the great works of twentieth-century literature, certain titles recur: Joyce’s Ulysses in English literature, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in French. On more than one occasion, I had heard Robert Musil’s enormous The Man Without Qualities named as the German counterpart to those monumental works, though, curiously, I knew nothing else about it, and had never heard of anyone reading it. If it was in the race for literary greatness, it seemed to be the dark horse. Then, some time later, I stumbled across a statement of Thomas Mann to the effect that Musil’s magnum opus was “without doubt the greatest writing, ranking with the finest our epoch has to offer”. Given my admiration for Mann’s own writing, I resolved at that point to read it.

Set in Austria in 1913-14, just prior to the First World War, the novel follows the activities of the oddly named Parallel Campaign, a loose committee of diplomats, civil servants, intellectuals, and artists charged with organizing a celebration to honour the seventieth Jubilee of the Emperor Franz Josef. Musil’s decision to set the events of the novel on the cusp of the Great War, yet to make only the most indirect allusions to the approaching conflict which was to so thoroughly undo all their preparations, casts a shadow of absurdity over the entire proceedings.

At the center of the story is Ulrich, the eponymous ‘man without qualities’, a soldier turned engineer turned mathematician who serves as a focal point for the novel. Yet to speak of a focus is potentially to obscure the novel’s shape, for, like much other modernist fiction, the novel’s structure is experimental, in the precise sense of having very little structure at all. The matter of the Parallel Campaign sets the stage, but beyond that the novel has no real narrative thread, consisting instead of a long series of conversations, meetings, and events, which never accumulate momentum in any one direction. This open architecture, with which an impatient reader may occasionally express exasperation, was intentional, and can I think be understood as contributing to the overall “argument” of the novel.

One respect in which The Man Without Qualities surely merits a place among the great works of literature is the sheer virtuosic brilliance of the prose. Musil’s style is precise without being concise; his sentences are long and elaborate, but they are clear and lucid.  In this respect he reminds me of Thomas Mann himself.  This does not mean, however, that the novel is easy going for the reader — quite the contrary. The novel’s subject matter is relentlessly academic and replete with psychological subtleties.

The book has a moral center. It is a kind of extended meditation on modernity, which Musil considers to be a culture that has lost its bearings and no longer knows how to carry on. Our culture teems with a great swirling mass of ideas, concerned with

algebraic series, benzol rings, the materialist as well as the universalist philosophy of history, bridge supports, the evolution of music, the essence of the automobile, Hata 606, the theory of relativity, Bohr’s atomic theory, autogeneous welding, the flora of the Himalayas, psychoanalysis, individual psychology, experimental psychology, physiological psychology, social psychology, and all the other achievements that prevent a time so greatly enriched by them from turning out good, wholesome, integral human beings,

as Musil puts it at one point. And as this quote hints, Musil’s central concern is not these ideas in the abstract, but rather their effects on our inner lives.

Central to the book’s argument as I understand it is Musil’s contention that modernity prevents an individual from maturing into an integrated, steady, grounded whole. Instead, it produces the “man without qualities”, a person whose inner life is such that they fail to acquire stable convictions or a robust stance toward life. We modern people encounter the world without a comprehensive framework for understanding it; we live in a world of competing and clashing points of view; we are skeptical of claims to truth; we are suspicious of the moral law; we “see through things”:

It just so happens that the second thought, at the very least, of every person today confronted by an overwhelming phenomenon, even if it should be its beauty that so overwhelms him, is ‘You can’t fool me! I’ll cut you down to size!’ And this mania for cutting things down to size. . .has hardly anything to do any longer with life’s natural separation of the raw from the sublime; it is, rather, much more a self-tormenting bent of mind, an inadmissible lust at the spectacle of the good being humiliated and too easily destroyed altogether.

It is easier to tear down than to defend. Freedom, we are told, means being unencumbered by tradition or obedience. Yet this habit of placing everything under our feet has a price:

‘What is left of me?’ Ulrich thought bitterly. ‘Possibly someone who…likes to think that for the sake of his inner freedom he respects only a few external laws. But this inner freedom consists of being able to think whatever one likes; it means knowing, in every human situation, why one doesn’t need to be bound by it, but never knowing what one wants to be bound by!’ In this far from happy moment, when the curious little wave of feeling that had held him for an instant ebbed away again, he would have been ready to admit that he had nothing but an ability to see two sides to everything — that moral ambivalence that marked almost all his contemporaries and was the disposition of his generation, or perhaps their fate.

This capacity to see two — or more — sides to everything does more than simply make one ambivalent, however. Pursued a little further, it exercises its power to render one’s relationship to one’s own experience tentative and self-conscious.  In time, this habit produces an incapacity for immediate experience:

[Ulrich] sometimes longed to be wholly involved in events as in a wrestling match, even if they were meaningless or criminal, as long as they were valid, absolute, without the everlasting tentativeness they have when a person is superior to his experiences.

Without a way to comprehend and assimilate our experience, Musil is saying, we are un-integrated, psychologically piece-meal. If we keep our ideas and experiences at arm’s length, warily, we find that we lack purpose. We are not in tune with the world, not at home. As Ulrich describes himself,

For a long time now a hint of aversion had lain on everything he did and experienced, a shadow of impotence and loneliness, an all-encompassing distaste for which he could not find the complimentary inclination. He felt at times as though he had been born with a talent for which there was at present no objective.

Part of the reason for this state of affairs, Musil remarks more than once, is the sheer amount of information to which we are exposed, voices clamoring without being coherent:

‘A man today who still aspires to integrity deserves a lot of credit,’ Walter said.

‘There’s no such thing anymore,’ Ulrich countered. ‘You only have to look in a newspaper. It’s filled with an immeasurable opacity. So many things are being talked about, it would surpass the intellectual capacity of a Leibniz. But we don’t even notice; we have changed. There’s no longer a whole man confronting a whole world, only a human something moving about in a general culture-medium.’

We are fractured, too, as everyone knows, because so many of the enduring certainties on which our civilization is founded have been brought into question by modernity. The great transvaluation of values heralded by Nietzsche, the secular experiment in which all of life is to be reinterpreted without reference to God, has broken the old consensus and let loose a bewildering chatter of opposing views. In such a context, it is not easy for a person to take up a definite position before the world, not easy for them to interpret their experiences without doubt, hesitation, and second-guessing, not easy to form convictions and be resolute. This is the predicament that occupies Musil’s attention, and he explores it from many angles.

A major force behind this destabilization of culture has been science, because it claims to be a new, comprehensive way of accounting for the world without reference to most of our traditional ideas. Musil is well aware of this, and though he does not reject science, he is critical of some of its cultural effects. He admires scientific precision of thought, but, to invoke a key phrase that appears more than once in the novel, what he really wants is “precision and soul”. He makes some penetrating remarks about the dehumanizing habits of mind that a purely scientific perspective cultivates. It is odd, after all, that scientific explanations, which claim to be thorough accounts of the matter at hand, so often fail to do justice to their object:

We can begin at once with the peculiar predilection of scientific thinking for mechanical, statistical, and physical explanations that have, as it were, the heart cut out of them. The scientific mind sees kindness only as a special form of egotism; brings emotions into line with glandular secretions; notes that eight or nine tenths of a human being consists of water; explains our celebrated moral freedom as an automatic by-product of free trade; reduces beauty to good digestion and the proper distribution of fatty tissue; graphs the annual statistical curves of births and suicides to show that our most intimate personal decisions are programmed behaviour; sees a connection between ecstasy and mental disease; equates the anus and the mouth as the rectal and oral openings at either end of the same tube — such ideas, which expose the trick, as it were, behind the magic of human illusions, can always count on a kind of prejudice in their favor by being impeccably scientific. Certainly they demonstrate the love of truth. But surrounding this clear, shining love is a predilection for disillusionment, compulsiveness, ruthlessness, cold intimidation, and dry rebuke. . .

This habit of reinterpreting our experiences in radically different terms provokes in reflective people a sundering within the inner life between knowledge and experience. When we hear that we are not free, or that our emotional life consists merely in hormonal secretions in response to stimuli, or any number of other counter-intuitive accounts of our most immediate experiences, the natural response (it seems to me) is to quarantine those experiences, to distrust them, to try to transcend them, to create a space within ourselves into which they do not penetrate. Yet if our experiences are not trusted to be truthful in that private center of ourselves, then nothing occupies that space, and we become, quite naturally, men without qualities.

Musil’s exploration of this modern pathology in its many manifestations is undoubtedly a great achievement. Whether his subject warranted a sprawling tome of this enormous size might be a matter of occasional doubt to the fatigued reader. He has a seemingly insatiable taste for labyrinthine psychological subtleties, and at times only the careful control of his prose keeps it from degenerating into a quagmire. In my view, his probing and analysis are thought-provoking, and the dedication with which he has pursued this modern predicament and brought it before our eyes deserves our thanks. But what are we to do? Is there a way out? To this question, Musil seems not to have an answer. The novel, sad to say, and despite its length, is unfinished. What remains is a magnificent torso, a sprawling, ambitious, exhausting study in the psychology of modernity. Where do we go from here?

**

[The modern landscape]
It was an intelligent country, it housed cultivated people who, like cultivated people all over the globe, ran around in an unsettled state of mind amid a tremendous whirl of noise, speed, innovation, conflict, and whatever goes to make up the optical-acoustical landscape of our lives; like everybody else, they read and heard every day dozens of news items that made their hair stand on end, and were willing to work themselves up over them, even to intervene, but they never got around to it because a few minutes afterward the stimulus had already been displaced in their minds by more recent ones. . . There was the special problem for persons of cultivated sensibilities: they no longer had the gift of faith or credit, nor had they learned to fake it. They no longer knew what their smiles, their sighs, their ideas, were for. What exactly was the point of their thoughts, their smiles? Their opinions were haphazard, their inclinations an old story, the scheme of things seemed to be hanging in midair, one ran into it as into a net, and there was nothing to do or leave undone with all one’s heart, because there was no unifying principle. And so the cultivated person was someone who felt steadily mounting up a debt that he would never be able to pay off, felt bankruptcy inexorably approaching; and either inveighed against the times in which he was condemned to live, even though he enjoyed living in them like anyone else, or else hurled himself with the courage of those who have nothing to lose at every idea that promised a change.

[On advertising]
So the captain of industry, disinclined to forgo greatness, which serves him as a compass, must resort to the democratic dodge of replacing the immeasurable influence of greatness by the measurable greatness of influence. So now whatever counts as great is great; but this means that eventually whatever is most loudly hawked as great is also great, and not all of us have the knack of swallowing this innermost truth of our times without gagging a little.

[A fine piece of writing]
It sometimes happened, in the midst of a social gathering in her transformed apartment, that she felt as though she were awakening in some dreamland. She would be standing there, surrounded by space and people, the light of the chandelier flowing over her hair and on down her shoulders and hips so that she seemed to feel its bright flood, and she was all statue, like some figure in a fountain, at the epicenter of the world, drenched in sublime spiritual grace. She saw it is a once-in-a-lifetime chance to bring about everything that she had always held to be most important and supremely great, and she no longer cared particularly that she had no very clear idea what this might be. The whole apartment, the presence of people in it, the whole evening, enveloped her like a dress lined in yellow silk; she felt it on her skin, though she did not see it.

Happy birthday, Chopin

There are several major musical anniversaries to celebrate this year, and today marks the first of them: it is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Frederic Chopin.  Like most people, I love Chopin’s music, and it seems fitting to play a little of it in celebration.  Here is my favourite Chopin pianist, Artur Rubinstein, playing the Nocturne in D flat major, Op.27 No.2. [online score]

Sweet victory

Last week I wrote a post in which I lamented the poor performance of Canada’s Olympic men’s hockey team, and, more generally, cast aspersions at the “Own the Podium” program which was supposed to make us the winning-est country at these games.  Today I get to eat crow.

The men’s hockey final yesterday was a nail-biter, but it had a happy conclusion: team USA died a sudden death at the hands of our young phenom Sidney Crosby.  Crosby had been silent for much of the tournament, but he certainly knew when to speak up.  The Americans played a valiant game, tying the score in the dying seconds and sending it to a white-knuckled overtime period, and they deserve a lot of credit.  Still, I am happy that we won.

I watched the game online in real-time (or, as I found out, in “real-time”).  To the extent that I have watched any events in these games, I have watched them online, but watching this game was different in several respects.  First, as the game progressed the quality deteriorated until, by the time the overtime period began, it was like watching a fuzzy, low-budget, stop-animation film.  I assume this was due to high demand on their servers, and it was quite amusing.  Second, evidently the “live” internet feed lags several minutes behind the live television feed.   My game-watching was interrupted several times by shouts and cheers and the clanging of cow-bells from neighbouring apartments.  Then, a few minutes later, Canada would score.  This took some of the suspense out of the game but it was also amusing.

As for the “Own the Podium” program, Canada did not win the highest number of medals — that honour went to the USA — but we did win the highest number of gold medals, and we came in third place in the overall medal standings, which is certainly very respectable.  Congratulations to all our athletes!  It was an exciting few weeks in this sleepy northern land.

UPDATE: When the big hockey game was over, I put our little one to bed and then curled up myself, unaware that our nation’s cities were being flooded with festive celebrations.  Nick Milne fills in some of the details.

Sleepy bunny

Sleepy Bunny
(Golden Books, 2003)
7 p.  One hundred and twenty-ninth reading.

Sleepy Bunny is one of those works of literature that saturate and transform one’s imagination.  Between the first page, when we are ushered into a quiet room where it is “time for bed”, and the last page (a mere 6 pages later, but what pages!), in which we look out at a dazzling night sky and drift to sleep, it is as though time is suspended, and we live in a fairy land of endless possibilities and bedtime snacks.

Philosophers have often said that sleep is a “little death”, and that preparation for falling asleep is an emblem or a symbol of how we, mortals all, must also prepare for death.  Sleepy Bunny subtly provokes such reflections.  Indeed, more than once in my many re-readings of this work I thought that I might actually die.  The book rehearses bedtime rituals which unite all humanity: cleaning up toys, saying goodnight to the family pet, reading a book (a sequence sure to send some especially sophisticated readers into fits of postmodern, self-referential ecstasy), and having a snack.  In so doing, it reminds us, allegorically, of the romance and dignity of manual labour, of the profound ecological relationships uniting all organic life on our planet, of the importance of education and intellectual development to the well-lived life, and of the conviviality and fellowship of a shared meal.  Only when such lessons are well-learned are we truly prepared, the book implies, to enter into our rest, gazing upwards in wonder at the stellatum, beyond which dwells inapproachable light.

Life is mystery, too, and Sleepy Bunny gently turns us toward it, though without attempting to cheaply “solve the puzzle” of existence.  In several of the book’s illustrations, a mysterious knee-high giraffe appears.  This giraffe is nowhere mentioned, or even alluded to, in the text, nor does it play any obvious role in the narrative.  Yet there it is, where we least expect it, like an unlooked-for blessing or a useless widget.  The fact that giraffes are never, in this world, knee-high only adds to the wonderment which this magical creature evokes.

Perhaps most remarkably, Sleepy Bunny is more than a book.  Indeed, one could say that it is a book only by analogy.  Sleepy Bunny is made of soft, plush fabric.  The “pages” are almost like pillows; they cannot be torn, and they can easily withstand even sustained chewing.  By fashioning the book in this way, I believe the book-maker is intending an elaborate pun on the use of “sewn” bindings in high-end “cloth” books, though to what purpose I cannot say.  Moreover, several of the pages are three-dimensional, with sewn pockets, and the book is accompanied by a small bunny which can be slipped into these pockets, just as one slips into bed.  How fitting.  This bunny is evidently the sleepy bunny.

Sleepy Bunny is a work of considerable originality and quiet beauty.  It can be revisited again and again and again and again and again, as I can attest from personal experience.  Though its merit will be best appreciated by a discerning adult, the book could also be suitable reading for young children.

Great moments in opera: Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Fresh from Tristan und Isolde, and preparing myself for Der Ring des Nibelungen, I listened for the first time this week to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and I fully expected it to fall into line with the others: monumental and tragic, but also ponderous, dramatically slack, and at least twice as long as it needed to be.  Imagine my surprise when I discovered that Die Meistersinger is a comedy!

It is true that, if brevity is the soul of wit, Wagner would have to be accounted one of the least witty men in history, but Die Meistersinger has surprised me with its good humour, spacious geniality, and gentle exuberance.  It is still very long (about 4-1/2 hours in performance) but it has a good story and a set of good characters that were a pleasure to watch.

The story, briefly, is about a young man, Walther, who seeks entrance to the guild of the Master Singers in 16th century Nuremberg.  The beautiful young woman whom he loves, Eva, will bestow her hand in marriage upon the winner of a singing contest, but only members of the guild are eligible to participate.  The guild Masters complain that Walther’s manner of song is unconventional and ugly, breaking all of the established rules, but one member, the cobbler Hans Sachs, sees the merit in Walther’s composition and helps him to gain admittance to the guild.  He sings beautifully, of course, and he and Eva live happily ever after.

It is not difficult to discern the self-regarding allegory at the heart of Wagner’s story: Wagner himself is Walther, and the guild Masters are the musical establishment, deaf to the glories of his new manner of song.  To his credit, he did not write a simple-minded celebration of artistic radicalism; at one point Sachs reminds the irate Walther that conservatism protects and sustains much that is good and praiseworthy.  And even if the opera is one giant criticism of those who opposed Wagner’s artistic vision, he was magnanimous enough not to indulge himself in shrill denunciations.  The work is genuinely light-hearted and charming.

I read, with some surprise, that Die Meistersinger was a favourite of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.  The founding of the Nazi party was celebrated by a performance of the opera, and its music was used in Triumph of the Will.  For the life of me I cannot see why it should have tickled Hitler’s perverse fancy, unless it be on account of the brief episode near the end when everybody sings the praises of German art.  Pretty benign stuff.  This is a good reminder — which will be even more important to keep in mind when we come to the Ring cycle — that the meaning of an artistic work is only partly due to its history of appropriation.  Hitler does not get to tell us definitively what Wagner means.

The music of Die Meistersinger is unlike anything else that I have heard from Wagner.  It is bouyant, sometimes lyrical, and always good-natured.  The use of leitmotifs is pervasive, and in certain scenes (such as at the end of Act II), used to superb effect.  I was amused to hear the Isolde leitmotif from Tristan und Isolde making a cameo appearance as well.

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Enough talk.  Let’s hear some music!  The most famous music from this opera is the orchestral prelude, which can be heard here.  I have selected two other episodes that I particularly enjoyed.

The first comes from Act II.  Beckmesser, the most curmudgeonly of the town’s Meistersingers and a rival with Walther for Eva’s hand, practices his song beneath her window on the night before the competition.   Earlier in the day Beckmesser had “marked down” Walther’s song, rejoicing at each transgression of the rules.  Here Sachs gives him a taste of his own medicine, striking his cobbler’s hammer each time Beckmesser makes a mistake.  Beckmesser is sung by Thomas Allen and Sachs by James Morris; the production is from the Metropolitan Opera in New York.  English subtitles are included:

In Act III, the central characters prepare for the festival at which the singers will compete, and they pause to sing a lovely quintet.  This doesn’t advance the story at all, but it is sure pretty.  Here is some footage from the 1963 Bayreuth festival, with Josef Greindl, Anja Silja, Wolfgang Windgassen, Erwin Wohlfahrt, and Ruth Hesse singing.  Text and translations here (scroll down to where Sachs sings “Die selige Morgentraumdeut-Weise”).

Toot toot! Do it yourself

Not to toot my own horn, but this week I posted what I think is a particularly good quote at The Hebdomadal Chesterton.  It is vintage Chesterton: witty,  windy, and wise.  His point, once you get to it, is that constantly absorbing mass entertainment suffocates the imagination, and that it is much more stimulating to be actively creative and make one’s own entertainment.   One who did this would enlarge himself:

His interests might be more local, but they would be more lively; his experience of men more personal but more mixed; his likes and dislikes more capricious but not quite so easily satisfied.

Now, I am as likely as anyone — and perhaps more likely than most — to listen to music rather than make it, to watch a film rather than stage a play, and to read a book rather than write one.  But I agree with Chesterton all the same.  Some people know that for the past few months I have been on paternity leave, and during my “spare time” (which does not really exist) I have been working on a creative project.  It has been very challenging, and is not turning out very well at all, but I have enjoyed myself very much.  There is something stimulating about sitting down with a blank sheet of paper and having the freedom to make whatever one wants.  The feeling is like that of looking at a deep blue sky.  Chesterton is right.