Wem soll ich mein neues gerade mit einem Bimssteinchen aufgeglättetes Büchlein schenken?*

Profiting from the downfall of others: A four-cd set containing all of Berio's works for solo instruments (sequenzae, alternate sequenzae, and pieces not otherwise grouped into, shall we call them, groups) for 30-some dollars?  Thank you, Tower Records!  (I also got some stuff by Toru Takemitsu, a piece by Kyle Gann, Die Winterreise, and Das Lied von der Erde with contributions by the grande dame of Lieder, Fischer-Dieskau—I tried but failed to remember this guy's name—and then later today I listened to Uri Caine's first Mahler album with a piece from DLvdE sung cantor-wise and it was great.)  I am slightly concerned that my impression of Berio has been colored by my intial exposure to him's having been extremely viola-centric, an instrument whose charms please me in the strictly Kantian sense.  Alex Ross asked, prompted by Tower's fall (first person ever to make that joke right here!  Now with extra reflection on its possible post–everything's changed impropriety!), why Manhattan can't have a good independent record store.  (Actually he asks why NYC can't have one, and then slides right into considering Manhattan rents.  Classy.)  But this is absurd, since both Other Music and the Downtown Music Gallery are in Manhattan, and the latter even has a classical section.  I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere in Brooklyn, wherever that is, there's at least one other decent independent store.

Shocking but true: I am down with Friedrich Schlegel.  Feast your eyes on some Athanæum Fragments:

32. One should have wit, but not want to have it.  Otherwise, you get persiflage, the Alexandrian style of wit.

53.  It's equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none.  It will simply have to decide to combine the two.

Too right.  Others of the fragments are positively Lichtenbergian, which does him no harm at all in my estimation.  Both of these above, it seems to me, say more or less the same thing; if only there were appended to the second one the sentence "Thus, you're fucked.", it would lack nothing.

* It turns out that I have badly misremembered how this line actually goes, but I leave the title as it stands as a testament to the creative element in memory.  Also, I have no idea if "aufglätten", which doesn't seem to be a word, can mean something like "polish up"; I always want to use "auf" to turn a verb into its up-form, but I really don't know if that's the done thing.  Though one of the entries for "auf" as a prefix in my word book suggests it might at least be comprehensible: "drückt aus, dass j-d/etw. in den Zustand gebracht wird od. kommt, den das Adjektive bezeichnet, von dem das Verb abgeleitet ist".

Comments

[Matt Weiner]

why Manhattan can't have a good independent record store

Jeebus. Guy needs to be rusticated so he can appreciate what he has. Lubbock doesn't have a good record store of any kind. I wouldn't be surprised if the nearest decent record store is about as far away as the nearest arthouse cinema or competitive congressional election, viz. over 300 miles.

["sprezzatura"]

I think I like this Schlegel.