A delightful moment in Adams

Opera rarely summons up a grin quite like the one I had on my face at this moment (4.20 in the clip).
And here's the scene I mentioned yesterday, where Pat Nixon comes into her own:

I'm finding that Nixon in China has an unexpected capacity to resonate with things I'm thinking about (mass communication, the nature of civic art, tyranny and self-absorption in Seneca's Thyestes) as well as the quotidian practices of life (planning trips, choosing clothes to wear, interacting with people of different ethnicities, running meetings, dealing with the unpredictable and irrational behaviors encouraged by certain types of institutional hierarchy).

DuBois and Cicero

As I rush to finish up a paper for a conference publication on panegyric that concentrates on Cicero's praise of Caesar in the Pro Marcello, I turn to W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk -- which Jim Tatum's and Bill Cook's terrific book African American Writers and Classical Tradition led me to reread a couple of months ago, and which a new paper in progress by Sharon Krause on non-sovereign freedom reminds me of again today -- in particular, DuBois' painfully acute insights into "the sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity." Cicero's speech is painful to read for related reasons: it is a proclamation of self-abnegation and obedience in a voice that insists on responsibility, volition, will, and agency even as it marks how these things are withering away--worse, how the very effort to recapture them is advancing their destruction.  What gives Cicero a heroic stature in this flattery-filled speech is his insistence on seeking a way forward through the experience of self-loss.  

Nixon in China

Though baritone James Maddalena (singing Nixon) was not in good voice, the Met's debut of John Adams' Nixon in China was thoroughly engrossing.   Since last night my thoughts have returned repeatedly to three moments in the opera, which I'll just mention quickly for now in the hope of elaborating further on them tomorrow.  First, Nixon's's lines at the start (perhaps among the best known of the libretto):    
News, news, news, news, news, news, news has a kind of mystery, mystery, mystery
When I shook hands with Chou En-lai
On this bare field outside Peking
Just now, the world was listening, listening, listening
These lines are sung in a staccato that conveys Nixon's excited self-importance but that also hints at a stutter, recalling to me themes of anxiety, guilt, fear, and self-censorship from Melville's Billy Budd (which I'm rereading right now for other reasons).
Second, the repetitive hum shot through with fleeting lyric fragments accompanying many busy scenes filled with people--Americans, Chinese, soldiers, dancers, diplomats, banqueters, street-cleaners.  No sound in an opera house is, I think, so utterly demotic.
Third, Pat Nixon's remark (beautifully sung as wry, comical, and sympathetic all at once) "This is prophetic," lifted from her recorded comments during a tour of Peking: the line ripped her character out of the playbook I'd at first thought she'd been plugged into, the reluctant First Lady, and gave her an heroic, almost biblical dimension.
Just a start, since I'm still on post-concussion hours.  

  

Howard University, the pleasures of survey, and reading notes

Now more or less post-concussion, I'm getting back to work with Helen Morales, with whom I co-wrote a letter to TLS a few weeks ago, on the possible rescue of Howard University's Classics department.

When I teach the graduate survey of Latin literature, as I'm doing this term, I find it difficult to take it seriously as work: it's too close to sheer pleasure.  The imperial canon is fascinating, the state of scholarly criticism is generally high, and the students (invested in doing the reading as preparation for their exams) have interesting things to say.  Unfortunately the concussion has put some pressure on that preparation, and put a serious crimp in my other reading, so along with Seneca's Thyestes, this week I did little more than indulge myself with watching one of the very few television shows I take real delight in, no doubt in part for its slash value (see my earlier comments on Patrick O'Brian).

On a more adult note, I made notes for future reading: Jane Kneller's Kant and the Power of Imagination; Nightingale and Sedley's Ancient Models of Mind; and Jim Porter's huge new book on Greek aesthetics.

Tonight: John Adams' Nixon in China.

Concussed but recovering

I fell or was crashed into at Squaw Valley last week; I have no memory of the event or the subsequent ten hours or so, but after a week of concussion-caused brain fog and exhaustion, I'm well on the road to recovery.
Recent reading includes the last of Patrick O'Brian's glorious sea novels, Blue at the Mizzen, which I read with real regret that there are no more to come (I will not read "21," tugged out of O'Brian's notes).
I vividly recall my first encounter with O'Brian in a used bookstore on Valencia Street in San Francisco in 1998 or 1999: the book (Master and Commander) caught my eye, in one of those happy accidents you come to wish with all your heart had happened years before; I pulled it off the shelf, crouched on my heels to get out of other customers' hair, opened the book, and over an hour later realized that my knees were close to permanently locked in their deep bend -- so utterly had the book pulled me into its world.  (I reacted the same way a couple of years later to J.G.A. Pocock's Machiavellian Moment, when I lifted it out of its Amazon box on the floor of my study, a few blocks away from that bookstore, and came up for air in a state of shocked excitement hours later.)
Fellow discoverers will recognize that first thrill of meeting the Aubrey/Maturin pair (which I am far from the first to write about).  Put all thoughts of the movie out of your head:

The music-room in the Governor's House at Port Mahon, a tall, handsome, pillared octagon, was filled with the triumphant first movement of Locatelli's C major quartet.  The players, Italians pinned against the far wall by rows and rows of little round gilt chairs, were playing with passionate conviction as they mounted towards the penultimate crescendo, towards the tremendous pause and the deep, liberating final chord.  And on the little gilt chairs at least some of the audience were following the rise with an equal intensity: there were two in the third row, on the left-hand side; and they happened to be sitting next to one another.  The listener farther to the left was a man of between twenty and thirty whose big form overflowed his seat, leaving only a streak of gilt wood to be seen here and there.  He was wearing his best uniform--the white-lapelled blue coat, white waistcoat, breeches and stockings of a lieutenant in the Royal Navy, with the silver medal of the Nile in his buttonhole--and the deep white cuff of his gold-buttoned sleeve beat the time, while his bright blue eyes, staring from what would have been a pink-and-white face if it had not been so deeply tanned, gazed fixedly at the bow of the first violin.  The high note came, the pause, the resolution; and with the resolution the sailor's fist swept firmly down upon his knee. He leant back in his chair, extinguishing it entirely, sighed happily and turned towards his neighbour with a smile.  The words 'Very finely played, sir, I believe' were formed in his gullet if not quite in his mouth when he caught the cold and indeed inimical look and heard the whisper, 'If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead.'
              Jack Aubrey's face instantly changed from friendly ingenuous communicative pleasure to an expression of somewhat baffled hostility: he could not but acknowledge that he had been beating the time; and although he had certainly done so with perfect accuracy, in itself the thing was wrong.