6 — Thursday, January 23, 2020
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
WHISPER
SUBMIT A
WHISPER
By Bruce Haight
(c)2020 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
01/23/20
Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle
Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis
01/23/20
ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:
Release Date: Thursday, January 23, 2020
ACROSS
1 Spunky
8 Longest-serving
Japanese prime
minister
11 Ave. crossers
14 Steel foundry
input
15 Traction-
improving
17 “Try some!”
18 Lamaze class
attendee
19 Expectant time
20 One of the family
22 About 24% of the
U.S. Congress
23 Stations
26 Place for
choppers
29 Not quite right
30 Oodles
31 Broadway song
that begins, “The
most beautiful
sound I ever
heard”
33 Brief encounter
34 Flag thrower
37 Co-tsar with
Peter I
38 Saucepan cover
39 Missile Command
game company
41 Place to stay
42 Newcastle
Brown __
43 Starts bubbling,
maybe
44 Fleecy one
45 Loafs
47 Strong suit
48 Lost, as a big
lead
49 Way back when
50 Rum drink
54 Competition
that includes
snowboarding
57 Pianist Rubinstein
58 California’s
__ Gabriel
Mountains
60 Egg cells
61 Like the most
busy busybody
64 Mid-Michigan city
67 Uganda’s capital
68 Accessory for
an Aquaman
costume
69 Before, in poems
70 Coffee hour sight
71 “Sounds right to
me”
DOWN
1 Positioned
2 Really want
3 New Year’s
Day event in
Pasadena
4 Tiny toiler
5 Name in eerie
fiction
6 Proper to a
fault
7 Himalayan
legend
8 “Furthermore
... ”
9 Fluffy wrap
10 Finish
impressively
11 Sportscast
technique
12 River near
Vatican City
13 Exhausted
16 “Hold it!”
21 Lamb Chop
puppeteer
24 Short, in a way
25 It helps you go
places
27 Gives the slip
28 Part of LAPD
31 Pedometer unit
32 Swear
33 Sport coat
34 Get support, in a
way ... and what
the puzzle circles
do
35 Writer Gardner
36 Rock that, oddly,
loses to paper
40 Puccini opera
46 Boxer Laila
49 Ventura County
city
50 German word of
gratitude
51 Wildly cheering
52 Knocker’s
words
53 Zinger
55 Chris of “Captain
America”
56 Handled
59 Wine made from
Muscat grapes
62 Camera type, for
short
63 You basked for it
65 USO show
audience
66 Wyo. neighbor
CLASSIFIEDS
734-418-4115 option 2
dailydisplay@gmail.com
FALL 2020 HOUSES
# Beds Location Rent
6 511 Linden $4650
6 722 E. Kingsley $4650
6 1119 S. Forest $4000
5 910 Greenwood $3900
4 809 Sybil $3200
2 221 N. First $1900
Tenants pay all utilities.
www.cappomanagement.com
Showings M-F 10-3;
email cappomanagement@
gmail.com
DEINCO PROPERTIES
734-996-1991
FOR RENT
“Kevins
hands are
always
moist.”
“Rob”
“some-
times
firemen
are
women!”
puzzle by sudokusnydictation.com
SUDOKU
4 BEDRM 5 person house
Mary Court @ IM bldg,
May-May $2990 month
FOR RENT
FOLLOW US ON TWITTER
@michigandaily
NOW.
COMMUNITY CULTURE REVIEW
Kate Wisel and her love letter to fiction at Literati
My friend glared at me when I told her Kate
Wisel’s collection of stories was about violence
against women. Other women don’t often like
to hear those two words together — violence
and women. Especially on a Friday night. I had
promised my friend a cozy outing to our favorite
coffee shop, a charming end to a not-so-charming
first full week of classes. She hadn’t expected
the reading to be so morbid. Nevertheless, we
sat ourselves down towards the back of the less-
than-full audience of bookworms on that bitter
winter night. We sipped our chai lattes, noses
still sniffling from the cold, as a man with a stern
expression introduced the young author.
I am a self-proclaimed lover of Literati. I love
its walls scribbled with pensive literary remarks
and its bountiful offering of espresso drinks. I
was excited to attend the event, which was part
of Literati’s ongoing “Fiction at Literati” series.
The night included a reading by author Kate Wisel
from her book Driving in Cars with Homeless Men
followed by a conversation with fiction writer and
essayist Brad Felver. The coffee shop’s normal
grouping of tables and benches was reconfigured
to make way for about five rows of black bentwood
chairs. Though the event was admittedly low
in attendance — my friend and I were joined
by an older couple and a few lone silver-haired
bibliophiles — Literati’s tranquil atmosphere and
quaint ambiance did not disappoint. All of us
Literati and literary lovers successfully escaped
the biting Michigan cold and sat before a petite
young woman with a voice sweet as honey. She
introduced her work by comparing the linked
stories to a “pool table,” with the characters’
plotlines crashing into one another as the book
progresses. She began the reading with a section
from the chapter titled “Trouble,” which is told
from the perspective of Serena, one of the central
narrators.
Wisel advertises her book as “a love letter to
women moving through violence;” the work is
a collection of stories that all take place in the
varied settings of working-class Boston. Through
her pool-table architectural style, Wisel takes the
reader on a journey through time and space, which,
as Felver described in his formal conversation with
her, lends to a disorienting reading experience.
With this style, Wisel says she is able to encourage
a more interactive author-reader dynamic rather
than having the reader be “picked up [by the
author] like a toddler and carried” through a story.
She also makes a point to pepper humor
throughout the book as an outlet to convey
the frustration and anger experienced by the
affected women. Her first reading of “Trouble”
spoke to this writing tactic: Serena, the character
narrating the story, compares the yapping of her
dog to a “Mormon girl [being kidnapped]” and
makes repeated jabs at her neighbor couple’s
matching lazy eyes. As Serena’s narrative went
on to include several more colorful details, Wisel
got some muttered chuckles from the audience.
I particularly enjoyed the way she described the
character’s dog as having a “coal-lined eye like an
emo teenager.” Wisel goes on to reveal that Serena
got the dog as a gift from her partner — a kind of
“sorry for making you bleed” peace offering. The
imagery Wisel employs to allude to the women’s
experiences with domestic violence was poignant
yet palatable, effective in its ability to make me
and my friend grimace with discontent. In the first
reading of “Troubled,” Serena’s abuse is illustrated
through details describing her and her home’s
physical state: her swollen eye, a bloody floor, a
shattered mirror. There was no explicit narration
of the abusive events Serena was experiencing.
The second story was once again told from
Serena’s perspective and as Wisel alluded to in the
conversation that followed her reading, jumped
in time from the first story. In the second section,
Serena is working as a flight attendant, traveling
miles and miles and basking in a sky-bound
existence away from her abusive partner.
After the reading and conversation with Felver,
the two authors opened up for questions from the
audience. Wisel received a few questions about
her unique architectural style and her method for
approaching such a sensitive topic like domestic
violence with humor and transparency. We got
to learn a little bit about the thought process
she employs when constructing sentences as she
explained how she leans into the natural rhythm of
what’s jumbled inside her head, ultimately giving
her writing a lyrical quality. Wisel answered all
of the audience’s questions with humility and
bubbliness as she cracked jokes about the quirky
journey writing a book can be. She made it sound
as though she did not approach her book with a
concrete plan, but rather let the women’s stories
develop naturally on the page.
After a handful of questions, the event officially
ended and the audience members dispersed, one
by one, going on to explore the rest of the warm
bookstore. My friend and I left, minds bustling
with thoughts of puppies and lazy eyes and hearts
aching with a dull pain for women like Serena,
bruised and bloodied and confined to Wisel’s page.
GRACE TUCKER
For The Daily
Hearne’s ‘Word for Word’ and what it means to create
This past weekend, I happened upon an old
recording of composer Ted Hearne’s “Word for Word”
for large orchestra. In the interest of full disclosure, I
should note that the piece was premiered by the New
York Youth Symphony in 2011 under the direction of
Paul Haas, a former composition teacher of mine.
Hearne is known for his unconventional use of form
and organization of time. His string orchestra work,
the “Law of Mosaics,” is one of my favorite pieces.
Its opening movement, “Excerpts from the middle
of something,” contains wide swathes of silence. In
between these bouts of silence are intriguing complex
soundworlds; the lack of connecting material between
these worlds gives the movement its unique flavor.
In “Word for Word,” however, Hearne experiments
not with silence and chronology but with the very
meaning of creativity. He takes simple, two-measure
orchestral figures that he claims “could have been
ripped from a piece of orchestral music from the 19th
century” and repeatedly distorts them using nothing
but a music notation program’s copy-paste feature.
He does not evolve this material in the “traditional”
compositional sense. He offers no other musical
ideas in the first movement that might evolve this
opening material. For many of the orchestral parts,
he does nothing but repeat the material with different
rhythmic offsets. Nevertheless, he plays the role of
“composer” in the piece, creating the notation that
produces the synchronous vibrations of air we refer
to as music.
As I began to think more about this piece, I ran
into a question of creative autonomy. Had Hearne
composed the piece, or was he aided by his computer’s
copy-paste feature? Is there a point at which
creativity becomes overly reliant on technology — a
point at which a creator must credit technology as a
co-creator of a work?
In this specific piece, it was the fact that Hearne
had composed the underlying copy-pasted material
that lead me to conclude that he was the sole creator
of the work. Though this material is 19th-century-
esque, a close reading of Hearne’s program note
indicates that it is his original music. But what if this
were not the case?
For this I turned to another movement of Hearne’s
“Law of Mosaics” for string orchestra: “Climactic
movements from ‘Adagio for Strings’ and ‘The Four
Seasons’,” slowed down and layered on top of one
another.” For those familiar with these two works,
the movement’s musical material is painfully obvious.
It is nothing but the climactic section of the “Adagio
for Strings” and a large, tutti section of “The Four
Seasons,” with both pieces slowed down considerably.
I found myself asking, yet again, whether Hearne
was really the sole composer, or creator, of this
movement. In this instance, the answer seemed much
more ambiguous. He was definitely the first composer
to notate these pieces slowed down at such a rate and
packed on top of each other in such a way. But he was
not the first composer to create these melodies, pitch
classes, or relative durations.
This problem, I realized, is also intimately related
to modern technology. Thanks to contemporary
music notation programs, streaming services and
public domain sheet music websites, composers
have the ability to view, listen to and emulate other
composers’s music like never before.
To complicate things further, I would ascribe
much of the meta-musical meaning I interpret from
Hearne’s piece to relate to this modern technology.
I think that his piece deals with our post-modern,
allegedly post-factual age. As much as modern
visual imagery is repeatedly recontextualized and
decontextualized at the hands of memes, Hearne is
able to strip two staples of the string orchestra canon
of their normal musical meaning.
I began asking myself if my preconceptions about
the role of a creator in an artistic work were thus
somehow outdated. Perhaps this is no longer a valid
means of understanding art and the artists that make
it. Perhaps other realms of the performing arts had
already evolved past this and classical music was slow
to catch up.
In rap music, for example, I knew that many
producers
relied
on
sampling
to
generate
accompanimental material. While the rapper wrote
and performed entirely new material, the producer
merely manipulated and organized music written by
others — the role of the creative producer, I would
argue, had been replaced with the musical curator.
But then I asked myself what had prevented other
composers from doing exactly what Hearne had
done or what many of these producers do. (This is
an argument I’ve frequently heard applied to John
Cage’s “4’33”” to great effect.) If Hearne’s work
wasn’t creative, what had prevented others from pre-
empting Hearne in his non-creative efforts?
SAMMY SUSSMAN
Daily Community Culture Columnist
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com