culture, etc

Went to see La Traviata last night. Marina Poplavskaya as Violetta was glorious, my goodness. Listening to her was just delightful. (I think I also heard her in Don Carlo, but I don't remember noticing then the things I noticed this time.)

The production was one of those Minimalist Contemporary affairs driven by the idea that sets and props get in the way of the audience understanding the characters. To that end, the chorus, men and women alike, was presented as a slavering mass of men in dark suits, highlighting Violetta as The Woman, which was rather effective.

Sometimes contemporary settings of things don't quite work - I recall a Modern Richard III at Oxford - because the story's mechanics just don't translate across time. This one worked exceptionally well, I suppose because the story is basically structured around the idea that Women Who Have Extra-Marital Sex Are Morally Turpitudinous and that one, sadly, translates into the present day rather easily. (Even the tuberculosis thing translates; Poplavskaya's Violetta seemed to have pain mostly in her stomach (?) so I chose to read it as terminal stomach cancer in someone who doesn't believe in hospitals, and that made it all quite believable.)

Anyway, it was really super, although it left me feeling oddly hollow inside. Not in a bad way, just in a sort of empty way.

Disaster in the Torah repair mines

Tears in Torahs are scary, people. I know. You see a big tear, you want to STICK IT BACK TOGETHER REALLY HARD so it WON’T TEAR ANY MORE. Nobody could be calm about finding this in their Torah, for instance:

But for the love of all things holy, don’t whip out the duck tape and do this:

The amount of tape used is directly proportional to the amount of trauma someone’s trying to fix. But think about it for a second – it’s torn already. Tape isn’t going to fix it. You’re only trying to make yourself feel better with all that duck tape.

Go have a cup of tea instead. When you’ve calmed down, come back. The job of the tape is not to fix the sefer or to assuage your guilt at having let it get torn; tape is to stop things getting any worse until it can be fixed properly with parchment. Duck tape is for pipes and trucks. A Torah is neither. For a Torah we use artists’ tape to stop something getting worse, while we’re working on getting it fixed.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

kindle

Getting books for one's Kindle (present from fond parent) involves Registering it on Amazon. The first step of Registering is Giving Your Kindle A Name. One can't just do these things lightly, you know? What should a scribe name her e-reader?