#evensong

[peaceinthestorm]

Arthur B. Davies (1862-1928, American) ~ Evensong, 1898

[Source: artvee.com]

[opera-ghosts]

Rare footage of Conchita Supervía singing a Spanish song

This wonderful excerpt is taken from the 1934 film "Evensong'. Supervía sings "Los ojos negros" (Dark eyes) composed by Luis Barta.

[cannibalpicnic]

[rhapsodomancer]

Watching the Evensong livestream from Canterbury Cathedral just to feel something

[jt1674]

[beyourselfchulanmaria]

傍晚,雨後。 我在天台21F望雲彩。

Evening, after the rain. I look at the rosy clouds on the rooftop 21F.

-Kaohsiung city, Taiwan- ℒan~*

and

I was thinking of the song - Evensong by Secret Garden 🎶

[authorstalker]

Gasp! The New Yorker just shared "Evensong," a previously unpublished short story by the queen of perfect sentences herself, my beloved Laurie Colwin. The above paragraph is an excerpt from this interview with R.F. Jurjevics on finding the story in Colwin's archives.

[rastronomicals]

1:36 AM EST November 26, 2023:

Robert Fripp & Brian Eno - "Evensong" From the album Evening Star (December 1975)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

Something that gets listened to and posted over here fairly often, but I never do the review thing, or at least not as much. I will say that (No Pussyfooting) is brilliant, brilliant like a white-hot welding torch, like 220V electric fireflies, while The Equatorial Stars is the true beautiful languid ambient.

Evening Star is smack dab in the middle.

[threewounds]

small victories: i sang in a quartet at a choral evensong service today with three professional singers. i was really nervous because i am not a professional singer, though i have been singing in choirs for many years. we did not rehearse until an hour beforehand, and i was feeling discouraged during the rehearsal because i made several mistakes in the more difficult piece we were singing (thomas tallis, dorian service).

i was terrified that i would lose my place and then just clam up, and almost everything we sang was a capella, so there was nowhere to hide

anyway, we sang the service, and it went really well! praise god for giving me the courage to sing out and not be afraid 🙌🏻

[blueberryshelves]

___________________________________________

Book Review

Title:  Evensong Author: Krista Walsh

Series: Meratis Trilogy, book #1

No. of Pages: 317

ASIN: B00I7BU09A

Synopsis:

Author Jeff Powell wakes up to find the impossible has happened. He is within his own novel—summoned into the fictional world of Feldall’s Keep by a spell he didn't write. One the House enchantress hasn't figured out how to reverse.

When the villain he's been struggling to write reveals himself, unleashing waves of terror and chaos, Jeff must use more than his imagination to save the characters he created—and the woman he loves.

Trapped within a world of his own creation, he must step outside the bounds of his narrative to help his characters defeat an evil no one anticipated, even if he must sacrifice his greatest gift. In the end, he has to ask: are novels really fiction, or windows into other worlds?

The Meratis Trilogy centers around author Jeff Powell, who wakes up in his sword-and-sorcery fantasy world. Initially an arrogant and close-minded character, Jeff has his eyes opened to a world of dragons, magic, and assassins. Faced with an evil he could never have imagined, Jeff is pushed to his limits and forced to rise to the most unusual challenges.

___________________________________________

What did I think of the book?

Evensong by Krista Walsh My rating: ⭐⭐⭐ 3 of 5 stars (3.5 of 5 stars) The entire concept of this book really drew me in. Books always feel like walking into another world, and as a kid, I sometimes thought of them like that quite literally. So it was pretty exciting to find a book with an MC who is an author, and they fall into their own story and meet their own characters they've been writing about. It really gets the mind churning about the "what if's" with stories. What if there is another plane of existence where all these stories we write actually manifest, or already exist and we're just tapping into them? Walsh did a good job bringing to life this idea, and how characters might interact with their "creator". It's hilariously unique, and the writing style is satisfying to read. My only major hiccup was about 70% of the way in, when the main character risks everything, including his future as a supposedly successful author, on a girl who he really doesn't know much about. That's when I got bored with the story, and haven't touched it again until now. The ending turned out exciting enough, but it left me feeling like "oh… That's it?". However, it does make me want to continue reading the series to find out what will happen, so that earns some points from me. Favorite character/s: Personally, I really liked Jayden for his charm and bold-hearted bravery. Second would be Maggie, because she's an eccentric witch. What drew me to this book? The cover gave me The Hunger Games vibes when I saw the design, but it was the concept that got me really interested. Stars: 3.5/5 - overall a pretty interesting story and concept, and though it has its hiccups, I'd like to continue with the series when I can. View all my reviews

[opera-ghosts]

Supervia sings "Musetta's Waltz" in 1934 film "Evensong"

"Evensong" -- a British film (directed by Victor Saville), adapted from a tell-all novelization of Nellie Melba's life, with a plot resembling "All About Eve". The Eve Harrington/Anne Baxter character is the great Spanish mezzo, Conchita Supervia (1895-1936). Supervia plays "Baba L'Etoile", the young rival of the aging British has-been "Madame Irela" (Evelyn Laye), who refers to the younger singer as a "Spanish cow". Supervia has a very small part in this film, but most of it is singing, and her distinctive vibrato is in full throttle here.

[cannibalpicnic]

[do-you-know-this-play]

[sohannabarberaesque]

We can just imagine Top Cat and clowder, on occasion, go into "glee club" mode on the likes of Hollywood and Vine, the Venice Beach Boardwalk, on Crescent Avenue in Avalon--and also during Character Convocations with fellow Hanna-Barberians.

[transboysoprano]

Singing the Stanford Magnificat solo tonight and at Evensong this Sunday, and it feels really weird right now to be singing the lyrics "He remembering his mercy hath holpen his servant Israel as he promised to our forefathers Abraham and his seed forever." Like, that doesn't feel right right now. I know I just have to do my job, and it meant something different when it was written than it means now.

I'm just one man, thousands of miles away from what is happening, so I could never understand the scope of the horrors being enacted on Palestine today, and I know that my singing of one word set to music over a century ago will mean nothing to anyone but me tonight. But, I can't help but feel heavy about it. What good can I do?

[kammartinez]

By Dennis Zhou

This week’s story, “Evensong,” is a previously unpublished work by your mother, Laurie Colwin, who first contributed to The New Yorker in 1969, when she was twenty-five, and published nearly a dozen stories in the magazine before she died in 1992. How did you discover this story?

In 2021, a lovely writer named Lauren LeBlanc wrote a piece on Laurie for the Los Angeles Times, in which she interviewed Vicky Wilson, Laurie’s longtime editor. Vicky had a memory of an unfinished Colwin manuscript, but wasn’t sure of its whereabouts, so I embarked on a search of my (extensive, exhaustive) Laurie Colwin archive. It took multiple trips to the storage unit and many hours of rummaging through boxes to find—alongside hundreds and hundreds of letters, funny doodles, telegrams, photographs, and publishing-industry ephemera—“Evensong.”

A perhaps silly anecdote, but: I remember seeing the typescript for “Evensong” as a child, under a different title—“The Strapless Dress”—sitting in a manuscript box on Laurie’s desk. In my mind’s eye, I can see THE STRAPLESS DRESS, in capitals, looking up at me. Even as a child, I could sense at least a little corner of the significance of this garment, that it was a bit of a thrill. Somewhere there exists a “book jacket” I drew, of a somewhat lumpy-looking frock on a tailor’s dummy (though, at six or seven years old, I was not aware of the story’s subject matter). Where this bit of childhood art ended up I do not know—nor do I know what became of the dress that was once in the story.

In “Evensong,” a woman strikes up an affair with her neighbor and begins to attend services at a nearby seminary, despite being Jewish. Did Colwin often think in terms of the sacred and the profane, as she does here?

The scenes in the chapel with Louis are, I think, less about the contrast of sacred versus profane than about the shock of witnessing the kind of commitment and unwavering belief so familiar to the devout and so alien to the narrator. The irony of attending church services as a Jewish person, and doing so with an illicit beau, reads as both funny and profoundly painful (a Colwin specialty), but I think this exists as a background dichotomy, rather than as something central.

Laurie was fascinated with religion. Our apartment was as it is in the story—right across from the General Theological Seminary in Manhattan. The seminary is as she described it, a lush campus reminiscent of an old English garden, which once occupied an entire city block. (Parcels were later sold off after the Chelsea neighborhood was made into a playground for the extremely wealthy.) Laurie deeply loved liturgical music, and would regularly go across the street to hear the choir in the dark and solemnly beautiful seminary chapel.

Toward the end of her life, Laurie (a “watered-down Jew” herself) began taking Hebrew classes at the Brotherhood Synagogue in Gramercy. I recently found a class notebook of hers, the first few pages filled with handwritten pronunciation guides and basic vocabulary. But it was Catholicism that particularly intrigued Laurie, who, like the narrator of “Evensong,” was drawn to the ideas of faith and ritual but was not a believer herself. The order, the detail, and the sacrifice required of the religious was something she wanted badly to understand. This interest was a theme that Laurie wove into her novel “Goodbye Without Leaving,” in which the heroine Geraldine’s best friend, Mary Abbott, decides to join a convent. Geraldine grapples with her desire to keep her beloved pal close, even as she is struck by the magnitude of what Mary is about to do, and the steadfast devotion of the nun-to-be. She knows that Mary has the comfort of certainty, a belief in the divine order of the world, which Geraldine, herself a wild agnostic, does not.

Colwin was known as both a fiction writer and a food writer, and had a regular column in Gourmet magazine. In “Evensong,” the narrator discusses how her affair has complicated her family’s meal plans, and wishes at one point that “Louis had not been my lover, so that I could have the luxury of sharing leftovers in a guilt-free atmosphere with an old friend.” What do you think is the significance of these meals to the narrator?

For Laurie, no meal was just a meal. Even if it was something as simple as buttered sourdough toast for my breakfast, eaten at the dining table before school, food meant an opportunity for connection. Laurie loved to, as she put it, “drag” people over to the apartment and feed them lunch, during which time she would ask them all sorts of questions about themselves. And they loved it. My father, Juris, once told me that he could tell when Laurie was about to begin her lines of inquiry when she would turn to her companion and ask, “So . . . how did you and your [husband/wife/partner] meet?” That was her go-to first question, even before the water for the pasta had boiled or the roasting chicken had been basted.

But, more than that, I think there was something egalitarian about meals for Laurie, an idea that the playing field would become level once the food was on the table. Everyone gathered, everyone seated, everyone together. No one—not the children, or the plus-ones, or the bewildered and uninitiated last-minute invitees—was less than anyone else. Everyone could speak, or request more chicken, or decline to eat the salad. (Laurie’s rule: “You don’t have to like it, but you have to try it.”) Laurie’s table was a place where everyone could put down all their baggage and all their damage and just be.

But, for the narrator of “Evensong,” this kind of relief was not going to be possible with Louis—at least not in the moment in question, which occurs before the two begin to have their formal-informal, platonic tea dates. The narrator first worries over Louis’s likes and dislikes, playing a torturous game of mental Tetris to shuffle meal plans around, depending on what Louis might select (and therefore what the narrator’s family would be left without). Leftovers, which Laurie adored (her writing about cold steak sandwiches brings up a visceral memory in me still), would be loaded with unspoken discomfort in this instance—the remnants of dinners that the narrator shared with her husband and daughter, now being served to her clandestine lover.

Colwin is sometimes known as a writer of happy endings, a reputation she pushed back against. This story ends peacefully enough, in the sense that the family stays together, but it is also colored by the narrator’s recognition of her inability to truly know her closest friends and relatives. Do you think that Colwin would have viewed that recognition as a source of melancholy, or as something more life-affirming?

The notion of the Colwin happy ending is one I’ve thought a lot about, actually. Laurie didn’t like the simple answer, and the simple answer is that her books all have happy endings. But what Laurie created was an ostensibly happy ending, an ending with a resolution that did feel complete—for the moment. There was always the impression that something could change, that it would change, but not then, not in the final scene. That scene marked the end of the story, sure, but it’s easy to see all the interconnected lives of her characters continuing on beyond what she’d written.

So much about “Evensong” is about the element of surprise. Revelations are everywhere, and the narrator alternately prickles at and is delighted by them. Like the narrator, Laurie wasn’t a big fan of being surprised by people; she, too, wanted to “know everything all at once.” But this is, of course, impossible, so the narrator has to grapple with that revelation, and eventually comes to accept it.

In Laurie’s view, one did not actually have to be “happy all the time”—a title from one of her novels that I think is as much tongue-in-cheek as it is wistful—to experience joy. You don’t have to stick to the script, either, or buy wholeheartedly into the messages continually lobbed at us by society at large. You could be messy, just as a person, and that had value, too.

Colwin’s complete works, including her five published novels, three story collections, and two books of food writing, were reissued in 2021. Have you felt any sense of a Colwin renaissance since then? Are there ways in which her writing seems especially resonant or timely now?

Absolutely. There’s been a resurgence of interest in her work, which has been wonderful.

Part of why Laurie’s books remain in print is because there has never been, and will never be, a time when we do not struggle with simply being human. So many Colwin stories are, at their heart, about figuring out how to be a person alongside other people, and how to become comfortable with being uncomfortable. It’s hard, being a person, and Laurie didn’t shy away from that difficulty—she celebrated it, because it’s what makes us interesting. Her deeply flawed characters are also deeply loved, sometimes for the things they hate about themselves, and we as readers get to experience this push and pull as they reckon with it all.

The best part about Laurie’s work is how she writes each character with such inimitable humor. She was so witty, was so right about so much, and wrote with an immense amount of love—irreverent love, yes, but with ferocious dedication to the characters she created, the same that she showed to the people she knew.