Category: Blog Post

quiet in the house

Fred Hersch, July 31

These past several months, the Village Vanguard (among other struggling venues in New York) has been performing concerts to an empty house—empty, that is, aside from the camera crews piping sight and sound to our living room routers. As in so many other dimensions of our Covid-inflected lives, the computer screen has become our best substitute for an increasingly distant “real world.” Packing dozens of chattering night-owls into a tiny Seventh Avenue basement now seems epidemiologically horrifying, so at least for the time being it looks like I’ll be meeting the Vanguard drink minimum with whatever I find in my fridge.

Bill Frisell, Thomas Morgan, Rudy Royston, August 7

Even if we’d gladly trade this and that (and that and that) to get back to our Vanguards and Mezzrows, there have been, I’ll admit, a couple perks to the Zoomified jazz experience. Aside from the ease of taking these historic, bemasked screengrabs—I still find them spellbinding—the empty house lets those final chords and cymbal crashes linger, never drowned out by eager applause. And the cameras, attentive to each instrument, sometimes give otherwise-impossible glimpses of the musicianship on stage. Overhead shots of Bill Charlap’s fingers, for example, or close-ups of Rudy Royston brushing a snare drum.

Drew Gress, Joechen Ruckert, July 31

Still there’s the unshakeable awkwardness and even sadness of playing to an audience of wall hangings and stacked chairs. Sometimes that comes across through poignant set lists—you’ll likely hear something like Fred Hersch’s “Wichita Lineman” or Bill Charlap’s “Here’s That Rainy Day.” Technologically and even musically, I think, these Vanguard live streams capture so much of our nation’s pandemic psychology. They’re absolutely worth your weekend evenings.

Bill Charlap, September 11

opinionization and the hybrid classroom

I was so glad to have an opportunity to write a review of Zena Hitz’s insightful and often lyrical book Lost in Thought for Commonweal (also featured today at Arts & Letters Daily). A member of the faculty at St. John’s College, Hitz offers a plausible diagnosis of some anti-intellectual trends in American higher education, but her book is especially fascinating to read as a precaution against some of the pandemic-related pitfalls awaiting our classrooms this fall. Chiefly, she worries about “opinionization,” a phenomenon she defines as “the reduction of thinking and perception to simple slogans or prefabricated positions,” and I suggest that the scalability of our universities’ technological adaptations will catalyze such adulterated intellectualism:

This kind of mental necrosis has its own underlying causes: like our worst politicians, it’s a symptom more than the disease itself. For Hitz, genuine intellectual work depends upon intimate settings, forthright conversation, and modest-sized “communion.” Thoughtless opinionization, by contrast, stems from our “system of higher education [where] person-to-person teaching belongs only to a handful of liberal arts colleges and to elite doctoral programs.” Hitz, whose background is in ancient philosophy, perhaps takes inspiration here from the observation, in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, that a small-scale setting like a courtroom or seminar table is a precondition for nuanced inquiry. Lecture-hall ostentation—domain of the pundit and the PowerPoint presentation—might make for an entertaining spectacle, but it’s antithetical to real intellectual activity.

Visit Commonweal to read the rest of the review.

laws of planetary motion

TLL vol. X 1, 2309, 37–45

I’ve written a brief reflection for Commonweal on the philological landscape of infectious disease, focusing on how the ancient Latin word planeta could denote both a planet in the sky and an illness in the body:

Derived from the verb “to wander,” the original Greek noun πλάνης was applied to more than just Mars and Saturn—in Euripides’s Bacchae, to take just one example, it refers to a “vagabond” who comes to town. Among the physicians of the ancient world, including Hippocrates himself, πλάνης could also mean “fever,” a pestilence that migrates from person to person. The Romans, of course, had their own words for disease—morbus, pestis—but they adopted this astronomical language in their own medical writings too, using the Latin cognate. In one account, planeta refers to a fever with an “unrestrained onset.” In another, planetae are those illnesses that obey neither finite duration nor predictable prognosis.

If we’re surprised by this strange metaphorical pairing, I imagine that future lexicographers “will marvel at the state of language in 2020, when ‘virality’ could simultaneously denote ironic meme culture and a global medical panic.” A tweet, after all, is not a plague, just as Saturn is not a fever.

Head over to Commonweal to read the rest.