Barry Kosky's Tchaikovsky: Eugene Onegin at the Zurich Opera house. A review in the form of notes.

Curtain rises, beginning: the two women are frozen, they are a photograph. They then begin moving when the music changes, they are now a memory. They are dressed in black, and there is a haze on the stage. They are singing of the past. Complacent, quaint, but ever so forlorn. The two women, sung by Liliana Nikiteanu and Margerita Nekrasova, sing beautifully a sad song with folk twang. The lower voice is so earthy it sounds – how do I describe this – like a woolen muff has been dipped in wine and squeezed into sound. They sing of men – men who are deceitful in life, but who become somehow saintly in their passing. My mother says my grandmother did the same hagiographic nattering about a husband she couldn't bear until he died, whereupon he could do no wrong. Ahh, the passage of time.

The Netherparts: How low country can you go?

For Easter, I visited the Netherlands. As I get older I care less and less about manufacturing experiences out of travel, am less often alone when I travel, and am despite my deadened aesthetic sensitivities more confident with age that I am seeing a place on my terms while still somehow submitting to it. So it was with the Netherlands, and here are my notes.

The first thing I noticed about Amsterdam was that it is overrun with Brits, and perhaps the best way to illustrate the Dutch character is in comparison to its neighbors. If Brexit was an impulse for people who complain about too many Poles living in their midst, then perhaps Amsterdam needs a counter-gesture (Brittenuit?) to close its airports to the flights leaving every three minutes from England's airports. Or maybe they, the locals, simply don't give a Dam.

The British there travel in packs, either in groups of twenty twenty-somethings or as pleasant families; their is no other deployment visible of Brits in Amsterdam. You don't see tour buses full of retirees, or romantic couples, or thirty+ sports tourists, for example. You either get prams, or Instagram (strollers or rollers?). It is not as if the twenty-somethings you see are on their best behavior. The only favor they would appear to do the city, besides filling its coffers with cash and its canals with upchuck, is that in comparison they make the Dutch seem so poised. Placing a British twenty-something tourist in Amsterdam, all dolled up and blinged out, next to a Dutch twenty-something local is like putting a donkey next to a thoroughbred, except that the donkey speaks a language you mostly recognize, and the thoroughbred speaks ... well, more on what the Dutch speak later.

Reading Sebald in English, and English vs. German syntax

In response to a friend of mine who asked whether reading W.G. Sebald in German was very different from reading him in English, and whether I thought something important was lost in translation:

Sebald in English is magnificent because the writing is magnificent. Sebald is a very at-the-surface writer because he wants you to look at things you already see. So he used a style that sort of coaxes you into a sense of "I already mostly know what this is all about." Then he gives you clues that what is at the surface is misleading, that what you can see means something else and that you are missing what's essential. And so he gives you another version, and another angle, and another clue, and another and another (making it a good bet to read the book again). He does this in a way that is not showy; it is humble and disarming and then finally all the more forceful for it. So, yeah, you can get most of that in English without worrying too much about what's missing.