DaveWells.us

Vivaldi’s Venice pro­vides some­thing that I feel has been some­what lack­ing from my musi­cal edu­ca­tion: his­tor­i­cal con­text. Patrick Bar­bier pro­vides a thor­ough look at the city of Venice dur­ing Vivaldi’s time, draw­ing heav­ily on accounts writ­ten by vis­i­tors to the city from var­i­ous other places in Europe. He details the com­plex social sit­u­a­tion in the city. Nobles and com­mon­ers did not nor­mally mix. How­ever, dur­ing the many annual fes­ti­vals, every­one wore masks in pub­lic. At these times (which took up a large part of the year, anony­mous mix­ing of classes was free to occur.

Also dis­cussed are the city’s pre­car­i­ous pol­i­tics. The state employed secret police to spy on the pop­u­lace — nobles in par­tic­u­lar. For­eign­ers were allowed in the city, but most peo­ple refrained from asso­ci­at­ing with them for fear of run­ning afoul of the gov­ern­ment. Car­ni­val masks pro­vided a way around this sit­u­a­tion, as well. Doges, the heads of state, usu­ally only reigned for a short while and were often the vic­tims of foul play. The sys­tem used for elect­ing a new doge was extremely byzan­tine, involv­ing mul­ti­ple rounds of vot­ing by var­i­ous groups of nobles.

More ger­mane to a study of Vivaldi are Barbier’s descrip­tions of musi­cal life in Venice. If con­tem­po­rary accounts are to be believed, music per­vaded every aspect of soci­ety, and any­one — from dock worker to doge — was liable to break into song at any moment. With such a large pub­lic inter­est, the city was able to main­tain a huge array of musi­cal orga­ni­za­tions. Some of the most cel­e­brated ensem­bles were those of the four ospedali — orphan­ages — of the city. Vivaldi spent a large por­tion of his career teach­ing at the Pietá, one of these ospedali. Bar­bier dis­cusses the Pietá and its sis­ter orga­ni­za­tions in detail, which offers insights into the sorts of musi­cal resources Vivaldi had at his disposal.

Vivaldi’s Venice is well-written — very infor­ma­tive with­out being dry. Bar­bier writes mainly about the social, polit­i­cal, and musi­cal his­tory of Venice, but he includes enough Vivaldi biog­ra­phy to make the mate­r­ial rel­e­vant to a study of the com­poser. The book offers a look at Vivaldi’s place in the big pic­ture of Venet­ian soci­ety — the sort of thing I wish I knew more about regard­ing other composers.

Oboist/journalist Blair Tin­dall has two sep­a­rate agen­das within this book: embar­rass­ing peo­ple by nam­ing names in her sor­did auto­bi­og­ra­phy, and bemoan­ing the cur­rent state of clas­si­cal music in the United States. Except for the fact that nearly every­one who fig­ures in her life story is a clas­si­cal musi­cian, the two sub­jects really have noth­ing to do with each other. I get the sense that Tin­dall is some­how try­ing to use her story as an exam­ple of what is wrong with the clas­si­cal music world, but she never really makes a strong argu­ment as such. She comes off as an aber­ra­tion rather than a typification.

Tindall’s auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal mate­r­ial con­sists largely of rev­el­ing in her promis­cu­ity and drug use, and is very short on per­sonal growth. She gets most of her oboe jobs by sleep­ing with some­one, and loses them when rela­tion­ships end. Although she seems bit­ter about this cycle, she never really tries to break it, and takes every oppor­tu­nity to name the men involved. Tin­dall tries to cast her­self as the vic­tim of a cor­rupt and exploita­tive sys­tem. How­ever, she destroys this argu­ment before she even makes it; in the begin­ning of the book, she details her seduc­tion of one of her high school teach­ers. The reader gets the impres­sion that Tin­dall would have tried to sleep her way to the top of any profession.

The dis­cus­sions of the his­tory and cur­rent sta­tus of clas­si­cal music in Amer­ica are inter­est­ing, but are marred by Tindall’s clumsy tran­si­tions between them and her own story. In fact, her tran­si­tions through­out the book are awk­ward or nonex­is­tent — I often found myself reread­ing para­graphs or pages in an effort to fig­ure out who, what, or when she’s talk­ing about. The over­all poor qual­ity of her writ­ing leads one to won­der if her old method of win­ning jobs has car­ried over into her new career as a journalist.

The bulk of this book is a seamy tale of sex and drugs that just hap­pens to be set in the world of clas­si­cal music. Sim­i­lar sto­ries could be told by peo­ple in other pro­fes­sions. Tindall’s con­dem­na­tions of the pro­fes­sion fall flat, either due to lack of sup­port or sim­ply from asso­ci­a­tion with the rest of her mate­r­ial. By her own admis­sion, Blair Tin­dall is a mediocre oboist. It’s read­ily appar­ent that she’s a mediocre writer, as well.

Although little-known today, fourteenth-century author Sir John Man­dev­ille was once widely read and revered in Europe. His out­put con­sists of a sin­gle unti­tled work, which is gen­er­ally known as The Trav­els. This book is an account of thirty-four years of jour­ney­ing across Europe and Asia — mainly the Mid­dle and Far East. By the time of Mandeville’s death in the 1360s, his writ­ings had been trans­lated into every major Euro­pean lan­guage. Mandeville’s writ­ing influ­enced explor­ers, such as Colum­bus and Releigh, as well as other authors, such as Shake­speare, Mil­ton, and Keats.

The account is divided into two parts. The first recounts his trav­els in the Mid­dle East, includ­ing stays in Con­stan­tino­ple and Jerusalem. The sec­ond half con­cerns China and the Indian sub­con­ti­nent. This lat­ter por­tion is full of fan­tas­tic sto­ries of cyclo­peans, giants, and human/animal cross-breeds. It was these tales that destroyed Mandeville’s cred­i­bil­ity as the Far East became bet­ter known to Europe. But what about the first half of The Trav­els, which doesn’t con­tain such fan­ci­ful sto­ries? Should it also be dis­missed as fic­tion? This is the ques­tion that Giles Mil­ton sets out to answer.

Mil­ton trav­els to the places described by Man­dev­ille to check the knight’s details. He also con­sults accounts of other trav­el­ers who vis­ited these locales around the same time as Man­dev­ille. Time after time, the details of Mandeville’s ear­lier trav­els are cor­rob­o­rated. Mil­ton exam­ines mul­ti­ple man­u­script copies of The Trav­els, and in doing so dis­cov­ers that many of the less cred­i­ble pas­sages (in the first half) were added to the text by scribes.

Thus con­vinced that the first half of The Trav­els is at least mostly true, Mil­ton pon­ders why Man­dev­ille would have paired a real pil­grim­age to the Holy Land with a fan­tas­tic tale of myth­i­cal beasts and sav­ages. Mil­ton con­cludes that the book is an elab­o­rate alle­gor­i­cal attack on West­ern cul­ture and Chris­tian­ity. Sir John enu­mer­ates all the sins and short­com­ings of “good Chris­tians” in the first half of his book, then turns around and describes the pagan peo­ples in the sec­ond half as pious and hum­ble. He makes spe­cific com­par­isons between Chris­t­ian rit­u­als and those of other reli­gions such as Islam and Hin­duism, with Chris­tian­ity always com­ing out on the bot­tom. What Man­dev­ille has done, argues Mil­ton, is forced his Euro­pean read­ers to view them­selves through the eyes of out­siders, in the hopes that this will engen­der tol­er­ance and understanding.

This is a very fas­ci­nat­ing book. Mil­ton attacks his topic from all angles, vis­it­ing the places men­tioned in The Trav­els, check­ing other con­tem­po­rary accounts, pur­su­ing the vague details of Mandeville’s biog­ra­phy, and exam­in­ing scrip­to­r­ial prac­tice and the alter­ations made to The Trav­els through the years. He does a very good job of pro­vid­ing his­tor­i­cal con­text through­out the book. Before pick­ing up The Rid­dle and the Knight, I’d never heard of Sir John Man­dev­ille. Now, I’m inspired to pick up a copy of The Trav­els and read this largely neglected work myself.

Bar­bara Ehren­re­ich cre­ated — then acci­den­tally vol­un­teered for — the jour­nal­is­tic endeavor at the heart of this book: to deliver a hands-on account of life as a low-wage worker in the United States. Her inspi­ra­tion was late ‘90s wel­fare reform, and con­flicts between the accom­pa­ny­ing rhetoric and wage/cost of liv­ing statistics.

For her exper­i­ment, she chose three cities: Key West, Florida; Port­land, Maine; and Min­neapo­lis, Min­nesota. She gave her­self one month in each city to find hous­ing and employ­ment. If she man­aged to make enough money to feed her­self and pay the sec­ond month’s rent, then she would con­sider that phase of the project a suc­cess. When job-hunting, she for­bid her­self to fall back on any of her edu­ca­tion or job skills; she pre­sented her­self as an unskilled divorceé look­ing to reen­ter the workforce.

Ehren­re­ich dis­cov­ered first-hand some of the finan­cial prob­lems faced by low-wage work­ers. For exam­ple: while some­one work­ing full-time for $6–7 an hour may be able to afford the rent on a cheap apart­ment, it’s very hard to save up the secu­rity deposit required by nearly all land­lords. Res­i­den­tial motels, a com­mon hous­ing alter­na­tive, are far more costly in the long run, and almost guar­an­tee that ten­ants will be unable to save enough to cover the ini­tial costs of an apart­ment. Ehrehre­ich also uncov­ered hid­den costs in feed­ing her­self. While it is cer­tainly cheap­est to buy food at the gro­cery store and pre­pare it at home, this assumes the avail­abil­ity of cook­ing and refrig­er­a­tion appa­ra­tus — lux­u­ries not afforded by many res­i­den­tial motels and low-rent apart­ments. Thus, she often had to resort to more expen­sive — and far less healthy — fast food, fur­ther drain­ing her finances. On top of these eco­nomic con­sid­er­a­tions, Ehren­re­ich relates the men­tal and phys­i­cal effects of work­ing long hours in menial and often phys­i­cally demand­ing jobs. A num­ber of her co-workers expe­ri­enced work-related health prob­lems, but have no ben­e­fits and can­not afford health insurance.

Ehren­re­ich does an excel­lent job of illu­mi­nat­ing the plight of the “work­ing poor” in our soci­ety. In addi­tion to her first-hand expe­ri­ences, she offers a cogent eval­u­a­tion of spe­cific prob­lems, their causes, and pos­si­ble solu­tions. This book is a good, albeit trou­bling, read, and I rec­om­mend it.

The years lead­ing up to the year 1000 A.D. were very tumul­tuous ones, espe­cially for the Chris­t­ian world. The tenth cen­tury saw rapid suc­ces­sions of kings, emper­ors, and popes. Twenty-eight popes and anti-popes reigned between 900 and 999 — a good indi­ca­tion of the polit­i­cal tur­moil of the period. The last pope of the cen­tury was Sylvester II, who ascended to the papacy in 999.

Sylvester, who for most of his life was known as Ger­bert d’Aurillac, was a very inter­est­ing man who dif­fered greatly from his pre­de­ces­sors. Ger­bert was one of the most highly edu­cated Chris­t­ian men of his time, sur­pass­ing his peers by learn­ing advanced sci­ence from teach­ers in the Mus­lim world. He was a friend of Emperor Otto I and tutor and men­tor to Emper­ors Otto II and Otto III. In a time when the clergy was rife with nepo­tism and simony, Ger­bert rose from the lowly rank of oblate (a child given to a monastery). When he even­tu­ally gained power, he used it to fight cor­rup­tion within the church.

Richard Erdoes uses the life of Ger­bert d’Aurillac as the core of this book about Europe and west­ern Asia at the turn of the last mil­len­nium. He pro­vides a good overview of life in the tenth and eleventh cen­turies in dif­fer­ent regions and at var­i­ous class lev­els. The polit­i­cal and reli­gious his­tory he includes is quite inter­est­ing as well, although he tends to intro­duce new names at a dizzy­ing pace. I often found myself re-reading pas­sages to fig­ure out exactly who he was talk­ing about at any given time.

My one major com­plaint about this book is its absolutely hor­ren­dous copy edit­ing. This book has more typo­graph­i­cal errors than any other pub­lished mate­r­ial I have ever read. There’s even a mis­spelling in one of the chap­ter titles! How­ever, if you can get past this highly annoy­ing char­ac­ter­is­tic, then you’ll find 1000 A.D. to be quite an inter­est­ing book.

Henry Pet­roski has writ­ten a num­ber of books about the tech­ni­cal and related social his­to­ries of objects that we tend to take for granted. This, his ear­li­est entry into that par­tic­u­lar sub-genre, traces the his­tory of one of the (seem­ingly) sim­plest and most com­mon­place objects imaginable.

Pet­roski begins in ancient times, describ­ing var­i­ous early attempts to replace ink (along with a pen, brush, or sty­lus) with some­thing more portable and less messy. These included wax tablets, spe­cially treated paper, and — the ances­tor of the mod­ern pen­cil — shaped pieces of lead called plumbums (the Latin word for lead). Noth­ing approach­ing a mod­ern pen­cil was cre­ated until after the dis­cov­ery of graphite some­time in the 16^th cen­tury — pen­cils have never actu­ally con­tained lead. The ear­li­est pen­cils were very crude, con­sist­ing of a chunk of graphite wedged into a small stick-like holder. Mod­ern pen­cils are far more com­plex than they appear, involv­ing very spe­cific types and mix­tures of graphite, clay, wax, glue, wood, var­nish, metal, and rub­ber. Pet­roski traces the 400-year evo­lu­tion of the pen­cil, from crude hand-made spe­cialty item to precision-crafted, mass-produced sta­ple of daily life.

He does a very good job with this mate­r­ial, but he tries to do too much else with the book. He relates the devel­op­ment of the pen­cil to the devel­op­ment of engi­neer­ing as a spe­cial­ized field. The anal­ogy is good, but he belabors the point. He also men­tions bridges every time he makes a com­par­i­son to engi­neer­ing. I found that lit­tle habit to be incred­i­bly annoy­ing. This book would have been much bet­ter if Pet­roski had just stuck to his main sub­ject, and saved the bulk of the dis­cus­sions of engi­neer­ing and bridges for other books. I believe that he has since writ­ten books on those very top­ics — per­haps they should have come first.

In short, this book is quite inter­est­ing — although not as much so as The Book on the Book­shelf — but it is a lit­tle too unfo­cused for my taste.

The map to which the title refers is an 1815 map cre­ated by William Smith. This map, which Smith title “A Delin­eation of The Strata of Eng­land and Wales with part of Scot­land; exhibit­ing the Col­lieries and Mines; the Marshes and Fen Lands orig­i­nally Over­flowed by the Sea; and the Vari­eties of Soil accord­ing to the Vari­a­tions in the Sub Strata; illus­trated by the Most Descrip­tive Names,” was the first real geo­logic map ever cre­ated. Smith, whose work pre­dates that of Charles Lyell (who is often called the Father of Geol­ogy), was one of the first to real­ize that lay­ers of rock are laid down in a par­tic­u­lar sequence. Bar­ring major geo­logic activ­ity, this order remains con­stant across a region. Smith also real­ized that strata of sim­i­lar com­po­si­tions can be dif­fer­en­ti­ated by their respec­tive fos­sil contents.

Smith’s work becomes all the more remark­able when one real­izes that he col­lected all the sur­vey data for his very detailed map by him­self over a period of 22 years. In a time when most sci­ence was con­ducted by the nobil­ity, gen­try, and clergy, Smith (the son of a black­smith) had dif­fi­culty gain­ing the respect and recog­ni­tion that he deserved. He often had trou­ble with money, and was thrown into debtor’s prison after his map and a num­ber of other works had been pub­lished. It wasn’t until late in his life that Smith began to be rec­og­nized for his achieve­ments and respected as a scientist.

This is the third of Simon Winchester’s books that I’ve read. He writes about very inter­est­ing and often little-known top­ics, and I quite enjoy his writ­ing style. At a few points in this book, he seems to be talk­ing down to the reader, but that is cer­tainly not the over­all tone. One thing I par­tic­u­larly like about Win­ches­ter is his pen­chant for includ­ing tan­gen­tial foot­notes. Through these, the reader learn a fair amount of inter­est­ing back­ground infor­ma­tion about some of the lesser involved peo­ple, places, and events that appear in the narrative.