My First Podcast! Introducing "Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera"

Marc Eliot Stein • January 10th, 2019
Audio Literature Being A Writer Classics Comedy Drama Internet Culture La Boheme Litkicks Music Personal Postmodernism Romantic Technology

Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera

Timing is everything. An article declaring that indie book blogs are dead made the social media rounds just yesterday, as I was about to announce something new on Litkicks: my first podcast. Well, it's true that a lot of book blogs are dead, but Literary Kicks never followed any trends — except the ones we want to follow, like podcasting. It's more fun trying something new than dying, right?

Yeah, my friends, I am into podcasting now. It's a technology that seems to fit the moment all over the world in 2019, for reasons that may be hard to express. Why are podcasts such a hot trend right now? Perhaps it's the intimacy of the human voice, or the down-to-earth spontaneity that the conversational format requires.

I can't exactly explain podcasting's appeal, but I can tell you that my primary method of consuming books for the last 6 or 7 years has been in my ears via Audible. Lately I've subscribed to so many fascinating, original and unique podcasts about such a wide variety of topics that I haven't even been had time for Audible books. I walk a lot, and I also drive a lot and do mindless chores a lot, all with stimulating ideas and stories streaming into my head. I was listening to a podcast one day last November when it suddenly hit me that I wanted to create one.

I was concerned at that time that I hadn't felt motivated to write many Litkicks blog posts in the past year. I guess after running this website since 1994 — the 25th birthday will be in July — I was bored with typing paragraphs in HTML. The idea of speaking a blog post to you all out there feels somehow magical and delightful to me. That's why, after promising to write a long blog post about literary opera last year, I nearly got finished writing it, and then realized I wanted to podcast it instead. So I bought a mic, downloaded audacity, and got busy.

 

i don't even know how to podcast, on instagram

 

"Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera" is the first podcast series from Literary Kicks. It's completely free, and the first episode is now available on iTunes, Spotify, Google Play and Stitcher. If you have a different podcast app you like to use, please post a comment to let me know. I want to spread this as widely as I can.

I will be doing a Patreon page and other stuff like that soon.

 

lost music on itunes

 

lost music on spotify

 

Recording and editing turned out to be harder than I expected. After years of developing my blogging "voice" (my written voice, that is) here on Litkicks, I suddenly found myself staring down a microphone through a pop filter, struggling to turn my natural speaking voice into an instrument that can carry my thoughts to untold strangers. This is especially not easy for me, since I've never liked my voice. I seem to always sound tentative and enervated. I talk too fast, then too slow, and certain vowels always kick my ass. I happen to have a Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island accent like the worst hack comedian's bad imitation of a bad Brooklyn/Queens/Long Island accent. (Yeah, that's me.) So, podcasting is not a natural fit for this longtime blogger.

But I learned something interesting after talking to some podcasting friends about this. It turns out none of us like our voices. That came to me as a surprise, especially since I think these friends have excellent speaking voices.

I have a track record of trying to develop my public voice. I like to push myself: doing spoken word poetry, singing in front of strangers, and more recently speaking at political rallies and protests. (A good protest, and we've had a few here in New York City the last couple of years, can really present a refreshing workout for the vocal cords).

Given the deeply conflicted feelings I have about my own voice, it's ironic yet fitting that I chose opera as the topic for my first podcast series. Opera, of course, is very much about the human voice — though my podcast also makes the case that opera is about much more than singing or even music. Opera is an intense literary experience.

And that's what "Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera" is about. As for exactly why I am lately so obsessed with this topic, and what I mean about "lost music" and "exploring literary opera". consider it a mystery. You'll have to listen to episode one for the answer, and I hope you will.

Editing also turned out to be difficult, and I'll be the first to admit that after much grueling work I ended up releasing a pretty raggedy mix for my first episode. When you hear all the technical errors and sloppy splices, you'll probably have trouble believing that this is like 20 hours of work, all crammed into 37 minutes and 2 seconds.

I'll get better at all of this for episode 2, and I'm not apologizing to anybody for mistakes in the mix. Hey, this is still punk rock over here.

 

Episode One: Otello

Music credits: Various excerpts from Otello by Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito, featuring Placido Domingo, Maria Callas, Kiri Te Kanawa, Piero Cappuccilli and Mirella Freni. All music is public domain found at Archive.org.

 

I'm going to be continuing to expand this page with other episodes as I release them. I'm also going to keep a running list on this page of other opera podcasts I like. Here are a few to start with: The Indie Opera Podcast. Unnatural Acts of Opera. Sex Drugs and Opera. The Met Opera Guild Podcast, and the Met's Aria Code. Backstage at Lyric (Chicago). The Art of Opera. Ideas at the House (Sydney Opera House). So much out there ...

Welcome back to Literary Kicks, as we head towards our 25th birthday, and I hope you'll check out and enjoy "Lost Music: Exploring Literary Opera". Please give me a good rating and tell your friends if you do!

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Satori in Brooklyn: Our Shared Spaces

Marc Eliot Stein • September 3rd, 2018
American Being A Writer Big Thinking Ecology Existential Nature New York City Personal Politics Psychology Religion

A few days ago a friend told me she was worried about my rage. "You seem upset a lot," she said.

Another friend told me the same thing after seeing my photos of a protest march. This friend says I need to "relax" about Donald Trump, Mike Pence, stolen seats on the US Supreme Court, the global resurgence of white nationalism and fascism, atrocities in Yemen and Gaza, abuse of immigrants and refugees, corrupt hyper-capitalism, environmental ruin. I'm letting it get to me, he says.

I'm glad my friends are concerned about my state of mind. But I'm having a hard time these days figuring out how to respond to people who worry about my level of rage, because I don't think the rage I'm expressing is my rage at all.

This is the world's rage. I hear it loud and clear all around me — here in New York City, and all over America and all over the world. I am a writer, and I am a political activist, and so I write about this rage and go to protests. Maybe some of my friends are confused about what it is that writers and activists do ... because telling either a writer or an activist not to express rage in 2018 is like telling a baseball player not to swing at a fastball. Huh? It's our job. This is what we were put on this earth to do.

When I write about the major problems around the world in 2018, I'm not thinking about my own personal feelings at all. Rather, I'm trying to dwell within a shared space, a place of community. But these shared, social spaces themselves have shriveled and sickened as a result of the political fiascos of the last couple of decades. Confusion, cynicism, paranoia and hopelessness have especially come to define the public mood in the United States, which was still reeling from the shock of the Al Qaeda attacks in 2001 and the disaster of Bush's Iraq War of 2003 when the fiscal crash of 2007/2008 happened, hurtling us eventually towards the racist kakistocracy of Donald Trump. Do we ever stop to mourn the common trust that has been lost within the various societies that enrich and sustain us? I don't think we do. It's hard to mourn and fight at the same time. Instead, we channel this unconscious sense of loss into feelings of anger, dislike, refusal, disgust.

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Reflections

Marc Eliot Stein • March 4th, 2018
American Beat Generation Being A Writer Big Thinking History Internet Culture La Boheme Litkicks Music Personal Politics Technology Transgressive Tributes

I'm in a reflective mood lately. Looking within, through a glass darkly and all that. That's my excuse for the fact that it's March 2018 and this is my first post of the year.

I also have another excuse: I've been working on a really good Litkicks article about opera. If you follow my Instagram (and I wish you would, because I'm really into expressing myself with images lately) you know that I've taken up regular attendance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City for the past couple of years. This followed a couple of other developments in my life: first, I've managed to transform myself from someone who has to slog to work in an office every day into a work-from-home arrangement, which makes me very happy. I now spend most of my daylight hours coding in a solitary room, which means I get to play whatever music I want in the background while I work. I've discovered that opera is the perfect background music for coding. It's dramatic and dynamic and continuous, which keeps me awake and engaged. But it's also in a language I don't speak, so the words can't interrupt my thinking as they would if I knew what the singers were singing about.

This is why I've been feeding Mozart and Rossini and Bellini and Donizetti and Verdi and Wagner and Puccini and Strauss into my brain at an advanced pace lately. I also happen to be currently crashing in upper Manhattan, with the Met at Lincoln Center just a pleasant walk away. This is why opera has suddenly begun rocking my world. I'm almost ready to publish a really exciting article for this site about the literary, cultural and historical significance of opera. But that article is not ready yet. This Litkicks post is not that Litkicks post, but I have a few other things to share today ...

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Dystopia Weekend: America's Ayn Rand Problem

Marc Eliot Stein • December 3rd, 2017
American Big Thinking Economics Existential History Litkicks Memes News Politics Psychology Religion

It was only six years ago — but it seems so much longer than that — that I wrote a book called Why Ayn Rand is Wrong (and Why It Matters). This book emerged from a series of blog posts I was composing (under my then-pseudonym Levi Asher) called Philosophy Weekend.

Philosophy Weekend was a wild ride and a big success on Litkicks, generating an incredible number of intelligent comments from highly engaged readers who wished, along with me, to delve deeply into the topic of morality and political ethics. I loved every minute of this, but eventually had to halt this series because work, family and other projects were demanding my attention. I hope Philosophy Weekend is still happily remembered by the hundreds of people who kept up a vigorous debate with me in our comments section — often about hot topics of the day, which we discussed in light of the writings of various progressive social philosophers like Socrates, Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, Auguste Comte, William James, Dorothy Day, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Martin Luther King, Carl Jung, Yoko Ono and Abbie Hoffman (all of whom I respect and consider important) ... along with those of several influential materialists or conservative "realists" like Thomas Hobbes, Friedrich von Hayek, Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman (whose asses I tried to kick in these debates).

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Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekhov: Russia's Eternal Literary #Resistance

Marc Eliot Stein • September 3rd, 2017
Beat Generation Big Thinking Classics Comedy Drama Eastern European Ecology Existential Fiction History Modernism Politics Reading Religion Russian Transgressive

Because I love literature, I bristle when I hear Russia described as my country's enemy.

Certainly Vladimir Putin is our enemy, because he is a tyrant who murders journalists. And certainly Donald Trump is our enemy, not only because he's a racist and a sexual predator and a con-man, but also because Vladimir Putin is clearly his role model, his idea of an effective leader.

But Putin does not own the epic Russian soul or mind, and Russia's historic intellectual achievements have formed bridges of human connection that no crass politician can ever tear down. Even if the entire planet explodes this weekend (as it might, since the ignorant Trump thinks he can solve the Korean problem with nuclear weapons), we will burn in friendship with the land that produced some of the most searingly brilliant writers of all time.

It was 196 years ago that the first of the three greatest of the many Russian greats was born. This is the fire-hot Fyodor Dostoevsky, who somehow found the formula to turn existential expressions of rage about the cruel absurdity of human life into taut, gripping works of fiction. I most recently read for the first time his The Idiot, which brought to me once again the special joys of a Dostoevsky novel: the twisted humor, the irony upon irony upon irony, even the simple gorgeous moments of innocent pleasure that enflame his tortured characters, because these moments tie them to their own tragic lives, and to the faulty, impossible Earth.

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Miami Diary, August 2017

Marc Eliot Stein • August 19th, 2017
Being A Writer Big Thinking Biography Internet Culture Litkicks Personal Technology

I've been communing with a view of the Atlantic ocean all summer.

I don't get to spend as much time out there swimming in it as I'd like, because I'm a workaholic no matter where I live. But the view out my window helps keep me centered. The great ocean sparkles and gently churns as I plug away on endless coding errors, architectural conundrums, bug reports. The gorgeous wide sky beckons to me too, swirls of orange fire in the morning, steady pale blue at noon, dusty maroon and magenta in the late afternoon.

I drifted down to southern Florida this summer for no special reason, except that an empty apartment became available to me, and my remote location job (for a very hip and innovative magazine/digital publishing company based in the Midwest) allows me to work anywhere I want. I'll be back in New York City in September, but I'm enjoying the getaway and the mellow Miami lifestyle. Well, I haven't had any margaritas yet, nor smoked a good cigar ... but I have played a bit of poker, done a lot of swimming and listened to a lot of Reggaeton, and I guess I'm getting a decent tan.

Some of you may remember the memoir of my technology career in the Silicon Alley years that I drafted on this blog several years ago. I got a great response to this work in progress, and I'm still planning (yes, really, I am!) to do a final draft of this memoir and publish it as a book. This autobiography covers my life and work from 1993 to 2003. Since then, I've remained fully in the game as a web developer as well as a literary/political blogger. On the web development side, I guess the technical challenges that vex me and my co-workers have only become more overwhelmingly difficult and paradoxical since 2003.

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Ride to Think: The Lonely Journey of Robert M. Pirsig

Marc Eliot Stein • April 29th, 2017
American Beat Generation Big Thinking Biography Eastern Ecology Existential Fiction La Boheme Nature Psychology Reading Religion Summer Of Love Technology Transgressive Tributes

Robert Maynard Pirsig, author of the great 1974 novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, died on April 24, 2017 at the age of 88. This novel was a cornerstone of the late Beat/Hippie literary era, and it continues to touch the hearts of countless readers all over the world.

Though this novel's fetching title makes a big first impression, it's about much more than Buddhist philosophy and combustion engines. As a philosophical novel, it brushes quickly past Eastern philosophy to dive deep into the classics of ancient Greece, and despite all this it's really a novel about parenthood, and about the challenge of staying centered and sane amidst the trials and challenges of everyday American life.

Most of all, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is a personal, autobiographical story about a father worrying about how to raise his son. It's mainly because the novel works so effectively on this raw emotional ground — of course, its clever title and zeitgest-y Summer of Love vibe helps too — that it remains so widely loved by so many readers today.

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