What happened yesterday is still too painful to talk about — and, besides, it didn’t happen yesterday, I just found out about it. It seemed, for several hours, to be so grossly awful that I took a Xanax to calm down, and I never take Xanax unless I’m on a plane. When I confess that it all had to do with iTunes, you’ll stifle a laugh; how could I be so upset about that?

I’ll answer obliquely. The other day, I had lunch with an English friend whom I often pester for pronunciations. Having surprised her with “tassles” for “Lascelles,” I bore her gentlest of rebukes for “Hairwood” instead of “Harwood.” She asked why I cared; “Americans never do.” I muttered something about wanting not to seem a fool, but completely forgot until later the taproot of the urge, which was planted during my radio days. In my day, if you wanted to get a job at your college classical radio station (and there were many such), you were given a long list of foreign names to read aloud. It was a sifting of shibboleths. If you said Bate Hoven and Moats Art instead of what unlettered people say, you had a chance at the job. Curiously, there were no British names on the list. One of the earls of Harewood might have written a book about opera, but he didn’t write any music (or, if he did…). And everyone can say “Elgar.”

Now some figures: since June 2011. I have added 20 gigs of new music to my iTunes library, but I have modified — updated and improved the “info” — on 70 gigs’ worth of files. When all that and more seemed lost yesterday, I needed a pill.

***

Today, I’m heading downtown for a bit of impromptu babysitting. It’s a good day for it; clear and not too cold. Will and I will go to the park. He has recently become a little less wild, less drunk on his new powers of locomotion. Well, they’re not new anymore; he’s been running around for nearly half his life by now. One of his favorite words is “Come,” usually spoken with an outstretched palm.

What I’d have done with the day to myself… well, providentially, I really was going to go to the movies. I was going to see W./E.; I’m dying to watch Laurence Fox stutter, and to see if Andrea Riseborough is as good as Anthony Lane says she is.

***

Last night, in any case, was brightened by a new book, The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay. I  gave Rose Macaulay a try a million years ago and it didn’t take, but a blogger whom I follow, Levi Stahl of I’ve Been Reading Lately (I believe that he’s attached to the University of Chicago Press) wrote up the recent NYRB edition so enthusiastically (and well) that I had to give it a try. I’m liking it enormously, not least because there’s a priggish prelate by the name of Chantry-Pigg. More, though, for the dry perfection of the tone:

But aunt Dot could only think how Priam and Hecuba would have been vexed to see the state it had all got into and no one seeming to care any more. She thought the nations ought to go on working at it and dig it all up again, and perhaps do some reconstruction, for she belonged to the reconstruction school, and would have liked to see Troy’s walls and towers rising once more against the sky like a Hollywood Troy, and the wooden horse standing beside them, opening mechanically every little while to show that it was full of armed Greeks.

But I thought there were enough cities standing about the world already, and that those which had disappeared had better be left alone, lying under the grass and asphodel and brambles, with the wind sighing over them and in the distance the sea where the Greek ships had lain waiting ten years for Trojam incensam, and behind them Mount Ida, from which the unfair and partial gods had watched the whole affair.

Pretty super stuff.

Drop me a line at rjk@dailyblague.com
This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 22nd, 2012 at 7:59 am.