Yes, There Is An Opera Titled ‘La Somnambula’. And it’s apparently good, by opera standards:
The soprano Nadine Sierra, center, as the title sleepwalker of Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” at the Metropolitan Opera.Credit…Sara Krulwich/The New York Times
Some opera plots are so preposterous that their setting hardly matters. At first blush, Bellini’s “La Sonnambula” seems to be one of them: On the eve of her wedding, a young woman sleepwalks into another man’s room, prompting her fiancé to call off the engagement until she sleepwalks her way back into his heart.
Bellini’s librettist, Felice Romani, adapted the story in 1831 from a ballet-pantomime by Eugène Scribe, and shifted the action from rural France to Switzerland. What harm can come if modern directors move it again? But the tenor-turned-director Rolando Villazón’s lucid and thrillingly sung new production of “La Sonnambula” for the Metropolitan Opera, which opened on Monday, makes a persuasive case for restoring it to an Alpine village under snow-capped peaks that loom both virginal and wild.
Never liked opera, to put it mildly. But this sleepwalker sure can sing:
As for opera, my dislike can be best summed up in this one-sentence review by Pauline Kael of ‘A Night At The Opera’:
The Marx Brothers, doing to ‘Il Trovatore’ what SHOULD be done to ‘Il Trovatore’.
Is This You? Don’t Feel Guilty:
This is embarrassing, but here goes. There are five novels beside my bed, all partially read. On my phone, I am partway through 36 audiobooks, which pales in comparison to the 46 ebooks I have abandoned on my Kindle. This doesn’t count the growing pile of advance copies beside my coffee table, vying for blurbs, now that I am a published novelist myself.
At first glance, these stats seem to corroborate Ian Rankin’s words. Commenting a fortnight ago on how easy it is to lose a reader’s focus, when it is fragmented by social media and the news cycle, the writer said: “Maybe as people’s attention spans change the literature will have to change with them.” But as someone who used to doggedly finish whatever I was reading, I now consider it a human right to put down a book that I’m not in the mood for.
I don’t believe that this habit is due to my short attention span – rather more to the feeling of life slipping through my fingers. I’ve always been struck by the Benedictine teaching: “Keep death daily before your eyes.” Oliver Burkeman’s reminder that we each have a mere 4,000 weeks on this Earth was as horrifying to me as to anyone else. And yet at what other point in human history have we ever had such immediate access to so many mind-blowing works of art, whenever we want? A glut of riches awaits me in every bookshop and behind every screen, and I want to be intentional about where I direct my attention. Could “DNF-ing” a novel (shorthand in the book world for Did Not Finish) be not a sign of a weak mind, but a discerning one?
What Food Banks Really Do–And Don’t–Need:
What Food Banks Really Need
Needs can vary by season and demand, so always ask your local food bank what they could use most. Food banks often request these items:
- Peanut butter and jelly
- Canned tuna, salmon, and other meats
- Canned beans and veggies like corn and tomatoes
- Pop-top soups and stews
- Packages of pasta and rice
- Breakfast cereal and oatmeal
- Pantry essentials like flour, sugar, salt, pepper, and garlic powder
- Coffee and tea
- Paper products
Rama Duwaji–The Ultimate Art Hoe? We’re Talking NYC’s First Lady:
It’s not often that I get to write this newsletter full of hope and joy, but in the wake of this week’s mayoral election in NYC, I feel it! However, this newsletter is not about politics, and in the interest of staying focused on our beat, let’s talk about the real story at hand:
Below, I will lay out my 4-point argument as to why NYC’s new first lady, Rama Duwaji, is the ultimate art hoe. I don’t think anyone will disagree, but if they do, they are wrong.
- The youngest first lady in history, 28-year-old Duwaji is an artist and illustrator, whose work has been featured in The New Yorker and The Washington Post (among many other places). Her work is both political and personal, and often seeks to uplift marginalized and underrepresented voices, especially in the wake of the genocide in Gaza.
You can read the other three reasons for yourselves. Then, consider making a contribution to Rachel Baiman’s Substack. She’s a wonderful indie musician who, yes, has performed here in Arden.
MAGA Lovers Just Can’t Find Love. Sad:
Pity the young MAGA voter. They’re out at the bars. They’re on the apps. They might even have a genuine meet-cute. But it turns out that being an out-and-proud racist/sexist/homophobe isn’t as alluring a look on them as it is on the man they worship. And that just isn’t fair, is it? If it weren’t for politics, they’d surely have found their perfect match. Isn’t all this worrying about political compatibility spoiling pure, untainted love? Why can’t people just let go of their judgments and be open to meeting someone who very vocally looks down on them?
These are questions that media outlets began asking even before Donald Trump was elected in 2016. Columns with titles like “Would a Clinton voter date a Trump supporter? Actually, the outlook is great” and “Do millennials date outside their political party? These couples do” — both published in the Washington Post during Trump’s first term — tried to keep to a sunny, it’s-just-politics outlook with chipper sound bites from the likes of Stamford, Conn. mayor Caroline Simmons and Connecticut state senator Art Linares. Meanwhile, headlines like “How Donald Trump is killing romance” and “Swipe left if you voted for Trump” took what often seemed to be a bemused look at how some people were foregrounding their dating dealbreakers on apps like Tinder and Hinge. (“I still swipe right,” said one defensive Trump voter. “I would like them to know who I am first before I openly tell them I voted for this person. They know nothing about me. I’m a very reasonable guy. I’m a nice person, open-minded.”) More hardline publications like The Federalist argued that people being exasperatingly particular about so-called associative mating — wanting to share values, goals and interests with the person they might spend the rest of their lives with — was in itself evidence of a coming societal implosion.
As time went on and allying with Trumpism increasingly began requiring paranoia, bigotry, and a decision to live life in a factually unsupported parallel universe, it would have made sense if these outlets admitted that maybe a dearth of politically star-crossed love matches was probably for the best. Instead, Joe Biden’s presidency found stories like these not only proliferating but doubling down. The narrative was no longer about people across genders adding “No Trump supporters” to their dating profiles; rather, it was about an existential crisis: If liberal women remained unwilling to date Trump supporters, the very future of the human race was at risk. A Washington Post piece credited to “the Editorial Board” laid out the stakes in the grim headline “If attitudes don’t shift, a political dating mismatch will threaten marriage.” (Well, actually, it would threaten the breeding of RWNJ’s, but I digress.)
The question that has gone conspicuously unposed in such arguments is, of course, why MAGA men care whether or not liberal women find them datable in the first place. It’s not like they’ve ever been shy about declaring that such women were miserable feminist harpies destined to die childless and alone with all their cats, after all. But the Washington Post’s most recent deep dive on what keeps Trump supporters so singularly dateless (“MAGA singles are looking for love in Washington. It’s a challenge”) might help answer that question. The piece, unlike most of its predecessors, focuses chiefly on the frustration of conservative women in D.C., whose optimism that a second Trump term would yield a bounty of eligible GOP bachelors is now bumping up against the reality that they aren’t bringing the A game of the high-value men they hope to be, and disappointing even the women most suited to them. (Because–table manners still mean something?)
Personal To Loveless MAGAts: This is precisely why G-d invented porn. But you already knew that. Cue the Polish Prince:
