An Inspiring Visual Revelation: To the Sounds of T. Tertius Noble

Sunday, May 19. Does anyone remember the weather? I'll remind you. In Manhattan, it was grey, grey, grey, and rainy ALL DAY. Sometimes the rain was heavy. When it wasn't raining seriously, it was constantly drizzling. And grey. The greyness enveloped everything. You could almost taste it.

In the midst of all this misty, water, precipitation, wetness, my choir  at the Roman Catholic Church of the Ascension on West 107 Street was giving a concert. It was a combination of the adult choir with the children's choir. The children's choir are neighborhood kids, not some chosen music majors elite. I admire their participation, since this kind of choral singing isn't the coolest thing for a 10 year old, and what they accomplished in the concert is truly wonderful.

The Music
The piece from the concert that music director Preston Smith uploaded to YouTube is the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis in B Minor by T. Tertius Noble. That's a memorable name. He was born in England in 1867, and was organist and choirmaster at the great Ely Cathedral from 1892 to 1898. Then he came to New York, and was choir director of St. Thomas Church, the Episcopal beacon on Fifth Avenue, where he founded the St. Thomas Choir School for boys in 1919.

That draws a nice line from the glories of Ely Cathedral to the young kids around West 107 Street.

The Revelation
Here's the amazing thing.  I had a pretty good idea of how the concert went, from the singing to the dreary wetness of everyone slogging into the pews with dripping umbrellas. I was wet and soggy myself from 9:00 a.m. onward, with all the back and forth to the church for Mass, then rehearsals, and the concert.

Then, when I watched the video, I was astonished to see sun rays streaming across the choir loft. They are so artfully beautiful that it is almost like something out of Hollywood.

It would be surprising to see such defined rays on any day, because the church is situated such that other buildings, built after the church,  block the light, and it is only very specific times when any sun actually enters through the stained glass.

But it is bordering on the miraculous to see these rays, caught on the video, on the wet, dreary, grey day WHEN THERE WAS NO DISCERNIBLE SUNSHINE AT ALL THAT DAY.

And that's the revelation: sometimes you are surrounded by light, which you cannot see until someone shows you a different angle, a different perspective from the one you're entrenched in.

Please click and see. And think about this phenomenon, especially if things seem dark and grey in your life. There are always positive and wonderful things around you. You may even be bathed is sun rays, and not know it. Plus the music is pretty good too.

Photo by Jean Prytyskacz.

Dorothy & Phyllis: Detective Queens, Amateur Theologians, & Moms

I came across an interesting video via the always interesting Patrick Craig of the Tallis Scholars.  Well, interesting if you are a literary nerd who likes the detective genre.

There are three great English writers of detective fiction: Dorothy L. Sayers; Agatha Christie; P.D.James.

Sayers died in 1957 at the age of 64 and Christie in 1976 at age 85, but the Baroness James is still with us, at a spry 92. And just last week she participated in a series of conversations at St. Paul's Cathedral, London, called 'The Mind of the Maker,' named after a treatise by Dorothy Sayers that explores an analogy between human creativity/creation and the doctrine of The Trinity.

This conversation with the Rev. Michael Hampel was framed around the James's own journey of faith, including its impact on her writing. (She is almost always asked, "Why isn't Adam Dagleish a Christian?" Her answer is that he loves the Church of England but would not be an active member.)

Hampel leads the conversation to Dorothy L. Sayers, who put Lord Peter Wimsey on the literary map in 1923 with Whose Body? Adam Dagleish made his first appearance forty years later in Cover Her Face.

Sayers was a serious student of Christian dogma, even though she remained outside the halls of academia. She believed her very best work was her translation of Dante's Divine Comedy, which is still used and known for her extensive notes. She wrote a serious of very accessible essays about the Apostles and Nicene Creeds collected as Creed or Chaos?

It's interesting that these two dynamic writers of detective novels—a genre that is loved by such a very broad range of readers—each had a deep, underlying interest in theology, which appeals to a very narrow swath of readers. Sleuths & Christian doctrine are unusual pasttimes to join up, except that you can investigate each eternally. Hmm.


Adam Dagleish & Lord Peter

For literary geeks it is a thrill to hear the creator of Adam Dagleish opine on Lord Peter and his creator.  Bits from the interview:

He (Adam Dagleish) doesn't develop as spectacularly as Lord Peter.

I think she [Sayers] fell in love with him [Wimsey] and made him the kind of man she would want to marry. An intellectual interested in religion.

She had a lot in common with Harriet Vane, who wrote detective stories. There's a slight bossiness about her, Harriet. And Dorothy was quite pugnacious.

If we want to know what it was like to work in an Advertising Office between the wars, we read Murder Must Advertise. It's absolutely brilliant.


And They're Moms

P.D. James married a doctor in 1941 and had two daughters. Dorothy married a Scottish war correspondent in 1926 and became stepmother to his two children. She had a son out of wedlock two years before, and asked her Aunt and cousin to raise him. So besides theology, our sleuths shared the identity and experience of mother.

James took the experience of giving birth into an unusual creative place with her 1992 dystopian novel, The Children of Men. Set in England in 2021 it tells the tale of a world suffering from global infertility. The 2006 film made many alterations to the novel, but it brought the work to a wide audience and James herself liked it.

From Caryn James's article on the movie: "As Ms. James said in an interview when the book came out: “The detective novel affirms our belief in a rational universe because, at the end, the mystery is solved. In ‘The Children of Men’ there is no such comforting resolution.”

Happy Mother's Day, Baroness.

A Literary Six Pack for Mom

Courtesy of the New York Times and SMITH online magazine, the Six-Word Memoirs phenomenon meets Mother’s Day.

I first ran into the Six-Word Memoirs in Lizzie Widdicombe’s New Yorker write-up in 2008. SMITH had run a contest: Your life in six words. Why six words? Lizzie believes the precedent was Hemingway’s short story in under 10 words composed to win a bet: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

(This story is itself a piece of apocrypha attached to Papa by the playwright John deGroot in his 1996 play of the same name. Excellent explanation about it here.)

Regardless of the origin, the six-word autobiography is now well established because of the SMITH contest, which spawned a series of books: the original Not Quite What I Was Planning, (the winner of the contest from the 25-year-old hairdresser from Minnesota with the great name Summer Grimes); its sequel in a deluxe edition; then Six Word-Memoirs on Love and Heartbreak; Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure, and more.

The ones in the New York Times submitted for Mother’s Day are witty, poignant, sad, funny, and spine tingling: a complete spectrum of experiences of the mother/child relationship. You can hear whole backstories in the six words.

Here are some where the relationship was sadly painful:

Her way was the only way.

Made me the scapegoat, thanks mom.

Never a kind word for me.

She did the best she could.

Single motherhood: think long and hard.

Never met mother; sent to another.


Then there were a bunch that I could have written for my Mom:

You know what's in my heart.

Made dinner every night. Thanks, Mom.

Most intelligent human being I know.

Six words is not nearly enough.

Whenever I walked in, Mama smiled.

Put on a sweater, I'm cold.


And here are my two six-word memoirs for my Mom:

Brother happy. I cried alot. Sorry.

“No lipstick?” Sure Mom, for you.



Happy Mother’s Day to you all!

Polyphonic Journeys: Voy a la Frontera

I am off to a polyphony workshop in the south of Spain, commune of Andalusia. A small pueblas blancas called Jimena de la Frontera.  Not famous, like it's neighboring Jerez de la Frontera, which begat Sherry for the world. I fly into Malaga, birthplace of Picasso, but I won't have time to walk in his early footsteps. The course has been designed with care by the extraordinary Patrick Craig, focusing on the Spanish masters Guerrero, Lobo, and Victoria.

So no Don Draper for me this week. It's a break from pop culture. But not entirely from Twitter. Hasta luego.

Season 6 of Mad Man: Teasing Images

The community comes back together at 9:00 pm ET as Don Draper and his circle re-enter our pop culture present. Images have been stacking up in my mind.

We've been teased by a poster of two Dons, going in opposite directions. One Don is holding the hand of some woman in a swinging sixties gown or peignoir; the other Don is holding a briefcase.

The illustrator is the 75-old-old Brian Sanders, who had that sixties-era that I vaguely associate with Pan Am and early I-Hop. So he's the real thing.

As is Cary Grant, and Roger Thornhill in a matter of speaking, the original falling mad man.

I don't know what it all means . . . . Yet.

Roger Ebert: The Man of Many Voices

I often learn of breaking news on Twitter, but it was an email alert from The New York Times that delivered the sad news after I got back from a meeting. It was shocking because I along with thousands had read only the day before of Ebert's "Leave of presence," talking about pulling back from the grind of weekly reviewing, but with a long list of other projects he would still be doing.

As dire as his health was, he was able to write to the very last. Such a fitting end for a blogger.

The Twitter Voice
Ebert's 2010 post about the revolution Twitter brought to his life is one of my all-time favorite pieces of writing. I have pointed many, many people to it as the best explanation for how & why smart people tweet.

"I vowed I would never become a Twit. Now I have Tweeted nearly 10,000 Tweets. I said Twitter represented the end of civilization. It now represents a part of the civilization I live in. I said it was impossible to think of great writing in terms of 140 characters. I have been humbled by a mother of three in New Delhi."

Tweeting had extra specific benefit for the man who had lost his voice and jaw to cancer:

"Twitter for me performs the function of a running conversation. For someone who cannot speak, it allows a way to unload my zingers and one-liners. One of the problems with written notes and computer voices is that, by their nature, their timing doesn't work. I used to have good timing. Now in real life a conversation will be whizzing along and a line will pop into my head and by the time I write it down and get someone to read it, the moment and the context will have disappeared."

I loved knowing that tweeting—something that many unenlightened still look down upon—could help restore to the critic what nature had so cruelly taken away.

And I loved his tweets, that distinct voice that spoke of his reviews, New Yorker cartoon contest entries, poetry, and wry commentary on current events.

The Blog Voice

Besides his job of reviewing films, Ebert was a first-class blogger who wrote on the whole range of everything with that clear, full-throttle writing voice.

From "The leave of presence"
"At the same time, I am re-launching the new and improved Rogerebert.com and taking ownership of the site under a separate entity, Ebert Digital, run by me, my beloved wife, Chaz, and our brilliant friend, Josh Golden of Table XI. Stepping away from the day-to-day grind will enable me to continue as a film critic for the Chicago Sun-Times, and roll out other projects under the Ebert brand in the coming year."

Some of my favorite posts were of his Catholic upbringing in Illinois. He wrote "How I am a Roman Catholic" on March 1, after Benedict's helicopter flew out of sight.

More about his reveals in that piece later.

The First Voice
And then there was his actual speaking voice. Which I had forgotten about until we pulled a short clip from Sneak Previews, 1980. You can still see it on the homepage at paleycenter.org [click the billboard to the third clip with the arrow, or enjoy the Abbott & Costello meet Charles Laughton and the Sesame Street clips first].

When I heard Ebert's speaking voice after so many years I was reminded of the distinct quick-fire cadence of his words, which was most delicious when he didn't like something.

Here's the clip where he reviews 1980 film Windows:

. . . that scene is the beginning of a relationship where they eventually fall in love, another one of those situations where the cop falls in love with the victim.

It's hard to say what I dislike the most about Windows: the ugliness of its violence or the stupidity of its plot which is a totally unbelievable combination of jealously, voyeurism, and sadism that goes on and on and unforgivingly.

If there is anything worse than a thriller with a completely unbelievable twist at the end it's a thriller with no twist at all.

Singing for the Silenced Voice
The poignancy and power of tweeting means that 843,159 people will miss Roger Ebert on a daily basis. That's an extraordinary thing.

In his March 1 post Ebert wrote:
"I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock and barrel, with this technical loophole: I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself a atheist however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable."

Now he knows. Requiem aeterna.

The In Paradisum from the great Faure Requiem, King College Choir.

In paradisum deducant te Angeli; in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Ierusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.

May angels lead you into paradise; upon your arrival, may the martyrs receive you and lead you to the holy city of Jerusalem. May the ranks of angels receive you, and with Lazarus, once the poor man, may you have eternal rest.

One Song to Rule Them All: Happy Easter

One of the most special things about Easter Sunday is how unified Christianity is, even if just for the space of these 24 hours. The division between Catholicism and Protestantism, and between the furthering splintering among the sects of Henry VIII and Martin Luther, fall away before the mystery of Jesus Christ rising from the dead.

And there is one song that symbolizes this unity. In churches and cathedrals literally around the world the processional or recessional hymn today is "Jesus Christ Is Risen Today." It's a 1739 hymn by Charles Wesley, an English leader of the Methodist movement, based on a 14th century Latin hymn. A nice encapsulation of Christianity itself. I don't know if the eighth note motif was in that underlying 14th century hymn, but coping with them is another thing every Christian deals with in his or her own way.

Alas, in one version on YouTube, someone from East Liberty Presbyterian Church wrote: "Our cathedral joyously resounds with choir and members singing "Jesus Christ is Risen Today."

And then the comments took off with a pounce:
How can you be a cathedral and be Presbyterian ??? You have to have bishops to have a cathedral. Like Episcopalian, Lutheran, Roman Catholic  ..

A cathedral is the church in which the diocesan Bishop's throne is housed, and Presbyterians most assuredly do not have Bishops. It is a large church, nothing more.

So, business as usual.

But the song. People can still at least be united in song.

Hereford Cathedral, Anglican
Hereford England, dating from 1079.

I love that the person who uploaded the video is French.
La maitrise et les fidèles de la cathédrale de Hereford chantent l'hymne "Jesus Christ is risen today" (Jésus Christ est ressuscité aujourd'hui) de Williams.




Northwood Presbyterian Church.
With a handbell choir! Love the comment "Trumpet stop was a nice touch on the 2nd verse."



Roman Catholic Church of Saint Michael, Stillwater, MN