Early Observations of Washington, D.C.

-Lots of streets are named after states. I’m close to Utah right now.

-The suit-wearing population is quite large. Lanyards are also very much in vogue.

-The Smithsonian is not a thing. It’s multiple things. I tried to walk to the “Smithsonian,” only to discover that the Smithsonian is actually 19 museums — including a zoological park!

-Acronyms and initialisms abound. Acronyms are initials that you can pronounce, such as “NASA,” and initialisms are initials you say letter-by-letter, like “FBI.”

-The White House is underwhelming. I saw it through the fence, took a selfie, and went off to find something more interesting to look at.

-Runners are everywhere. Look over your shoulder., there’s a runner. Cross the street, a runner is crossing with you. Time of day doesn’t matter–wherever you are, the runners will always be there.

-The metro at Arlington Cemetery shuts down at 7:00. This is very convenient for a certain taxi driver, who waits there for the uniformed tourist (namely me) to show up looking lost, tired, and confused by the lack of metro. The tourist then gives the aforementioned taxi driver $20 for a lift home.

-The metro stop where Zoe Barnes was pushed to her death in House of Cards DOES NOT EXIST. It was a set. Frank could not have killed Zoe in a real metro station because the platforms are open and not conducive to murder. Totally kills that scene for me now.

-Designer labels on clothes, bags, glasses, shoes, hats, watches, etc., are extremely common.

-People commute an hour and a half to travel 20 miles.

-Monuments and memorials are basically everywhere. The famous ones (e.g., Lincoln) are best seen at night.

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A Letter to my Mother

Dear Mom,

You will notice that your sunglasses are no longer on the piano. The truth is, I took them when I left for Minneapolis. My sunglasses were lost in the rubble of totes and suitcases jammed into my car, so I snapped up yours and transported them 198 miles out of your reach with no thought of bringing them back.

Another confession: I have your hat. You and I found two great hats at Sears one day–you got the blue one, and I got the black one. After a while, I realized I liked the blue one better, so I confiscated it from your closet without asking.

There’s also a necklace I took from your dresser. I’ve had it so long, you probably don’t even remember owning it.

Oh, and the next time you’re loading leftovers into a perfectly sized GladWare container and can’t find a lid, I’ll be the one to blame. In all my frenzied packing and cleaning, I made off with one or two kitchen items that weren’t mine.

I even have one of your spoons. I don’t really know why.

It’s true that I’m the jewelry, scarf, and shoe thief in your life, that I’ve used your postage stamps without asking or replacing them, that I’ve parked my car on grass you were trying to grow, and that I’ve kept you up late at night so I could vent about the dramas of my life.

Now that I’ve moved to Minneapolis, your odds of ever seeing your pilfered items again are pitifully small, but at least your stuff won’t go missing nearly as much. I just wanted to say thanks for letting me live at home and eat your chocolate chips while I figured out my next move in life. You and dad were great landlords, and I promise I’ll be back to park on your lawn and borrow your sweaters.

Love,

Sarah

To begin again

A year ago, I kicked off this blog with exciting tales of my journey overseas. Now, after eight turbulent months, I’m settled back in my hometown and beginning to hit my stride again. So what shall I do with my blog? My life these days doesn’t revolve around hearing world-famous musicians, climbing mountains, and seeing great plays. So what exactly do I do that’s worth blogging about? Well, let’s find out.

Saltaire: the model of a nineteenth-century city

Were he alive today, Titus Salt would likely be addicted to Sims games. Prior to computer-generated realities, very few people could claim to have designed a town, but Titus did so with style. Saltaire is named for the River Aire and for the man who inscribed “T” for Titus and “S” for Salt on almost every building in town. Titus Salt was the wealthy owner of Salts Mill, a nineteenth-century wool factory he had designed in the style of an Italian palace. When you’re rich, you can do those sorts of things. You can also build the church, the town hall, the school, and every other major structure in the shape of a “T” (with all the door handles “T” shaped for good measure), and you can have a bust of your face in as many places around town as you want.

When told I’d be moving to a mill town in northern England, I immediately thought of the smoky factories that ground human lives to dust during the Industrial Revolution. Manufacturing brought wealth and poverty in startling extremes to places like Manchester and Bradford. With rapid urbanization and poor sanitation, life expectancy in factory towns was around 20 years old, and cholera epidemics killed by the thousands. Then Mr. Salt hit the scene.

He was a successful manufacturer in Bradford, but the city was crowded and cholera was rampant. He wanted a clean start, so he bought three miles of land by the River Aire and the Leeds to Liverpool Canal. Get this—the houses for his workers were built on a grid. A grid! Most streets in England meander mindlessly, but Titus had a plan. There would be bathhouses, a washhouse, a hospital, almshouses, churches, a school, and a hall. He also had a retirement home for his aged employees, which was a completely new thing in the 1850s. There was no pollution in his town—all his chimneys consumed their own smoke. Each house had its own plumbing system (as opposed to everybody peeing in the river in Bradford). The workers had to follow a strict set of rules, and, Titus being a good Christian, insisted there be no drinking or pubs in town. (Today there is a pub in city limits called “Don’t tell Titus….”) Titus was not perfect. He employed children under the age of nine, which was illegal as of 1833, but since Titus was the constable and magistrate, he could pretty much do as he pleased. The kids went to school half the day, though, because he wanted to raise an educated workforce.

The mill:

Saltaire was, in fact, a very nice place to live. It remains so. It even smells nice, since every house has a garden and flowering trees abound. I’ve taken a number of local tours and learned about the nineteenth-century toboggan rides and rollercoasters that used to sit on top of the Shipley glen. Saltaire was famous for leisure as well. Titus built a beautiful park (with a huge statue of himself) for people to enjoy, and the town’s shops started to draw folks from all over the area. The mill is today an art gallery, café, antique store, and museum. Titus lives forever, of course, since how could you forget a man whose name is stamped everywhere? Saltaire was named an UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001. According to UNESCO: “Saltaire, West Yorkshire, is a complete and well-preserved industrial village of the second half of the 19th century. Its textile mills, public buildings and workers’ housing are built in a harmonious style of high architectural standards and the urban plan survives intact, giving a vivid impression of Victorian philanthropic paternalism.” And it’s my home for a few months more.

Titus Andronicus

Titus Andronicus was actually Shakespeare’s biggest hit. The Elizabethan Age favored brutality on stage and off. To get to the Globe Theatre, people had to cross London Bridge, passing underneath the severed heads of convicted traitors on spikes. The Globe was competing for an audience with other violent entertainment industries, such as the bloody pastime of bear baiting, so a play like Titus Andronicus—with its unrelenting negativity and cruelty—was actually just the thing to get the audience through the door. History did not treat the play well. In 1687, Edward Ravenscroft called it “a heap of rubbish.” T.S. Eliot in 1932 did not mince words, saying it was “one of the stupidest and most uninspired plays ever written.” Samuel Johnson summed it up: “The barbarity of the spectacles, the general massacre which are here exhibited, can scarcely be conceived tolerable to any audience.”

I’ve been reading the play all week, wondering just how the Globe’s production would make such themes as rape, mutilation, and cannibalism palatable on the stage. There is nothing at all redeeming in the plot. It starts with ritual human sacrifice and ends with mass murder, passing through every level of horror in the meantime. I’m surprised Quentin Tarantino hasn’t adapted it. So, I kept wondering—did I make a huge mistake getting tickets? Should I have just seen Much Ado About Nothing and called it a weekend?

I’m glad I didn’t. It was a bloody good time. As an audience member standing in the yard (a “groundling”), you did more than just watch characters moving around on stage—you were forced into the action. Hordes of Goths pushed past you to rebel against Tamora, and proud soldiers bore Titus through the crowd as he entered victorious into Rome. Every surface of the theatre was performance space. If you didn’t move out of the way for the moving platforms, you really would get crushed by them. At one point, a net was stretched from the front of the stage, and the audience standing on either side became the pit it was supposed to represent. The energy of the crowd was unreal. Our attention never wandered—we were captivated for three hours in this world of Rome and revenge.

Yes, there was blood. And fainting—lots of fainting. At the Q&A session, actor Brian Martin joked that “it’s like acting in a hospital ward.” Paramedics really were standing by. The fact that people were dropping like flies added to the comradery of the experience. After the show, people asked “did it affect you?” as much as they asked “did you enjoy it?” But we did enjoy it, and I’ll tell you why—because it was superbly done. All the characters were three dimensional and strongly motivated—this was not violence for violence sake. The crowd was fascinated by the deep psychological intelligence conveyed by the actors. I’ve seen dozens of great Shakespeare casts, but this one outstripped them all. In Titus Andronicus, the actors at the Globe had truly achieved something remarkable.

Reading the play and seeing the play are two vastly different experiences. Reading it is uncomfortable and uninspiring—you wish it had never been written. But when you see it, theater does what theater does best—it takes you to an extreme. Whether it be extreme love or extreme sorrow (or extreme vengeance in this case), theater pushes you to beyond the limits of reality. From this heightened perspective, you can see the human condition in ways your ordinary life does not allow. So what did Titus Andronicus teach me about the human condition? That humanity is capable of going to a deep dark place, and that we should run as fast as we possibly can in the opposite direction.

Here’s me with the actors who play the rapists — Brian Martin (left) and Samuel Edward-Cook (right). They did the Q&A session. Aren’t they adorable villains?

England

The novel Wuthering Heights opens with the arrival of Mr. Lockwood, a bumbling and effete English gentleman. Tired of city life, he thinks he’ll find a restful escape by renting Thrushcross Grange on the barren Yorkshire moors. Instead he’ll be swept up in a gothic narrative of ghosts, vengeance, and romance on the moors. As the north wind bites into the rocks and snow falls in the mist, he arrives to greet his landlord, Heathcliff, who lives at Wuthering Heights. With charming obliviousness, Lockwood is unable to see that Heathcliff is a villain who has wreaked desolation on every person, place, and animal within his reach. But after being attacked by the household dogs and treated scornfully by Heathcliff and the residents of the Heights, Lockwood’s illusions begin to fade. With the weather turned stormy, he gets stuck overnight in a room haunted by the ghost of Kathy, Heathcliff’s dead love. At last the morning comes and Lockwood can escape, “benumbed to my very heart.”

My arrival at my new home in Yorkshire was not nearly so tempestuous. Instead of a gothic estate built of jutting stones, I showed up at a small white house in Saltaire. The weather here is partly cloudy with occasional rain—hardly the setting for ghosts and tragic love stories. In lieu of a pack of hounds, there is a poodle, “Bertie,” who is far too fluffy and cute to make a threatening impression. Like Lockwood, I am in Yorkshire for a break from the city. Saltaire is a small town, especially compared with Vienna, and I find I can relax here. For the next three months, I’ll be taking care of Bertie and exploring England before heading back to Vienna in July.

Composer of the day: Johann Georg Reutter

Reutter was born in Vienna in 1708 and died here in 1772. He aspired to be the court organist (like his father), but Johann Joseph Fux (see earlier post) rejected his application three times. He did some traveling to Italy instead, and when he returned he managed to get the position of court composer. His style is Baroque, and he was once called “the single most influential musician in Vienna.” When Joseph Hadyn was seven, he auditioned for Reutter as a soprano singer. Reutter accepted Hadyn into his ensemble, where Hadyn got his early musical training as a choirboy. Apparently Reutter was no Daddy Warbucks–the choirboys were said to be underfed and given a patchy education. More on Hadyn to come.

The “k” in “knee” and other linguistic foilables

Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a language. And everybody who lived in Denmark and the southern parts of Norway and Sweden spoke this language. They lived twenty-five hundred years ago, long before smart phones had translator aps. But because they all spoke the same language, they understand each other and lived happily ever after (or more likely died of violence, famine, or disease). This language, which came to be known as Proto-Gemanic, gave birth to seven children who were all much alike and stayed closely related. They were named German, Dutch, Yiddish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Icelandic. They were a happy family of languages. When German said “tochter,” Dutch would say “dochter,” then Norwegian said “datter,” while Swedish said “dotter,” and Icelandic would end the chorus with “dottir.” But there was another child in the family, who wandered far away from its siblings and made all kinds of new friends, like French and Latin. This child stole new word after new word until it went radical and changed its grammar altogether. It kept mixing with other languages for centuries until this child—English—became the prodigal it is today.

I enjoy running into German words that are similar to their English equivalents—like the words “tochter” and “daughter.” It reminds me of the history imprinted on the words we speak. I am an editor, and people sometimes think that means I deal with absolutes in terms of grammar and punctuation. The truth is, language is constantly evolving, and the precepts we know as “grammar rules” are not rules at all—they are time-honored conventions. Even a language is not concrete. As Max Weinreich put it, “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” Editing standards are quite important to me, though, but those standards are inventions and are more or less arbitrary. Some are even outdated. The classic example is the split infinitive: thou shalt not separate a verb from its “to.” According to this rule, the Star Trek catch phase should be “to go boldly,” not the more punchy “to boldly go.” Sticklers like to catch split infinitives and point to them as criminal offenders. But why is it a rule to not split infinitives (or “not to split”)? Actually, it’s a leftover from Latin. In Latin, infinitives are one word and therefore unsplittable. When infinitives crossed the linguistic divide into English, this rule followed them there, even though there’s no real reason for it to exist. But it’s still generally not acceptable to split them in professional writing, so I try to avoid doing so.

Language is on my mind because the mystery is over. When I was a kid, I wondered and wondered, but it never made sense—why don’t we say the “k” in “knee”? What is it about that k that is so forbidden? To this question, adults would say, “Just because.” Kids know that’s a silly answer, but they aren’t allowed to argue. I would like all the silly adults in the world to know that there is an explanation. In Old English the “k” was spoken. But sometime around the 16th to 17th centuries, the consonant cluster evolved into a simple “n” sound, possibly because it was deemed hard for English speakers to pronounce. But guess what—German speakers say “k-nee”! I first heard the word pronounced with a “k” at my yoga class. And with that, my childhood mystery was solved. We don’t say the “k” in English…because we just don’t! And Austrians say the “k” because they just do! That’s language for you.   

My current project is learning the German alphabet so that I can sound out words. Initially I cheated. There was no reason for me to learn the actual names of things like subway stations since I never needed to say them out loud. I therefore renamed them something I would remember. The subway stops “Ketternbruckengasse” became “kettleballs,” “Margaretengurtel” became “margarita-ville,” “Floridsdorf” became “Florida,” and so on. But enough of that. I’ve been here almost two months. Time to learn to read.

Concert Etiquette at the Musikverein

The Musikverein is Vienna’s famous concert hall. Each day from September to June, the venue hosts four to six concerts by top musicians from all over the world. Danish architect Theophil Hansen designed the building in the Neoclassical style of an ancient Greek temple, intending it to be a temple of music. Within the Musikverein are the Golden Hall for large concerts, the Brahms Hall for chamber music, and two newer halls in the basement for contemporary music. The Golden Hall was built in 1870 and is considered one of the greatest concert venues in the world. To achieve the outstanding acoustics, Hansen created resonance spaces throughout the hall. All of the ornamentation and pillars are hollow, and there’s a large empty room beneath the hall that makes the wooden floor responsive to the sound.

Just like the Vienna State Opera, the Musikverein offers standing-area tickets for 5 euros ($6.87), which are available one hour before the performances. I line up for concerts about three times a week. My favorites so far have been pianist Mitsuko Uchida, cellist Sol Gabetta and the Basel Chamber Orchestra, flutist Maria Fedotova, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra performing Romeo and Juliet by Sergei Prokofiev, and violinist Hilary Hahn performing a Brahms concerto (which is fitting since Brahms was the musical director of the Musikverein from 1872 to 1875).

So what’s it like standing through concerts? Once you get your ticket, you wait about 15-30 minutes to be herded upstairs by the ushers. Then you wait again for the doors to open, at which point there is a buzzer—yes, a buzzer—that signals you to dash for the rail at the front, where you can mark your spot with a scarf. You don’t want to end up staring at a column or at some tall person’s head. Being at the rail helps because it gives you something to lean on. There’s always a bouncer (if a classical music hall can be said to have a bouncer) who keeps order and watches to be sure the standers don’t do something dumb, like take videos. During the actual performance, no one chews gum, which leaves me skipping for joy because gum chewing is my most passionate pet peeve. The most comical bit of etiquette is the coughing—concert attendees seriously don’t cough until an interlude. Every time Mistuko Uchida reached the end of a movement, it sounded like the hall was dying of tuberculosis.

I was excited to see Uchida play on Monday after learning that Alan, my pianist friend, had named his car after her. She’s a big deal. She was awarded Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire by the queen in 2009, making her the first dame I’ve seen in real life. You lose yourself in her playing. You’d almost believe she was making it up on the spot—it all sounds so natural and present. She played an hour and a half of Beethoven like it was nothing.

The Great Hall of the Musikverein is, according to my friend Alan, “a giant shoebox covered in gold leaf.” For a shoebox, it serves quite well as a concert hall.

This evening I went to see Kammerorchester Basel with cello soloist Sol Gabetta. The ensemble uses period instruments, something I’ve always wanted to see and hear. As for Sol Gabetta, I am speechless. All my life I hope to collect moments of true beauty, and tonight was one of those.

Composer of the day: Johann Fux

As the son of a peasant family, Johann Joseph Fux (1660-1741) came from humble beginnings. He was given music lessons, however, and eventually attended a Jesuit university. With his talent, he worked his way up to the status of court composer for Leopold I in 1698. He also served the next two Habsburg emperors: Joseph I and Charles VI. His counterpoint technique was highly regarded and was studied by future composers Haydn, young Beethoven, and Mozart. The work of Fux marks the end of the Baroque period in Austria. He remained a famous composer until his style went out of fashion.