IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Kleinhan’s Music Hall, Buffalo, NY

Kleinhans Music Hall is the home of the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. Kleinhans is considered one of the finest concert halls in the country, with remarkable acoustics. The reflecting pool seen here was not present for many years, but was recently restored. The main concert hall is the larger section of the building, the lefthand portion of this picture; the smaller section to the right is the Mary Seaton Room where chamber music concerts are held. The current Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic is JoAnn Faletta; previous Music Directors include Lukas Foss, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Semyon Bychkov.

(The picture links to an organization dedicated to beautifying the Buffalo neighborhood in which Kleinhans resides.)

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The University at Buffalo hosted former President Bill Clinton yesterday. His speech can be heard here, courtesy WBFO, Buffalo’s NPR station.

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Poetical Excursion #1:

“Blow, Bugle, Blow”

by Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

The splendour falls on castle walls

And snowy summits old in story:

The long light shakes across the lakes,

And the wild cataract leaps in glory.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear,

And thinner, clearer, farther going!

O sweet and far from cliff and scar

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing!

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying:

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O love, they die in yon rich sky,

They faint on hill or field or river:

Our echoes roll from soul to soul,

And grow for ever and for ever.

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying,

And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, dying.

(How perfectly Tennyson uses alliterative effects and rhyming to suggest the echoing of a bugle call. More than that, his language implies things passing into memory — repetitions of the word “dying”, reference to “long light” which suggests sunset, and elegant phrasing implying distance: “farther going”, “faintly blowing”. The effect is masterful. This is a poem that begs to be read aloud. If pressed to name a favorite poet, I will generally name either Whitman or Tennyson — depending on which I’ve read more recently.)

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A funny article on the unwritten rules of sports conduct can be found here. Funny stuff, precisely because it is so accurate.

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It’s a good month for film score collectors. Not only will John Williams’s score CD for Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones arrive in stores on April 23, but one week earlier two of what have been the most eagerly sought-after scores of recent memory arrive. They are Alan Silvestri’s Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Bruce Broughton’s The Rescuers Down Under. Wonderful news, on all three releases. I have already heard enough positive buzz on the new Star Wars score that I am almost as excited about it as I am the film itself.

Also, there is a new column on film music on AICN, written by Dan Goldwasser (the gent behind Soundtrack.net). This is to be a biweekly feature, although in the past regular features on AICN have turned out to not be so regular.

Finally, I have been listening to Miklos Rozsa’s remarkable score to King of Kings for a little more than a week now (since it was delivered two days before Easter, a feat of timing that had me wondering if Divinity was involved). I’m not the biggest fan of those large-scale Biblical epics of the 50s and 60s, but they sported some of the most amazing film music ever created — witness Ben Hur, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and even The Ten Commandments (far from my favorite film). Rozsa was a towering genius, quite possibly the greatest composer of film music of all time, and King of Kings is first-rate Rozsa.

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My intention is to keep my musings on politics and world affairs out of this place as much as humanly possible. That said, I’ve added a link to another blog — the USS Clueless — that is very well written and contains a lot of interesting thought about the current world situation. (This is not a blanket endorsement of all of his content, though. I don’t agree with everything he says, but in keeping with my above-stated dictim I shall not explore my differences.)

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It is now official: ABC has demonstrated its ongoing commitment to mediocrity and the pursuit of crap by cancelling its finest show, Once and Again. The last episode is next week, which will free up a timeslot for that Supreme Court show with — gasp — Sally Field.

And ABC also decided that it wasn’t getting good enough ratings off the Bond films on Saturday nights, so they bagged that idea as well. This now means that, aside from NYPDBlue and (for half the year) Monday Night Football, there is no reason to tune into ABC. (Well, I hear good things about Alias, which I haven’t watched due to my soon-to-be-completed commitment to The X-Files — which, by the way, had a really fun and quirky episode last night with Burt Reynolds as….well, this one was so odd that I’m not sure who or what his character was.)

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Just finished: Patience and Fortitude: A Roving Chronicle of Book People, Book PLaces, and Book Culture by Nicholas A. Basbanes. This is the follow-up to Basbanes’s earlier book about book collecting, A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes and the Eternal Passion for Books which has become something of a classic work about the phenomenon of book collecting and the lengths to which people will go to fuel their passion. In Patience and Fortitude, the focus moves from the “gentle madness” that formed the theme of the earlier volume to a more general overview of the entire culture that has evolved around the book world.

Basbanes first takes us on a tour of some of the oldest libraries in the world, some of which are still functioning in their original locations and serving the same purpose. He gives us a fine sense of what the libraries of the world used to be like, and how the lack of artifical lighting shaped the day led by the monks who worked in those libraries to create the very books that are now the core of the most valuable collections in the world. From there Basbanes gives a few more profiles of book collectors, the most notable being the Italian writer and semiotician Umberto Eco. The portraits of the ancient libraries and the collectors of today are fascinating; Basbanes has a gift for pictorial detail in his writing.

The best part of the book, though, comes when Basbanes delves into the “infrastructure” of the book world: booksellers and the great libraries of today. He profiles a number of prominent booksellers, many of whom have tracked down very rare volumes at the behest of private collectors and bought entire collections en bloc. In so doing, Basbanes also notes with sadness the passing of what was perhaps the Golden Age of bookselling, when the large number of active booksellers active in New York City at midcentury have dwindled down to a precious few. Admirably, Basbanes does not merely blame this phenomenon on the rise of “supergiant” stores like Borders and Barnes&Noble; in fact, to do so would be fallacious since the type of customer served by these kinds of stores are not entirely the same as those served by the legendary booksellers of the past.

The next section of the book deals with the libraries of today. Here Basbanes’s theme begins to unfold: the viability of books in a digital age, and the problems faced by libraries as they are confronted with increasing costs for materials, space considerations for storage, how to deal with materials that are seldom (or in some cases never) used, and a sadly increasing view of libraries as luxuries that are not essential to the life of a vibrant community. Most telling is the chapter on the newly-built San Francisco Public Library, opened in 1996 with insufficient room to shelve the entire collection as it existed at that point. Librarians there tell of patrons walking into the new building and asking, “Where are the books?”, and stories are circulated — and later confirmed — of truckloads of books taken quietly from the collection and put in the landfill. Issues like these are far from resolved, but Basbanes shows how a number of other facilities have attempted to avoid these pitfalls and retain their sense of cultural importance.

“Content” has become a buzzword as the World Wide Web has gained prominence; this book by Nicholas Basbanes reminds us, as his earlier volume did, that the physical artifact of the book is important in itself. Patience and Fortitude is highly recommended.

(The title refers to the unofficial names given to the two marble lions that guard the main entrance of the New York Public Library.)

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It’s always nice when the mainstream book review outlets decide to take a look at SF and Fantasy, two genres that are usually ignored completely. (It hardly helped when Oprah Winfrey, supposedly a lover of books, announced on her show that SF was not welcome in her Book Club, and it’s irritating especially to see writers like Danielle Steele and Sydney Sheldon regularly reviewed in newspapers, but not Gene Wolfe, Vernor Vinge, or many other SF luminaries.) The Washington Post has done a section on SF and Fantasy this week, with a number of articles and reviews.

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Like every other aspiring writer, I own several “how-to” books about writing. Some are good for mechanical advice on the process itself; others are good for inspirational purposes (writing is lonely, and kindred spirits are hard to find except in print); and still others are good for placing writing in one’s life. Here are a few of my favorite writing books:

Writer’s Market (2001 ed.): This book, published yearly, is basically a catalog of markets for various types of writing. It also contains a large number of articles pertaining to writing, including interviews with prominent writers from different genres. A yearly feature is a selection of query letters, some done well and some done (remarkably) badly. The badly-done ones are amazingly instructive.

The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E. B. White. This brief book is indispensible. It is part-handbook, part-hymn to clarity in writing, part-instruction manual. Its most famous admonition, “Omit needless words”, will be (and should be) a mantra for writers.

How To Write Science Fiction and Fantasy by Orson Scott Card. This is an excellent and concise introduction to the problems and pitfalls specific to these two genres. Card is one of the biggest names in SF and he brings all of his expertise to bear. The best part of the book is the section on world-building, a concern of particular (some would say paramount) importance to the SF and Fantasy writer.

Advice to Writers compiled and edited by Jon Winokur. Subtitled “A Compendium of Quotes, Anecdotes, and Writerly Wisdom from a Dazzling Array of Literary Lights”, this book is just that: a collection of thoughts on various topics from such people as Woody Allen, Isaac Asimov, Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, E. B. White, Tennessee Williams….this is a fun book to dip into, for nuggets such as this by William Styron: “You write because you want to be read.”

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King. Given the thickness of many of King’s novels and his ability to churn them out at the rate of two per year, one might expect On Writing to be a veritable doorstop. Instead, King writes a fairly brief book that partly relates how writing has shaped his life (and, not unimportantly, how his life has shaped his writing) and partly doles out some of the more important advice from the many writing lessons King has absorbed through the years. The advice section contains nothing that you won’t find anywhere else, but somehow the old chestnut “Show, don’t tell” seems more vivid when illustrated by King. And you’ll certainly never look at adverbs the same way again….but what makes the book so good is King’s meditations on writing itself and its place in his life, especially as he describes his problems with alcohol and drug addiction. His life’s lesson, learned very late, is this: “Life is not a support system for art. It’s the other way around.” King later describes, in rather harrowing detail, his recent life-threatening accident when he was struck by a van and his return to health and to writing. It’s powerful stuff, and what shines through most is not King’s love for writing but his love for his wife, whom he considers his “ideal reader”.

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