HE'S BACH, AND THIS TIME, HE'S BAD

New Year's Resolution 2017 Edition: Listen to all of Bach's cantatas according to their original performance dates (i.e., today features BWV 190, BWV 41 and BWV 16 from the first, second and third Leipzig cycles respectively, as well as BWVs 171 (pr. 1729), 143, 248/4 and 134a.)

Bach's cantatas follow the Lutheran calendar (obviously, in their capacity as liturgical pieces) and the seasonal flow of the year permeates their texts, so they lend themselves to a chronological listen-through.

I'm using John Eliot Gardiner's glorious Music in the Castle of Heaven (Gardiner's 2000 "Bach Pilgrimage" gave me the idea in the first place), the excellent Bach Cantata Website and whatever other internet goodies I can locate as sources.

We kick off with BWV 190, Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, performed Jan. 1, 1724 in Leipzig. I prefer the punchier Gardiner performance to Koopman's Low Country mellow, as it seems more fitting for a New Years celebration where every second word is loben ("to praise").

The final line of the fifteen-ish minute piece is the most interesting. After rousing, jubilant music and psalmic ebullience, the choral concludes with "Die Heuchler mach zuschanden / Hier und an allem Ort" ("confound/ruin the hypocrite, here and in every place"). Oddly out of place, to a modern ear, for a piece entirely dedicated to ringing in the new year, but I suppose 18th century churchgoers were used to sterner admonitions.

Anyway, we'll see where this leads.

TYMPANIC TANTRUM

Bzzzzap

So I'm reading The Insects: An Outline of Entomology, and its authors (P.J. Gullan and P.S. Cranston) have introduced me to a brilliant little parasitoid of auditory interest.

Meet ormia ochracea, at left, a nocturnal fly who locates prospective hosts (male crickets and katydids), via sound, and then rather coyly uses them as larva hatcheries.

Interesting thing is, according to Penny G. and Peter C., the hearing mechanism in these flies is too small (1.5 mm) for them to determine sound direction via the traditional time-lag-between-ears method à la humans. Uniquely, they only have one auditory chamber containing two bulbae acusticae (basically one ear, two ear drums). These tympana are so close together that the timelag between sounds is only <1-2 microseconds.

To compensate, these flies boast a "cuticular structure" which functions as a sort of leaver between their "ears," magnifying the time and intensity differential between sounds by dampening the vibration from one tympanic membrane to another. So, they get two ears in one, and with hyper-accurate directional hearing. 

I thought this was awesome, and Google makes it look like a lot of other people do too (NPR apparently ran a piece on it in '99). Of course, Wikipedia mentions it, as well as £430,000 grant received by Uni. Strathclyde and MRC/CSO Institute for Hearing Research to develop a hearing aid based on it.

And here's the original (1994) article Penny'n'Pete refer to on the subject, if you happen to have an account at $pringerLink.

MACHIAVELLI IN HELL

Just finished Sebastian de Grazia's in/famous work of intellectual biography: Machiavelli in Hell. It's as idiosyncratic as it is compelling: Rife with amusing Italianisms, scatalogical digressions and pretty Renaissance paintings, it takes a brilliantly odd approach to Machiavelli, the world's most misquoted philosopher after Nietsche and Hobbes. 

This is a work which manages to evoke an intimate portrait of Machiavelli while quoting Mark Twain ("heaven for the climate, hell for the company.") 

Basically, de Grazia presents old man Niccolo as an off-the-wall, off-color and slightly goofy theologian hell-bent on restoring the old Roman notion of virtus, specifically in the person of a principe nuovo who would restore order among the Florentine civitates who left Machiavelli without a job. Fortunately, de Grazia doesn't try to round off the contradictory edges in Machiavelli's writings either. Dense, scattered, the whole thing reads like your favorite professor rambling from behind his desk about his favorite subject and you're not entirely sure he remembers you're there. The editing is appalling, but it's almost the better for it. I will read it again at some point.

But the most important thing I learned about Machiavelli is this: he wrote a novella entitled Belfagor arcidiavolo, which follows the exploits of a devil (Belfagor) sent to earth to investigate the allegations of recent male entrants into hell that they arrived there because of their wives. Belfagor's travails at the hands of one Onesta Donati, whom he marries in the pursuit of the truth, eventually sends him packing, gratefully, back to hell.

BARON GREENPICKLE

German as a language specializes in absurdly comical names. Some Romance names may provoke a grin, but Italian over-flamboyance and Spanish goofiness are nothing compared to the German monopoly on the denominatively ludicrous.

Take, zum Beispiel, a glorious reference buried on page 134 of Princeton's Drawings from the Holy Roman Empire 1540-1680, to a certain Baron Ferdinand Hoffman von Grünpichl und Strechau. Besides providing sorely needed respite from a succession of unimaginatively named artists, the good baron provides a good laugh by virtue of his apparent place of origin: Grünpichl. I don't know about you, but that immediately puts me in mind of Greenpickle and, well, that's good enough for me. 

Of course I'm still working on the actual etymology of Grünpichl. Duden.de defines picheln as "(in kleiner Runde) über längere Zeit Alkohol trinken," which I find amusing. Of course a pre-16th century place name probably has a very different origin.

BY THE NUMEROS: FREQUENCY DICTIONARIES

Since I've been on a history kick I haven't spent as much time on foreign language material. So, just to keep the neurons idling, I've started decking out my bathroom mirror with lists of Spanish words culled from A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish from Routledge. Once I memorize the couple hundred or so I couldn't recall, I know that I'll have the first (by Routledge's reckoning) five thousand down pat. That's a fun thought.

Anyway, I think this sort of rote memorization is a good supplement for direct reading immersion (which remains the best all-around way to absorb and retain foreign vocabulary), but it's only valuable in so far as a). it's used as a supplement and b). (I think) it's more useful to fill in vocabulary gaps once the learner's at a more advanced level.

But now for Routledge's dictionary in particular:

A Frequency Dictionary of Spanish brings together frequency, alphabetical and thematic lists, combines them with English definitions and Spanish phrases for each entry, and wraps the whole thing up with a pretty bow. It's quite well-done. Basically, it does its job, and it does it well. Which is more than you can say for the bulk of language reference material out there. I look forward to going through their German, French and Portuguese editions. Unfortunately they don't have an Italian edition as of yet, but they do have Russian and Arabic.

CAN YOU SAY "WATER" IN MARTIAN?

par Chesley Bonestell

The indispensable Language Hat has brought another internet gem to my attention: Edmund Griffith's "Remarks on the Etymology of Literary Martian." It's a highly amusing mock-philological essay on various fictional "Martian" languages in literature, ranging from Aleksandr Bogdanov to C.S. Lewis. Griffith cheekily points out different real-world languages authors have used as reference points for their own constructions (C.S. Lewis = Old Icelandic), and maintains an endearing, faux-academic register throughout that tickled this reader's funny bone.

Griffiths' website includes an Infrequently Questioned Answers page that's also worth a peek.

COLLECTING BUGS LIKE IT'S 1941

 A good friend of mine shared a little book from 1941 (first print 1936) endearingly entitled How to Know the Insects by Harry Edwin Jaques (who obligingly specifies the pronunciation of his name with a phonetic spelling on the title page: "Ja' - kwis").

In addition to providing a handy introduction to entomology, this miniature masterpiece features a homely guide to the manufacture and use of what Jaques calls "killing bottles." For those collectors who, Jaques says, "fear the deadliness of cyanide," there are other more benign options available: "killing agents such as chloroform, ether, gasoline, benzine, and carbon tetrachloride."

The book's 140-odd pages are fairly evenly divided between quaint 1930s wisdom on collecting/mounting techniques and information on the insects themselves (it's full subtitle is: An Illustrated Key to the More Common Families of Insects, With Suggestions for Collecting, Mounting and Studying Them). The whole is delightfully complemented with naturalistic line-drawings such as exhibit A at right: a hexagenia limbata, or giant mayfly.

 Actually, the book (which is available in full on the Internet Archive if anyone's interested) is worth taking a look at just for the drawings, which I can't find credited. But it takes a true prodigy to produce something of this unparalleled sublimity: