Seeing Is Believing

Galileo.

Leonardo: if the beard fits, wear it.

     "It's through seeing that you understand the beauty of created things, the greatest of the things that induce love."
     - Leonardo arguing in the early 1500s for what is in front of us, what we can see, touch, smell, hear, taste.    

     Galileo, one hundred years later, complained that "people were denying the evidence of their own senses and submitting to the judgement of others [i.e. the church], allowing people totally ignorant of an art or science to be judges of intellectuals ... these are the new powers that can ruin republics and subvert states."
     Same old refrain, 500 years later.

Avoidance of Traditional Musical Tonality

Issue IX, Writers on Writers, Now Out

Stacey Rozich's Meanwhile at Home Vol. 1

     The new issue of PageBoy Magazine, Writers on Writers, is now out! Please see the review below, and then HELP SUPPORT INDEPENDENT MAGAZINES by, well, purchasing a copy.
Issue ix reviewed here.

Who Killed Rilke?

Rilke at home, just before being killed by the academy.

     " ... the hallmark of academic criticism: it kills everything it touches. Walk around a university campus and there is an almost palpable smell of death about the place because hundreds of academics are killing everything they touch. I recently met an academic who said that he taught German literature. I was aghast: to think, this man who had been in universities all his life was teaching Rilke. Rilke! Oh it was too much to bear. You don't teach Rilke, I wanted to say, you kill Rilke!"
     -Geoff Dyer, Out of Sheer Rage.
   

Puccini's Oregano

this week's libretto

     "Opera begins in the market where, over and above the simple demands of competition of being able to attract customers' attention, stall holders have to convey the color and taste of fruit in their voices. The man selling oregano, for example: he called out and the air was fragrant with oregano.

His job was not to sell oregano, but to fill the air with the sound of its scent."

                     -Geoff Dyer in Out of Sheer Rage.