Category: Blog Post

jahresrückblick

Ed Lefkowicz, BAM

It’s the season for best-of lists, but for this and that reason I wasn’t able to put together a new version of Lecta Delecta, my annual collection of the “best ancient literature of the year.” (My friend Patrick Burns at NYU/ISAW is carrying on the tradition — scope it out at his site.) In lieu of oddball Latin, here’s some of my favorite music from 2016:

  • Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society, Real Enemies
    As one review points out, Real Enemies was imagined some time before this November’s presidential election, and it doesn’t have an overt political agenda, but it’s a fitting soundtrack as the credits roll on 2016: the album explores “the broader themes of cultural paranoia and false truth.” Regardless of these topical considerations, Argue’s mish-mash of jazz, electronic sampling, and symphonic modernism is solid from start to finish.

  • Kadhja Bonet, The Visitor
    I think I originally found Bonet’s album through NPR, which has covered it a couple times. She’s a striking vocalist, and her classical training as a violinist shows in the strings that she incorporates throughout the album. It’s hard to pin down the decade that this album could fit in, a good sign of its freshness.

  • Isabelle Faust, Il Giardino Armonico, and Giovanni Antonini, Mozart: Violin Concertos
    I love Isabelle Faust’s violin performances, and her collaboration with Alexander Melnikov on Beethoven’s Sonatas for Violin and Piano remains a favorite classical album from the past several years. Mozart isn’t normally my composer of choice, to be honest, but the playing here on period instruments is top-notch.

  • Johnnie Frierson, Have You Been Good to Yourself
    Found in a thrift store, Frierson’s Have You Been Good to Yourself is a lo-fi, immediate picture of the American South. It’s a reminder of my former life in rural Arkansas and all its characters — in Frierson’s Memphis, for instance, we find a “Space Man” who performs the everyday miracles of auto shop work.

  • Fred Hersch, Sunday Night at the Vanguard
    Another great jazz album, from Evans-style ballads like “For No One” to more erratic tracks like “We See.” Hersch’s own “Valentine,” played as an encore for this recording, has the lyricism of a melancholic Christmas standard and perhaps is an appropriate final track for the year.

Post Scriptum: This year I also unearthed some older gems: German music from early 20th-century cinema, including works by Friedrich Holländer and Robert Stolz, and this 1979 new wave from Japan. Not new, still great.

December 27, 2016

New Essay at Commonweal: Review of Seamus Heaney’s Aeneid Book VI

My review of Seamus Heaney’s translation of the Aeneid‘s sixth book is out in the January 6 issue of Commonweal Magazine. Heaney died three years before the publication of the volume, which fittingly narrates Aeneas’ descent into the underworld to visit his dead father. Head over to Commonweal for more on Heaney’s Anglo-Saxon version of Rome’s imperial epic.

December 19, 2016

word-search aesthetics

optantianusdetail

We don’t know all too much about Publilius Optatianus Porfyrius. But he’s one of the more striking authors I’ve come across this year in my work at the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae.

Written under Constantine, Porfyrius’ poems conform in some sense to standard aesthetics of ancient poetry. You’ll find regular meter and allusions to canonical authors. But Porfyrius also displays a playful virtuosity in these poems, creating figures—abstract shapes and sometimes even whole words—that are hidden within his texts. Above, you’ll see sunt quoque diagonally positioned within a grid of hexameter lines (in this poem, 37 lines each with 37 characters). By writing Christus Salvator in the first line and consilium virtus in the second (and so on), Porfyrius spells out these “word-search” Easter Eggs throughout his works:

rabanus_maurus_in_honorem_sanctae_-_btv1b849006693

rabanus_maurus_in_honorem_sanctae_-_btv1b849006692

(You can find these poems and more from Porfyrius in Rabanus Maurus, In honorem sanctae Crucis [De laudibus sanctae Crucis], held at Bibliothèque nationale de France.)

Perhaps this Porfyrius material doesn’t amount to much more than literary showmanship, but it also directs readers of ancient poetry toward an aesthetic beyond, say, intertextuality. I’m certainly not the first to think about these visual elements. To take some recent examples: my friend Mathias Hanses wrote about acrostics in Aratus, and John Schafer is doing incredibly interesting work on poetry on the page. (I saw Schafer present on this topic at Joe Howley and Stefanie Frampton’s excellent conference on ancient bibliography last year.)

December 7, 2016