Re: GG: Newspaper and magazine articles

["Anne M. Marble" <amarble@abs.net>]

From: Mary Jo Watts <mwatts@rci.rutgers.edu>
To: Claude B. Zachary <czachary@usc.edu>; <f_minor@email.rutgers.edu>
Sent: Tuesday, October 05, 1999 1:04 PM
Subject: Re: GG: Newspaper and magazine articles


> OOH-- The Post article is by Tamara Bernstein, is it?  She would
know a
> little bit about boring.  Her presentation at the gathering was
absolute
> torture IMNSHO. On and on and on. (Certainly the worst of the
gathering
> and that was a disappointment to me because there are so few female
> critics out there...also I heard she was saucy and I was prepared
for
> her to be interesting.)

I'm surprised you didn't say that her speech was "AB-so-LUTE-ly
Ab-SURD." :-> (Just a little reference to GG's remarks when he was
filmed in Eaton Centre during the "Glenn Gould's Toronto" video. I'm
finding out that it's a great quote with lots of uses.)

>Her knowledge of GG as a person certainly was
> not parallel with what people who knew him told me and she certainly
> didn't 'come within a thousand miles' of him.

If I refused to listen to a composer or musician because I thought he
or she was unbalanced, I'd have no CDs! If I refused to read a
novelist because I his or her life was imperfect, I'd have empty
bookshelves. An impossibility! (There are a couple of authors I refuse
to buy because they've hurt people I know. But messed-up artists who
are strangers to me fill my library shelves.)

>She never engaged with his
> musicianship long enough to be interesting on that subject...

Maybe she made the mistake of listening to the critics instead of the
music. I was only able to listen to GG's music when I listened for
myself instead of listening to what people had written about it.

> That's not to say she's entirely wrongheaded in her criticism.
She's
> right about Payzant.  There was a lot of St. Glenn about the
place...

Oh, you noticed that, too? :->

It's a good thing certain people didn't spot me posing on THE bench
with my new wool hat. Then again, we might have gotten into a
fascinating discussion of "Just because Glenn Gould said it or did it,
that doesn't I have to live by it." After all, I bought a copy of
"Cosmopolitan" the other day. :-O Though I must admit that I enjoyed
my GlenGould magazine more.