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Assd. Misc.
I want to make it clear that I was neither endorsing nor defending McDonald's when I wrote the Big Mac entry. (I have to link to it? Oh, just go back two entries, for heaven's sake.)
On the contrary, I think McDonald's has a lot to answer for. I don't even like most of their food, as I think I noted. But I can dislike them and still admire their infrastructure, their ruthless efficiency and ability to achieve standardization.
Standardization is hard. You can argue, as Heather did in email, that it's not really a goal worth fighting for - and I don't disagree - but if you do want it, it almost always proves tricky to achieve. You have to admire the ability to get it, even if that ability is turned to bad ends.
To use a more shocking (and polarizing) example, I have been reading some World War II history. In the section of my current book dealing with the causes of WWII, and the years just prior to it, author John Keegan points out that after Hitler assumed the chancellorship of Germany in 1933
What followed was one of the most remarkable and complete economic, political, and military revolutions ever carried out by one man in a comparable space of time. Between 30 January 1933 and 7 March 1936 he effectively restored German prosperity, destroyed not only opposition but the possibility of opposition to his rule, re-created, in a spectacularly expanded German army, the principal symbol of the nation's pride in itself, and used this force to abrogate the oppressive treaties defeat had imposed on the nation while he was still a humble soldier.
I am no fan of Nazis or Hitler, a statement which should be obvious, but I will make it anyway because those two words are still so charged, fifty-plus years after the fact. Nonetheless, I am perfectly capable of admiring that ruthless efficiency, even as I decry the ends it was used to achieve. This is not a paradox.
Last night I went to see the Boston Pops Christmas program, and I suddenly realized that - when it comes to compositions for full orchestra - I may be a bit of a snob. Actually, I think I just have very specific tastes. (The former statement is the latter's evil twin, you'll note.)
What junk!
There were three really excellent pieces: "Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring" (remember: There Is No Bad Bach), a fast Bizet piece I don't recall the name of (which had only the slimmest of connections to Christmas), and parts of the Duke Ellington jazz/swing reinvention of the Nutcracker Suite, arranged for orchestra - a really good joke for people who know the Tchaikovsky backwards and forwards.
The rest of it was done by what I call "the Hollywood school" of composing - mostly horrid contemporary Christmas songs, horridly arranged for orchestra. Even when they did good Christmas songs - i.e. ones before about 1900 - the full-orchestra arrangement drowned out all the fun.
I think that putting the Bach and Bizet on the program was a mistake; it made the rest look worse by comparison. This was my first Pops (aside from glimpses on public television) and I hope it's not representative ... but I suspect it is. So if I ever go back to Symphony Hall, it's likely to be for the actual Symphony.
I like popular music, of course, but I guess that a part of me believes that after a certain time - say, the death of Spike Jones in the early 1950's - popular music was no longer in a format where a full orchestra was the correct medium to play it. (I also do not consider most latter-day orchestral composers to be "popular music," given that I and the average Philistine-on-the-street can barely name any.)
I was catching up a little today on my long-neglected journal reading and I found this comment from Shmuel:
Columbine, incidentally, is annoyed about the fact that, as she puts it, the [Harry Potter] books have been translated from British to American. For some reason, she finds it offensive that an American publisher, in accepting a book for publication in America, would not immediately throw its style guide out the window, but would instead insist on printing the thing in (shudder) American English. The horror.
Yes, the horror indeed! You see, I believe that once a book has been published in the English language, the time for style edits is past. There should be no such thing as an "American edition" or "UK edition" - only an English-language edition, and if that edition happens to contain idiom of the writer's home nation, tough luck.
Put another way, Shmuel: Suppose I wrote a book with heavy Cajun Louisiana idiom and it was published by a small press in that state. Later a major U.S. publisher decides to pick the book up and distribute it nationally - "but these half-French phrases have got to come out," the editor says, "no one in New England will understand them." I'd be raw-ther peeved. Wouldn't you in the same situation? Can you imagine any of the excellent writers who use Yiddish idiom heavily being forced to curb their tongue for the benefit of the goyim?
© Columbine
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