Paraphrases from Us Conductors, a novel by Sean Michaels The vacuum tubes, were like wineglasses, like
seashells, like emeralds. The theremin's
sound is a stranger to the earth--its voice that is not a voice neither paused
nor took a breath.
May 3, 2015 For people into the music scene in Canada, Sean Michaels needs little
introduction. His music blog, Said
the Gramophone, is considered one of the go-to blogs
for music reviews of every genre. So for
those who know and appreciate his writing style, it came as no surprise when
his first novel was published last year.
While music is a theme in Us
Conductors, the instrument at the heart of the story is not all
that well known. It's the theremin,
invented about 100 years ago by a Russian scientist, Lev Termen. Us Conductors is
a story about love, music and espionage and it won him the Giller prize last
fall. Read a portion of an interview with Sean Michaels at http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/sean-michaels-us-conductors-author-talks-about-his-inspiration-1.3057575
Born in the former capital of Scotland
(Stirling) in 1982, Sean Michaels grew up in Ottawa, Canada. He has lived in Montreal since 2000. His music blog, Said the
Gramophone, launched in March 2003, and added songs in November of that
year. It was one of the world's first
mp3blogs.
Leon Theremin playing his own instrument
Lev Sergeyevich Termen, or Leon
Theremin in the United States, was a Russian and Soviet inventor, most
famous for his invention of the theremin,
one of the first electronic musical instruments and
the first to be mass produced. He also devised the interlace
technique for improving the quality of a video signal, still
widely used in video and television technology. His listening device, "The Thing", hung for seven years in
plain view in the United States Ambassador's Moscow office and enabled Soviet
agents to eavesdrop on secret conversations. It is considered a predecessor of RFID technology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A9on_Theremin#United_States
On an April night in 1960, Guy
Carawan stood before a group of black students in Raleigh, N.C., and sang a
little-known folk song. With that single
stroke, he created an anthem that would echo into history, sung at the
Selma-to-Montgomery marches of 1965, in apartheid-era South Africa,
in international demonstrations in support of the Tiananmen Square protesters,
at the dismantled Berlin Wall and beyond.
The song was “We
Shall Overcome.” Mr. Carawan,
who died on May 2, 2015 at 87, did not write “We Shall Overcome,” nor did he
claim to. The now-familiar version of
“We Shall Overcome” was forged by Mr. Carawan, Pete Seeger
and others in the late 1950s, but its antecedents date to at least the 18th
century. The song’s present-day lyrics
appear to have originated with “I’ll Overcome Some Day,” a hymn by a black
Methodist minister, Charles Albert Tindley, that was published at the turn of
the 20th century, though apparently to a different tune. By the mid-1940s, Tindley’s words and the
now-familiar melody had merged. In 1945,
the resulting song, known as “We Will Overcome,” was taken to the picket lines
by striking tobacco workers in Charleston, S.C., who sang: “We will overcome,/And we will win our rights
someday.” Margalit Fox http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/08/us/guy-carawan-dies-at-87-taught-a-generation-to-overcome-in-song.html
The various fish that come under the
banner ‘hake’ are
deep-sea members of the cod family and are popular throughout Europe and
America. Hake is quite a mild fish, with
a white flaky texture and a flavour that is more subtle than that of cod. In France, hake is called ‘saumon blanc’
(which translates as 'white salmon') while in the United States it’s known as
ling or whiting (what is known as whiting in Europe is a different, less tasty
fish). Link to recipes at http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/hake
What if printed books went by ebook rules? by Dennis Baron I love ebooks. Despite their unimaginative page design,
monotonous fonts, curious approach to hyphenation, and clunky annotation
utilities, they’re convenient and easy on my aging eyes. But I wish they didn’t come wrapped in
legalese. Whenever I read a book on my
iPad, for example, I have tacitly agreed to the 15,000-word statement of terms
and conditions for the iTunes store.
It’s written by lawyers in language so dense and tedious it seems
designed not to be read, except by other lawyers, and that’s odd, since these
Terms of Service agreements (TOS) concern the use of books that are
designed to be read. But that’s OK,
because Apple, the source of iBooks, and Amazon, with its similar Kindle Store,
are not really publishers, not really booksellers, they’re "content
providers" who function as third-party agents. And these agents seem to think that
ebooks are not really books: Apple
insists on calling them, not iBooks, but “iBooks Store Products,” and Amazon
calls them, not Kindle books, but “Kindle Content.” Read more at https://illinois.edu/blog/view/25
CLARIFICATION The May 6, 2015 Muse said that L'allée Des Alyscamps was the big
seller at Sotheby's Impressionist and modern art sale on May 5, 2015, bringing
$US66.3 million ($83.2 million).
The number in parentheses refers
to Australian dollars. See the original
New York Times article: The sale, the
first major auction of the spring season brought in a total of $368 million for
Sotheby’s, making it the second-highest sale of Impressionist and modern art in
the auction house’s history. Last
November, Sotheby’s took in $422 million from
such a sale. Bidders walked off with 50
of the 64 lots offered. The rest were
left unsold. For the van Gogh, the work had last
sold for $12 million in 2003. The
highest price paid for a van Gogh at auction was the $82.5 million paid in 1990
for his “Portrait of Dr. Gachet.” See
picture of L'allée Des Alyscamps at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/06/arts/design/van-gogh-painting-is-star-during-sothebys-auction.html The auction was held in New York. See also http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/2015/impressionist-modern-art-evening-sale-n09340.html
Nestled in the Pennsylvania countryside, on and around the bucolic campus of Lehigh
University, the Bethlehem Bach Festival, under the artistic direction of
conductor Greg Funfgeld, is in its 108th season and going strong. The Bach Choir of Bethlehem’s 100 volunteer
singers perform the music of Johann Sebastian Bach and that of his sons and
contemporaries with exceptional devotion.
Flanked by concerts of related vocal and instrumental works, Bach’s Mass
in B-minor has been the centerpiece of the annual festival since 1900, when the
complete work was presented here, for the first time in the U.S. The festival is a compact affair spread over the
weekends of May 1 and 2, and May 8 and 9, 2015.
Barrymore Laurence Scherer http://www.wsj.com/articles/bethlehem-bach-festival-review-honoring-a-musical-master-1430949335
STORY OF A TOLEDO PHOTOGRAPHER: Marty
Reichenthal Reichenthal was born in Rock Island, IL, and his relationship with
Toledo began around age two or three. “I
was unceremoniously dropped here against my will to spend summers with
relatives,” he said. It was during one
of those summers that his uncle, a local dentist, gave him a camera. Marty was nine years old, and became
fascinated with the device’s focus mechanism and shutter speeds. Predictably, the veteran photographer
hates the Photoshop culture. He
remarked, “Nothing is shooting today. It’s
really more of an additive technique. Look
at National Geographic. They still do
real pictures.” Counting Irving Penn,
Gordon Parks, Richard Avedon, and W. Eugene Smith as influences, Reichenthal
still shoots photographs of friends and of his surroundings, most of which he
keeps to himself. He still vastly
prefers black and white, though he likes the control of adding color.
STORY OF A TOLEDO POET AND WRITER: Joel Lipman Joel Lipman is Toledo’s first poet laureate. A former creative writing instructor—he taught
for 37 years at the University of Toledo—Lipman’s work has been published
extensively in the small press community. He has edited independent and university press
books, and has made an impressive career of the written word. Many writers just begin writing. Some generate text and transfer it from one
medium to the next, before arriving at a final product. “When I
write poems, I revise extensively,” he says. “I jot rough notes in a notebook, work in pen
or pencil, and then enter the text on my Apple and work out lineation and
concrete composition on the machine.” This is the first in an ongoing series that explores regional
writers’ work
and workspace. http://www.toledocitypaper.com/May-Issue-1-2015/The-right-to-write/#Arts & Entertainment
and workspace. http://www.toledocitypaper.com/May-Issue-1-2015/The-right-to-write/#Arts & Entertainment
http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com Issue 1294
May 8, 2015 On this date in 1745, Carl
Stamitz, German violinist and composer was born. On this date in 1829, Louis Moreau Gottschalk, American pianist
and composer, was born.
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