Shrug

Hey, remember in 2012 when I told you some things that Thomas Adès said about Mahler? You do, huh? LIAR! Why must you always lie to me? Does it make you feel big and important? Anyway, that's okay, because I want to tell you something else Thomas Adès said about Mahler, specifically about two notes at the beginning of the 9th symphony: "It contains a fruitful paradox: it resolves onto a dissonance... If he'd planned, he'd never have started. That is why it's so moving when he does work through to a logical way of resolving the paradox. It's a very Viennese answer, a shrug which as if accidentally makes the problem disappear." Thomas Adès has so many mean, hateful things to say about Mahler all the time that when he throws him a backhanded compliment, the reader turns giddy, as if the big turkey just arrived at Bob Cratchit's with all the trimmings. But that's not the point. The point is that it's connected with what Dr. Theresa and I were talking about on New Year's Day. You remember that, don't you? LIAR! Are you trying to gaslight me? Allow me to quote one of my many, many unpublished novels: "Alternately, consider a novelist who is writing to kill time, and to distract himself, or herself, from the more unpleasant aspects of a long period of unemployment. Such a person would inadvertently produce a number of annoying little strings that needed to be knotted up, like the haunting interval in Mahler’s Ninth..." and from there I go on to work in a Thomas Adès quotation, which is what everyone wants in a novel. And, as you can see, it is also a novel about, in part, a novelist, and everybody goes absolutely 100% ape for that too! "Why can't there be more writing about writers?" people are always shouting in my face all the time. 2025 is the year I give up. Again.