Archive of July 2008
The Stress of Giles Coren
The blogosphere has been faintly tittering over British critic’s profane and public excoriation of the sub-editors at his paper over a word that they excised from a review of his. It’s mildly entertaining, though I have to say I think it appeals more to the allegedly dryer British sense of humor, which tends to delight more in heaps of rather nasty and a little artless prose. Anyway, these poor schmucks dropped an ‘a’ from his final sentence, and he is much aggrieved. The reasons for his grief are many, and I won’t address any but his last. I’ll let Gruber sum up, and include his editorial:
Giles Coren, to his editors at The Times (London) for removing the word “a” from the closing sentence of his review:
And worst of all. Dumbest, deafest, shittest of all, you have removed the unstressed ‘a’ so that the stress that should have fallen on “nosh” is lost, and my piece ends on an unstressed syllable. When you’re winding up a piece of prose, metre is crucial. Can’t you hear? Can’t you hear that it is wrong? It’s not fucking rocket science. It’s fucking pre-GCSE scansion. I have written 350 restaurant reviews for The Times and i have never ended on an unstressed syllable. Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck.
Coren is, of course, correct. The sentence was mutilated.
He’s incorrect, in fact. The sentence might have been mutilated semantically, but metrically—his ultimate, dramatic thrust about a lost stressed syllable—is simply and demonstrably wrong.
Simply:
The resulting final feet are a series of simple iambs. Short-long, short-long, with a single anapest thrown in around “wondering.”
- / - - / - / - /
and wondering where to go for nosh
“For a nosh” is an anapest, a short-short-long. So in both cases the piece ends with a stressed syllable, and you can claim that one is more metrically pleasing than the other; but his dramatic lead-up sadly ends flaccid. He can be pleased, anyway, that he has maintained his claimed record of never ending with a stressed syllable; though his scansion thus far leaves me with little confidence in the claim.
New Phone Number
So I just got a new cell phone, and I’ve got a new number too. I think I was pretty good about SMSing or emailing anyone whose contact information I had, but if you didn’t get a message and you think you should have, please message me directly and I’ll let you know what it is. My email address is on the top of the sidebar, to the right.
Hollenthon – Opus Magnum
So I have finally gotten my hands on the new Hollenthon record, and it is fucking great.
I’ve been a huge fan of Hollenthon for a long time; they put out two records, one in 1999 and one in 2001, that were just thoroughly fantastic. Really groovy, well-written death metal with a fantastic array of samples (and keyboard parts? never can tell). I’ve never seen anything else like them, really; Amon Tobin-style strings, chants, Yat-Kha, a lot of Leonard Bernstein or Holst-esque orchestration. Of the two, one focuses more on ‘world-music’ style folk and chant, and the other on huge string and brass ensembles. Really, some of the only symphonic metal of any stripe that’s worth listening to.
And then they took 7 years to make a new one, partly while Martin Shirenc worked with his other band, Pungent Stench. At some point last year I became aware that they were working on a new album, and became suitably excited. But my repeated visits to the Hollenthon homepage for any scrap of new information, my high hopes, my love of the original albums, and their incredible distinctiveness also left me a little nervous that the new record wouldn’t be as good.
It’s almost inevitable, after all, that over 7 years a band that so clearly works from a position of originality and creativity would change up, and then who knows whether it would be good or not? And I watched 30 seconds of a Youtube video of the new single, “Son Of Perdition”, and was not buoyed. It was pretty simplistic and lacked the texture and layering that made Domus Mundi and With Vilest Of Worms To Dwell so rich.
So now that I finally have the album, I can say that all my fears were unfounded. It’s a little glossier, as recording techniques have become marginally nicer in the last seven years, but (the first half of) “Son Of Perdition” is a definite outlier; its simple, slightly boneheaded main riff is unlike anything else on the album. The rest of the songwriting on the album is incredibly vital; if Shirenc needed to wait 7 years to write songs that didn’t sound tired or overworked, I won’t begrudge him them.
The sample work on this record kind of splits the difference between the orchestral and the world-music sides. But the nice thing is that the riffwork is awfully catchy, and very much in Hollenthon’s characteristic style. And at first listen the rhythm section has everything very much nailed down; with all the chants and horns, pretty much every track has a monster groove to it.
