To find there but the road back home again

[sovay]

And then last night I slept ten hours. I hope I haven't broken something. Have some links.

1. Courtesy of a friend who is not on Dreamwidth: Unleash the Archers, "Northwest Passage." Otherwise known as a female-led power metal cover of Canada's unofficial national anthem, wherein Stan Rogers is surprisingly well served by blast beats. I kind of want to hear them take on "Barrett's Privateers." I like the many-worlds band-tour video, too.

2. I knew of several female scientists of the Manhattan Project, but somehow I had missed Elizabeth Rona until her insistence on buying her own PPE—and surviving more than one radioactive laboratory explosion because of it—came up relevantly elsenet. I'd love to get hold of her professional memoir, but I suspect that was a project for the days when I had access to academic libraries.

3. Courtesy of moon_custafer: an important PSA about left-wing anti-intellectualism. Includes a nice recommendation for an Egyptology blog.

4. To be honest, since he had been involved in the premieres of Benjamin Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream (1960) and War Requiem (1961), I had no idea until his obituary that harpist Osian Ellis had still been around, but I was absolutely delighted to learn he had also played for The Goon Show (1951–60).

5. Courtesy of spatch: regarding the death of Rush Limbaugh, it's time once again for these valuable words.

Comments

[ashlyme]

*I bet there'd be an audience for it if you did, too.*

I know enough metalheads who might be game for it!

Thank you so much for discussing Britten - everything you've said here suggests I'll love him, so I'll see what I can find on CD. Please do expound on other favourites too, as much as you like. I would probably fall in absolute *love* with "The Lighthouse".

(Also, my God, "A Vixen When She Went To School" is *fantastic*.)

[selkie]

I am here to also recommend Peter Grimes, the only Britten I know besides some liturgical stuff and the War Requiem. I am honor bound to tell you Menotti is creepy as shit hell fuck and goddamn, and entirely the reason I thought S was not of the living for the first two weeks or so of our acquaintance.

[sovay]

I am honor bound to tell you Menotti is creepy as shit hell fuck and goddamn, and entirely the reason I thought S was not of the living for the first two weeks or so of our acquaintance.

I can't believe I don't have a recording of myself singing "The Black Swan." This would be the perfect conversation to drop it into and innocently walk away.

[selkie]

Gyargh.

I should clarify, that's not a critique of the performance. I just haven't heard you sound so like a residual haunting looped into itself since then. I can't say whether one ought to blame the industrial plumbing or the score.

Edit: I couldn't sniff it out, either! I was starting to doubt myself! A residual haunting in a collective living space within a hundred-eighty feet of me! The shame.

[ashlyme]

*Menotti is creepy as shit hell fuck and goddamn, and entirely the reason I thought S was not of the living for the first two weeks or so of our acquaintance.*

You do know you're both selling this to me right? My own theory is that Sovay is a sea-fae.

*I can't believe I don't have a recording of myself singing "The Black Swan." This would be the perfect conversation to drop it into and innocently walk away.*

Damn! I've heard you read, but never sing. Are there any recordings of you performing that you can point me at?

[selkie]

I don't say a damn thing, but they are 98% human by my rough calculation. Possibly it teeters around 97% in immediate proximity to saltwater. Nope. I don't say a thing.

[sovay]

Thank you so much for discussing Britten - everything you've said here suggests I'll love him, so I'll see what I can find on CD.

You're welcome! I went looking to see if I could find a good recording of the "Sea Interludes" from Peter Grimes which are sometimes performed as a separate suite and found them courtesy of André Previn, who thanks to the Muppets I always think of as "Andrew Preview": "On the beach (Dawn)," "Sunday morning by the beach," "Moonlight," and "Storm," which should give you some flavor of Britten's sea-writing. And here's "Now the Great Bear and Pleiades," the signature aria of Peter Grimes after he blows into the unwelcoming pub at the height of the storm, looking like a drowned man dreaming:

"Now the Great Bear and Pleiades where earth moves
Are drawing up the clouds of human grief
Breathing solemnity in the deep night.
Who can decipher in storm or starlight
The written character of a friendly fate—
As the sky turns, the world for us to change?
But if the horoscope's bewildering,
Like a flashing turmoil of a shoal of herring,
Who can turn skies back and begin again?"

Please do expound on other favourites too, as much as you like.

All right! The Medium is a claustrophobic weird tale whose inciting event is a séance where the boundaries between children's games and bereaved belief and a charlatan's drunken paranoia collapse suddenly with the cold brush of a hand in the dark; it was filmed in 1951 in the full noir-expressionist style with Marie Powers and Anna Maria Alberghetti and is just about the only opera I would set up against the strange stories of Robert Aickman. For years my standard audition aria was "The Black Swan," a murder ballad performed as a lullaby where the sun bleeds out and a sleepless, weed-mouthed lover roams the restless river bed. The Consul is a Kafkaesque fever nightmare of bureaucracy, where a husband can disappear without a trace into a paper trail and the same fading figures have haunted the waiting room for years and even a magician can produce anything out of his pockets—cards, flowers, doves—but the papers he needs to get out of this country tightening like a rope around all their necks. A televised production was recorded in 1960 with Patricia Neway and I have never seen it in full, but I was chilled and thrilled when its famous aria turned up on YouTube:

"To this we've come:
that men withhold the world from men.
No ship nor shore for him who drowns at sea.
No home nor grave for him who dies on land.
To this we've come:
that man be born a stranger upon God's earth,
that he be chosen without a chance for choice,
that he be hunted without the hope of refuge.
To this we've come:
and you, you, too, shall weep.
If to them, not to God, we now must pray,
tell me, Secretary, tell me,
who are these men?
If to them, not to God, we must pray,
tell me, Secretary, tell me!
Who are these dark archangels?
Will they be conquered? Will they be doomed?
Is there one—anyone behind those doors
to whom the heart can still be explained?
Is there one—anyone who still may care?
Tell me, Secretary, tell me!
Have you ever seen the Consul?"

It got into my poem "Acceptable Documentation." Susannah is an Appalachian murder ballad with roots in the apocrypha of Susanna and the Elders; I fell in love with it in college thanks to the 1962 recording with Phyllis Curtin and Norman Treigle and then had the joy of finally seeing it performed by the BU Theatre in 2010 with a pre-show talk by Curtin and Floyd, which is how I learned that the composer had grown up in the holler country he depicts, where a woman who lives by herself and a traveling preacher man can be on a one-way collision to Hell, just not the way anyone in town whispers. I used to perform its soprano arias "The Trees on the Mountain" and "Ain't It a Pretty Night?" Every time people refer to opera as some kind of reactionary and fossilized art form, I can point to any of these and cough meaningfully.

I would probably fall in absolute *love* with "The Lighthouse".

I wish I could get you a time machine to the performance I saw. I wanted the BLO to make a recording, but I don't think they had the rights to. Davies was openly queer and lived in the Orkneys—he collaborated famously with the poet George Mackay Brown—I see no reason for you not to like him.

(Also, my God, "A Vixen When She Went To School" is *fantastic*.)

Thank you!