A Meme of Seven Esses

Favorite Song: (at the moment) Douglas Hein: Orlando, He Dead.

Favorite Sonata: Mozart No. 15 in F major, KV 533/494.

Favorite Symphony: Ives Fourth Symphony.

Favorite Sandwich: Monte Christo.

Favorite Story: "Byron the Bulb" (from Gravity's Rainbow.)

Favorite Sound: Snowfall.

Favorite Season: Fall.

Who's next?

Three

Reorganizing bookshelves has been an excellent opportunity to ponder the suitability of this volume or that for operatic treatment. Some books are obvious, no brainers even, as opera subjects... any one of the short novels of Ronald Firbank, for example, or one of those totally fake chapters from The Travels of Marco Polo, or Nicholson Baker's Vox, which has Menotti's The Telephone beat in every possible way (so to speak). But more interesting possibilities are definitely to be found in those books which are less obviously opera material: how about Henry Petroski's The Book on the Bookshelf, a history of, well, bookshelves, or a 1968 copy of the Wolf Cub Scout Handbook, or Nabokov's Pale Fire?

Which comes to

THE VERY DIFFICULT LIBRETTO MEME:

Name three books that would make very difficult subjects for an opera libretto which you'd nevertheless like to see and hear on stage:

(1) James D. McCawley's The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters. ("The purpose of this book is to enable non-Chinese who enjoy Chinese food to better exploit Chinese restaurants."*)

(2) The Earthly Delights chapter from Luis Buñuel's memoir, My Last Breath. No, strike that, this is better: Robert Bresson: Notes on the Cinematographer.

(3) Walter Abish's Alphabetical Africa. (A novel in 52 chapters, the first of which uses only words beginning with "a", with each following chapter adding words beginning with the next letters of the alphabet until the 26th chapter has words available beginning with all 26 letters, and then reversing the pattern over the remaining 26 chapters.)

Your turn, now.
_____
*I had to include a food-related text, but Baker's The Gentleman's Companion, the obvious choice, is just not difficult enough; I also considered The Joys of Jello, an interesting feminist document, and the brutalist The Roadkill Cookbook, rejecting both for lack of opera-plot-level conflict.

Twice-tagged

This is for Paul Bailey and Steve Hicken, who know why:

The Captain, a stranger, now enters with Arlecchino. He says he has come from Spain to find his brother, married to a woman in Rome these many years. They knock at the door of the inn.

Tagged by the dog

Matthew Guerrieri has tagged me with the following meme seeking five blogs that "make you think":

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the 'Thinking Blogger Award' with a link to the post that you wrote.

In his tag, he expects me to seed the classical blog world, a large expectation given the superb but small audience here. But I'm game, and will stick to music blogs, although it's hard not to mention Crooked Timber, Ron Silliman's poetry and poetics blog, Debra Solomon's margins-of-the-edible culiblog, or SFMike's Civic Center (a photo blog of one of my favorite cities), all blogs outside the music world that somehow do wonders for my thinking about music (and then there are all those classics and anthopology blogs...). But Matthew wants seed capital among the music blogs, and the bloggers that get me thinking most are usually those whose work is most different from my own, so my list includes not a single blog from my own blogroll. Here goes, five thought-provoking blogs:

I'm obliged to include Sound & Fury, a blog by A.C. Douglas, with whom I agree on next-to-nothing (i.e. he's a perfect wagnerite, I'm the wagnerite who thinks Richy took a wrong turn after Die Feen). But heck, nothing clears up your own viewpoint better than a healthy disagreement among curmudgeons.

A View From the Podium is conductor Kenneth Woods' blog. It's specially interesting when he discusses repertoire that he's currently preparing

Nico Muhly, a composer who has an admirably anxiety-free way with connecting to musical worlds both older and more pop than our own.

Mixed Meters, by David Ocker, a recovered virtuoso with some real insight into the musical politics that too often gets in the way of making music.

Darcy James Argue blogs about a new music world parallel to my own, and he's also a pynchonite, which is a fine thing.