v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Iris Murdoch Quote

"The best thing about being God would be making the heads”
— Iris Murdoch

Natalia Ginzburg at Jacobin

 

I just finished reading Ginzberg's All Our Yesterdays, a masterful novel of life during wartime and under fascism. Here is a well researched biographical article on Italy's great anti-fascist intellectual and novelist Natalia Ginzburg:

In 1934, Natalia’s middle brother, Mario — also a GL member — became “notorious” for hurling himself into Lake Lugano when Mussolini’s police tried to arrest him and a companion in the town of Ponte Tresa. “In the water with his overcoat on,” cried his mother, Lidia. As a result, his father and older brother, Gino, were arrested as accomplices and held for a number of days in a Turin prison. These events and others led to a roundup of many GL members in that city. As author Alexander Stille describes, on May 15, 1935, “More than fifty people were arrested in Turin and abut two hundred homes were searched for compromising material.” Stille points out that GL operatives collected information about fascist economic and military policy, about working conditions, unauthorized factory strikes, and peasant uprisings.

Many GL members came from the professional classes, and families like the Levis. “Rumors of mass arrests swept quickly through the Turinese upper-middle-class families of lawyers, businessmen, doctors and professors . . .  The waiting room and the police station turned into a kind of social club for wives, mothers and girlfriends of prisoners,” adds Stille. Most GL prisoners were released after a few days but Vittorio Foa, Natalia Ginzburg’s friend, and a well-known GL activist, spent eight traumatic years in prison. She would come to view her father and his friends as “old fashioned Socialists,” as she told Radio Tre. “There’s nothing we can do, we can’t get out of this now,” her father intoned. After the passing of the antisemitic racial laws in 1938, banning Jews from jobs in public institutions, Giuseppe Levi lost his professorship in Italy and luckily was hired to teach in Belgium.

But in 1937, Mussolini’s men brutally murdered Carlo Rosselli along with his brother Nello on a quiet country road in France. The following year, Leone Ginzburg — a native of Odessa, literary critic, and professor of Russian literature — was stripped of his Italian citizenship after an earlier refusal to sign an oath to Mussolini, costing him his teaching job. While Carlo Rosselli famously came from a rich, well-connected Florentine family, this was not the case of Leone Ginzburg, a special target of the fascist secret police, the OVRA.

Leone Ginzburg, who married Natalia in 1938, was perhaps the GL activist best known to the OVRA. In 1936 he was released from Civitavecchia Penitentiary. “His coat was too small and his tattered hat sat slightly askew on top of his black hair,” wrote Natalia in Family Lexicon. “He walked slowly with his hands in his pockets, his lips down, his brow knit, his tortoise shell glasses resting halfway down his large nose with his black, penetrating eyes.”

He met with Giulio Einaudi, who had started a small publishing house back in 1933. Together they decided to revitalize that company, Einaudi editore, and publish those who were fighting against Mussolini. That company would become famous in the postwar period for its talented trove of new Italian voices.

In the Resistance period the largest antifascist party, the Italian Communist Party (PCI) was, however, anything but sympathetic to GL and its troubles. It considered the movement founded by Rosselli elitist, non-Marxist, and thoroughly bourgeois. “For Rosselli,” writes Stanislao G. Pugliese, author of Carlo Rosselli: Socialist Heretic and Antifascist Exile, “the task of GL was nothing less than reconciling the political and social potential of the Russian Revolution with the scientific humanistic, liberal legacy of the West . . .  Rosselli had had an obsession with renewing socialism, with trying to find some way out of the impotence of international socialism . . .  Rosselli was especially impatient with the insipid socialism of [French socialist prime minister] Leon Blum and willing to break the taboo of pacifism . . .  nor was he in favor of state socialism.” Instead, Rosselli had called for a “strategy of a permanent, adversarial, and confrontational stance versus the state.”

“The PCI, with good cause,” Pugliese writes, “perceived GL as its most serious competitor for the allegiance of young, active antifascists. The two groups were the most vital, innovative, and well-organized of the exiled, and underground antifascist organizations. . . .  For the PCI, GL was ‘an agency of Italian capitalism . . .  anticommunist organization . . .  that seeks to trick the workers and separate them from the Communist Party.’” And for all the profound sacrifices made by GL members, the movement did not attract a mass following, like the PCI. GL would morph into the Action Party, which only lasted until 1947 after disappointing results in the first postwar elections. Still, Pugliese writes, “their ideals were kept alive by many independent intellectuals of the Left, ideas first broached by Rosselli in the 1930s.”

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The Clarity of Ginzburg

From The Paris Review, Italo Calvino's review of Natalia Ginzburg's The Dry Heart, her second novel:

Natalia Ginzburg is the last woman left on earth. The rest are all men—even the female forms that can be seen moving about belong, ultimately, to this man’s world. A world where men make the decisions, the choices, take action. Ginzburg, or rather the disillusioned heroines who stand in for her, is alone, on the outside. There are generations and generations of women who have done nothing but wait and obey; wait to be loved, to get married, to become mothers, to be betrayed. So it is for her heroines.

Ginzburg comes an outsider to a world in which only the most conventional signs, tracing from an ancient era, can be deciphered. From emptiness there emerges, here and there, an identifiable object, a familiar object: buttons, or a pipe. Human beings exist only according to schematic representations of the concrete: hair, mustache, glasses. You can say the same about the emotions and behaviors; they reveal nothing. She doesn’t reveal so much as identify already-established words or situations: Ah ha, I must be in love … This feeling must be jealousy … Or, now, like in The Dry Heart, I will take this gun and kill him.

And yet Natalia Ginzburg is a strong woman. By which I mean a strong woman writer. The burden of which hangs, like a condemnation, over her books. And yet her acquiescence to such a burden does not make her language earnest, sentimental, or evasive. There is no womanly capitulation to the flurry of sensations or intermittent tricks of memory you find in Virginia Woolf, then imitated by other women writers, even Italian women writers.

Natalia Ginzburg believes in things, those scarce items that can be ripped from the vacuum of the universe: the mustache, some buttons. She believes in her feelings, in her actions, whether kind or desperate.

Whosoever has said that, because of the raw nakedness of Ginzburg’s language, she is influenced by the Americans, is being simplistic. The prose lineage she belongs to is that of open eyes, all scene, one where human connection is tacit. It is a great lineage, one that links Maupassant to Chekhov, and Chekhov to Mansfield. But young Katherine Mansfield knew how to play with sadness as well as boredom. Natalia Ginzburg doesn’t play; she surprises, she dreams. Moreover, as interwoven as they are with echoes of place, her novels invite association with the great women writers of Italian realism, Grazia Deledda, Caterina Percoto.

Ginzburg writes in the first person, on behalf of characters who are profoundly remote. Hers is not the first-person of lyrical diary keeping, but rather an externalization in which she participates body and soul. Deep down, however, she is still the same bored and lonely woman who never seems to find, or even bother to seek, meaning in her life. The proletarian girl from her first book, The Road to the City, who doesn’t know how to protect herself from emotions, whether her own or those of others, is refashioned in Ginzburg’s second novel, The Dry Heart. Here is a middle-class teacher, at first lonely and waiting to find a husband, then trapped in the disappointment of a bad marriage. The restless need for redemption that appears in the first novel as a longing for the city destined to fade, incarnates now as murder, a gesture of ultimate desperation.

That is how it ends, but the ending comes at the beginning. The novel opens with the crime: “And I shot him between the eyes.” After which the heroine sits on a park bench and recounts how she got to such a point and then turns herself in. To tell the story here would deprive you of the flavor, the stern clarity that drives the story right through, unfaltering, to the end—that’s the reason that you have to read it all in one sitting.

Pitty the Americans

 

From NYRB, Fintan O'toole writes about Trump's disastrous two months:

In a period when trust in government became vital, Trump would not let go of his obsession with the malevolent “deep state”—as far into the crisis as March 9, he tweeted, “There are still some very bad, sick people in our government – people who do not love our Country (In fact, they hate our Country!).” On the same day he retweeted a claim by the pro-Trump author Charlie Kirk that “Democrats and the mainstream media are trying to incite panic over the Coronavirus.” As late as March 25 he was insisting that “The LameStream Media is the dominant force in trying to get me to keep our Country closed as long as possible in the hope that it will be detrimental to my election success. The real people want to get back to work ASAP.”

With this stream of disparaging commentary, Trump himself became a vector of the coronavirus. His followers got the message that the whole thing might well be a media and Democratic conspiracy, and therefore that they did not need to take the threat seriously. A Quinnipiac poll on March 9 showed the effect: while 68 percent of Democrats said they were concerned that they or someone they knew would be infected, only 35 percent of Republicans felt likewise. Belief in the seriousness of the threat is a prerequisite for self-protection (not to mention for reducing the spread of the virus)—Trump’s undermining of that belief is literally lethal to his own supporters.

We must bear in mind that Trump’s “real people,” the ones who make up his electoral base, are disproportionately prone to the chronic illnesses (the “underlying conditions”) that make Covid-19 more likely to prove fatal. A 2018 Massachusetts General Hospital study of more than three thousand counties in the US reported that

poor public health was significantly associated with the additional Republican presidential votes cast in 2016 over those from 2012. A substantial association was seen between poor health and a switch in political parties in the last [presidential] election.

For every marker of the prevalence of poor health (such as diabetes, obesity, days of illness, and mortality rates), there was a marked shift toward voting for Trump. Trump has acted in relation to Covid-19 like the God who tells the Jews to mark their homes with a sign so that the plague he is inflicting on Egypt will pass by their doors—with the malign twist that he has instead marked out his own chosen people for special harm.

Trump’s most remarkable (though little remarked) intervention was a retweet on March 22 of a March 18 column in the right-wing Washington Times by the Fox News contributor and former judge Andrew Napolitano. The article was a fundamental attack on the public safety measures being put in place to slow the spread of the virus. Napolitano describes state-level “decrees closing most retail establishments, particularly all restaurants, bars and theaters” as “totalitarian impulses” that “impaired the fundamental rights of tens of millions of persons”:

These nanny-state rules are unconstitutional, unlawful and unworthy of respect or compliance.

Why is this happening? Throughout history, free people have been willing to accept the devil’s bargain of trading liberty for safety when they are fearful. We supinely accept the shallow and hollow offers of government that somehow less liberty equals more safety….

Today, the fear of contagion gives government cover for its assaults on freedom and poses a question the government does not want to answer: If liberty can be taken away in times of crisis, then is it really liberty; or is it just a license, via a temporary government permission slip, subject to the whims of politicians in power?

By effectively endorsing these claims and inviting his fans to share them, Trump showed support for the belief not just that the restrictions on social gatherings could be defied, or even that they should be defied, but that they must be defied. If they are totalitarian and unconstitutional, there is a patriotic duty to flout them. “Live free or die” becomes “live free and dice with death.”

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Some Ambient Mix from Jilk

acloserlisten · Jilk's Slumber Party mix

Radical Transparency

From NY Times, this article relates how the Trump administration tried to control the public's perception about the coming pandemic:

The strongest critics of the Trump’s administration’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic point to its flat-footedness and the consequences of time lost.

But the full account looks worse. Over the last five days of February, President Trump and senior officials did something more sinister: They engaged in a cover-up.

A look at this window of time gives insight into how several members of the president’s team were willing to manipulate Americans even when so many lives were at stake.

The recent reports that the president wanted to fire the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s top expert on viral respiratory diseases, Dr. Nancy Messonnier, during this period helps put the pieces of the puzzle together.

What was her offense to the president?

In a conference call with reporters on the final Tuesday of the month, Dr. Messonnier spoke frankly. “We want to make sure the American public is prepared,” she said, then put it in personal terms by saying what she told her children that morning: “We as a family ought to be preparing for significant disruption to our lives.”

At the time, senior officials knew the coronavirus was an extreme threat to Americans. Thanks to information streaming in from U.S. intelligence agencies for months, officials reportedly believed that a “cataclysmic” disease could infect 100 million Americans and discussed lockdown plans. The warnings were given to Mr. Trump in his daily brief by the intelligence community; in calls from Alex Azar, the secretary of health; and in memos from his economic adviser Peter Navarro.

The same day that Dr. Messonnier spoke, the military’s National Center for Medical Intelligence raised the warning level inside the government to WATCHCON1, concluding that the coronavirus was imminently likely to develop into a full-blown pandemic.

But the White House did not want the American public to know.

The president’s stated concerns were specific. He didn’t want to upset the markets or China during trade talks, and it appears he may have also simply been in denial, counting on his personal hunches and luck.

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On Gerhard Richter

From a NYRB article on Richter exhibitions:

Richter is contemporary art’s great poet of uncertainty; his work sets the will to believe and the obligation to doubt in perfect oscillation. Now eighty-eight, he is frequently described as one of the world’s “most influential” living artists, but his impact is less concrete than the phrase suggests. There is no school of Richter. His output is too quixotic, too personal, to be transferrable as a style in the manner of de Kooning or Rauschenberg. Though his influence has indeed been profound, it has played out in eyes rather than hands, shifting the ways in which we look, and what we expect looking to do for us.

In Germany he is treated as a kind of painterly public intellectual—personally diffident and professionally serious, a thoughtful oracle especially as regards the prickly territory of German history. He was among the first postwar German artists to deal with pictorial records of Nazism, and his approach to the past might be summarized as poignant pragmatism, rejecting both despair and amnesia. One measure of his status is that visitors today enter the Reichstag flanked by two soaring Richters: on one side a sixty-seven-foot glass stele in the colors of the German flag; on the other, facsimiles of Birkenau (2014), the paintings through which he finally succeeded in responding to the Holocaust, abandoning earlier attempts across five decades.

The Birkenau paintings, which had never been seen on this side of the Atlantic, were among the eagerly anticipated inclusions in “Gerhard Richter: Painting After All,” the last exhibition to be held at the Met Breuer before the building is ceded to the Frick Collection in July. A streamlined, eloquent summa of Richter’s career, curated by Sheena Wagstaff and Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, the show opened on March 4, nine days before being shuttered by Covid-19 (along with a concurrent exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery). I’m one of thousands who missed that brief window. It is not yet known whether the show will reopen in New York before it travels to Los Angeles in August. In the meantime, we are left with an expansive website (the museum has posted images of all works in the show, installation shots, and some film clips), a weighty catalog, and memories of works seen in person. This is, of course, not ideal: many of the things shown depend on properties of scale and reflectivity that cannot be experienced in reproduction. But this is a retrospective about retrospection, and the situation is not without a certain resonance. . .

. . .American audiences came late to Richter. In the 1960s and 1970s the hegemony of American Pop, Minimalism, and Conceptualism tended to crowd out curiosity about what was going on elsewhere. Richter’s first solo show in New York in 1973 did not ignite great excitement, and for many years he was understood here primarily as a graphic artist; his first interview in the American press appeared in The Print Collector’s Newsletter in 1985.² By then, a series of influential exhibitions (as well as favorable exchange rates for American dealers and collectors) had stoked new interest in European art, but Richter’s reputation lagged behind those of Germans such as Joseph Beuys and Anselm Kiefer who made raw work that spoke of war and atonement in no uncertain terms.

Richter’s oeuvre, by contrast, was measured and indirect and took a confusing variety of forms. His foggy photo-paintings suggested an oxymoronic lugubrious Pop, the random color squares an ebullient Conceptualism, and his soft-focus landscapes and portraits channeled both the Sturm und Drang of German Romanticism and the cool distance of contemporary photography. Uncertain terms were Richter’s métier, and critics simply did not know what to do with it. Many concluded he was a cynic bent on invalidating art itself: “Richter wars on poetries,” declared a 1989 review in The Washington Post. “When he depicts a cloudy sky, or a log fence and a red-roofed barn in the quiet countryside, he somehow makes you queasy.” Even admiring critics like Peter Schjeldahl acknowledged Richter’s reputation for “severity, hermeticism, and all-around, intimidating difficulty.”

It was not until the 2002 Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Gerhard Richter: Forty Years of Painting,” organized by Robert Storr, that American audiences really warmed to Richter. He was then seventy years old, and the emotional hypervigilance of his early work had softened. American viewers had also matured: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of that hopeful experiment in peace and prosperity, the European Union, bathed Germany in a more benign light than it had enjoyed in the anglophone world for a century. The photo-paintings now looked plangent rather than snide; the multivalent shifting of styles was recognized not as sarcasm but as a defense against dogma; the portrait of his daughter turning from the camera (Betty, 1988), hushed and luminous, made no one queasy. His peculiar breadth was evidence of a patient regard for the world. Richter, it turned out, was a mensch.

“Painting After All” recapitulates this history (indeed, it features many of the same paintings), while extending the timeline both later and earlier. The show’s interest in memory is visible through groupings and inter-gallery vistas that illuminate continuities and repetitions across time. The catalog takes a more didactic approach, and how you feel about it probably depends on how you feel about Buchloh, Richter’s long-time interlocutor (though the two have famously disagreed about some of Buchloh’s conclusions) and an art historian deeply entrenched in Frankfurt School social theory and philosophical postulates. Perhaps because of the wealth of Richter literature already in the world, the text bypasses the usual career overview; each of its seven authors (all but one quotes from Buchloh) targets a specific subset of works. This has the advantage of illuminating some less-visited corners of Richter’s oeuvre (Hal Foster’s discussion of the glass works and Peter Geimer’s pocket history of German abstract photography are particularly useful), though readers new to Richter may feel like they’ve accidentally enrolled in the second term of a class in which every other student has taken the intro.³

Knausgaard Interview

I just finished the first book of Knausgaard's My Struggle and I'm impressed. This is a book for today's readers and artists. It details daily tribulations some what of mundane quality but with a Proustian lens so apparently minor details expand and envelop personal experience that meaningfully echo in the reader. It's an authentic voice and authentic book. It's quite an accomplishment and I'm only on the first book. Looking forward to the rest.

Paris Review interview with writer of My Struggle, Karl Ove Knausgaard by James Wood:

WOOD

Your six volumes have been received as an extraordinary example of literary courage—the courage to confess and the courage to take risks with form. Sometimes you take the stakes so low that fiction or drama, conflict, plot might disappear altogether. You’re also, of course, willing to look at things. In Book Three, you’ve got a bit about you and a friend shitting in a forest. Like everyone here tonight, I read it thinking, He’s going to describe the shit. Not just the act. I think, knowing Knausgaard, he’s actually going to describe what the piece of crap looks like. And you did. Then there is small stuff, like your willingness to use exclamations like “yuck,” “phew,” “oh oh oh,” “ha ha ha”—the kind of exclamation that one sees in children’s fiction or genre fiction but which is snobbishly disdained in contemporary high fiction, so to speak. Were you aware at the time that these were risks, that they were acts of daring?

KNAUSGAARD

That was the torture of writing this thing, especially Book Three, because it’s seen from the perspective of a kid between seven and ten years old, and that is the perspective of an idiot. The whole time I was writing these six books I felt, This is not good writing. What’s good, I think, is the opening five pages of Book One, the reflection on death. When we were publishing that first book, my editor asked me to remove those pages because they are so different from the rest, and he was right—he is right—it would have been better, but I needed one place in the book where the writing was good. I spent weeks and weeks on that passage, and I think it’s modernist, high-quality prose. The rest of the book is not to my standard. [Laughter from audience] I’m not saying this as a joke. This is true. 

WOOD

But to know that, at the time of writing, is to be making an experiment, no?

KNAUSGAARD

Yes, it is.

WOOD

It’s to be courageous in some way, wouldn’t you say?

KNAUSGAARD

No, it hasn’t anything to do with courage. It’s more that I was so desperate and so frustrated. The only way I could trick myself into writing was by ­doing it like this. By setting myself the premise that I would write very quickly and not edit, that everything should be in it. Without that, I wouldn’t have been able to do it. I’m too self-critical to be a writer, really, and I was very critical of this project. It was torture. I had a friend, I read everything to him on the phone, all thirty-six hundred pages as I wrote them, and he had to say, This is good, you must go on. 

The part you describe about shitting in the wood, though—that was a joy to write. That’s the other side of it, you know, because it’s unheard of to go into such detail, but for a kid it’s very important how the shit looks, how it smells, all the differences between one shit and another. That’s a child’s world, and I felt connected to it through the character of the child. I ­remembered, all of a sudden, how it was. The small things mattered, like shitting. It’s easy to understand why. You don’t yet have many experiences, and it’s your body, and here is the world going into it and then leaving it, 
and although it’s not the first time that this has happened, still it is kind of a new thing. 

WOOD

And of course that’s the great theme of your work—meaning and the loss of meaning. It’s obvious enough that in your work the insane attention 
to objects is an attempt to rescue them from loss, from the loss of meaning. It’s a tragedy of getting older. We can’t ever recover that extraordinary novelty, that newness, that we experienced as children, and so you try to bring those meanings and memories back. There’s a lovely thing in 
Adorno’s Negative Dialectics that reminds me of your work. Adorno writes, “If the thought really yielded to the object, if its attention were on the ­object, not on its ­category, the very objects would start talking under the lingering eye.” Does that sound like a reasonable description of what you are trying to do?

KNAUSGAARD

Very much so. Before I wrote My Struggle, I had a feeling that novels tend 
to obscure the world instead of showing it, because their form is so much alike from novel to novel. It’s the same with films, with their attention to narrative structure. Most films, anyway. One thing I did while I was at work on the project was to watch the film Shoah, about the Holocaust. In the 
end, after you’ve seen these nine and a half hours, there is no form. Or it’s a kind of extreme form, which brings it closer to a real experience. I’d 
been thinking about that and about the world as it ordinarily comes to us filtered through news, through media. The same form, the same language, makes everything the same. That was a problem I had before I started 
My Struggle. The traditional form of the novel wasn’t eloquent. I didn’t 
believe in it, for the reasons I’ve said. Now, I don’t really pay much attention to the world. I’m not very present. I’m detached from almost everything. 
I’m very occupied with myself and my own mind. I’m not in connection with the world—but in writing, I can be. That’s a way for me to open a world up.

But this is a personal problem, not a general problem. 

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Pandemic Excursions

The days are now starting to mesh together in the same way my photographs are. I'm accustomed to taking photographs of musicians playing in the dark and city streets and signs so having only my neighborhood and the parks in the surrounding area makes visuals more difficult. Try taking photos of nature and I think you will see that unless you have a very good eye for that type of subject it becomes a difficult puzzle to solve. Here's some stuff from the last week and you will see the similarities in the frames.

Vallejo Nocturno 2020- Pandemic Walks

Listening to New Music

 

From Jeremy Larson on Pitchfork on why we listen to new music:

If all the brain science is mostly on the side of listening to popular hits and golden oldies, that might explain why, for the vast majority of American listeners, music is just one small facet of life. Most people experience music as a passive creature comfort, like socks or reality television. In this historic moment of colossal fear and dread, music listeners are in desperate need of comfort. Of the 32 artists we asked, almost all of them were listening to music that is older, soothing, familiar; the same thing happened when we asked ourselves what we were listening to in isolation. (I do realize that old music can be new music if you’ve never heard it before, but you get it.)

The act of listening to new music in the midst of a global pandemic is hard, but it’s necessary. The world will keep spinning and culture must move with it, even if we are staid and static in our homes, even if the economy grinds to a halt, even if there are no shows, no release parties, and even artists sink even further into the precarity that defines a career as a musician. The choice to listen to new music prioritizes, if for one listen only, the artist over you. It is an emotional risk to live for a moment in the abyss of someone else’s world, but this invisible exchange powers the vanguard of art, even in times of historic inertia.

It also appears that we are in the most impressionable era in generations as each day brings some new, heretofore unfathomable statistic. In this unfamiliar world, our brains have never been more plastic—a spongy tabula rasa onto which you can imprint a new timestamp. My other argument for constant exploration is that I will assuredly remember these pandemic days, the way I remember my first breakup or my first love and the songs that defined them. Don’t let history be recursively defined by a feedback loop. Steer into the skid, pour the fear and dread leaking through your roof into something unfamiliar, because it could be the new artifact that exclusively defines this moment for you—a new friend who totally loves you for what you’ve become.

To those of you getting back into discovering new music, you’re not alone. The incredible $4.3 million Bandcamp paid out to musicians in one single day will hopefully bode well for the health of new music, and like clockwork, every Friday will still come with a big sack of new albums to open. The coda to the famous The Rite of Spring riot at its premiere in Paris is not often told, but it’s crucial to the full life of the piece. After the melee of that evening, the ballet continued running at the theater for many months. Alex Ross writes: “Subsequent performances were packed, and at each one the opposition dwindled. At the second, there was noise only during the latter part of the ballet; at the third, ‘vigorous applause’ and little protest. At a concert performance of Rite one year later, ‘unprecedented exaltation’ and a ‘fever of adoration’ swept over the crowd, and admirers mobbed Stravinsky in the street afterward, in a riot of delight.” What is unheard of could define history—might as well come for the show.