The Dish

A reader writes:

Choral music is a rich source of deeply expressed faith, as Giles Fraser notes, and music based on Lent offers particularly striking examples. The most famous such piece may be the Allegri Miserere [seen above]. Backstory here. The score of the piece was a closely guarded Vatican secret for more than a century, until the church made the mistake of inviting a 12-year-old boy named Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to hear it. He listened twice and transcribed it from memory, and the score was published shortly thereafter.

Update from a reader:

“Choral music is a rich source of deeply expressed faith” – while this is undoubtedly true, I’m convinced there is another aspect that is being missed in this discussion.

I am from a Scottish Presbyterian background and started singing in my secondary school choir. At a Scottish university I auditioned with two choirs in freshers week and much to my surprise was invited to join one of them. I was exposed to the English choral (Anglican) tradition: with one of many highlights being learning psalm singing reading pointing at choral evensong services. Now based in Silicon Valley, I’m again a long-term member of a choir singing broadly sacred music, this time specializing in late mediaeval and renaissance times. Our repertoire spans 400 years: the diversity of styles is immense. Rehearsing, learning and performing roughly 10 news pieces for each concert is a great diversion from everyday life in high-tech.

Now to my point: I don’t believe in God, despite regularly singing some of the most exquisite sacred music you could ever hear. Which prompts me to think about how many of the composers of the music were believers? The bulk of surviving manuscripts of music from renaissance times are sacred – not a huge surprise as the church in those times was the seat of learning. If you were a talented singer or composer in those times, what were your options if your talents (like mine) are consonant with sacred music? Which gets me thinking, how many of the giants of the sacred music were atheists: Byrd, Tallis, Palestrina, Victoria, Josquin, Dufay?

Adedamola Osinulu argues that dramatic growth of African Pentecostal churches in the US “demands a change in how we, in both secular and religious America, understand our relationship to African Christians and Christianity as a whole”:

Africans’ interest in Pentecostalism was fueled by literature emanating from North America in the 1970s and ’80s. But, as one example of how they re-shaped Pentecostal theology to be more responsive to local practitioners’ material conditions, they presented a God who is deeply invested in believers’ fiscal and physical well-being in the present, not just the fate of their souls in the after-life. Amidst the swirling political and economic crises of the postcolonial state, this was an immensely attractive proposition.

Conceiving themselves as part of a global religious community, they began to export their brand of Christianity around the globe. As a result, we find that the largest single congregation in Europe, the 25,000-member Embassy of God, is a Pentecostal church founded by a Nigerian man. Today the largest African Pentecostal organizations are sending so-called “reverse-missionaries” to North America and Europe. One of those groups, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG), founded in Nigeria, has 15,000 parishes around the globe including at least one in every major North American city.

Last month, Jason Margolis reported on the RCCG’s efforts in America. Keating’s take-away from the piece:

American missionaries played an important part of spreading the faith around the world, but one question posed by researchers is whether the transmission would reverse: Would any of the hundreds of new denominations sprouting up in Africa cross the Atlantic and gain adherents in the United States? The decentralized structure of Pentecostalism leads to new branches and churches being created more quickly than in other forms of Christianity.

Margolis’ reporting on the Redeemed Christian Church of God seems to indicate we haven’t hit that point yet. The church’s members are nearly all Nigerian or African immigrants, and it has had a hard time expanding beyond those communities. But the Catholic Church certainly isn’t the only Christian denomination whose geographical center of gravity is shifting.

Previous Dish on the rise of African Pentecostalism here.

Johanna Fairview makes her living narrating erotica audiobooks:

[F]or real, people buy them. One of my best-selling audiobooks is a book that is so bad I created a second pseudonym to record under, because I didn’t even want my first fake name associated with it. It was a collection of short erotic stories that were so terrible the author included a recipe for meatballs when he ran out of ideas. But I sexy-read the shit out of it, and last month I received a royalty check for $623.30.

What it takes to succeed in the industry:

There are various skill levels when it comes to dirty-book reading.

I humblebrag and mambleyag that I am remarkably good at it. I’ve got a nice, low voice that easily sounds like a man’s or a woman’s (important for sexy-reading scenes between male and female characters); I’ve got suitcases of character voices, an ear for accents and years of experience storytelling and doing solo performance. I’ve got no problem locking myself in a closet for two days in order to finish a nine-hour book. (I’m proud to say that my studio has graduated to a walk-in closet from underneath the comforter in the middle of the floor). I love learning new words and proper pronunciations and playing all the parts, no matter how cheesy or racy or weird the script may be.

I won’t lie though: it’s kind of hard being so happy with my job, but not really being able to share my work with most of my friends and family. I’ve played clips for my boyfriend and a few close friends, but aside from that, most people get a weird look on their face when I hint at the bisexual paranormal three-way I narrated today.

(Photo: Screenshot of the current top-selling erotic audiobook on Audible.com)

Margaret Talbot pivots off the “bossy” debate:

There are precedents for such reclaiming—pejorative words like “queer” and even “slut,” for instance, which their targets have taken over and brandished with pride. But maybe a more apt comparison would be the word “nerd.” “Nerd” used to be a put-down—and it used to cover boys more often than girls. Like “bossy,” it wasn’t really that harsh, but it wasn’t nice, either. It actually had a gender dimension, too, because it called out brainy boys who were not athletic or aggressive. It was a dis of boys who lived in their heads and wore pocket protectors and ate their lunch indoors, playing chess. Just as “bossy” might be said to undermine female leadership, “nerd” might be said to have undermined male intellectualism.

But now “nerd,” and its close cousin “geek,” are words that lots of people are happy to identify with, humble-bragging about their obsessive expertise.

Update from a reader:

If you’re going to talk about the (mis)appropriation of “nerd,” you gotta include this Portlandia PSA; it’s weirdly heartbreaking and hilarious at the same time:

In another video from the TV writer and showrunner, he shares one of his least favorite plot conveniences:

The Bill Pullman reference he makes is from Sleepless In Seattle (representative clip here). With regards to another set of cliches the Mars series avoided, Nolan Feeney praises the show’s complex depiction of inequality:

Race and class are often intertwined in [the show’s fictional town of] Neptune, but Veronica Mars often served as a good reminder that they’re not to be conflated. One of the series’ recurring conflicts is between the PCH Bike Club, a largely Latino motorcycle gang, and the obnoxious 09ers, rich kids from Neptune’s über-wealthy 90909 zip code, but the show never suggests only white kids can be rich kids and only minorities can be poor. Jackie Cook, a second-season addition played by Tessa Thompson, was both black and one of the richest girls in school. In one episode, while investigating a series of muggings, a classmate tips Veronica off that the culprit might be targeting the “coconuts”—Latino and Latina students criticized for being “brown on the outside, white on the [inside].” The PCH gang does engage in criminal activity, but their crimes are repeatedly contrasted against the transgressions of the rich, which are often worse. And in Season Two, it’s a rival gang made up of mostly working-class Irish-Catholics that’s dealing the hard drugs (to the parents of 09ers) and making people “disappear.” Veronica Mars didn’t entirely subvert stereotypes, but it usually tried to at least complicate and challenge them.

Arielle Duhaime-Ross adds that the series also took on rape in ways no other show had:

Exceptionally smart writing and acting aside, the date rape story-line is what made this particular teen drama different from all that ones that aired before it. Unlike most televised rape accounts, Veronica was no damsel in distress waiting to be rescued. She had agency and was given a voice that went deeper and was more honest than any of its predecessors. Throughout the television show, Veronica has nightmares about the night she was assaulted. Viewers also find out in the second season that Veronica has an STI as a result of her rape, making the assault all the more realistic. Needless to say, the teenager ends up developing a keen distrust of the men around her, affecting all her future relationships throughout the show. But despite getting laughed out of the police chief’s office when she comes forward about her ordeal, Veronica never loses sight of the fact that she is not to blame for her rape—and neither do the show’s viewers, who are treated to a dramatic story-line that is both realistic and empowering. For fans and haters alike, Veronica Mars remains the only American television series that successfully depicts the long-term effects of this type of sexual violence.

In our final video from Rob, he explains why he always wanted the character of Veronica to be written as a “porcupine”:

Rob Thomas is an American producer, director and screenwriter, best known for the TV series Veronica Mars and Party Down. A year ago, he launched one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns of all time in support of the Mars movie. (Our discussion thread of the innovative, Dish-like project is here.) The movie is now out in theaters and video-on-demand. Rob’s previous Ask Anything videos are here.

(Ask Anything Archive)

A reader joins the discussion on the comparative appeal of languages:

Count me as one vote against the beauty supremacy of French – though it may just be my frustration with either reproducing or understanding its pronunciation. I was surprised to read Dreher’s opinion that swept all East Asian tongues under the same blanket! In college I switched from studying Japanese to Chinese in part because I grew enamored of the sounds I overheard in my Chinese-speaking friends’ conversations (Japanese to me sounds elegant, but not really beautiful). And while Mandarin Chinese is music to my ears (except in the sibilant Taiwan accent), Cantonese actually makes my stomach turn a bit.

I also find German rather gorgeous, especially the way it tends to be spoken by women. I can’t listen to any Scandinavian language with a straight face.

English went astray, aesthetically speaking, with its hard A and I sounds … but it indeed has many lovely specimens, like the word “resplendent,” for example. And English’s melting-pot nature also confers the advantage that one can select words originating from different language families for their sonic and cultural associations. Basic examples would be using tons of straight-from-Latin words to sound legalistic, old Germanic ones to be punchy and down-to earth, or French cognates to sound poetic and fussy.

Another:

Your post on how languages sound reminded me of one of my all-time favorite clips from the Catherine Tate show. I’ve probably watched it a dozen times, and it still makes me laugh every time:

Helen Gao isn’t surprised that The Catcher In The Rye continues to captivate Chinese readers:

In the 1980s, the novel’s attack on conservative social mores resonated with the liberal and iconoclastic zeitgeist of a newly opened China; in the early 1990s, its cynic and frustrated tone gave expression to the despondency of Chinese youth, who had just seen their democratic ideals crushed by the massacre of student protesters in central Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. The 21st century, which has brought China unprecedented material wealth and social inequality, has granted the book new relevance.

Huo Er Deng, or the Chinese incarnation of Holden Caulfield, The Catcher in the Rye’s protagonist, speaks a language uncannily similar to that of a stressed student in a competitive Shanghai high school, or a disgruntled migrant worker serving a difficult boss, or a bored scion – in Chinese slang “rich second generation” – struggling to lead a meaningful life. Indeed, who would understand “phony” better than a generation weighed down by spiritual discontentment and the pressures of modern life, one whose grievances are still muffled by party control?

In September, Reed Johnson noted that Russians feel a similar affection for the book they call Over the Abyss in Rye:

First introduced to readers during Khrushchev’s thaw, Salinger’s novel became an instant sensation among Soviet readers in the 1960s, and it has remained a classic. The Party authorized the novel’s translation believing that it exposed the rotting core of American capitalism, but Soviet readers were more likely to see the novel in broader terms, as a psychologically nuanced and universally appealing portrait of a misfit who rebels against the pieties of a conformist society. For a postwar intelligentsia chafing under repressive Communist rule, Holden Caulfield’s voice was electrifying – who knew phony better than these daily consumers of official Soviet language? Teenagers adopted their hero’s speech patterns—or their Russian equivalents – even though the world of The Catcher in the Rye, with its private schools, hotel trysts, and jazz clubs, existed across a great abyss.