Save the Words

For just 30 second a day, you too can save some words in the English language.  Listen to them cry out for attention at this website.

Karajan and the big box set

In a comment to my post on that the live Mackerras Beethoven symphony cycle, Kevin Edgecomb mentions that he has a special fondness for the recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto with Karajan and Alexis Weissenberg.

Kevin and everyone who loves Karajan is luck.  Last year was Karajan’s 100th anniversary, and all of the big record companies have obliged with huge, relatively inexpensive collections of Karajan recordings.

EMI has released the most ambitious projects with an extensive web site, two massive box sets, and an audio documentary entitled Remembering Karajan.

• Complete EMI Recordings (Orchestral), 88CDs (track listing).  This is the set that contains Kevin’s favorite recording.  It is available for $148 from Amazon and £81 from Amazon UK.
  
• Complete EMI Recordings (Operatic and Vocal), 72 CDs (track listing).  It is available for $130 from Amazon and £90 from Amazon UK.
  
• Legendary Decca Recordings, 9 CDS.  This contains the complete orchestral recordings with the Vienna Philharmonic, including the version of Strauss’s Thus Spake Zarathustra used in Kubrick’s 2001 A Space Odyssey.  It does not include the many outstanding operas that Karajan recorded with Decca, including the version of Die Fledermaus with the amazing gala scene.  The Decca box set is available for $72 from Amazon and £31 from Amazon UK.
  
• Deutsche Grammophon Karajan Symphony Edition, 38 CDs.  Deutsche Grammophon is the label most closely associated with Karajan, and this is their big release (albeit, a limited edition).  Mostly 1970s recordings:  Beethoven symphonies 1-9 and selected overtures; Brahms symphonies 1-4, Tragic Overture, Haydn Variations; Bruckner symphonies 1-9; Haydn (“London” and “Paris”) symphonies 82-87, 93-104; Mendelssohn symphonies 1-5; Mozart symphonies 33, 35-41; Schumann symphonies 1-4; Tchaikovsky symphonies 1-6.  It is available for $90 from Amazon and apparently out of print in the UK.
  
• Deutsche Grammophon Karajan Master Recordings, 10 CDs.  See the Amazon description for details.  It is available for $120 from Amazon and £68 from Amazon UK.
  
• Deutsche Grammophon Complete Recordings of Mutter and Karajan, 5CDs.  The complete recordings with Karajan’s leading protégé.  This should definitely be purchased from the UK, it is $126 (!!) from Amazon but only £25 from Amazon UK.

Clearly, the super-bargains here are the (soon-to-be-out-of-print) DG Symphony Edition and the EMI “everything” box sets.  I think even Karajan detractors might enjoy these sets.

There is quite a wealth of super-classical box sets available now, but I must mention (because I think it will be out of print soon) the amazing Stravinsky 22 CD box set or conductor-supervised recordings for a mere £18 from Amazon UK.

A futuristic idea from 1981: newspapers on your PC

Here is a news segment from a local San Francisco television station suggesting what might be a wild idea at the time – making newspapers available to home PC users.  As the New York Times painfully notes, “the best part comes about one minute into the clip, when one of the Examiner’s editors explains that the paper is ‘not in this to make money.’ ”

The World’s Smallest Grand Piano

Better sound than you might expect.

J. D. Trout – do as I say

This brief interview with Loyola social philosopher J. D. Trout simply stuns me with its unintentional humor – such as suggesting that giving a child music lessons is equivalent to the (apocryphal) Roman decadent “vomitoriums” or in its revelation at the end that he has not spoken with his brother in six years.

Books on my Amazon pre-order list

Here are the latest four books on my Amazon pre-order list.  I can’t claim they are reviews – after all, the books have not even been published yet, but they look sufficiently promising for me to commit my credit card number:

The Book of Dead Philosophers – this purports to be a set of brief accounts of about 200 philosophers’ lives and deaths.  It is compiled by a well-known philosopher, Simon Critchley, Philosophy Chair at the New School and the Chief Philosopher of the whimsical International Necronautical Society.  There are page previews available at Amazon of the British edition and they had me laughing out loud.  (Note:  after I pre-ordered this, I came across this favorable article.)

The Third Mind: American Artists Contemplate Asia, 1860-1989 – this is the catalogue of the just opened art show at the New York Guggenheim (a show that I will be seeing soon.)  Here are some sections from a New York Times review (that is written in an atrociously informal style – since when did the Times allow writers to use “for sure” in the first sentence of one of their pieces?):  “The first thing you see is a 1970 piece by the West Coast conceptualist Paul Kos: a circle of microphones clustered around a block of melting ice, picking up the sound of every crack and drip. Up the ramp is the famous ink and brush painting of a circle, triangle and square by Sengai Gibon (1750-1837). It’s a Zen Mona Lisa, on a rare loan from Japan.  And just beyond that is The Death of James Lee Byars: an open-front box, a kind of teahouse as wide as a two-car garage, lined with blazing gold leaf, with a bierlike platform inside. Mr. Byars, an American Buddhist dandy, long resident in Japan, made the piece when he was very much alive and sometimes lay on the bier ‘practicing death.’  Now that he’s gone – he died in 1997 – five small crystals take his place. The show finds the museum unusually full of sounds, however faint. Bells held in a kind of cage periodically sail down the spiral and ring. Synthesizers drone and vibrate away somewhere, and an amplified buzzing of bees has, when you get close, the roar of fighter planes.  Periodically parcels of books descend by pulley from on high, as part of an elaborate – overly elaborate – installation by Ann Hamilton. Lights flash in the dark; paintings all but disappear into walls.”  The catalogue should arrive from Amazon just before I leave on my trip, so I can study up in advance.

Blank Spots on a Map:  the Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World – so this is a bit of a ringer – I know the author Trevor Paglen.  Trevor is a graduate student in geography and an artist specializing in trying to understand US intelligence efforts.  He conducts tours of secret military sites and is interested in mapping out the “black world.”  He took photographs and co-authored one of the most amazing travel books of all time, Torture Taxi, on the CIA’s extraordinary rendition program, and collected the mysterious shoulder patches (think merit badges for the military) of a number of US intelligence missions in I Could Tell You But Then I Would Have To Be Destroyed By Me.  Steven Aftergood has some strong opinions about this new book by Trevor, and Steven reports that it focuses a great deal on “[the] Groom Lake facility in Nevada, secret prisons in Afghanistan, secret satellite constellations in orbit, secret contractor locations around Washington, DC, and elsewhere.”  This should be out in two weeks from Amazon.

The NRSV Notetaker’s Bible – J. Mark Bertrand calls wide-margin Bibles “the thinking man’s study Bible.” Rick Mansfield says “I feel like I haven't really used a Bible if I haven't written in it.”  There is no doubt about it – wide-margin Bibles are a delight, whether for taking notes or making doodles.  Thanks in part to energetic support from those two writers, a number of publishers are releasing wide-margin Bibles.  If you read Hebrew, one of the best is this beauty, which I heartily recommend.  If you read the Bible in English you have a number of choices, but it is exciting news that the closest thing we have to a “universal English translation”, the celebrated New Revised Standard Version, is coming out in two editions (regular and deluxe).  The deluxe cloth edition looks especially thick and useful.  Sample pages posted on the Internet look great.

The new hot spot for Jewish studies?

Jerry Falwell’s college, Liberty University, reportedly has plans to open a Judaic Studies program.  Randall Price has been appointed as executive director of the new Center for Judaic Studies.

In one of his first acts as the new Judaic Studies director, Price reportedly plans an excavation in Turkey to find Noah’s Ark.

Reasons to finish that dissertation

A new research report seems to suggest that social science doctorates who finish their degree earlier are more likely to land tenure-track jobs (perhaps not so easy this year, though!)  Inside Higher Ed reports “Those doing the hiring view “time to degree” (fairly or not) as an indicator of quality. . . . The findings can suggest inappropriate considerations (favoring younger candidates) or skepticism about whether someone taking a long time to finish a dissertation may also take a long time to finish a first book or other research projects. . . . Other findings from the new analysis support the idea that graduate programs need to spend more time on helping graduate students prepare for their careers — not just their dissertation defenses. In surveys of Ph.D.’s wherein they evaluate their programs, those who finished doctorates sooner than others were more likely to give “excellent” rankings to both their mentoring and training and also to “professionalization” activities, which include programs to prepare graduate students for careers (both finding jobs and being socialized into academic life).”

The clumsy pope-academic

Joseph Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, came to the papacy with strong academic credentials, having been a faculty member at Bonn, Münster, Tübingen (together with Hans Küng), and Regensburg for nearly two decades, a participant in Vatican II, and for 24 years the chief doctrinal officer of the Vatican as in his role as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.

Yet, for all of his academic brilliance, the Pope and his Vatican administration seem to lack common sense when it comes to inter-religious relations.  The first disaster was at Regensburg, with the Pope delivered a speech that offended Muslims around the world by quoting the “erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus” as saying “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.” 

The Pope attempted an inadequate healing by moderating the quote with this footnote in the published speech:  “In the Muslim world, this quotation has unfortunately been taken as an expression of my personal position, thus arousing understandable indignation. I hope that the reader of my text can see immediately that this sentence does not express my personal view of the Qur’an, for which I have the respect due to the holy book of a great religion. In quoting the text of the Emperor Manuel II, I intended solely to draw out the essential relationship between faith and reason. On this point I am in agreement with Manuel II, but without endorsing his polemic.” If you are a Muslim, would that paragraph reassure you?

The latest blunder by the Pope, of course, was his lifting of the excommunication on the far-right SSPX bishops, including Richard Williamson, who had just before denied the existence of the Holocaust on Swedish television.  The Vatican expressed surprise at at claimed to be ignorant of Williamson’s rampant anti-Semitism – but this seems to be a dubious claim at best.  A simple Google search would have turned up evidence.  As National Catholic Reporter columnist John Allen wrote in his personal blog: 

I take at face value the assurances of Vatican officials that they were unaware of Williamson's interview, but they hardly needed Swedish television to alert them that something was amiss. In 1989, Williamson narrowly escaped prosecution in Canada for praising the writings of Ernst Zundel, a German-born Canadian immigrant whose works include The Hitler We Loved and Why and Did Six Million Really Die?, both mainstays of Holocaust denial literature. All this was documented in press coverage at the time. In 1991, Williamson published an open letter referring to “the false messianic vocation of Jewish world-dominion, to prepare the Anti-Christ's throne in Jerusalem.” In 2000, Williamson went on record asserting that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion are legitimate. His reputation was so well-known that in 2008, Shimon Samuels, director of international relations at the Simon Weisenthal Center, told the Catholic Herald in England that Williamson is “the Borat of the schismatic Catholic far-right.”

The Vatican quickly arranged for an apology from the head of the SSPX:

The containment strategy this time featured a Jan. 27 apology from Bishop Bernard Fellay, superior of the traditionalist Fraternity of St. Pius X, for the incendiary comments of Bishop Richard Williamson, who denied in an interview with Swedish television that the Nazis used gas chambers and asserted that no more than 300,000 Jews were killed in World War II. In a statement released by the Vatican, Fellay also said that Williamson has been barred from further comment on political or historical subjects.

but this apology really skirts the depths of anti-Semitism in the SSPX:

It would be equally misleading to style Williamson as a “lone gunman,” an isolated crank with no connection to broader currents of thought in the traditionalist world.  The folly of that view was illustrated on Thursday by Fr. Floriano Abrahamowicz, a well-known priest of the Society of St. Pius X in northeastern Italy, who gave an interview to an Italian paper in which he defended Williamson. Abrahamowicz said he wasn't sure that gas chambers had been used by the Nazis for anything other than “disinfection,” seemed to cast doubt on the number of six million Jews killed, complained that the Holocaust has been exalted by Jews at the expense of other acts of genocide, and called the Jews a “people of deicide,” referring to the death of Christ.

The fact that Abrahamowicz would voice these sentiments even after Fellay had apologized, and after Fellay insisted that the Society of St. Pius X has no competence to speak on anything other than faith and morals, illustrates how deeply entrenched they are in some quarters of traditionalist Catholicism. . . .

Meanwhile, Fr. Pierpaolo Petrucci, a prior within the Society of St. Pius X, told reporters on Thursday that traditionalists still believe that many aspects of Vatican II “contradict the teaching of previous popes.” In particular, Petrucci said the Lefebvrites [SSPX members] remain “scandalized” by Pope Benedict XVI's 2006 trip to Turkey, in which the pope paused for a moment of silent prayer in the Blue Mosque alongside the Grand Mufti of Istanbul. Petrucci said that popes before Vatican II had rejected inter-religious relations as a matter of principle, implying that Benedict XVI (like John Paul before him) is some sort of apostate.

In the wake of all this, the leadership of the Society of St. Pius X in Italy has canceled an upcoming national meeting, in order to avoid “further polemics and confusion.” Translation: the leadership wasn't sure it could keep a lid on what might be said on the floor of the meeting, or around the edges.

What recent events make clear is that there are two camps in the small universe that rotates around the Society of St. Pius X. The first, represented by Fellay, is composed of traditionalists whose concerns are solely liturgical and doctrinal, and who see the future of their movement as a leaven within the formal structures of the church; the second, represented by Williamson and Abrahamowicz, includes people for whom theological traditionalism bleeds off into far-right politics, xenophobia, and conspiracy theories, and who are far more suspicious of any “deal” with the post-conciliar church.

While prominent American bishops and priests have been cowed into silence, Vienna Cardinal Christoph Schönborn has spoken out:  “Hier ist offensichtlich ein Fehler passiert. Jemand, der den Holocaust, die Schoah leugnet, kann nicht in einem kirchlichen Amt rehabilitiert werden. Hier muss man auch eine gewisse Kritik an vatikanischen Mitarbeitern üben, die offensichtlich nicht genügend hingeschaut haben oder die in der Information sich nicht ausreichend die Sachen angeschaut haben.”  (“A mistake has obviously been made here.  Someone who denies the Holocaust, who denies the Shoah, cannot be restored to an office in the Church.  Here there must also be a criticism of the Vatican, which obviously did not research the matter or did not sufficiently examine the information that they had.”)

These constant missteps by the Pope threaten to characterize his papacy as a period in which the Catholic Church managed to antagonize much of the non-Catholic world – a step not into greater spirituality, but into greater conflict – ultimately marginalizing the moral influence of Rome to speak on matters that are not purely internal to the Catholic Church.  (See also Tzvee’s conclusion:  “this sordid affair . . . will bring down the papacy of Benedict XVI into ruin.”)

Hiring a hit man – a Talmudic analysis

Who bears religious responsibility for a murder via a hit man:  the hired man or the person who hires him?  What sort of guilt does the person who hires a hit man bear?  This is a fascinating example of Jewish analysis of religious law, and if you are interested in how Jewish analysis of religious law works, here is a shiur (lecture) by Rabbi Michael Taubes (from January 17) that you may enjoy.  It is full of excitement, as the audience challenges him.  While this is not exactly your typical sermon, it is quite interesting.  I think this is a wonderful introduction to how Talmudic analysis of Jewish law works.

(Of course, fortunately, in our secular legal system, someone who hires a hit man is fully liable, as a former Reform rabbi, Fred Neulander, discovered when he hired a hit man to murder his wife.  Neulander is currently serving a thirty year to life sentence in the New Jersey State Prison in Trenton.)