Category: Culture

On sliding from note to note

Listen link #1. Please read the first two paragraphs before you listen.

Want to start a barroom brawl in a place where the musical cognoscenti hang out to drink? Easy. Just say the explosive Italian word portamento and run for your life.

The Italian word is about carrying something. But portamento singing, in English, better translates to sliding, or gliding, from one note to the next note. Gliding from note to note is one of the markers of country music singing — so much so that there is even a country music instrument designed to slide from note to note, the steel guitar. Patsy Cline’s wonderful version of “The Wayward Wind” sounds almost as though she is imitating the steel guitar, sliding both up and down to reach her notes. Go ahead and listen to Listen link #1 now.

Patsy Cline was a fantastic singer, from the days when country music singers actually could sing. But, as far as I know, she never had formal musical training. Her portamento sliding from note to note works (for most ears, anyway), because she does eventually end up on pitch, and the timing of her sliding serves her musical and emotional intent. One of the reasons I grit my teeth at, and run screaming from, most country music is that the sliding from note to note is done with little musical skill and in poor taste. As for skill, the singer seems to lack the ability to land on pitch and must hunt for the note (often without ever finding it). As for taste, the singer is attempting to convey emotion but doesn’t have the skill or taste to do it.

It would be easy to write off all portamento singing as provincial. But the Italians, after all, do have a word for it. And then there is Maria Callas (and many other opera singers). Go ahead and listen to Listen link #2 now and take note of her portamento. You may need to listen carefully, because Callas’ portamento is more discreet than Patsy Cline’s.

Listen link #2

Though the musical cognoscenti and Callas fans (of which there are millions) may argue about her portamento, there is no disagreement on her technique. She knew what the destination pitch was and was perfectly capable of landing on that pitch.

If you’re not quite clear what it means to slide from note to note, consider the piano, where no sliding is possible. Strike a key and you’re on pitch. But consider the violin, which has no frets. Violinists can slide from note to note by sliding a finger, but they don’t (except occasionally and intentionally for musical effect).

For an extreme example of a portamento instrument, consider the theramin. The musician has pretty much no choice but to slide from note to note, and the quality of the musician’s ear will determine the accuracy of the destination pitch and the musical quality of the sliding. And a skillful player such as Clara Rockmore can make surprisingly quick transitions from note to note:

Listen link #3.

 

Extra credit: In the Maria Callas video above, note the difference between portamento and the glissando. At 6:09, Callas sings a descending glissando. Note that she doesn’t slide from note to note in the glissando. She hits each individual note, stunningly and on pitch, on the way down.

In the theramin video, note the wavering of the musician’s left hand, which produces vibrato, a kind of trembling of the pitch.

Joan Baez was known for her rapid vibrato. Clearly it wasn’t easy, because as she aged (she is now 80) she lost this vibrato and wisely sings many of her old songs differently.

Bottom line: singers and musicians play with pitch. But it helps if they know what they’re doing.

What ended the Mediterranean civilizations?


The Mediterranean today. Google Earth. Click here for high-resolution version.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Eric H. Cline. Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press, 2021. 278 pages.

Reading about ancient history before the time of the classical Greeks is a challenge. We want a reasonably clear narrative and a good story. But the problem is that we don’t know enough about what happened 3,000 years ago for a clear narrative. All we get is a big mosaic of random pieces, with most of the pieces missing. No clear narrative emerges. But we continue to learn about ancient history, and so quickly, that this book, originally published in 2014, was revised in 2021.

Books from Oxford University Press (and certainly from Princeton as well) can be very dry reading. But the Oxford press in particular has a knack for finding academics who can write for non-academic (though motivated) readers. Eric Cline is a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University. His device for making this book more readable is to treat it as a mystery. That’s fair, because the history of high civilization in the Mediterranean and how it ended is a mystery. The year 1177 B.C. is arbitrary, of course. Cline chose that year because that is the year that Egypt, under the pharaoh Ramses III, was invaded by the “Sea Peoples,” and the long era of Egyptian power came to an end.

The kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean were rich and powerful — Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenaeans, Canaanites, Cypriots. Each kingdom fell, quickly, like dominoes. There followed a dark age, out of which new civilizations arose — Israelites, Aramaeans, Phonenicians, Athenians, Spartans.

Because Cline wrote this book as a mystery, I think I will not get into what he has to say about what caused the collapse, insofar as we even understand what caused the collapse. The pleasure of this book is in becoming interested in the mystery. For a long time, what we knew about this period was learned only through archeology and from the thousands of cuneiform clay tablets that have been found all over the eastern Mediterranean. I had no idea, actually, that so many tablets survived. Many are mundane — inventories, or ships’ manifests. But the rulers of those kingdoms wrote each other lots of letters (on clay tablets), and many of them survive. At least one language has not been deciphered. Other tablets are still being translated and published. In addition to the new material from newly discovered and newly translated clay tablets and the ongoing work in archeology, new types of data are becoming available — DNA studies (from DNA recovered from bones), climate studies, and data on ancient disease pathogens. The history of the ancient Mediterranean is still very much being written.

Clearly some historians including Cline would like for us to know more about ancient history because there are parallels with today’s world that might serve as warnings. That’s fine. But historians are as unlikely to agree on the lessons to be learned as they are to agree on why a civilization fell. Cline makes reference to one historian whose view is that maybe it was a good thing that palace power in the Mediterranean collapsed, leaving room for experiments with different sorts of cultures and governments and a wider (if only slightly) distribution of wealth and power.

As for the warnings, did the ancients have any?:

“Many questions still remain unanswered, however. We do not know whether the various entities (Hittites, Mycenaeans, Egyptians, etc.) knew they were in the midst of a collapse of their society. We do not know whether there were organized efforts to evaluate and remedy the overall evolving situation and look to the future. We do not yet have any indications in the archaeological remains or textual records that anyone at the time was aware of the larger picture.

“And, even if they did know, could the leaders of the individual societies have done anything to slow the spread of decay or to prevent the ultimate collapse? There were certainly individual efforts to counter the effects of famine and drought (e.g., grain ships sent by the Egyptians; possible breeding of drought-resistant cattle and crops in the Levant), but apparently they were for naught. It has been pointed out elsewhere, though, that in virtually all such previous collapses, ‘there were sages or scholars who had a reasonably good understanding of what was happening and how it might be avoided.’ However, ‘If they were listened to at all … their advice was typically followed too little and too late.'” (The quotation inside this quotation is attributed, in the notes, to Thomas D. Hall.)

You will need some good maps while reading this book, and by the time you’ve finished it your Mediterranean geography will be quite good. There are two maps in the book, but they’re not great.


The Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

Testament of Youth

While scouring HBO, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, etc., for those rare items that are both intelligent and not set in the here and now, I came across “Testament of Youth.” It is a beautiful but disturbing period piece about World War I, based on the memoir by Vera Brittain, which was published in 1940.

Brittain’s dream was to go to Oxford. That dream came true, but the war fell hard — very hard — on her generation. After the war she became a pacifist activist.

As much as I wanted to read Testament of Youth, after looking at samples on Amazon I decided not to. Unfortunately she was not an appealing writer.

But, regardless of her style of writing, Brittain’s is a story that deserves to be told and to be remembered. The film, with a fine cast, does a very good job of that. Anglophiles will find much in the film to interest them.

“Testament of Youth” can be streamed from Amazon Prime Video.

Martin Chuzzlewit


Pinch starts homeward with the new pupil. Hablot Knight Brown (also known as Phiz). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In our era, Charles Dickens is neglected and undervalued. Martin Chuzzlewit surely is one of Dickens’ most neglected and undervalued novels. For reasons that I was completely unprepared for, now would be a good time for a Dickens revival, not to mention a Martin Chuzzlewit revival.

The last villain I would have expected to mention in a review of a Charles Dickens novel is Donald John Trump (whose name happens to have a Dickensian ring to it). But it’s not Trump himself who appears in the novel. It’s the red-cap wearing, snuff-dribbling, dumb-as-rocks and in-your-face Trumpists who appear in the novel, fine Americans all.

Wikipedia writes, citing Hesketh Pearson (1949), “Dickens’s scathing satire of American modes and manners in the novel won him no friends on the other side of the Atlantic, where the instalments containing the offending chapters were greeted with a ‘frenzy of wrath.’ As a consequence Dickens received abusive mail and newspaper clippings from the United States.”

Martin Chuzzlewit was published in serial form between 1842 and 1844. Dickens had visited America in 1842. Clearly he had some things he wanted to say about Americans, so, in Chuzzlewit, Dickens has two characters visit America. This visit to America is peripheral to the plots, so clearly it was a device for conveying Dickens’ disgust with the hypocrisy of Americans — or, at least, with the hypocrisy of certain Americans. Americans in Chuzzlewit are always going on about liberty, their own liberty, liberty that they deny to others, up to and including slavery. Two years after the Civil War, in 1867, Dickens returned to America and backpedaled on his criticism, calling it satire (which of course it was).

Maybe Dickens believed in 1867 that Americans, having gone to war because of it, had confonted and corrected themselves on matters of liberty. If that’s what he thought, he would have been wrong. In How the South Won the Civil War, the historian Heather Cox Richardson describes how Southern values — “a rejection of democracy, an embrace of entrenched wealth, the marginalization of women and people of color” — not only lived on but also migrated west, encoded as the myth of the ruggedly independent cowboy. Today’s Trumpists, Richardson shows, are the very same people.

That they are the very same people also is what Dickens shows in Martin Chuzzlewit. It is to be regretted that Dickens ever backpedaled on those insights. There have been times in American history when it might have been possible to imagine that America had changed and turned over a new leaf — for example, July 2, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act; or November 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. Now we know that we might as well say that we are still fighting the battles of the Civil War and that we just came through one of the most dangerous battles since Appomattox.

But enough about Trump and Trumpists, who seem to intrude into everything these days, for the purpose of exercising their liberty to drag everyone down with them (public health and the climate of the planet, for example, not to mention, as always, the tyranny of the rich). One of the reasons I read novels is to escape from all that.

Back in England, if I had to choose one word for what drives Dickens’ novels and motivated Dickens to write them, that word would be character. By that I mean character not in the sense of “Tom Pinch is a character in Martin Chuzzlewit.” Rather, I mean the character of the characters, as in the Oxford definition, “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.” Charles Dickens, I must imagine, quietly studied the character of the people around him, no less than did Sigmund Freud. Dickens obviously did not like much (maybe most) of what he saw. He chose satire as his vehicle. As for Dickens’ lovable characters (Tom Pinch, for example), they are not perfect. During the course of the story they will learn, and by the end of the story they will be changed.

I can think of a dozen reasons for reading Dickens today beyond what I would call Dickens’ “re-relevance,” that is, the fact that, 180 years ago, he came to America and saw straight through us. (Unfortunately, as the arc of justice has moved on, some people never changed.) As I wrote here recently about Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’ style is worth studying for its cinematic qualities. His ability to evoke atmosphere is enormous. The setting, the dialogue, and even the weather will work together to create a powerful scene — for example, the opening scene of Barnaby Rudge inside an English tavern on a dark and stormy night.

In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens spends several pages to take the reader on an absolutely thrilling stage coach ride (on top of the coach) from Salisbury to London. If I were a scholar and had the time, the first paper I’d want to write about Dickens would be a survey of his complete works for what people are eating — scrumptious or revolting as the scene requires, and always beautifully described. Dickens gives as much attention to costumes as to food. There also can be no doubt that, just as Dickens looked around him and was horrified at the ill treatment of human beings, he also was well aware of the suffering of animals, such as the birds in the bird shop in Chuzzlewit and the horses who draw the coaches on those thrilling, and rather dangerous, stage coach rides.

Yes, reading Dickens takes time. His style is not suited to reading fast, and his novels are long. Chuzzlewit is about 770 pages. I realized, while reading Chuzzlewit, that I identify with Dickens. I too look around me and am horrified at how bad and how deluded people can be. It’s easy to be angry. But Dickens never, ever sounds angry. Rather, he makes fun of crummy people. He lets their own words expose them for what they are. And his stories always deliver in the end exactly what his characters deserve. Here we are, 180 years later, still trapped in Dickens’ world with our work cut out for us, a world in which hardly anybody — whether good or bad — gets what they deserve.

Hinge and Bracket

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7KbhGQTak8

George Logan (Dr. Evadne Hinge) is now 77 years old and lives in France. Patrick Fyffe (Dame Hilda Bracket) died in 2002 at age 60. In the 1970s, their musical comedy was extremely popular on British television and stage. They first worked together in 1972 and became famous after they appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974.

What was remarkable about their act was their superb musicality combined with their comic genius. Fyffe’s singing also recalls the extraordinary sound of the castrati singers of centuries past. We will never hear that sound again, but male voices singing falsetto surely come remarkably close. The best such singers (and Fyffe was one of them) can blend their “head voice” (higher notes) and “chest voice” (lower notes) in such a way that the sound is almost like a male voice and female voice singing together.

The Tomorrow War

I admit it. I’m a sucker for movies like this — pure, fast-moving, undemanding, popcorn-friendly entertainment. With that kind of movie, pacing is critical. There have to be times when the characters (and the audience) can stop and catch their breath. “The Tomorrow War” nicely balances the action against a family story, in much the same way as “Greenland.” Both the family drama and the action drama make good use of the time-travel angle.

Paramount Pictures intended this movie for release in theaters, but because of Covid-19, it was released instead on Amazon Prime. It doesn’t score very high on Rotten Tomatoes, but I’d give it at least a 90.

Charles Dickens: Barnaby Rudge


The Maypole Inn

Choosing the next novel to read is a huge pain in the neck. I Google for novels on particular subjects or particular periods, or I pore over book lists, and then I look up the books on Amazon. Sometimes I settle on a novel that looks like it might be a good choice, but when I “look inside” the Kindle edition on Amazon, I quickly see that the author cannot write. I move on.

When stuck between novels, reading a classic is a fallback that rarely fails. I have a Kindle file with the complete works of Dickens. I settled on Barnaby Rudge. I am no stranger to Dickens. I have read David Copperfield at least twice.

Yes, Dickens’ style is a little thick. His characters, especially the wicked ones, usually border on caricature. Important scenes are usually melodramatic. And yet few novelists have ever been able to paint pictures in the mind the way Dickens does. His style, actually, is remarkably cinematic. According to the Wikipedia article on Dickens, in 1944 Sergei Eisenstein wrote an essay on Dickens’ influence on cinema. Dickens may have invented the technique of cross-cutting, in which the narrative shifts back and forth between things that are happening at the same time.

There is a particular reason for reading Barnaby Rudge at present. The novel is about the Gordon Riots of 1780. The similarities between the Gordon Riots of 1780 and the Trumpist insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, are remarkable, so remarkable that I’m surprised not to have come across an article about it. Some things never change, including the sickening religious character and mob-affinity of people who do such things. Lord George Gordon was an odious man, the puritanical head of the Protestant Association, horrified by the idea of Catholics having equal rights. Yep. The mob attacked Parliament.

Even if you are reluctant to take on such a long book (almost 700 pages) and such a dense read, the opening scenes of Barnaby Rudge are worth reading. It is a dark and stormy night, and the story opens inside a country inn ten miles outside of London. Few writers can conjure atmosphere the way Dickens can. Dickens’ Maypole Inn very much reminds me of Tolkien’s Prancing Pony. What could be more cozy and comfortable that an inn in old England (or Scotland, or Ireland) on a dark and stormy night? Another thing about Dickens that I love: When people are eating, he always tells us what.

I don’t really find Dickens’ style of writing archaic. So many novelists, especially today, just can’t write. There is still much to be learned from Dickens about how it’s done.


Charles Dickens in 1852. Source: Wikipedia

Pasta is a piece of cake


Homemade tagliatelle with basil-parsley pesto. The basil, parsley, and lettuce came from my garden. The pesto was made with a mortar and pestle.

When I posted last week about working on my Italian cooking (“A summer project: Italian cooking,” June 2), I was not thinking about pasta — honest. I was thinking about how to make the most of the summer vegetables from my garden.

But as I read more and more of Elizabeth David’s Italian Food, I realized that pasta is part of the deal in Italian cuisine. So I needed a pasta plan — including figuring out how not to eat too much of it.

It was easy to see that a pasta machine would be necessary. I am pretty sure that I will never, ever, be able to make pasta with a rolling pin. So, when I was grocery shopping on Tuesday, I stopped by the Williams Sonoma in Winston-Salem and bought an Imperia (made in Italy!) pasta machine, $80. This is a hand-cranked machine. Williams Sonoma also has attachments for KitchenAid mixers. But the attachments are much more expensive than the hand-cranked machine, and I reasoned that a pasta machine driven by such a high-powered motor would be a very high-powered way to make a very big mess.

With the hand-cranked machine, at least, the mess is much less than I feared. I was afraid of a sticky mess. But instead it was a mere floury mess. If you’re used to handling dough, your second batch of pasta will be excellent. I won’t presume to give any instructions here, because I’m just a novice. But there are many videos on YouTube about how to make pasta at home.

Amazon also has the Imperia machine, for less, naturally, than I paid at Williams Sonoma. It’s a heavy little thing. And it’s entirely practical, not at all a use-it-once kitchen gadget.

I do have one warning. Most recipes for pasta will make an outrageous amount of pasta, enough to feed a family of ten, to require a 40-gallon cauldron for boiling, to keep you turning a crank for half a day, and to run out of places to hang pasta. If you’re cooking for an old-fashioned Catholic family, I understand. But since I cook only for myself and for the possum who makes nightly visits to my backyard, even a one-egg batch of pasta is more than twice as much as I can eat. My possum will eat Italian tonight.

A thought that helped me overcome my resistance to making something as high-calorie as pasta is that pasta skills (and a pasta machine) also will assist with egg dumplings, which would make a fine winter comfort food. Also, the method of making Asian noodles can’t be that different from making Italian pasta.

I’m probably the last California-influenced cook to start making pasta. There are two skills involved, I would say: How to make the pasta (easy); and how not to make too much of it (hard). The real technical challenge with homemade pasta, I would say, is making no more of it than you ought to eat.

The princely hoe


The new hoe

I confess that I ruined my old hoe. I left it out in the weather too often. That weakened the handle, and the handle separated from the blade. The blade fell off while I was hoeing a row of tomatoes. To wear out a hoe would be an honorable thing. But to neglect and abuse a hoe is a crime and a shame that would have shocked our ancestors.

I know better than to leave garden tools outdoors, but I plead guilty to doing it. Wooden handles deteriorate. Blades rust. As I reflected on my cruelty and guilt, hoping that my contrition will ensure that I never harm another hoe, I realized how ancient the hoe must be. The hoe is a kinder blade than the sword and the ax, but no doubt it changed the world just as much.

The Wikipedia article on the hoe describes some of the history. Hoes are mentioned in the Code of Hammurabi, about 1750 B.C. Even today, Third World subsistence farmers with no ploughs get by only with hoes. When there is no iron or steel, wood will do. The Wikipedia article includes a photo of an Egyptian hoe made of wood. The Roman hoes, of course, were made of iron.

In European culture, there can be no doubt that hoes were introduced across Europe in the migrations that brought agriculture, the wheel, the horse, milk animals, and the Indo-European languages. How could I be so thoughtless as to leave out in the rain an instrument so royal? I vow to never treat a hoe with disrespect again. I should be able to salvage the old hoe and put a new handle on it, though replacing handles on hand tools is becoming a lost art.

My new hoe has a fiberglass handle. That was the only kind of hoe the hardware store had. I’ve made a hook in the shed for it to hang from, away from the rain and sun. Fiberglass won’t decay like wood, but it hates ultraviolet from the sun.

One of my favorite gardening books, Gardening When It Counts, emphasizes the importance of keeping hoes sharp. I find that to be true. I use a hoe in the garden not so much for loosening the soil but for cutting weeds. It’s remarkable, really, how efficient hoes are for that. As long as the weeds don’t get out of hand, I can hoe my garden in not much more than 30 minutes.

The new hoe (and probably all new hoes) came with an angle on the blade, but the blade is not truly sharp. I took a file to it. I’ve also ordered a sharpening tool from Amazon that attaches to a drill. The rotary sharpener is made for lawn mower blades, but I’m pretty sure that it will do a good job of sharpening the hoe.

When I was a young’un growing up in the Yadkin Valley of North Carolina, I wasn’t made to work as much as some young’uns were. But I was sometimes made to hoe. I didn’t like it. But I’m glad to have acquired some hoeing skills early in life. And since this post is an obituary for my old hoe, I want to mention that my old hoe never harmed a living thing that wasn’t a weed, not even a snake. Many a hoe, like pitchforks, have been used as weapons.

When I lived in San Francisco, I learned that people who grew up without any farm experience did not even understand the expression “a long row to hoe.” That is sad. I have looked down long, long rows of weedy tobacco on hot summer days.

Rest in peace, old hoe. If I can find a new handle for you, I’ll bring you back and never mistreat you again.