I believe in letting an invader in and then setting a good example. That is the reply Benjamin Britten gave to a tribunal for the registration of conscientious objectors in 1942 when asked "What would you do if Britain was invaded?" I was reminded of it when researching my recent article on Marco Pallis , who was an authority on both Tibetan Buddhism and early music, and, together with Britten, a champion of Purcell . In his best-selling book Peaks and Lamas , which was written in 1939, Pallis tells this story about the Sakyas , the ethnic group of which Gautama Buddha was a member which inhabited the foothills of the Himalayas. News was brought to them of an impending attack by a hostile tribe and it was debated anxiously whether resistance should be offered or not. Eventually they decided that, as followers of [Buddhist] Doctrine, they were debarred from offering armed resistance, but must welcome the invaders as friends, so they threw down their arms... The Tibetans, how...
Comments
It doesn't seem to have occured to anyone that the reason I embed links to other OAOP posts is to add value, and that I couldn't give a stuff where my blog appears in primacy tables.
Hyperlinks are the point of the internet guys.
"the refreshingly unselflinking Alex Ross"
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Oh please, I'm starting a blog on rabbit breeding.
Hahahahaha.
Yikes, my fellow Yanks. I've noticed that Americans in general have an amazing ability to leech every last bit of fun and interest out of things by turning them in to surrogate sporting contests, marketing opportunities or, more commonly, putting a dreary Puritanical gloss on them.
That's surely a joke, because if you took away Mr. Ross' links to his New Yorker articles, TRIN would be pretty thin gruel at times.
The Sounds & Fury ranking is a useful, but debatable, guide to the ranking of classical music blogs for those that need one.
But it may be worth considering that the apparent popularity of OAOP is due to the fact that readers actually like both the content and the embedded links, rather than being achieved by some cunning and arcane mathematical manipulation.