I apologize to my reader (Hi Mom!) for the sounds of silence the last couple of weeks. We bought our first house last week, and I am preparing for my audition on "Jeopardy!" tomorrow and my New Orleans bachelor party this weekend. I think the audition deserves a more in-depth treatment here, but I am reviewing some weak areas (Books of the Bible, Opera, English literature, Current World Leaders) and that is taking up most of my time.
To tide you over, here's some interesting stuff I have discovered in the past few days:
- Richard Wagner, whose work was heralded by Hitler, was quite the anti-Semite. In addition to being adopted golden boy of the Nazis, he published his own anti-Jewish screeds in the middle to late 1800s. Jackass.
- Deuteronomy 25:11-12 prohibits women for coming to the aid of their husbands by attacking the other man in the crotch ("[11] When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets: [12] Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her."). Something to keep in mind, ladies.
- Joshua, after destroying the walls of Jericho, took the Israelites born during the Exodus to a place in the desert and had them all circumcised. This is place is known by the name Gibeath Haaraloth, which means "hill of foreskins".
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
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4 comments:
Wagner sucks. Mahler is at least bearable. PLus, I don't think he was anti-semitic, but I'm not sure on that one.
^^
"wagner sucks"? by comparison to what? by what standard? quite a broad statement, and pretty ridiculous to boot. it's like saying "shakespeare sucks" or "picasso sucks". you're welcome to that opinion, but saying "wagner sucks" makes you sound like a small-minded reactionary. "i don't like wagner" would be a more reasonable statement, though why anyone would care i have no idea.
anti-semite he may have been, but to write off tristan und isolde and the ring cycle because you don't like someone's politics is downright...well, republican.
daniel barenboim has it right...you engage in a dialogue about the guy, but you don't toss his music out because he was, as the original post pretty much correctly had it, a jackass.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/aug2001/wagn-a01.shtml
and yes, mahler is quite good as well, though he and wagner are about as close to apples and oranges as you can get.
OK. Fine.
"I don't like Wagner."
Wait. Let me be more specific. How's this?
"I don't like Wagner because he sucks - by which I mean I'd rather shave my balls with a cheese grater than listen to the &$^#%!(%&$#* Ring Cycle."
Does that pass muster?
And by the way, I logged on originally to say...
What happened to not being MIA? (That's to the author of the blog, not the commenter...)
Ahhh, Jamie. You are a hoot! Wagner does indeed suck. His anti-semitism is completely irrelevant in this context, though (just because Hitler was an idiot on so many levels, doesn't mean he didn't lift the German economy out of a rut). It's probably the bombastic and simplistic quality of his music. And if publius is going insist on making the meaning of "suck" contingent on how the subject relates to everything else, then let's rephrase: Wagner sucks compared to everything else.
Really, the metric is an innate human aesthetic, which can identify when something is not working towards perfection, and instead insists on depravity. If that's not a good enough answer to publius, perhaps we can apply said cheese grater to his balls and ask whether what he's experiencing is painful, and if he says yes (and he will), ask "Painful, you say? Painful compared to what?" and keep on grating. I'm fairly certain there exist more painful experiences than being cheesegrated (like listening to Wagner), so why stop?
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