Caveat Lector

The Holst is written in eleven parts (eleven!), two full SATB choirs plus three treble parts singing a lot of amens and one or two other little tidbits.

We’ve drawn our trebles from the youth arm of the choral society, which has run into some difficulty lately because their director has been ill. They’re… um… how to put this nicely… let’s just say they could use some divine grace dancing, okay?

So the solution may turn out to be yanking a few women to sing with them, and because I am a big lummox, I volunteered. Haven’t heard whether that’s the plan yet, but if it is, it’s back to high-school choir for me. Amen, or something.

Because David has to endure a root canal tomorrow and I still have boatloads of vacation time to burn, I took the day off to go be a tourist with him. We went to Alexandria and picked up a river cruise to Mount Vernon.

I am fond of tourist river cruises. They’re especially nice as a change of pace from tromping around on foot, David and I found in Montreal. The Potomac isn’t as pretty as the St. Lawrence, but it’s not bad. We also picked a picture-perfect day, not so hot that walking was unpleasant, but not so cold that the stiff breeze on the river didn’t feel good.

Before we entered the grounds, which are a no-food zone, we sat on a log bench by the river to munch up a couple of apples. A water-monster made his presence known, which made us feel right at home, and then a great blue heron hovered his way in and stalked the river-wall nearby looking for—well, more water-monsters, probably.

And then another one sailed in a little way away with the same aim in view. I happened to have the binoculars when they both took off, so for just a moment I had both of them in view—along with the third one. Wherever he came from.

The brown donkey in the Mount Vernon paddock didn’t mind us petting him, though the arrogant white rooster expressed considerable disapprobation. The gardens are neat as a pin and very flowery this time of year. They don’t seem to be having much luck with their fruit trees, though.

The house is a lesson in lack of ostentation that not a few folks could stand to learn from. I rather liked the dodge of putting sand in paint to create a faux-stone exterior. The view, of course, is quite magnificent.

And as we waited on the wharf to hop the boat back to Alexandria, we saw ospreys sailing overhead and cormorants swimming in the river. The boat passed a heron standing sentinel on a buoy, and another buoy sporting a rickety gulls-nest (complete with gull). We stopped for dinner in Old Town Alexandria, then walked back to the metro and came home, tired, happy, and full to the brim of quite good Indian food.

I am pondering the hypothesis that great blue herons do not actually have bodies, just wings and legs and long snaky neck somehow attached to each other. Because, really, how can they find room to fold up those immense wings and still have space for a body?

David got through his root canal in fine fettle. Still not so much for the chewy foods, but he’s fine otherwise.

Dream went back to the vet. His heartrate is definitely going in the right direction (down, that is), but he’s had his dosage increased a tad. Curiously, the pills seem to have revved up his appetite. This is not a bad thing at all; he was getting too skinny.

And there’s nothing wrong with me except a touch of sunburn from Mount Vernon on the forearms.

So the big news in libraryland this week was the FRPAA bill—well, it should have been the FRPAA bill. But it wasn’t. It was the merger of OCLC and RLG.

I’d like to be thrilled about this. I’m not.

OCLC has lots of smart people. RLG has lots of smart people. The two together are likely to have—fewer smart people. Most mergers lead to pink slips. Even those that don’t inevitably lead to departures.

And frankly, if I were an RLG employee—and possibly even if I worked for OCLC right now—my résumé would be hitting the wires right this very minute. Why? Because nobody in either organization was told about the merger until it was all but a fait accompli. Look around the biblioblogosphere. You won’t find anybody who’s anything but shocked. (Lorcan hasn’t weighed in, probably wisely.) That’s not management behavior that I would be inclined to trust. Call me suspicious if you will.

Will the folks who leave stay with librarianship? Maybe, maybe not. Almost certainly we lose a few. Yay. This is me rejoicing. Yay, I said.

I also tend to worry about what happens when two organizations working on similar projects join. I think we’ve lost some diversity of approach with this merger; both OCLC and RLG were working on FRBRization projects, but from rather different angles. What now? “Oh, we’re doing that over here. Go do something else.” Trust me, if there’s one thing library research does not need, it’s less experimentation.

And then there’s the big kahuna—OCLC sells its R&D results. RLG is a membership organization, so that it can offer its R&D free to all comers. The floated merger proposal, as I read it, keeps RLG’s membership system intact—but I don’t trust the firewall between RLG and OCLC, not one bit. Of course OCLC will do its level best to monetize the cool stuff coming out of RLG. That’s their business model. I look forward to being charged out the wazoo for Trusted Digital Repository certification, unless NARA can put the brakes on things—and why would NARA care?

I would very much like to be wrong about all this. I should say that I don’t think anybody’s gone into it in bad faith, and I do believe that Lorcan Dempsey will do his level best with it. (And, hell, I haven’t heard anything bad about Velterop at Springer, so maybe I’m wrong about this too.) But I see more bad than good in this for libraries; I truly do.

I was sitting quietly in my favorite chair reading when a groany-growly noise started out back that sounded rather like a horribly-tuned Harley.

Then I heard a big crack, and some buried part of my hindbrain made me scramble up to run for the door.

My hindbrain is smart. Took a while for the rest of my brain to catch up and identify the sound as a decidedly large tree falling. Not on us, fortunately, nor on any inhabited structure, but the neighbors are going to have some hefty fence repair to do. Shame to lose the tree, but according to David it was inevitable given the windstorms we had during the winter; on investigation, he found that the tree had been hollowed most of the way through. Well, I daresay some critters will find it a good home.

And speaking of critters, we have a starling nest in our utility closet. I can hear the little nippers saying tsip, tsip now and then. I have made a small offering of canteloupe innards, but I draw the line at hunting grubs; mama starling will just have to find her own.

Baby starlings are good to practice music by; they shriek for food in regular eighth-note triplets.

It’s kinda cool to see that someone searched your name on the repository you run. (Yes, I do consume mine own dog food. I’m thinking of stashing the Baladro in there too, actually, but that’s going to have to be a copious-spare-time kind of project.)

Somehow it’s vastly less cool when the reason you find out about the search is that the search triggered a system error. (Apparently the Log File that Ate Neo-Tokyo—from a completely different system service—blitzed enough hard drive space to cause problems. The World’s Coolest Boss was on the case before I was.)

Rehearsal tonight was energetic and worthwhile (more on that tomorrow, I hope). The best part of my day, however, was waiting for me when I got home.

I haven’t got time to crop this properly before I go to bed, so I’m going to link to it instead of including it inline.

The photo is not doing this justice. It is exactly what I had hoped it would be. I love it absolutely to bits and pieces and it’s already on the wall in the dining room.

The artist (and oh my, she is one) is Lorraine Ortner-Blake and I’m so thrilled about what she made me that I could just about cry.

Norton Juster’s extended meditation on sound in The Phantom Tollbooth starts with a visit to KAKOFONOUS A. DISCHORD, DOCTOR OF DISSONANCE. (My apologies to those whose news-aggregator layouts I have just broken.)

I’d put good money on Holst being one of Dr. Dischord’s favorite composers. The Hymn of Jesus is good and loud (though I’ll stop short of calling it cacophony). It is also plenty dissonant.

You’ll be happy to know (especially if you’re coming to the concert May 20th) that we’ve finally pretty much pulled the piece together. The high-school semichorus must have put in some serious after-school practice time last week, because they got themselves in gear quite impressively. This won’t be a Holst for the ages, but it won’t be a trainwreck either.

It’s not a bad idea to check out a translation of the Acts of John from which the text is taken before you come. (Search the page on “hymn” until you find it.) David and I discovered that Holst seems to have taken a couple of useful and interesting liberties with the text, which he translated himself.

Before the hymn proper, Holst introduces the two famous chant melodies “Pange lingua” and “Vexilla regis” in a short, undemanding, meditative prelude. (I digress briefly: One of the few good memories I have of my first stretch in grad school was signing up for an evening enrichment course in singing chant. I learned to read neumes and to fake reading C-clefs, and I had a marvelous time. I will always remember “Pange lingua” fondly.)

Hold onto your seat at the end of the Prelude, because the chorus is about to peel the wax from your ears with a stentorian “Glory to thee, Father!” The semichorus calms your fight-or-flight reaction with some nice amens, and then the main chorus burns another one over the plate: “Glory to thee, Word!” More amens, and just when you’re cringing back in your seat because you know this invocation (slightly unusual though the second recipient is) comes in threes, Holst gets the last laugh, a murmured “Glory to thee, O Grace” wafting out gently.

(Hey, I like a composer with a sly sense of humor. Sue me. No, this is not a funny piece—not at all—but I do think Holst is going for a laugh. A shaky laugh of relief, if nothing else, the sort of laugh-to-keep-from-crying that is very proper to the piece’s post-WWI milieu.)

Holst isn’t very sophisticated with choral dynamics; his method of starting something off softly and letting it get loud is staggering entrances with a view toward a big pile-on at the end. Not that this doesn’t work, mind you; it’s just not the most intriguing way to get the effect. (Compare this to the Chilcott Canticles, which make the chorus work hard for dynamic effects.) Be that as it may, he staggers entrances in a spoken section and then a sung one, ending in a split-chorus shout of praise. (The part of my brain that likes clever translation work delights in the inspired “We give thanks to thee, O shadowless light!”)

The chorus split now takes on character: half the chorus represents the master(s) of the rite, and half the initiate(s). They trade lines back and forth, the initiates explaining what they want to gain, and the masters what they can offer. Tellingly, both halves exclaim together “I am mind of all—fain would I be known!”

And then Holst starts a catchy, brass-laced dance, although why he thinks anybody dances in 5/4 time is beyond me. (Holst. 5/4. It just is. You deal with it.) It is a dance of joy, a dance of grief, a dance that covers earth and heaven and everything in between, a dance that grants knowledge, a dance so vital that it is almost frightening. (Here is where having read the words will help.)

Indeed, the initiates are now a little nervous; the masters reassure them. When all is well, both choruses united explain the significance of the rite to its celebrants in immense crowded chords that would have Dr. Dischord clapping his hands in glee.

And then the “Pange lingua” turns up, Jesus explaining that the dance is key to understanding the suffering about to ensue. Another dance begins (at least, I think it’s intended for a dance), this one a swingy reedy number that reminds me so of Gershwin that I actually looked up dates—but Gershwin wasn’t Gershwin when this piece was written, so perhaps Holst was one of the composers that Gershwin learned to be Gershwin from? Anyway, this dance leads into triumphant trumpets and sopranos proclaiming the “Vexilla regis” (which it kills me that I don’t get to sing; it’s an awesome bit). Triumph through dance, again. I love it; it’s a deeply unusual message in our hyper-verbal world.

The next section is about suffering, and without being bombastic, it cuts to the bone. Watching Jesus’s pain, using empathy to learn from it, letting it be a spur to action, is the only path to wisdom; the end to suffering is through suffering, dealing with suffering, transcending suffering. I can’t see any better way to say it than Holst did: “Learn how to suffer, and ye shall overcome!”

Quite a message, that. Worth pondering, particularly now, and particularly for us who are soft and privileged. What wisdom are we missing?

A last echo of the dance, from the semi-chorus: “Fain would I move to the music of holy souls!” A last invocation to learn, and then to praise—and then we’re back to the stentorian shouts of glory, much easier to hear, even to thrill to, now that they have been explicated. The piece closes with thoughtful, considered amens from the entire chorus.

Even less-than-stellarly sung, this is a wildly fantastic piece of music, worth hearing in person. It is not often performed in this country, I am given to understand, so call for tickets.

The new blog Carrollogos (which is very much worth a repository-rat’s time) dissects the claim that open access is harmful because lay readers do not have the training or experience to interpret research articles. (See the New York Times for examples of this argument, lest anyone think homines straminei are what’s at stake here.)

Carroll’s counter-arguments are good, and so are the comments, but I have another angle on the issue. Simply put: when did gatekeeping become part of publisher mandate?

If you ask a researcher or a librarian what publishers are for, “keeping knowledge out of the hands of inexperienced readers” is not going to appear on the response list. I don’t know any publishers who attract submissions because they promise fewer readers!

Indeed, I suspect the majority researcher response to the inexperienced-reader question, if it were posed outright, would be a bewildered stare and “If they’re willing to wade through it, why would I stop them?” I grant that a substantial minority response would be the snobbish “They can’t possibly care or understand,” but even in that case, I doubt the researcher would want the publisher deciding who is or isn’t a qualified reader!

Do publishers really act as gatekeepers now? Do they vet all their subscription requests for competence in the related field of inquiry? (I can just see it: “No, this community-college library may not subscribe to the Journal of Incomprehensible Results! They’re not worthy!”) Do eighteen-year-old undergraduates, who have the full run of their libraries, really count as “qualified” readers? Does it bother publishers that lay readers can walk freely into a great many academic libraries (though, sadly, fewer than in days of yore) and read their journals?

And what about reprint requests, or pay-per-downloads? What competency controls do publishers maintain on those? Yes, I’m laughing too. This is all about the money. We know that, publishers know that; let’s everybody cut out the nonsense.

My sense, in fact, is that this line of reasoning is a dangerous one for publishers. Nobody expects or even wants them to vet readers; their claims on this score smack of overweening arrogance that researchers won’t approve of. I am only surprised that no one else has yet called publishers to account for this ridiculous rhetoric.