Concert & Random Notes

I finally got around to asking my cousin and the other director of the New York Festival of Song for the recording of their Lorca concert last Spring. How different this Spring has been from the last one!  I thought I would take the day off from work, but listening to an hour 1/2 concert and taking notes is kind of like "work." I also wrote a silly poem about making and eating breakfast.  That is "work" too.

I haven't been to live concert since last fall, probably.

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I've become a big fan of art song since I began this project. As with everything else, there are mediocre ones, too. I don't even know enough to tell the difference, always, so I have to rely on instincts.

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On facebook, I corrected someone who posted a fake quote by Unamuno. "Racism is cured by reading," etc... How someone could think Unamuno said that is beyond me. The word racism wasn't even in use in Spanish in this period. The original quote was something different, and by Pío Baroja not Unamuno, who probably was racist himself (big surprise). The urge to cite authorities for what we think is too strong, I suppose. It reminds me a bit of attributing your own poems of a contemporary American to Hafez.  You could play around with it a bit, I guess. 

The idea that racism and fascism could be cured by reading or traveling is absurd on the face of it. Didn't slave traders travel? Didn't writers become fascists? If reading and traveling were antidotes to bad political attitudes...