Recent links of note:

“Why Page Turners Matter”
Benjamin Poore, VAN

Children, it is said, are meant to be seen and not heard. In the world of classical music, page turners are often considered lower than that. As with so many roles in musical production, they have but one criterion for success: going completely, utterly unnoticed. Fittingly, an essay by Benjamin Poore on this forgettable yet thoroughly honorable office reminds one of an extended and charming footnote.

Take the example of Mike Oldham, who is apparently “something of a legend in piano circles.” (Which ones? Asking for a friend.) Oldham, we learn, has been turning pages semi-professionally since the ’70s, beginning his illustrious career beside the likes of Alfred Brendel. He is a figure cloaked in mystery—“I am not sure I should tell you,” he demurs, when asked about the secrets to longevity in his profession. Poore’s piece also dives into the dos and don’ts of good page-turning, the unexpected difficulties that come with the territory, and some of the truly bizarre ways in which these quiet workhorses have been thrust into the spotlight by modern classical compositions. You wouldn’t need to know any of this—recognizing and appreciating page turners, after all, makes their job harder—but you’ll be glad you read it.

“The Secrets of Hawthorne’s Writing Desk”
Julian Hawthorne, New England Review

Despite its inclusion here, this piece was not penned recently. Not even in the last century. Julian Hawthorne was the son of the New Englander so famous for pitting, in The Scarlet Letter, the cloistered darkness of personal guilt against the unruly collective spirit of the mob. And many, Julian included, believe that Hawthorne senior was writing from experience. As James Tuttleton noted in our pages long ago: “According to Julian Hawthorne . . . Herman Melville once said that ‘there was some secret in my father’s life which has never been revealed,’ a secret that ‘accounted for the gloomy passages in his books.’”

Tuttleton takes Philip Young, a professor of American literature, to task for hypothesizing a spurious brother-sister romance between Nathaniel and his sister, Ebe. Many others have tried to sleuth out precisely what that secret was, with a minimum of success. It is to our benefit, then, that New England Review has republished an excerpt from Julian’s 1903 memoir Hawthorne and His Circle that may put us on a different track. In it, Julian locates a rather literary emblem as a possible seat of his father’s harrowing sense of interiority: Nathaniel’s immense writing desk. Imposing and magical, especially to the young and impressionable Julian, it was replete with hidden locks and secret compartments that seemed to reveal themselves only of their own volition—thus serving as the base, literally, upon which some of his father’s most psychologically complex novels were written. The wondrous aspect of this desk, like Hawthorne’s oeuvre, does not depend upon the hidden secret itself. It lies in the very machinery of its conceit.

“Street art is a crime”
Alex Cameron, spiked

It has been one year, almost to the day, since Banksy’s publicity stunt at a Sotheby’s auction, in which the street “artist” doubly conned purveyors of hollowed-out bourgeois taste by rigging one of his works to shred itself once it sold. (Doubly, because shredding the piece only increased its already exorbitant value.) After reading Alex Cameron in spiked, however, you’d think it was just yesterday that the debacle took place. The author, driven nearly to despair by the ubiquity of graffiti in urban Europe, looses a superlative and just indignation on all the guilty parties in this modern-day art racket: the wanton scribblers, for unduly arrogating to themselves the common stewardship of public space; the ditzy amateurs of such kitsch, for blindly latching onto the most wayward and dissolute of fashions; and, most of all, the cultural and intellectual elite, for two-facedly imputing any lasting significance to an art form that is explicitly calibrated to passing glances, not careful valuation—all for the sake of appearing up-to-date. We agree with Cameron; we have agreed for some time, and will agree for however long these self-selected pariahs continue to peddle their quibbles in the guise of urgent and profound art.

From our pages:

One-eyed Jim
by Nic Rowan
On “A Mile and a Half of Lines: The Art of James Thurber” at the Columbus Museum of Art.

Cadmean progeny
by George Loomis
On Semele at Opera Philadelphia

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