In keeping with the news cycle, Terry Teachout revisits his earlier comments about the guitarist Julian Bream.
https://www.artsjournal.com/aboutlastnight/2020/08/julian-bream-r-i-p.html
......
Julian Bream, who gave a recital Tuesday at Alice Tully Hall, made his professional debut a half-century ago. When he started out, guitar recitals consisted of fluff: second-rate Spanish pieces, miscellaneous arrangements and transcriptions, encore-type lollipops. Today, classical guitarists have a huge repertoire of challenging music on which to draw, much of it—including most of the best of it—either discovered or commissioned by Bream. No one since Andres Segovia has had so powerful an influence on guitar playing, and no one has played the guitar better.
I recall Matanya Ophee saying that if all you want to do is play "lollipop" music and your audience wants that, great, but that if you aspire to more challenging and ambitious music to not follow the herd instinct.
more links after the break
By way of Jim West's blog, Ariel Sabar's book on the fraudulent fragment allegedly from the Gospel of Jesus' wife is the topic of a new book.
https://zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com/2020/08/14/roberta-mazzas-take-on-ariel-sabars-new-book-on-the-karen-king-gospel-of-jesus-wife-fraud/
https://facesandvoices.wordpress.com/2020/08/14/the-dark-side-of-truth-some-thoughts-on-ariel-sabar-new-book/
...
The book is important not so much for the account of the sexual life of the con man and the rebellious childhood of professor King, but rather because it is an enduring witness of the collective failure of an academic system that should have ensured that that fragment – as others before and even after it – would have never been presented at a conference and would have never been published. The fact that it was discussed at the 2012 Rome conference without showing a picture is something I didn’t know before, and reminded me of the Green Initiative students covering the images of the papyri they presented at past SBL and of the pathetic images, blurred and cut, that I found in the catalogues produced by Carroll and later Trobisch for the Green exhibitions in Rome and elsewhere.
What the book demonstrates is that the academy as a whole had not enough antibodies to react to what was happening. It is here that I see some weaknesses in the way the book has been structured; the reader is lead to dissect the lives of the two main characters, and some other key-actors, while instead they should have been brought to look at the wider context and the many issues surrounding the fragment, first and foremost its provenance. We get glimpses into all of this – the university pressure on academics to make headlines, a professor hoping to oppose the restructuring of her School through making those headlines, the young scholars who nailed the decisive arguments to prove the fragment to be a forgery but don’t have jobs and even run away from academia, the influence that opinions coming from some top-professors had on the way the debate unfortunately developed. To some extent the prominent space occupied by the Harvard professor and the con man gives even the opportunity to all the other culprits in the story to get out clean. More importantly it impairs the reader’s ability to appreciate that the Jesus Wife fragment case is deeply rooted in the long history of our disciplines – papyrology, Coptic studies and others – and the far too close relationship academics have had with collectors and the market. We were all in this together, I would say, although with different degrees of responsibility.
...
Karen King should not have been given the possibility to present and publish this papyrus not because it was a patent forgery but because she did not check if the provenance story provided by the owner was solid or even true. She was indeed warned about the oddities of the provenance tales by at least one of the Harvard Theological Review readers, professor Emmel. In the report that Sabar showed me, the coptologist pointed out that the provenance of the papyrus was highly suspicious and inconsistent, and that increased his already serious doubts about the authenticity of the fragment – not a word about ethical issues were in the report, however. King and the editors of the journal seem to have ignored those wise words. In the light of what has happened, I would recommend journals and also publishers in our fields to learn the lesson and amend their publication ethics policies accordingly, as Brill has recently done adding a section on unprovenanced artifacts, after the nasty experiences they had with the New Sappho fragments and the Museum of the Bible series.
I have suffered reading the book because it sadly reminded me of my old self, of how naïve I have been when the Jesus Wife and the New Sappho fragments first came to light. At that time, I had a blind trust in senior colleagues and the universities they belonged to. I was sincerely convinced that both texts had some shady aspects in their collection histories but I was far from suspecting the amount of problems that were going to come to light. Having seen what I have seen happening in this last 6-8 years, I have become very cynical about the profession. While everyone is indeed responsible of their own actions, I think that as lecturers/professors we should internalise the failure of a certain way of teaching and practising textual disciplines. We did not insist enough on teaching and researching manuscripts as archaeological objects and the ethical issues behind their circulation not only on the market but also on our desks.
Are there any positive outcomes from the Jesus Wife affair, apart from the entertaining brilliant book written by Sabar? Certainly there is more awareness on the issues at stake as a result of this and other scandals. At the moment, however, I feel just low, confused and also a bit ashamed. We can all be definitely better than this....
Long, long ago around the time he published Crazy for God, Frank Schaeffer declared that by making abortion a non-negotiable "you must be pro-choice to be a Democrat" position, the DNC had probably severely damaged its ability to appeal to people who would otherwise be progressive or liberal on most other policy issues except on the issue of abortion. I.e. by closing off the possibility of being a pro-life Democrat at the level of the power base, Schaeffer worried that the DNC was preparing to shoot itself in the foot on long term electoral issues. Generally Frank Schaeffer lacks nuance, such as when he decided to hold every single white evangelical vote in the United States responsible for mass shootings.
Pertinent to the old Frank Schaeffer who had some tiny capacity for nuance, consider a Get Religion piece considering the situation of an older black Democrat who is not in favor of abortion who has found that the DNC mainstream has progressed without him on that specific issue.
https://www.getreligion.org/getreligion/2020/8/12/veteran-minister-and-tennessee-lawmaker-fights-for-his-political-life-as-pro-life-democrat
fuller coverage at ...
https://christianchronicle.org/ousted-by-democrats-longtime-lawmaker-and-minister-fights-for-his-political-life/
Jerry Fallwel in some kind of free-fall is hard to get too worked up about. I wasn't the biggest fan of Falwell Sr and Jr's apparent demise may simply be temporary. Nonetheless, a topic for writing at The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/08/jerry-fallwell-evangelicals-liberty/615112/
https://blog.ayjay.org/catholic-wokeness/
My old friend Jody Bottum thinks that the various Woke movements amount to a kind of post-Protestantism. I think this is wholly wrong. Wokeness is aspirationally Roman Catholic in its structure. It already has:
- magisterial teaching that one must hold de fide in order to belong
- the pronouncing of anathemas upon those who dissent from that magisterial teaching
- a distributed Inquisition devoted to unearthing and prosecuting heresy
Wokeness despises the fissiparousness of Protestantism and wants to replace it with Real, Substantial, and Visible Unity under its banner. It’s basically a secularized Counter-Reformation.
- an ever-growing Index of Prohibited Books
asasdf
https://blog.ayjay.org/so-sue-me/
I have developed a theory about academic life in America today, one that started as a kind of joke but has developed into a genuinely held view. Here’s my theory: A great many university administrators want to get sued, or at least to get seriously threatened with lawsuits.
Many university administrators are under heavy, heavy pressure from politically agitated students and faculty to combat racism by introducing speech codes, implementing racial quotas in hiring, expelling noncompliant students, firing noncompliant faculty members even when they’re tenured, compelling speech in favor of their policies, and essentially creating an enormous panoptic surveillance state to discipline and punish. The whole business is logistically impossible and would be a nightmare to build and an even worse nightmare to maintain.
Fortunately for these administrators, almost all of the proposed remedies for racism are legally forbidden to public institutions, and many of them are forbidden to private ones as well. When organizations like FIRE show up to remind administrators of that, those administrators have a card to play in their tense poker game with protestors. FIRE has actually had a good deal of success in getting colleges and universities to rescind fundamentally illiberal and often illegal policies, and the success has come through meaningful threats to take the universities to court. (FIRE itself has no standing to sue, of course, but its lawyers can represent those who do have such standing.)
My theory is that many administrators love it when FIRE shows up, or when other plausible threats of legal action come across their desk. Then they can go to the protestors and say, I did everything in my power to create Social Justice U, and I would’ve gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for that pesky Bill of Rights!
I'm still hoping to put together some stuff about Roger Scruton on Heinrich Schenker and I've been incubating a probably long-form musing on American civic religious impulses, statue toppling, and that activity as a kind of exorcism but that's, so to speak, in the slow cooker rather than being something that can come fresh off the cast iron skillet.
Roger Scruton, it turned out, had a LOT to say about what he thought was wrong with Schenkerian analysis beyond just the basic observation about how irrelevant it is to anything from Debussy on out or from roughly Sweelinck and earlier but it will take time to put that together. It's germane to the recent Ewell controversy for an obvious and simple reason, Ewell doesn't have to point out that even the most famously conservative white guy on the aesthetics of music, Roger Scruton, pointed out two decades ago that Schenkerian analysis is of really limited value even within the canonical works of the nineteenth century. There's basically nothing you couldn't find on the surface and the "middle structure" of a musical work through Schenkerian analysis, Scruton argued, that you couldn't have found without using the theory! Like I said, it will take time to put that post together.
I haven't forgotten about the Turner/Bruskas interview with Throckmorton and there's a small but significant update/clarification from Turner about that. That's stuff that has to stay in the proverbial slow cooker while I go back and trawl through county assessor documents relevant to real estate transactions in the closure of Mars Hill to show that, whatever people may be disposed to presume about Turner's disclosure, the stuff he's said seems to basically line up with my admittedly tedious chronicle of real estate acquisitions and sales in the history of Mars Hill. But that is another entree that is, per above, in the proverbial slow cooker. This blog picked up a reputation for detailed to the point of exhaustion analysis of things relevant to Mars Hill and there's no point in breaking that pattern now.
This weekend is expected to be a scorcher and that's another reason that, frankly, I don't want to spend so much time blogging this weekend. A scorcher for Puget Sound is probably just a cool and sweet summer day for much of the United States but bear with this native Puget Sound blogger for not feeling like writing the usual 6,000 to 8,000 weekend word count this particular weekend. :) Or maybe I already did that, in which case, enjoy the rest of your weekend.
POSTSCRIPT 3:24PM
Throwing this in by way of Bryan Townsend, Clarence Hill tries playing "Giant Steps" in 13/8.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d27JKz4VW0A
The song isn't one of my favorites from the Coltrane catalog since I feel like it's over-played but in 13/8? Okay, demonstrating how metrically flexible the melodic and harmonic foundation of the song can be is something newer and more interesting to me than just proving you can play it with chops o death. I can forgive the bad notes.
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