August highlights from our Tiny Book Club

Your comments on Contrapuntal Order

Thanks to you all (over 330 strong!) for reading and participating in our inaugural Tiny Book Club on “Contrapuntal Order” and thanks again to Micah Hendler for being my first guest. To close out the month, I want to highlight a few of your comments that really stuck with me.

Next week, I’ll be announcing our September read and guest, and I may put together a survey about how the Tiny Book Club is working out for you. (For one thing, I’m wondering if the chat with the guest should be split into two parts—I didn’t realize how much we’d say until we said it!). If you have comments or questions, you’re welcome to add them to this post or email me directly.

I’m grateful to Catherine Addington, for introducing me to contrapunteo:

Contrapunteo is basically like a rap battle, where two musicians sing improvised verses back and forth. I first learned this term from Fernando Ortiz's 1940 essay (Contrapunteo cubano / Cuban Counterpoint), which imagines Cuban history as a contrapunteo between tobacco and sugar. Long story short, contrapunteo makes me think less of "two balanced voices," and more of "two voices constructing something new in a dialectic where the discord is what makes it interesting." After all a rap battle where both people sound the same is just a duet.

I’m definitely familiar with the phenomenon that Melinda Johnson describes here:

This excellent article recalls for me a long ago conversation on the Trinity. My conversation partner, and eventual husband, dwelt on the human tendency to collapse tension. If we can't conceive of threeness and oneness simultaneously, we flatten the more complex aspect to resemble the limits of our understanding, and the tension is thereby removed. In this way, perhaps inadvertently, we recreate the world in our own image. Although I perceive beauty in both the modern and older conceptions of harmony so aptly described in this article, I think I share with the author a sense of loss that one concept has replaced the other. It is a collapsing of tension, and with that recreation in our own smaller image, we lose much of our perception of the character, even the worth, of melodies not our own.

I’m touched that her interlocutor is now her husband! Marriage is certainly a relationship that requires you to dwell a little in the tension of being part of something larger than yourself. (My husband and I read Fulton Sheen’s Three to Get Married during our engagement). Collapse marriage down to the scale of two people alone, and it’s hard to hold together.

And for just a little further reading and listening:

Gabriel Ellsworth suggests Karen Loew’s “How Communal Singing Disappeared From American Life” in The Atlantic.

And Ivan Plis offers Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong’s unlike voices melding in “Stars Fell on Alabama.”

I can’t wait to see what resonances your chorus of comments brings next month.

Ex libris,

Leah