SCALES #7
Hello!
I just finished reading Anna Karenina. It's been quite the process, full of failed attempts (and a viewing of the Tom Stoppard-penned film adaptation, which above all else left me with a very particular image of Vronsky's dandyish mustache). My first go started one summer at Oberlin. I remember reading in the mornings before going into lab, sitting on the front steps of my apartment and drinking a cup-and-a-half of very strongly brewed coffee. I only got one or two hundred pages in before it drifted out of my routine. Then, or maybe before, I read the final Kitty and Levin section in a Russian lit class. After that there were a few other "attempts" that mostly consisted of looking at the library book on my shelf. But then in Cambridge, a like-new copy of the Pevear-Volokhonsky translation appeared in a Little Free Library and it felt like fate.
Anna K lends itself to meandering through its landscape over an extended amount of time. Once you have your bearings you can visit for the length of a bite-sized chapter or two and sample a new view. There are some great set pieces, like the horse race, or the (very Turgenev) hunting episode, but I enjoyed even the interstitial moments as a chance to spend time with the characters.
For me the pleasure of reading all 800-odd pages did come down to Tolstoy's tender handling of the characters—the count is such a softie. So many nuanced emotional states of being. The novel portrays the urgency of a charcter's emotional state, while gently ironizing it: we see that the feeling is fleeting and contingent. Characters become convinced they've reached a permanent new feeling, or figured it all out (most notably Levin at the end), but then their mood changes and we're left with something more complicated and more true. For me this was the richest strain in the book and crucial to avoid didacticism, especially for Tolstoy stand-in Levin's paternalistic serf politics.
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Throwback album: Neko Case's Fox Confessor Brings the Flood. The partnership of language and music is so strong here, and if Drake is the master at lyrics-as-Instagram-captions, Neko here is the master of lyrics-as-allusive-adolescent-angst-Facebook-statuses (removed here a transcription of basically the entire album's lyrics).
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So I've been listening to this podcast...
For Meet the Composer, Nadia Sirota pushes hard on the idea of the performer in Western art music, and ends up in a bunch of strange and interesting places. So good. (Part 1. Part 2.)
New developments in Kiwi accents. The "r" is coming to South Auckland!
The new streaming/playlist era changes not only the landscape of the Billboard pop charts, but also how artists and labels try to game their way onto those charts.
How the logistics of fancy single-origin coffee sits inside the standardized, containerized system of global trade.
Links
Following up from last newsletter, "A Brief Economic History of Time" (h/t @urbnallen).
"I thought I had come to Elko to wallow in the melancholy of the cowboy poet, but really, it was just another chance to see if I could belong in my own country."
Michelle Dean on paying attention, Gay Talese.
"In his 1992 Nobel lecture, [Walcott] decried “that consoling pity…[in] tinted engravings of Antillean forests, with their proper palm trees, ferns, and waterfalls”—the prelude to an aesthetic indictment charged with moral force: “A century looked at a landscape furious with vegetation in the wrong light and with the wrong eye.”"
Boston Public Schools move away from Mercator.
Science! (And maths.)
A de Bruijn sequence is "a cyclic sequence in which every possible length-n string on A occurs exactly once as a substring".
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Replies always welcome!
—Adam