MEMETERIA by Thomas May

The anechoic test chamber at Orfield Laboratories in South Minneapolis holds a Guinness Book record as “the quietest place in the world.” Used to test the amount of sound generated by an amazing variety of products (Whirlpool, Harley-Davidson, etc.) and to determine sound quality, the chamber has generated a meme about the psychological limits to enduring an unnaturally quiet environment. It has a reputation for being “so quiet it becomes unbearable after a short time.”

Justin Glawe over at The Airshipcasts doubt on all the publicity. Is it really a matter of gullible journalists repeating the brand hype?

It’s much less impressive in person than in the photographs you can find online. What you can’t see in image searches is the dust coating the fiberglass fins that cover the walls and sit below the chicken-wire floor.

…[David] Berg, lab manager for the last 22 years, said the claim that…

Claudio Abbado (1933-2014)

What terribly sad news to wake up to: today Claudio Abbado died at his home in Bologna. He was 80. This should be a front-page news story instead of just a link on the New York Times homepage.

Michael Haefliger, the director of the Lucerne Festival, pays homage to the musician who was a central musical pillar of the festival. The Maestro gave his final concerts leading the elite Lucerne Festival Orchestra, one of the ensembles he was acclaimed for founding:

“Wanderer, there are no paths. There is only wandering.” This quotation, which Claudio Abbado’s long-time friend, the Italian composer Luigi Nono, discovered on the wall of a monastery in Toledo, might also serve as an emblem for the life of Claudio Abbado: not to map out one’s life according to certain paths but rather to proceed, to live, and to remain open to experiencing what is…

W.H. Auden in 1939

Edward Mendelson’s new essay “The Secret Auden” in the New York Review of Books is a provocative read. The literary executor of the Auden estate and an authority long familiar to Audenites, Mendelson reveals some of the poet’s best-kept secrets.

Not tabloid secrets, not the gossipy stuff. Auden’s “secret life” lay hidden “because he would have been ashamed to have been praised for it.” Mendelson starts by touchingly recounting several instances of the poet’s under-the-radar generosity to war orphans, prisoners, people in need. And “when he felt obliged to stand on principle on some literary or moral issue,” writes Mendelson,”he did so without calling attention to himself” — in contrast to Robert Lowell, “whose political protests seemed to him more egocentric than effective.”

A potent example Mendelson adduces: Auden’s preface to his co-translation of Dag Hammarskjöld’s diary reflections, Markings, implicitly referred to the UN Secretary…