We have opera buffa, opera seria, soap opera, horse opera (my father’s term for a cowboy picture) and now an opera written and performed in Klingon. Some people in Holland, perhaps unemployed in the current depress….I mean, downturn have prepared a musical work that will feature not merely a libretto in that other worldy language but also some special instrucments crafted just for this work. An invitation was sent to the Klingons to attend but so far, at least, no answer has been received. People, on and off, have been lamenting the decline of opera as an art form, but that can’t really be the case, since composers are churning them out like nobody’s business. We’ve had The Great Gatsby, Streetcar Named Desire, something Lord of the Rings-ish with elves and whatnot. A lot of them just sink from sight after the premiere, but a couple have managed to elbow their way onto the regular repetoire and are performed with some regularity;Little Women, for instance, by Mark Adamo. Well, we’ll see or hear, or see and hear, since this is opera after all how the Klingon opus fares.

Opera

By the way, the fact that many new operas don’t seem to succeed is nothing unusual and certainly no sign of the composer’s deficincies. Many of the famous opera greats wrote plenty of operas that didn’t go anywhere. Sometimes it takes a while for a piece to be discovered.

We’ll say farewell to this week with a little goodie I stumbled on when looking at the WIRED page. Some guys have figured out how to create interesting and arresting images from pages of text. If you block out certain portions in an appropriately clever way, you can form the resulting space into a picture. It’s a bit hard to describe, so I’ll just let you examine the link and see for yourselves. Classic texts are used, ones likely to be outside current copyright provisions and so up for all sorts of creative re-arrangements. My favorites are the Austen and the Verne. The Melville is good too.

Poster

David Pogue is the tech guy for the New York Times and in this morning’s issue he has a long article on the new Kindle e-book reader, which Amazon launched recently. Apparently, it’s selling like Billy-be-damned, as the old saying goes. In fact, I saw a notice that they’re fresh out of the gadgets. Pogue’s survey points out a couple of things: the new reader is lighter and smaller, but has the same screen size as the first generation readers. Amazon cut down the overall dimension by clipping the edges. Battery life is good, the price is a lot lower and the purchaser has a choice of versions, with different capabilities. E-ink does give a very good page image and it does approximate quite closely the printed page. Unfortunately, it’s slow, relatively speaking, to refresh when the reader turns the page, and that seems to be one of the limitations of the technology. In all, the man says it’s a very good dedicated e-reader. The big, big edge with Kindle is the large selection of titles that Kindle user can purchase. And, this leads to a difficulty, quite a thorny one in fact. When you download a title from Amazon, and pay for it, what has happened? Did you “buy” a book? The so-called law of first sale says that when you buy a book, it’s yours. You can tear it up or give to somebody else. Can you do that with a downloaded title? No, it seems not. It seems the transaction is more like a lease, or a qualified purchase, in which the seller imposes some conditions which the buyer accepts. Consumers aren’t paying too much attention to this, right now anyway, but it could be a problem in a while.

Reader

Good question, and nobody seems to know. The cause of Mozart’s death has been a matter of debate almost since the guy shoved off. Various doctors have advanced various possibilities…it could have been this, it could have been that. Today’s New York Times has an article in the Arts and Leisure section about the efforts of a physician to categorize the various candidates into groupings such as poisoning, cardiovascular disease, kidney failure, etc. etc. The medical reports have been parsed to death, but vocabularies have changed a lot since 1792, and what was current lingo then is largely incomprehensible now. Beyond that, the reports were written in Viennese medical German, so it’s quite easy to miss the meaning, even for native speakers of German. The words now don’t mean what they meant then. None of this has stopped anybody, including a lot of physicians, from having a shot at determing what killed Mozart. The author suggests that one reason for this enthusiasm for post mortem diagnosis on the part of doctors is that a lot of them are themselves musicians, and so feel a sympathy with the composer. I thought about that for a second or two, but, in my experience, it’s true. I know quite a number of MDs who are really quite accomplished musicians. Here in Galveston, a number of the regulars in the Galveston Symphony are physicians, so maybe there’s something to it. There is also the mystery, the puzzle, and that’s a draw. An apparently health man gets sick and dies. Why? I have some hesitations about the “healthy” part. I think that the general health of people in Mozart’s time was pretty lousy. Most of them got plenty of exercise, that’s for sure. In fact, they were worked to death. But, infectious diseases were common, nutrition was poor, sanitation was, shall we say, quaint, clean water hard to get. When you add it all up, even accounting for class differences, I’ll say that most people harbored something, or more than one something, that would carry them off pretty early in life. Throw in the occasional war, invasion or plague, and you wind up with a lot of unhealthy people. So, nobody knows what killed Mozart and it’s unlilkely anybody will ever find out for sure. But, they’ll keep trying.

Mozart COD

Harvey Cushing was one of the pioneers of American neurosurgery. In the course of a long operating career, he treated many people for diseases of the brain and nervous system, and he acquired an extensive collection of brains and brain section that illustrate various stages in the course of illness. These specimens were regarded as extremely valuable teaching resources for physicians and medical students, in the days before extensive imaging technologies had been developed. Cushing left the collection to Yale University, but, one thing leading to another, as they say, the various jars and bottles were moved around, displaced, misplaced, separated and lost sight of. Moreover the careful annotations about histological type, extent of involvement, age of patient and similar data were mixed up or lost. Now, the Harvey Cushing Center at Yale has gathered about 500 of the original specimens and made them available with proper identification in a special display area devoted to the collection. Cushing was present at the creation of neurosurgery, and not only present, but active in shaping it into the careful, disciplined and methodical operative technique it is today. Cushing was famous for his judgment about where tumors could be found, how to approach them surgically, and how to avoid “collateral damage” to healthy tissue. At the time, neurosurgeons were writing the play and acting it out at the same time. Somebody had to go first, and he did.

Brains