Saturday, November 25, 2006

How weird is this?

A sleepless night found me surfing the internet around 3am [sad, I know]. I was startled to find a classical music forum in which a bunch of gentlemen were having yet another dig at my opinions about Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire, expressed on this blog so long ago that I can't even locate it in my archive.

Those opinions were written in the way that blogs tend to be: rapidly and with the occasional strong view [oh, we're not meant to have those, are we?] emphasised in capitals - back then, I was using a browser that wasn't compatible with Blogger's editing features, and I hadn't yet learned how to do bold, italics etc with html code. Neither that post nor anything else in JDCMB was ever intended to be taken as academic gospel and I can't think why anyone would consider it suitable for quotation. Nevertheless, fellow blogger Steve Hicken saw fit to quote it extensively in a lengthy article about the work, twisting my words to make his point (the opposite of mine, of course). That sparked the discussion on the forum, where someone also took me to task about 'laying it on a bit thick' with said capital letters. Hey, chaps, I could throw some of my favourite Hungarian swear words at you, but I'll keep it simple instead: haven't you got anything better to do? I'm not trying to write the New Grove here. And if you have to quote daft stuff like mine, couldn't you have the courtesy to spell my name right? You'll find it at the top of this blog in, oh dear, big letters.

The declaration of love from another gentleman on the same forum was marginally more welcome. Dear sir, thank you, but I'm a married woman.