Creating Interest

Making Life More Interesting

2009-06-25T16:13:00.008-05:00

Every morning from mid-June to mid-July I’m usually in the garden by 6 am with my notebook and camera. One of my creative occupations is the cross-pollinating of hybrid daylilies. I’m one of thousands of backyard hobbyists or business people who raise anywhere from 50 seedlings a year to mind-numbing numbers exceeding twenty thousand. I’m on the low end of the spectrum. I raise about two thousand a year.

There is luck, whimsy, and disciplined thought in this occupation, as there is in writing poetry or moderating a workshop with museum volunteers. The triumphs are all the sweeter when they are unpredicted, when they come seemingly out of nowhere or from the grace of God. A good paragraph feels that way, or a bon mot when trying to convey a vision.

This morning I stood in the garden looking in awe at a dozen or so plants from a single pod of seeds gathered three summers ago. Every plant from this cross grows in a healthy way and has blemish-free foliage. That’s the ticket! Yet the flowers on each plant have their own style of opening in the morning, which surprises me, and their own coloration, which does not surprise me. It does not surprise me that the best flower in this cross (above) is borne on the plant that seems inclined to produce the lowest number of buds, and that the best bud-producers in the cross are producing ho-hum flowers.

If things had gone otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this reflection today; I’d be thinking of how I could conceal the “perfect daylily” long enough to increase it for the massive influx of orders at Daylily Lay, a garden whose name is sung, not spoken.

At lunch today with a delightful PR professional whose last name in Dutch means, “from Lion,” and whose hair is blonde but not leonine, I said “A humanities council helps people make life more interesting.” It’s as simple as that. Those classes we took in Literature or History or Archaeology or Comparative Religion or Baroque Art had a common focus on the production of meaning in human experience. They also had a common result of cultivating a habit of mind appropriate to the subject. In other words, those classes not only opened up a slice of the world to us, they helped us learn to think better, more widely, deeper. We learned to ask more and better questions of the world around us. We learned to appreciate our place on the long highway of human experience.

When I listen to a recording of a Schubert piano piece, I enter another world and live in the ebb and flow of musical ideas that make more sense to me because of some instruction I had a long time ago. A professor taught me how to listen. Have you ever had such a music teacher?

I studied poetry once with a man who taught me how to read, how to notice on many levels, how to savor, how to devour.

Sometimes how a story is laid out is as interesting, or more interesting, than the story itself. Kathy and I were talking the other night about the artistic choices in the screenplay of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. We were trying to imagine the F. Scott Fitzgerald story behind the movie. Neither of us had read the story. I placed a bet that the notion of a backwards-running clock was borrowed directly from Fitzgerald’s original. It seemed so “literary,” so unnecessary to the film. Yesterday I found the story online and read the first page or two, finding no mention of a clock. There might be a clock in there, but I don’t intend to read further. It’s low priority now. What was great was that Kathy and I could have that interesting discussion because of how we’d been schooled to think by our teachers.

A humanities council helps local people and institutions carry out activities that make life more interesting – in families, school classrooms, libraries, historic houses, museums, community centers. My colleagues and I are teachers and guides. We facilitate action that constructs a better family, school, library, museum, town, county, country, and world.

The Greek term for daylily is hemerocallis, which I’m told means “beauty for a day.” That gorgeous rose pink daylily may prove to be a phantom of experience. The toothy white edge may be an effect of a prolonged heat wave and high humidity. When the weather cools off, the next flowers may be merely gorgeous pink, and the white edge will be wire-thin or not there at all, like the present flourishing of homo sapiens during a long ice age that appears to be on the wane.

I learned some interesting things about ice in a rented BBC documentary on the earth last weekend. It provided a very long view of earth history, such that the human experience could be seen intimately connected to the history of ice and atmosphere. How strange to feel that the past and future I imagine, as well as the present I live, are all related to something, some energy, much larger than all of us put together. I have certainly felt that way in connection with spiritual ideas, but not before in connection with what might be called natural history.

Oh, how I came to love her very nature!

I feel intimately connected these days with Schubert and Bach, Handel and Verdi. The molecules of my dear late San are intermixed with theirs and with mine, too, and mine are intermixed with Kathy Wofford, who I'll marry on July 19 in a circle of friends near my daylily garden, far from the collapsing glaciers, but not far from the thought of them.

Guessing Someone's Intent

2009-05-22T13:41:00.003-05:00

A couple of weeks ago I had another peak experience on the stage of Powell Hall. The St. Louis Symphony performed Beethoven's 9th Symphony to three sellout crowds. I don't think it possible for an orchestra to play better or to hear a more devoted interpretation or to be more thrilled and still live to tell about it!

The element of devotion comes from our maestro, David Robertson. I have thought since the first time I saw him prepare a concert ten years ago that he brings an enormous empathy to a score. Trained in composition, he looks at the notation to discover how the piece lives and breathes. He tries to imagine why a composer made each choice, as if the options were his own.

The result was an approach to the 9th symphony the likes of which most of us had not encountered before. We all grew up with recordings of the 9th that were made a generation or two earlier. An earlier approach to Beethoven brought out beautiful passages that seemed "untroubling" to my ears. I knew the Ormandy way, the Karajan way, the Muti way, and I thought I understood, through them, "the Beethoven way."

Robertson's approach startled me, shook me, made me question why he "imposed" such difficulty on the performers. I came to realize that he had decided to approach the printed score as if Beethoven actually meant what he wrote down. What a concept! Beethoven may have been stone deaf, but let's not assume that after a lifetime of experience with voices and orchestras, he suffered from insanity.

To give only one example, there is a section at the opening of the final movement in which the orchestral basses seem to be playing a vocal recitative-without-text. It sounds like a standard recitative in my favorite recordings. There is nothing untroubling about the sound of it.

My favorite recordings, however, don't follow Beethoven's instructions. He says "in the character of a recitative, but in tempo." Robertson caught the string bass section off guard when he took that section in tempo. It was as if the musicians had never seen the music before. Their passages didn't go anything like the way they'd done them previously.

Taken in strict tempo, those passages sound awkward, there is no way for them not too. They sound like they truly do not "work." The listener senses the string basses are attempting to do something for which they are not at all suited.

And then a unique thing happens. For the first time in a classical symphony, a human bass sings these words: "Oh, friends, not these tones." And he means, "let human voices take over here; human voices have what this symphony really needs at this moment." And so the chorus enters and completes the resolution of the earth-shattering tensions of the whole symphony.

In Robertson's interpretation, taking Beethoven literally, the text of the singer makes the kind of sense it never makes when the old-style interpretation is in play. If the orchestral basses sound perfectly fit to play a recitative, there is no reason for a human voice to say, "enough, already!"

That's what we learned this time by watching David Robertson devote himself to someone else's intentions. I think everyone in the hall sensed how special a concert this was. A second after the last note sounded, they leapt to their feet as one, shouting and clapping, thanking us all for opening their ears to a work of genius.

Robbie

2009-04-01T09:41:00.003-06:00

I know this guy named Robbie. He always has a book with him, and when the chorus takes a break, Robbie doesn't leave the chorus seats, he just stays put with his book.

An adult chorus is a complex organism. We get an idea of each other as musicians, primarily. Robbie's a really fine, high baritone. He does meticulous prep, sits in a way that looks totally engaged in the task, and is rock solid reliable. (This has been a banner year for baritones. Ringers to the right of me, ringers to the left of me, ringers in front of me, less than six hundred.) We're the opposite of the Light Brigade. We charge toward success, won't settle for adequate. We're a band o' brothers, we happy few.

It turns out that last night I asked Robbie what he's reading, and he said he's reading young adult books, "fantasy writing" in the vein of the Harry Potter series. It turns out he has written reviews of over 800 of them! It turns out he also has two blogs! It turns out he is not only a voracious reader but a massively productive writer.

Some of my most interesting stories began with a small question so a musician. "What's your day job," I said one time and found a common interest with a future corporate sponsor of the READ from the START program of the Missouri Humanities Council. Like a church, you join a chorus for the aesthetic pleasures, and then you become part of a community of distinct personalities, hopes, breakthroughs, and sadnesses.

Robbie's book reviews are at Muggle Net. His blog is called A Fort Made of Books. I'm going to put links to his writing on my blog. What a discovery!

First Growth

2009-03-04T10:02:00.005-06:00

I photographed first growth this morning with Lola-the-Poodle. The daylily, MING PORCELAIN,  looking clean, no burn, is up an inch. DIVA ASSOLUTA, some of it on the edge of the clump, is up two inches. David Hall's oldie, GUSTO, is up 3 or 4 inches. BARBARA MITCHELL and most others are not up at all, saying "Brrrrrr!" I photographed orange-red Witch Hazel this morning, too.  I'm thinking about my new daylily show for clubs and know I want to begin with the awakening garden, when crocuses alert us to the renewal that's coming as soon as the daffodils push farther up. Daylily shows are not actually about daylilies, though they may look like it. They are about hope, risk, vision, the journey to clearer sight, the process of learning to keep friends. Daylily shows are about gardeners. Bless gardeners. Curses on thieves and scammers, who are thieves. Flay them first, then curse them.

So, lately, a fog has begun to lift, one I didn't know was there. I know it by its lifting. I am shedding books and vinyl records. This week I'm taking 10 boxes of sheet music and scores to the university where San had the best decade of her career, also a box of CDs for the Vocal Literature class and six boxes of books about music from our joint professorial library. I'm staging surplus file cabinets and small furniture items in the garage for the big day in April when scavengers troll the streets of my neighborhood for the bulky items we place at the curb for pick-up. We're limited to five items per household, but we can be confident about placing many more than that number out on the curb.

Out! Out! Out! San and I were complementary opposites. She could not throw anything away except newspapers and junk mail other than retail catalogues.  I am a purger in need of a measure of restraint. Rather than build more and more bookcases, I donate books I no longer need to reassure myself that I exist and that I have good taste. I almost never reread a book, so why do I store read books on wooden shelves? I think they constitute an environment, one of metaphorical mirrors (I have thought from time to time).

Soon purchased daylilies will begin to arrive and it will begin again. I just printed Avery clear labels to put on EON plates for the seedling crop that will go into ground in May.

Last night while waiting for water to boil I leafed through the New Yorker magazine and came across a feature about Natalie Dessay, a soprano sensation I haven't heard about until last night. I finished the article over breakfast and saw where she's taking on the role of Violetta in Verdi's La Traviata at the Santa Fe Opera this summer. Eureka! Kathy's birthday is in July. I got on line and set up a birthday present a week early. We're going to Santa Fe to see La Traviata and to sightsee for a couple of days the week after the Region 11 daylily meeting in Manhattan (not New York, but Kansas). San daydreamed about us retiring to Santa Fe, a dream of a place in her opinion. I didn't want to retire there, because of daylilies. Arid air, water restrictions.

We were married there on Garcia Street in a friend's back yard almost 32 years before San died last June. I lived there from 1972 to 1977 and I'll tell you, it is less of a dream to live there on a salary that's not enough, in a job you know you'll have to leave when it comes time for a tenure review. Sometimes the sense of magic about a place depends pretty much on whether things are going well. They were going well for San and me that summer, when she got up all the courage in the world and said, as we drove downtown a week before returning to Vermont, where I would be her sub while she went to France to study again for a month, "why don't we get married?"  Since that happy conclusion to our rekindled romance, Santa Fe has been extra-special to us and to me, and now it is time to plan to bring Kathy into the sense of special places, as she will for me when we go to her family reunion in southern California in August.

Resolutions for my Imaginary Museum

2009-01-26T14:53:00.004-06:00

I imagine that when I retire I will volunteer in a museum and try to make things interesting. I’m motivated in that direction by a little section of the patchwork-quilt-song-lyric, “Mississippi,” by Bob Dylan.

Stick with me, baby,
Stick with me anyhow,
Things are gonna start to get interesting
Right about now.

We’ve got to stick with our local museums, anyhow. My imaginary museum wishes there were more volunteers. It wishes that visitors were more in evidence. It wishes things were in better order, that the place looked less cluttered, better lit, cleaner, more interactive, and…there are so many ways to say this…more like the product of a lively mind. There are any number of museums that are already delightful, but it will be just my luck to retire in a place where the museum faces a world of challenge.

So I’m putting myself into the situation of the people I visit, cheer on, and admire and I’m assigning myself an imaginary retirement in their shoes, with only two months to go before the doors open again. Here is a list of resolutions about what to attempt in those two months. There is no chance I can accomplish all of these, but I’ll see what I can do to make a difference.

I will create an interesting activity at the museum entrance, which I will clear of all distracting clutter so that the visitor’s first impression is that of being welcomed into an “introductory” space that feels “hospitable.”

The activity will involve the visitor and also launch the visit. The Blackworld History Museum in St. Louis “launches” each visit with a handout. It’s a list of things to find in the displays. The visit becomes some kind of scavenger hunt. People love having that list to focus their attention.

The activity will be germane to the museum’s mission. If the museum is in Missouri’s prairie region, and if there are farm implements on display, maybe I’ll create some kind of hands-on experience involving sod, soil, and plows of several designs. Much of Missouri was once tallgrass prairie. I have not yet seen a museum in Missouri that conjures up the appearance of tallgrass prairie or the special technology (a plow of specific design) that made agriculture possible. I can’t remember seeing a county museum that oriented the visitor to the interesting features of The Earth at this county’s location. Was the county a buffalo range, an ancient sea bed?
I will look at the old photographs in the collection and gather a set of them together in a little display about “how to read a photograph.” I won’t need more than a handful of pictures. I’ll find one that is superb as a grayscale print and use it to teach about the range of tones in a fine print. (I saw one such picture in the museum in Unionville, and it was arranged with other objects so that they all made more sense of each other.) Then I’ll state a few facts about what one sees in the image and pose a question or two.

I’ll find another one that serves a purely documentary purpose.

I’ll find a third one that’s a standard business portrait in color from the 1960s or 70s and compare the portrait style from that era with the earlier era.
I will make a little display called “Hand Made, Tailor Made, and Catalogue” for ways of obtaining clothes. (Hmm. I could add “hand-me-down” and Army to that list.) There’s a doll in the Clay County Museum with a label from the doll’s donor saying, “Whenever I made a dress for myself I also made one for my doll.” There are several “feed sack shirts” in the museum in Unionville. There’s a 1920s fashion catalogue in the Morgan County Museum in Versailles. It belonged to one of many traveling salesmen who came through town on the railroad and stayed in the hotel that is now the museum. There’s a tailor-made suit in a small historic house in Chamois; it was made in that town for the wedding of the donor’s husband. I’ll find a few examples and pose questions about remembering home-made clothing, tailors, seamstresses, or catalogue shopping.
I’ll organize one small display area to look like it’s lived in. I saw such an idea at the Bates County Museum last summer.
I’ll have an interactive military display where people can polish brass and spit-shine a black shoe, hopefully with experienced instruction. If possible, I’ll have some complete military outfits available for kids to put on and “fall out for inspection,” again with someone experienced.
I’ll see what I can do with color in the museum. The Harlin Museum in West Plains has a small workbench of a local sign painter. My eye always goes to it, when I’m not wishing I could play that Porter Wagoner guitar. I’d try to do something about the skill of sign-painting or lettering people’s names on glass office doors. I’ve always wanted to know how painters of those doors really steadied their hand with the stick they use. I’ve wished for a museum that would let me try that out. Now that I’m making resolutions, maybe I can figure out how to schedule such an experience one Saturday morning a month, for the kids primarily, but also for the parents as a “benefit” for people who drop a donation in the cigar box.
I will subtract objects from the displays one at a time for as long as I can get away with it or until the entire museum looks appealing, whichever comes first. (Never underestimate the value you can add by subtracting something that competes for attention.)
I will pull various things that are currently displayed with other things just like them into new relationships. I will try to create expectations that displays in my museum stimulate thought.
I will think of the other volunteers whose friendship is essential to the success of our museum and I will bake cupcakes for them, or go visit them, or take them out to tea, or invite them to go visit and evaluate another interesting museum with me. I will remind myself every day of the off-season that people volunteer for positive social interaction and fulfillment of some kind. I will create positive social interaction with the other volunteers this winter. I will mend fences and build bridges and make friends.

Detail in Classical Music

2009-01-08T10:50:00.005-06:00

I recently bought a stack of complete recordings of Handel operas, going with "Used-Like New" whenever possible to spare expense. The initial motivation was to hear more of the work of one of my favorite conductors, Nicholas McGegan. Another motivation was to hear more of the glorious singing of the late Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. I now own a lot of her recordings! The subject of this short blog is "authenticity" in Nic's work.

This subject of authenticity is something experts and critics love to chew over. There are no recordings of 18th century concerts, of course. There are, however, reproductions of 18th century instruments. There are contemporary accounts of some of the details of musical taste and interpretation. Conductors can make educated guesses about sound from the number of musicians that Handel used, the size of the performing space, etc. All of these ways of knowing are based on forms of evidence that are one step removed from the music on the page and the words beneath the music. It is in the deep thinking about the expressive potential of notated music that I believe Nic McGegan soars!

I have listened to many live and recorded performances by Nic. I've sung in several concerts he conducted and have seen firsthand the way he releases the expressive potential of the details in the scores. The question critics may pose is, "how plausible is it that such attention to detail ever took place in the real-world performing conditions of the 18th century?" Put another way, "Is Nic McGegan over-expressing what is in the score?"

These questions came to mind the first time I worked with him. The details were refreshing in ways I had not heard before. The overall integrity of his conception was compelling. While he is not the only "leader" in the pack of 18th century specialists, he is distinctive in the way he conceptualizes the sound. Other leaders are distinctive, too. That is in the nature of leadership at the top level. I love them also. I would not say flatly that I think he is better than his peers; only that I am more refreshed by his renditions, more thrilled by what I hear in his concerts, than I am by the others.

If you want to hear what I'm talking about, borrow his recording of Rameau's music from Nais and compare it with any other good recording. You'll instantly hear differences in the "thickness" of the sound and in the balance and in the ornamentation and in the phrasing. You don't have to pick a winner; you may actually love contrasting approaches to the same pieces, as I do. But if you compare them, you will begin to hear what is distinctive about Nic's gifts.

I've about finished my first listening to the full recording of Handel's Ariodante. I've got another full recording lined up to go through the same opera, start to finish, with another five-star ensemble. I may have more to say on this subject as I get deeper into these performances.

Anthems For The Stadium

2009-01-05T14:56:00.003-06:00

Just sitting and listening to music can bring on thoughts of improving the world. I have wondered recently about updating the moldy oldies that people sing at baseball and football games. I don't mean to replace the National Anthem, of course. That uniquely unsingable anthem stands as the supreme challenge to singers young and old, strong and weak of mind or voice.

Even if you can remember the words, you really can't remember where to breathe. Not that anyone would fault you for breathing before "see" in the first line. Nor will anyone fault you for sounding as if you are being slowly impaled when you sing "free" after an ill-considered breath in "land of the free." That, too, is expected. The singer of the National Anthem is expected to suffer greatly during the task and to emerge alive, though seldom victorious.

Bad style and bad technique do not mar our love of country. We have heard so many spectacularly bad renditions that we have come to accept them as a part of our Heritage.

So leave the National Anthem alone and let it survive serial attempts and assaults by one and all. I have in mind other opportunities for updating the music at our sports events. I envision the replacement of a moldy oldie like "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" with something really suited to the lungfull of air you can take after five beers, several hot dogs, a plate of melted cheese product with traces of corn chip, and many bags of popcorn or peanuts. What I would much rather hear is a chorus of 40,000 fans singing either of two Three Dog Night hits from the Golden Age of Polyester, "Joy to the World" or "Shambala." Yes, I really mean it. Imagine the joy of thousands of people singing the much easier words and tune of Shambala:

Wash away my troubles, wash away my pain
With the rain in Shambala
Wash away my sorrows, wash away my shame

With the rain in Shambala

These are confessional, hopeful, wholesome sentiments made into prayer with the three-part harmony of Ah-ah-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo-oo, Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah! After several choruses of that, they'll all be primed for an astroturf-melting shout of "HOW DOES THE LIGHT SHINE in the halls of Shambala?" People will be so happy they will forget that the teams have resumed play. Verily, if the beer hasn't intoxicated you, the singing of that Ah-ah-oo-oo chorus will do the job!

I think the Cardinals organization should take this seriously. I think our government should take this seriously. I am seldom happier when chiming in with a song than I am when I sing this great rock anthem, Shambala.

There are certain songs that every adult should know by heart. Especially in these hard times, we should all know the timeless one by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, "Free Falling." That's the tune for the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Reserve, the Stock Exchanges, and the hyper-compensated thieves who have been pushed out of the aircraft with golden parachutes. Rather than have it sung at those times and places, I'd have it sung by the hundred thousand Penn State fans in Happy Valley. They'd sing it in place of "Fight On, State!"

On the Home Page of the investment brokerages, I'd have a singable audio clip of Paul Simon's "Slip Sliding Away." Doesn't that make sense? "You know the nearer your destination, the more you're slip sliding away." These are songs everyone should know. Besides, the Paul Simon "investment anthem" is less troubling than the Beatles' "HELP!!"

Another really good one for those who are embattled and resisting impeachment is also a Tom Petty tune. "I won't back down" is the name of it. Tom sings, "you can stand me up at the gates of Hell and I won't back down." Then comes the big refrain that 40,000 fans should chime in with..."HEY, BABY! THERE AIN'T NO EASY WAY OUT. HEY, YEA! And I'll stand...my...ground. And I won't...back...down."

These songs should be required learning by one and all because they represent the vanishing legacy of My Generation. My 15-year-old granddaughter, who wants to play electric guitar, does not recognize the name "Tom Petty" and can't sing or play any riff or phrase from "Free Falling." You can say all you want about a generation that doesn't realize that Muhammad Ali was an American boxer, doesn't recognize the phrase, "it depends on what "is" is," thinks the American Revolution was a rock band, and is bewildered by telephones with dialing mechanisms. All these things can be remedied or punished. But you can't replace a timeless cultural legacy that is embedded in these singable evocations of History.

Ah, Paul Simon, how you grind up syllables! My personal theme song is one of his. I'll sing the refrain in Paul's pronunciation: "But I would not be cawn-vic-ted by a jury of my peers; still crazy after all these years."

Joy in Grieving

2008-12-23T14:10:00.003-06:00

Yesterday was the 6-month anniversary of San's last breath, five hours after my children and I blessed her and bid her leave to go as she slept away the last of her life of almost 68 years. I did not think of her as "old" in any way. Until her liver failed in the last couple of weeks, San never looked her age except in infancy. The people who knew her thought I'd made a typo on her memorial service when I gave her birth year as 1940. Her students may have thought of her as a mother figure. To think of her as a grandmother was a real stretch. I thought of her as my girl. We were youthful with each other and for each other even as we neared the dimming of our days together.

I have done no research into grief. I can't tell you about stages of it unless I notice I have moved from one form of it into another form. I don't want to know the template. I only want to know experience as I live it and look back on it, this experience, anyway. In the history of the world, San was just a speck, as I am. In the history of 2008 in the U.S., San was just one of 40,000 women who perished from breast cancer. Yet, to say that is to reduce the dignity of human life to a statistic, and I am sorry for even putting a number into this memorial of grieving. Every one of the 40,000 was one. We do not live as a statistic, we live as a unity, a point of focus of the grand energy that spins life, weather, worlds, galaxies, epochs, sinners, and saints.

The one is the one I bless here. San was one and now she is one with the One. I have only indirect knowledge of the One. I sense that I am its instrument, but I can't tell you more than that. The One is the source and also the final home of all the little ones.

So, rather than tell you all that I have done since my grieving began in July, I will tell you a thing that came to me from that source that feeds my imagination with metaphors. A friend approached me at a conference in early November to ask sincerely how I'm doing. I gave a sincere answer. The words are somewhat different each time I give that answer. That's OK; there is more truth than one telling ever can express. Just as you can't talk about The Border War era in Kansas and Missouri in one voice, you can't talk about the loss of a spouse in one telling. I said what my friend hoped to hear, that San had suffered no agony at the end, that the vigil at her side that last day was much like watching the tide go out.

Little did I know what I'd released with that metaphor. Ten minutes later, while listening to an angel, who appeared in the person of the poet Naomi Shahib Nye, give one of the best talks I've ever heard, I realized that I had just received a poem. It came in one piece admitting of no editing, and it stands as my report on the life that passes and the life that continues.

When I woke and sensed

the tide of her life

had gone out,

I knew I was not

the dry beach

but the ocean.

Style and Story in a Christmas Narrative

2008-11-24T13:19:00.003-06:00

I wrote a piece last year, “Suggestive Pacing,” about the way the style of telling a story seemed to fit the story. Cormack McCarthy’s The Road was the object of my attention. I had never read any other examples of McCarthy’s work, so I formed the mistaken impression that the style of storytelling in that book was a unique stroke of genius. Later, when I read four other books by him, I understood that McCormack told all the stories in that style. It was accidental that the style seemed so apt to the story of The Road.

Now I’m engaged in another process of sorting through style and story, this time in a wonderful and challenging piece of music for Christmas titled El Niño. It’s an oratorio by America’s foremost composer, John Adams, who may be best-known for his “minimalist” opera, Nixon in China. The libretto is constructed of disparate sources, Biblical and otherwise. The emphasis of the work is a feminine perspective on the sacramental nature of conception and birth. To carry this theme through the work, Adams has chosen a group of poems by women who wrote in Spanish.

The overall effect is magical, but there is a stylistic challenge for the listener in the opening movement. That challenge is what prompted me to consider style and story again. As I thought of “barriers to understanding” in that opening section, I had to consider the challenge the composer took on as well. John Adams wanted to say something about the great mystery and divinity of all births by connecting the Christmas narrative with the present day.

I didn’t think of “barriers to understanding” until I played the opening of El Niño for my colleague, Patricia Zahn, during a drive to Hannibal a couple of weeks ago. A trip to Mark Twain’s town and the site of great stories…what better occasion to tell Patricia about Adams’ treatment of the Christmas story? Imagine us in the car now.

I tell Patricia about the minimalist technique of deconstructing a text, breaking it down to syllables, individual words, short phrases, and strewing these pieces of language as tossed confetti, or nuclear fireflies, or a swift immersion in madness. I tell her of the effect of a tsunami of sound at the moments of God’s presence in the story. Then I offer to play her the opening movement on the car stereo. She is eager to hear it.

And when she does, she is perplexed. I allow the recording to continue from the disorienting beginning to the strange quietude and clarity of the sung narration that follows the first big section. I sense her unease, then, and turn it off. The first word that comes to her mind is “annoyance.” She thanks me for preparing her for the experience. I imagine if I had not, she would have begun to look for a way to leave the car without injury!

Her reaction made me wonder why Adams would begin such an important story by subjecting the listener to an experience of incomprehension. There is a beautiful poem there; why would he deny the listener a chance at hearing how the words add up to a poem? Even after many hearings of this opening section, the most attentive listener will have no way of knowing the text. Then I realized that in performance, the listener has a printed text, either in the program or in projected supertitles. I thought of this printed text as a sort of “scripture.” The listener is placed into a relationship with a “scripture.” This is where style and story come into a relationship probably unintended by the composer.

“Why did you do this?” says Joseph to Mary later in the oratorio. It is a good way to approach the opening movement that so disorients and mystifies. I don’t know why John Adams “did this,” and it would be folly to think that I could read his mind. It is not folly, though, to observe what he “did” and then to think about how his choices are helpful, even miraculous, in making this well-known story fresh.

Here is what happens at the beginning. Instantly, simultaneously, I hear reminders of musical ideas from a long tradition of classical music. I think of obstinate rhythms in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the Latin American polyrhythms and the harpsichord of the Missa Criolla of Ariel Ramirez, the jiggling violins and cellos from one of Bach’s Brandenburgs (which one???), the twinkling down of baubles of bright tones as if overlaying this hubbub, but in exotic scales; the gruff, irregular, huffing pronouncements from low brass, like the weight of received wisdom from a gang of old farts, or of encrusted church doctrines taken for granted; all of this with unflagging energy and momentum.

The experience is “layered” and evocative of Charles Ives, who imagined the effect of hearing several bands in a town parade, one near, the other blocks away. Mozart had imagined this too, in the 18th century, in the ball scene from Don Giovanni. There are three small orchestras at the Don’s ball, each in a different room, playing for a different class of people, each playing in a different meter, and we hear them all at once.

So this is the soup we’re in while El Niño engulfs us in sound and rhythm. Out of this energetic texture comes the sound of female voices repeating the single syllable, “mai,” which we know is not “May,” the month, because we are predisposed to depend on “scripture,” the program in our hands or the supertitles above the performers. They sing, “mai-mai-mai-mai-ma-mai- mai-mai…Mai-den!” as if acquiring the capacity for language. Then out of the hubbub comes the male exposition of the word, “King – King – King – King;” then, smoothly, “King of all kings – king of all kings – king of all kings” and other fragments of a beautiful poem given out in atoms of language. “So – still; so – still; so – still.” “He’s like the dew; he’s like the dew; he’s like the dew.” “Maiden and mother and maiden and mother and maiden; mother and maiden; mother and maiden.” Atoms, atoms! Atoms everywhere in this dense throb of human activity, as if the whole world is engaged in the cacophony of whatever this poem is.

The opening might seem pure chaos if not for the sense that it moves forward on the back of Jonah’s great whale, or on the great plates of the earth’s crust, which I think of when I hear the basses and cellos of the orchestra move from the one note they’ve sustained to its adjoining neighbor up or down.

This sense of “harmony” is in no way ordinary, yet it is sensed as a product of intelligent design; an extremely disorienting, counter-orienting experience is managed through intelligent design. I find this fascinating.

What kind of story begins with an incomprehensible experience? What kind of story posits a supernatural event in the context of an intelligent design? What kind of story requires an act of tolerance for disorientation and an act of enduring faith? What kind of story frightens the participant?

I give you the story of Mary, unwed teen mother, and her incredulous, humiliated, enraged, disappointed fiancée, Joseph, trying to judge their proper course of action in unbelievable conditions, and we listeners are a part of that story if we can resist the impulse to escape it, and what it may imply about what is important.

(The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Chorus will perform El Niño on December 13th and 14th, 2008.)

Giving Full Value to Something

2008-09-18T10:28:00.006-05:00

I’ve recently been inside a couple of museums where a lot of imagination is evident. This is not the exception, mind you. I think most of the small museums I enter these days are showcases of imagination. They might all look pretty much the same to the casual observer, but to the “collector of museum experiences,” which is what I have become, they are distinct from each other in terms of what I hear the guides tell me when I ask for a tour.

I always ask people to “show me what you really like in here, or what you think is special.” That question often starts a conversation, and if there would have been a memorized narrative on the entire collection, it can’t find a launching pad in a conversation based on personal admiration.

The really odd thing, and the point of this blog, is that you’d never know the special thing was special from the way the museum treats it! Its special qualities are hidden from the visitor.

Hiding special qualities from the visitor is like administering a sedative. If everything has equal value, and there are a thousand things in the room, then the experience is a growing need for a nap. It’s when we elevate something and assign it more importance than its neighbors, that we help the visitor remain alert, or at least awake. The museum experience needs contours.

For instance, consider the presence of a bugle in a glass case containing other military items. Every museum displays military items. I’ve seen bugles in several of the displays. But in none of the displays have I been invited to make sound on the bugle, though a bugle is indestructible, and in none of the displays has there been an audio station where I could hear someone play a bugle. There is no explanation of how bugle sound is produced, or why bugles are used instead of trumpets or cornets or harmonicas. There are no audios of oral history interviews with soldiers recounting the feelings of hearing taps while in a war zone or at a funeral. Lacking these, the actual bugle in the case is merely filling empty space. It’s just a “metal thing” among “cloth things” and “paper things,” and the sum of the experience is only slightly above zero.

Consider the presence of one of Porter Wagoner’s guitars in a glass display case in the Harlin Museum in West Plains. Porter Wagoner is a West Plains native and a living memory for the Baby Boomers and their parents. He died a year ago. There are any number of gifted guitar-players in West Plains and nearby. The guitar in the museum is not the big, booming Gibson you see in some of his pictures. He used a variety of guitars and he had a collection of them.

I was once a guitar player, so I have questions.

I suggested to the museum's board President, Kathy Wofford, that they upgrade the display of the Wagoner guitar with regular live demos of how it sounds. I imagined inviting someone like the folklorist, Matt Meacham, who knows his way around a guitar, to play the Wagoner guitar and try to ascertain when Wagoner used it, and in what settings. Maybe he only used it at home when doodling around. Maybe it was his “songwriting” guitar. Maybe there is nothing very appealing about its tone. I would want someone skilled to play that guitar as well as a few other guitars, demonstrating the way some models emphasize a rumbling bass while others emphasize a sweetness and lyricism in the treble, and still others are made to penetrate through competing sounds. If we’ve got a celebrity’s guitar, let’s play it well and put it into the service of beautiful thinking until there are no more people who remember Porter Wagoner or care to know what sort of entertainer he was. By that time there will be other guitars, or there won’t, but maybe there will be a bugle player in town who can bring tears to visitors’ eyes by playing taps in honor of honor itself, and in recognition of the pity of war and the fleetness of youth.

My advice on this subject is: pick something, anything, in the museum and let your imagination have a festival of new ideas, and then try them all.

Portrait of a Teacher

2008-07-18T10:10:00.007-05:00

This is Sandra Bouman a year ago. I picked up a liking for calling her "San" from her lifelong friend, Maria Aquilina, who was her college roommate at Penn State and her best friend for fifty-one years. San was the optimistic, idealistic, youthful presence within Sandra. Unless I was joking and called her "Sandy," with the retort, "Mikey," she was pure San all the way.

My dear companion of thirty-two years died last month in one of the more fortunate ways to succumb to breast cancer, without much pain, with full mental and emotional responses all the way to the final sleep, and engaged in a sudden outpouring of affection from lifelong friends, colleagues, and students, most of whom only learned of her deteriorating condition four days before she slipped into the fog.

She had learned that her condition was dire the previous week. She had sensed the dizzying rate of her decline a week before she died, and so she and I had concentrated our 42 years of history, distilled it to the essence, and pledged to continue living until life took leave. There would be no death vigil in our house. Even as she lost her physical abilities from the failure of her liver, she and I invented ways to give texture or dimension to the smaller and smaller number of tasks or actions we could do with each other. In this I sensed a commitment to invest "sacramental energy" in every attentive deed, and I asked the congregation at her memorial service, "if we find the capacity to do this with someone when they're dying, why not try it when they're not?"

We blessed each other, and that is what now carries me forward into an active life.

Among the blessings others bestowed on her were messages of how her teaching had affected them. I'm going to quote a few of those messages. I think they convey a better portrait than any of my vast collection of images of her.

"After we spoke on the phone I felt that I wanted to put these feelings down on paper for you to have. I think you deserve to know what an impact you've had on me, and I know that I am only one of many.

"I'm sorry that I was too young to fully understand the depths of the gifts you were bestowing on me. I've just recently started to get it and I want you to know how grateful I am.

"Even though we haven't been a part of each other's daily lives for some time, it is obvious to me now that whatever I didn't come here with, I owe to you.

"You invested in me in a way that I couldn't understand until recently. Maybe I just needed to grow up a little.

"And somewhere over our years together, you became a part of me. Yours is now the voice I hear in my head. Your dignity and grace surround my voice. And your unfailing drive toward greatness will forever be my motivation.

"So thank you, my teacher, for these precious gifts you have given me so selflessly. I am eternally grateful. And wherever I go, and whatever I do, I will take you with me.

"With love and admiration, your student, ( )"

The same day, this e-mail arrived from San's former student, Ruth:

"I wanted to take a very important moment to tell you how much you mean to my life. I just moved to England and was in the middle of looking for an apartment when I heard of your condition. My heart and prayers are with you. There is love all around you and your support and love has been a changing force in this world. I can clearly trace my life back to a certain point that brought me here to my PhD program in England and the confident and joy-filled woman I am today. That point was you. How you encouraged me to keep working; how you saw my potential and not the mess of poor technique I was then. You are my "musical mother" just as I said those years ago. That is true for so many young artists you have touched. Your support and motivation allows flowers to bloom.

"I love you very deeply. Ruth"

This one, from Emily, the day before San was mostly in a deepening sleep:

"I must admit that when I started school I was not terribly interested in the voice lesson part--it was just a means to an end for me--another class I had to take. I was also reticent to stretch myself, not really believing that I had any great talent, and that what I did have was good enough for my purposes. You, from the beginning, challenged all of that, and while I resisted at first, and resisted you!, I have to say that your demanding more of me than I was prepared to or wanted to give was probably the best experience of my musical "career." I am so GRATEFUL that I was able to learn from you, even it it was way too short a time. I don't think that there will ever be a time that I sing that I won't think of you, your indomitable spirit, and what you so diligently tried to teach me.

"Okay, so that is enough about me and my experience, now about you: You are quite possibly the strongest woman (or person) I have ever met. Your dedication to your craft and to your students has been inspirational. I cannot imagine how difficult it was to maintain your secrecy regarding your illness, and come to class day after day and give what you gave. I cannot express to you how much I respect you, and how grateful I am that you did fight so hard. I am glad to have had as much time with you as I did.

"Be assured that your legacy will live on in all of us that you have touched. I will take you with me in my singing and in my teaching, as will all of the rest of those that you have mentored. I have the tape of our lessons, which I will keep. I will try my best!! to keep my jaw out of my singing, to not say "n" before I start a phrase, and to breathe correctly.

"God bless you. Emily"

I have a file full of touching notes. In some cases, San had no idea about the capacity for fellow-feeling in the sender, and so she was all the more moved when they revealed that side of themselves to her. I, too, had no idea of the self-knowledge and the potential for eloquence in her students. I knew them mostly by name, mostly as people with performance or study habits that San was trying to transform into something more promising.

It was her nature, as it is mine, to see potential and try to bring it out. We fed off each other up to the last moment of consciousness, and that is some kind of blessing, I'll tell you!

You're OK

2008-05-08T15:09:00.007-05:00

Oh, no, not another quote from the title song of "Oklahoma!" Don't worry. The title of today's blog is a take on a book title from somewhere back in the era of helpful advice....I'm OK, You're OK.

I'm thinking about how the path to greatness begins with OK. It almost never begins with GREAT. With luck, it might begin with GOOD, but if greatness is the prize at the end of all the work, good is not usually something you achieve at the beginning.

It turns out that I am an expert on being no good at the beginning. When I was 18 or so, (OK, I'll fess up; when I was 20 or so), I thought that poetry was something that sounded like the verses we were trained to revere in high school, and I thought it was necessary to write sonnets, so when I noticed that all of what passed as "folk music" in the mid-sixties was pseudo-folk pop music, I composed a disgruntled sonnet that began:

Someone has fashioned an arid, barren plain
Where hordes of rhymesmiths forge false yesterday

I was right proud of the assonance in the first line, the aa sounds of arid and barren, and the way they struck the ear like small anvils in a forge. My pride increased when I noticed that I'd placed internal rhymes in the second line (hordes -- forge), and I nearly knighted myself over the repeated effs of forge and false.

Luckily for you, I can't remember offhand how that embarrassing beginning continued, and it is SO not worth the time to see if it is in my stash of saved garbage. I sent it to my high school English teacher, Reese J. Frescoln, Jr. He was tactful and kind in his note of reply, as I recall, stressing his happiness to have heard from me and saying very little about the sonnet.

About that time, perhaps a year later, I began to waste my free time writing pseudo-folk songs in the style of the day, which is to say, absurd on so many levels, yet so indicative of what might pass for "promise" on a bleak, dry day, where creative juices never flowed, but just formed dust bunnies.

I'd had it with singing covers of Bob Dylan tunes and Pete Seeger tunes and I decided to be a song writer at the lone coffeehouse in town, The Jawbone, an outreach program of the Lutheran Campus Ministry. So I wrote up a repertoire of love songs and topical songs and inflicted them on my peers.

Love songs had to include the phrase, "my love," I imagined, and there had to be some overt sensuality in the lyrics because Eric Andersen had changed the rules of the game with his "Come to my Bedside, My Darlin'."

I was sort of smart enough to realize that Andersen's line, "lay your body soft and close beside me/And drop your petticoat upon the floor" was horrible writing, as if "your body" were something disconnected from "you" and subject to being set down like a coverlet or shoe, but Andersen was BIG at the time, having written an even worse line in "take off your thirsty boots and stay for a while."

He was the one to beat, though, so I worked out a little musical hook that lay easily under my fingers and "wrote" a lyric that began like this...

Relax your mind and close your eyes and linger for a while,
And I will spin a thread of sound and it will be your smile,
And if you want to hear another song on my guitar,
Well, relax your mind, my love, I won't be far...
I'll save a song for you.

The highways of light are fading now to a gentle hue,
So let your spirit sail with me and I'll play you a dazzling view,
And you will feel your senses rise and float across the glen
To settle on the mornin' dew and then float back again.

It went on for a few more verses, and I can testify that this song did not turn out to be a "chick magnet." Nosir! It had most of the requisite veiled references to love, "morning dew" being a favorite of mine, but on any scale from OK to Great, this was "not OK." I fell into the same trap with "relax your mind," as if "your mind" were disembodied from "you." The remainder was earnest silliness.

This next perilous dive into the deeps of Metaphor was much admired by my friend Lynn, though not for the lyric. She smiled at the fetching little guitar hook I'd provided for it.

My love, my love, my lo-o-o-ove,
She greets me every morning with the dawn.
My love, my love, my lo-o-o-ove,
Her breath has made the sky no longer wan.

My love's a steady breeze of true devotion,
Blowing kisses in the sun from off her palm,
And I'm a lofty ship on the briney ocean,
Without her I'd be lost in a boundless calm.

I should have been jailed then and there for literary abuses, and I was still Not OK as a song writer.

In my senior year, inspired by a new knowledge of classical art songs and by a poem that began "Oh, death will find me long before I tire of watching you," I composed a one-verse song and recorded it at The Jawbone for an album that showcased all the student song writers.

Death will tire me.
Death will tire me long before I see your face again.
But everywhere will your swift shadow be:
Here your perfume in someone else's hair,
And here are lips like those in darkest night
That warned me not to share.

A little closer to OK, I think, but still struggling with overripe linguistic effects.

One rainy day two years later, in a state of angst, I wrote a song I called "Slowly Failing:"

Dark all day on the lonely side of town,
The light behind the clouds is slowly failing.
I will set my mind at peace before the night comes trickling down,
I'll provision all my thoughts and set them sailing.

The song never got beyond two verses, a rather tiny fleet to set sailing, and the persistent awkwardness in my style shines through unmistakably, though I like the feminine endings and the final metaphor. Not on the Map of OK yet and my sophomore year is at this point four years behind me.

Five years later I tried another, for my little girl:

One more night with the window wide open,
One more phrase of a song to recall,
All the sounds I could sing but a token
Of your bright spirit's rise and fall.

Ride a weathervane,
Ride a weathervane,
The wind, it will blow it,
I'll come if you call.

In my opinion, this one is on the map of OK.

Eighteen years later, with the sound of baby talk still in my mind, I wrote a song called "All The People," my daughter's way of requesting a repetition of the Humpty Dumpty rhyme. I worked out a tune that went round and round, postponing musical resolution, as if in suspended animation, and I put words together with an ear for elision, all syllables flowing together easily. My daughter was leaving to continue her education in Texas, prompting the line about "when they are leaving" near the end of the song. The year was 1991, and it's the end of my songwriting story. I'm very attached to this one, both music and verses, so whatever you think of it, this one and "Ride a Weathervane" are the peak of my abilities in a genre I was not meant to master, but where I made a little journey from Not OK into OK.

Someone's playing on a guitar,
Songs of long ago...
Swaying dancers seen from afar,
Round and round they go...
Gentle music over the lawn,
Rainbow, sunset, and sky.
I remember days that are gone,
Seen with a toddler's eye.

Sing me a ballad, sing me an air,
Sing me a girl with yellow hair,
Radiant hair, delightful to see,
Sing me the woman who married me.
Radiant hair, radiant eyes,
Sing me a ballad for all our lives.

Someone's playing on a guitar
All my bygone days...
Ocean water...rides in a car...
Rows of new-mown hay....
Conversation, people at ease,
Tying ribbons and bows...
Bedtime stories, all that we please,
Only Daddy knows.

Sing me a ballad, sing me an air,
Sing my family then and there.
All the people here tonight,
When they are sleepy, bid them good night.
All the people ever I'll know,
When they are leaving, let them go.

Sing me a ballad, sing me an air,
Sing me a daughter ever fair,
Sing me a boy who looks like me,
Sing me a woman happy with me,
All the people in my song,
May they be dancing all night long.

Update, August 4, 2008: I found a recording I made of this song in 1991, shortly after I wrote it. I had adapted it for a friend's 50th birthday, so "yellow hair" became "auburn hair" in the first verse. This is an mp3 recording.

An Halucinatory Oratory

2008-05-06T11:49:00.008-05:00

"An" is a pesky word. People are afraid of sounding natural or appearing uncouth, so they stick "An" in front of a word with a voiced H, such as "historian." The strict grammarians who taught me some of what I know stressed the importance of smooth elision. They said that "an" only belongs in front of an unvoiced H, such as one might hear in a Cockney accent....'istorian. Used in a sentence, 'e's come up i' the world, 'e's an 'istorian.

Actually, that's far-fetched, it's an honor to say.

I shouldn't, but I shudder when someone writes "an historian," but I don't pass a remark on the subject.

In honor of dear, misplaced Anne, I wish to report "an" halucinatory incident this morning while taking Lola the Poodle on her morning constitutional. I saw an white egret looking for breakfast at the well-stocked pond at Lewis Park, and, just beyond th' egret, I saw a fish bicycling fast in the opposite direction, but getting nowhere.

How this story turns out, I cannot say. Th' egret was 'appy to 'ave me snap a picture or two, as long as Lola and I kept our distance. So 'ere is the evidence, that I am not crazy.

The Storyteller and the Editor

2008-05-01T11:01:00.007-05:00

Recently I finished reading a story that held my interest week after week, reading a half hour here, and hour or so there, until I got to the end. The book is Richard Russo's Bridge of Sighs. I don't intend to summarize the story here or to review the book. I like to read them for myself and make up my own mind, and I suspect you do, too.

This blog is about a sentence I found after I finished the book. "Nat Sobel has made every one of my books better, but he absolutely saved this one." Until I read that, I'd been wondering about the role of the editor in this book, and here it is...he improves what the author creates.

A year ago I performed an editorial service for a friend who had written an essay that no one would touch. I wanted to publish it because it was an interesting account of culture shock and compulsive reading as a therapy. What interested me in it wasn't coming through clearly, though, so I wrote back with some suggestions for reshaping the piece. My friend wrote back that I was the only person who had actually engaged his text, and he said he would work on it.

We went through this process of back-and-forth revision and critique a couple of times and he lost interest in further shaping of the piece. I think he didn't see the reader interest I saw in it, and so it wasn't worth the time to him that it was worth to me. Maybe he'll pick it up again some day and see what I saw in it.

Back to Bridge of Sighs now. What I absolutely loved about this book is the distinctive and consistent "voice" of the characters, particularly the central character, Lou C. Lynch, who has taken to writing a summary of his life as he approaches retirement. This is a relaxed, thoughtful voice, and the life is that of a person who lives in a small town that has been cursed by the toxins of the industries that kept it alive for generations.

Structually, the story Russo unfolds is complicated by shifts of focus and shifts of narrative voice. Lou C. Lynch tells his own story, first-person. At the end of Chapter 1, Lynch speaks of his boyhood friend, Bobby, who has been much on his mind of late.

The narrative voice of Lynch is replaced by an omnicient narrator in Chapter 3, when the scene shifts to Venice and the focus shifts to a man named Noonan, who we later surmise is Lynch's old friend, Bobby Marconi. We are in the dark, though, about the name Noonan.

I was drawn into this story as Lou C. Lynch unfolded the details of his childhood, of his father's and mother's natures, and of their relationship with the gritty secrets of the Marconi family. Late in the book, though, I began to notice passages, turns of phrase, that I thought belonged in a discarded draft. What I have to say about those passages is pure guesswork. I haven't contacted the miracle-worker, Nat Sobel, or the masterful yarn-spinner, Richard Russo, to confirm. This is what I think happened:

Russo delivered a mountain of typescript pages to his publisher, and Sobel spent many days in a very careful reading, making copious notes, just as I did last year with my friend's essay. Sobel prodded Russo to preserve and protect the integrity of that distinctive voice and tone of Lou C. Lynch, and to sharpen characters or scenes, and to cut passages that didn't really advance the story. Russo got back to work and sent revisions. Sobel sent more suggestions.

Meanwhile, time was running out at Alfred A. Knopf, publishers. Knopf wanted to release this blockbuster just after the start of school in 2007, when people are looking for something to read again or to buy for the Holidays. As the deadline approached, did Nat Sobel tire of the constant process of tuning the book? Did Richard Russo grow weary of the work? Or did they just run out of time?

What I noticed is that there was more than one "omniscient narrator" in the book, and that is a flaw. There are passages where the narrative voice resembles that of a guy making wisecracks with you in a tavern. There are other passages where the narrative voice is psychoanalyzing the book's characters. I thought I was reading the equivalent of notes Russo wrote to himself about what was going on in the mind of his characters. Given the quality of the first half of the book, this sense of "mission creep" for the impersonal narrative voice was unwelcome. I would gladly have put up with many more pages of the real thing rather than the fewer pages of this new voice.

Then there are small turns of phrase that hit the ear like lead. When seventeen-year-old Bobby Marconi moves into a vacant room above the drug store, it is a sorry, run-down place with a toilet and sink over on one wall, unenclosed, and when the toilet is flushed, the whole setup shakes and rattles "like an epileptic." In a book in which Lou Lynch has mounted a map of town and placed a black pin on the location of every death from an exotic form of cancer, the epilepsy metaphor is both unique and utterly out of place. It's the kind of writing one expects to see in college fiction-writing classes. It's amateur, just as Russo was an amateur at one time, and Nat Sobel no doubt would have red-lined it if time or energy had not run out on them. Nat would have also raised an eyebrow, I imagine, at the alarming similarity of the scene in which Noonan sees Sarah Lynch through the window of a departing train just as a wierd physical event wracks his body. It's too much like the movie death of Dr. Zhivago, so we're reminiscing instantly on the film careers of Omar Sharif and Julie Christie and the miraculous cleanliness of their clothing in that winter they spent in the abandoned house in the middle of nowhere, probably with no running water. Richard, what were you thinking???? But the clock ran out on Bridge of Sighs and it had to go to press, ready or not, and it was not...quite...ready. There is a finer book in there than got into print, and I highly recommend it, even so.

I mentioned this "editorial fatigue" to a writer the other day. He said it's common in the publishing world. Once a writer scores with a hit, the publishers are afraid to do serious editing any more for fear of deleting the magic. He named several best-selling writers who complain about lax editing and bloated books.

As I say, I have no idea if I've guessed right about Bridge of Sighs. There was one opportunity for a huge misstep that Russo either avoided or Sobel averted, and I won't tell you what it is because I think it would spoil some of the mystery and magic of this wonderful story.

Social Networking With Books and Ideas

2008-03-24T13:33:00.004-06:00

Social Networking is one of those expressions that creates less interest rather than more. There is one unnecessary word there, “Social,” making the expression a (stand back!) pleonasm. Just when you thought “tautology” was the only vocabulary word you’d need to express this verbal excess, along comes “pleonasm,” which our intern, Kara, just found on the internet when I explained the need for a term. Isn’t “networking” enough?

Now I can pretend to have a vocabulary!

I know “social networking” from email discussion groups called “listservs.” I subscribe to several of them and participate in few. In the few I read regularly and contribute to, I have the feeling that I’m engaged in a real community and I have the sense that my contributions “shape” those communities. Participation has that effect, even if it’s negative in tone.

Last month I wrote about Facebook in connection with the readmoremissouri.org web site. There’s a social networking possibility for people who want to talk about The Starcatcher Trilogy by Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson. I signed up for a Facebook account, wondering what in the world I would do with it. In setting up my Profile, I had to respond to a question like, “Do you have religious ideas?” or some such thing. Rather than write a confessional, I responded, “Yes, much of the time, don’t you?” No one in this vast social network has taken me up on that, and probably no one has seen it. However, I did receive an immediate e-mail from a county library employee who reads my newsletter and subscribes to Facebook. I suppose that is how social networking begins, with a neighborly “howdy” across the electric fence. But after, “howdy,” what is there to say, unless you have a common interest?

Now it seems that Amazon.com is trying to implement social networking on its bookselling page. I stumbled upon their attempt while looking for a digital image of the cover of Goodnight Moon. I Googled for the title, clicked one of the links that came up, and landed on a page devoted to the “board book” version of that title. Here is the link I clicked:

http://www.amazon.com/Goodnight-Moon-Margaret-Wise-Brown/dp/0694003611

Behold! There is a small set of family photos depicting parents and children with that book. What a great idea! I thought some of the pictures were truly charming, so I tried to contact the parents who uploaded them to ask for permission to use those pictures on a Family Education web site.

That’s where “social” and “networking” broke down completely. There was no way to directly contact those parents as there is on a photo-sharing site like Flickr.com. I had to try to do it indirectly, by clicking through layers to their “Profiles” and then clicking something that provided me a way to invite them to become my “Friend.” Doing this made me feel like a stalker, but I did it, explaining who I am and giving the URL to my completely legitimate web site at the Missouri Humanities Council. That was on March 14, and I have not heard a peep in reply.

There are several possible reasons:

Amazon hasn’t created a way to get such an invitation to the intended party, not yet, anyway. Amazon makes no mention at all of “social networking” in its vast array of topics about managing “My Account,” so maybe Management at Amazon doesn’t know that something new has been rolled out.

Amazon has created a dumb way, such that the recipient only discovers the message when they log in to their Amazon account, which may be very infrequently.

OR, Amazon has done this smartly by sending the invitation directly to the e-mail address the recipient provided; but the recipient has changed email accounts recently, doesn’t use the account they gave Amazon, or doesn’t check email that often.

My invitation for Friendship was lost in a Spam folder somewhere or turned over to the local Police or FBI.

My invitation was received but was viewed as an unwelcome intrusion.

My invitation was received but was saved for “later” because the baby needed changing, and “later” now means “forgotten.”

In any case, Social Networking at Amazon is not functioning two-way at the moment. It’s just one-way, and that’s a surprise and a letdown. I think there’s a great opportunity there to make it easy for parents to share ideas about the benefits of books in the home. I think it’s such a great idea that you’ll find it implemented on our own family reading web site ASAP.

The Art of Lieder Singing

2008-02-13T13:57:00.006-06:00

After I bought my iPhone, I discovered a treasure of classical music on YouTube. Here is one by the German Baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. This one performance is sufficient to convey the essence of German Lieder singing, what we aspired to do and be when we first learned this repertoire as undergraduates.

The song is “Gute Nacht” by Franz Schubert. It is the first song in a sequence of twenty-four in a cycle titled “Die Winterreise” (Winter Journey). There is a lot of commentary about this song cycle on the web, and you can spend a day or so getting into the context of German art songs, German Romantic poetry, and Schubert’s place in the history of song.

I suggest you look at the performance first, and don’t fret about the lousy video quality. It’s probably from an old source, as the performance dates from 1966, perhaps on Japanese TV. Look and listen, and then follow along as I describe what I see and hear, and why this would suffice if all other Lieder recordings were suddenly to disappear.

You Tube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tc_GCguYgHw

The first thing one notices about the song is the regular pattern of sound that the piano lays down. It evokes the thought of footsteps. The minor key is somewhat somber. There is no figuration in the piano part, just the steady “footfall” of block chords. We know from the title that the time is night and the season is Winter.

The job of the singer is to create a sense of the personal situation that prompts these lines of poetry, set in just this way by the composer. The text is not a play, so the actor’s craft here is to imagine what sort of “character” utters these words.

Now is a good time to have a look at the text with a line-by-line translation by Professor Celia Sgroi from the State University of New York at Oswego (by coincidence, the place where I had my first college teaching job).

What is distinctive about Fischer-Dieskau’s art is his ability to “place himself” in the currents of emotion that lie between the lines and between the stanzas. In this song, he must be observed by the audience as he mutters to himself about what has just transpired. In many art songs, there must be no direct eye contact with the listener. This song is a soliloquy.

Someone has lost in love and is leaving town after everyone has gone to bed. “A stranger I came, a stranger I leave.” When you watch the video again, just look at his body movements. I think all of them are expressive of the emotional currents in the text.

As you watch, listen very carefully for changes in vocal tone and intensity in the text. At the start of the second line, when “Fremd” is reiterated, did you hear Fremd? He leaned on “stranger.” It pains him.

Then when he sings “Die Mutter gar von eh’” the second time, it’s a blow. The mother even spoke of marriage, (and now look where I am)! But then, in the space between that line and the next one, Fischer-Dieskau takes a hard slap to the face. You can see it. He is stricken to think of the reversal of fortune, and we believe it. We are no longer watching Fischer-Dieskau, we are watching the unnamed fellow who is, literally, left out in the cold and on the way to who-knows-where?

He modulates the sound in the next phrase, “Now the world is so gloomy.” And after the repeat of that phrase, I sense shame in his downcast look. He leaves with a sense of disgrace; can’t face the people in town, or the girl he lost, or her mother.

Then a fleeting look of resignation to his fate, and the soft utterance of his powerlessness to affect his course. The active word is wählen in the second line. Listen closely to how the character of the tone changes on the important word. Then, as soon as he comments on the darkness, he thinks of the moonlight overhead and sees it before he sings it. But then, as he sings of deer tracks in the snow, his mind is obviously back inside the house he is approaching, where his former love lies sleeping.

His art consists of knowing what to transmit; certainly not deer tracks in the snow, but the emotional affliction that sets the scene for what is to follow.

The next verse is edgy, combative, and he avoids the sophomoric trick I’ve seen recommended elsewhere on “Lass irre Hunde heulen/Vor ihres Herren Haus?” The trick is to exaggerate the rolled Rs to mimic the growl of dogs. To do that is to draw attention to a detail “on the outer surface” of the performance, when the whole point of this song is to draw attention to the inner life of the sufferer.

And then a shift of mood toward “distraught” on “Love loves to wander, it’s God’s plan.” Listen to how he spins “einem” and “andern,” “one” to “another.” Then he backs the sound off into bleakness as if to say, “God meant me to be the loser.”

As the piano finishes that verse, Fischer-Dieskau weaves in space as if blown about by the winds of a cruel fate. The interpretation continues through the spaces in the text.

And then, amazing!, Schubert suddenly changes the key to major, and any sensible pianist makes the slightest delay in the forward motion of the rhythm just before entering "the atmosphere" of those major chords, and then the walking rhythm is as before. And even before this major tone is sounded, the singer is bereft, and his vocal utterance a moment later is delicate, bordering on inaudible, but with the slightest emphasis on “shame” in the second line.

The climax of the piece is “an dich hab Ich gedacht,” On you I thought! The musical peak is “An dich” but there’s a slight portamento downward to “dich” to continue the sense of emphasis. (None of these nuances are notated in the score). At this point, you can hear something new in the way the pianist is presenting those repeated chords. There is a sense of small blows falling, again not notated, but part of inhabiting the spirit of the story.

You may have noticed that there is no sense of physical effort in his vocal production. He will not be exhausted physically after twenty-four songs without a break, but you can already imagine how emotionally drained he will be. This level of commitment is what distinguished Fischer-Dieskau when he launched his career at the age of twenty-two in 1947. He was forty-one when he gave this performance.

If you listen another time or two, you can make a study of “perfect” legato delivery. True legato is a seamless flow of sound from one syllable to the next while retaining clarity of words. In this performance, legato is the norm, and any breaks are for textual clarity or emphasis.

You can see quite a few other examples of Fischer-Dieskau’s art on YouTube. I was so enchanted with this that I bought two DVDs of full performances of this song cycle and Schubert’s other big one, Die Schöne Müllerin.

I remember when I first heard his name. I was a college freshman on a tour with the Penn State Singers, and our leading student baritone was going on and on about the quality of Fischer-Dieskau’s sound. It would be two years before I first heard him on recordings, about the time I was first assigned some Schubert Lieder for my senior recital. Then in my senior year, my voice teacher organized a group trip to hear him give a recital in Carnegie Hall. I was wonderstruck. I started collecting his records. My teacher said I would never succeed at that; he was the most-recorded voice in history.

I saw him in recital again in Montreal in 1975, and again in Carnegie Hall for a series of recitals in the mid-1980s. One of my DVDs is of a Schubert performance he gave in 1992, a couple of months before he decided that he was no longer meeting his standard of excellence. I can hear the voice of a man of 67 in that recital, but only now and then. For most of the time, I hear the same quality of sound he always had, and the same world-stopping penetration of the emotional life of the songs.

For me, Fischer-Dieskau did not “interpret” a song. He was the song!

i phone, i tune, and now i tube!

2008-01-14T14:38:00.001-06:00

For a long time I thought iTunes was software for someone else. I even deleted the software and its icon from my desktop computer to minimize personal cultural shock. Little earphones and tinny little tunes, so I thought, were not for my high-expectation ears. Note that I wasn’t being a snob, please. It’s not the tunes I disdained, but what I supposed was the audio quality.

Then I bought an iPhone, which is a dressed up iPod to some people and a tiny entertainment device-with-phone for others. I underestimated the entertainment potential when I decided to buy it, and then many things changed.

I no sooner decided to buy the gadget than I decided to learn to use the iTunes music library as a real library for myself. I decided to create a little sonic autobiography on my laptop. I started to remember songs that were so vividly woven into memory that I recalled scenes and situations related to each song. Please Mister Custer, a song I didn’t want to hear again, is still in my memory of riding in a car with my friend, Jim Nickell. We played in a little rock band in high school and we palled around now and then as we both got drivers’ licenses. Jim was driving in the day I remember, the car was a big blue Buick, I think, and he turned up the bass on the radio so that Please Mister Custer really boomed out. I remember the joy of that moment, how we both relished the things that could be done with sound.

I browsed the iTunes library for some old favorites like The Drifters singing Under the Boardwalk and Judy Collins singing The Hills of Shiloh. The more I browsed, the more I found alternate possibilities for the songs I remembered, and the more I found music I’d never heard of but which I wanted to have for repeated listening.

I’ll give one example. I wanted to look up the title of a tune on the CD “Meeting By the River” by Ry Cooder. I looked up Ry Cooder and discovered a world of recorded music I hadn’t known anything about. One of his old CDs was titled “Bop Till You Drop” (1979). It is a joyous look back at infectious material from the 50s and 60s. Little Sister is my favorite track. It has the feel of informality, horsing around, in the vocals, but with very clean, tight instrumental backup. The utter lack of “rehearsed” ensemble when the gang sings “oo-oo-oo-oo” in the refrain tells me this is about the fun of playing the music, and not about the what the lyrics are narrating.

I finally imported Ry Cooder's rendition of Isa Lei from the CD I own. Once I knew the title, I found it in other versions and discovered an outstanding guitarist, Ed Gerhard, who I hadn't known about. Wow, the things you discover!

The earphone experience was another revelation. Those inconvenient little ear buds that come with the iPhone created surprising amounts of listening pleasure in the few moments the buds remained lodged in the right position. Real earphones made a huge difference for me. The surprise was how good everything sounded. A minor addiction was under way. I imported a vast number of songs from my CD collection and in no time had nearly 800 items on my computer and iPhone and still more than half of the iPhone’s storage space available. Listening to Joni Mitchell's All I Want from the "Blue" album is a great example of "earphone music." With the ear buds in, Joni and her dulcimer sound like they are in the center, between my ears as it were, and I hear other distinct things on the right and left. On the right, as I imagine things, sits James Taylor, who is listed as a guitarist on this song.

As I listened to my newly-captured tunes, I began to organize some into a “playlist” and started to goof around with the order of things so that my chosen songs made sense in their juxtaposition. The making of a playlist can be a creative project, and I’ve derived a lot of satisfaction from working up a long one.

I spent much of yesterday surfing YouTube for video versions of some songs I liked. The “library experience” at YouTube is much like the one at iTunes. You can type in a song title or you can type in the name of an artist. Either way, the search results show you some related material that you can easily browse.

One type of music video is a photo montage over the audio recording, there being no video of the artist performing the piece. A gorgeous example of this is thomasj157’s upload of winter pictures to go with Gordon Lightfoot’s Song for a Winter’s Night.

Another style is the candid video of an artist either in rehearsal or in a non-concert setting. I love the one I found of Joni Mitchell singing Night Ride Home in someone’s back yard.

She recorded the CD in 1991, so I guess this video is from the 1990s. I like it a lot better than the “produced” music video she made.

There are a lot of gems in the list of Joni Mitchell clips on YouTube. I like to watch her play guitar in the distinctive way she developed over 40 years ago. Distinctive lyrics, distinctive guitar, she’s one of the songwriting giants of that long era.

“Produced” music videos, for me, are less interesting than live performances or informal renditions. I looked up Kathy Mattea's Asking Us To Dance because the listening experience was outstanding with those little iPhone earbuds. I found a produced music video from 1991 with a "ballet" of sorts intercut with a secondary ballet between the camera and Mattea's wonderfully expressive face. I had seen these things before....where? Aha! The choreography and cinematography were taking ideas from recent movies: a sex-in-a-downpour scene from 9 ½ weeks (1986) and the after-hours dances in Dirty Dancing (1987). The video is a sensual viewing experience, not R-rated by any means, but Kathy Mattea’s mocha mezzo voice is the loser here. A voice like that deserves earphones-only listening, eyes closed. She’s photogenic, though, and the camera tours her face like a lover’s lips.

I prefer the style of Mike Reid’s Walk on Faith video from 1990. It’s like looking at a college yearbook for me. I knew Mike years earlier, when he was an All-American defensive tackle at Penn State and a classical piano major studying in Earl Wild’s studio. I was a few years ahead of Mike, but I saw him give impressive, piano-shattering performances in student recitals, and I watched him play pro football with the Bengals on TV. I had no idea back then that he wanted to sing and be a songwriter, so I treasure my CD of his music and this video of him in lip-synch with his recording. It’s a really cute montage of images, and it captures the Mike Reid I remember, though with a thinner neck and more hair than when he was a Nittany Lion!

p.s. If you liked that one, I think you'll have fun with another of the same era, Poor Boy Blues, with Chet Atkins and Mark Knopfler.

My Product is a Memory

2007-11-26T13:38:00.002-06:00

The President of a Chamber of Commerce once said to me, “my product is a memory.” We were in a roundtable discussion of leaders of various cultural organizations. The leaders were thinking together about what “tourism” means in terms of a few specific kinds of visitors. Our facilitator had conjured up three sets of imaginary travelers and had divided us into three teams to consider their interests and needs.

We imagined those visitors and sought answers to a short list of questions. Why are they traveling? How did they decide to come to this place and not some place else? What time of the week are they coming and for how long? What month or season are they coming? What will they hope to experience while in this place? You might imagine this hypothetical exercise is useless, but it was amazing to see what the group realized about their town as they tried to imagine it as an outsider. They realized, for example, that some of the key businesses that weekend travelers would seek out are closed on Saturdays.

Tourism is a buzzword. “Readiness” is the soft underbelly of that word. To make an organization ready is one thing; but to make a town ready is a whole other ball game, and it’s a hard game to win.

“My product is a memory” sounded like an excellent theme statement for someone at the head of the Chamber of Commerce. A less thoughtful person might have said, “my product is a 50% increase in membership by year’s end,” or “my product is a measurable leap in public awareness of our town as an attraction by year’s end.” But she got right to the heart of why people come back: they remember having a good time. They found their way easily to whatever brought them here; they found parking without getting lost; they found an interesting place to eat near an interesting place to shop; they found the Church Directory they needed; they found things to do with their children; they found who-knows-what and they were happy they found it.

The President of the Chamber of Commerce was on target with her word choice. She would have missed if she had said, “my product is a favorable memory.” It isn’t always favorable, after all. If the Chamber’s members do nothing attentive to visitors, their product will be an array of bad memories. The Chamber has to do something within that community of members to turn their attention to shaping visitor experiences toward favorable memories.

Here is a quasi-hellish memory of mine from a recent stay at the Hospitality House in Williamsburg, Virginia. I stopped in for lunch one afternoon around 2 and decided on quick service at the pasta bar. I asked the server to prepare some sausage and spinach to mix with penne and a marinara sauce, which he did in a cordial way. The flavor of the first bite was totally distinctive, like no Italian pasta dish I had ever tasted, an alien, surprising, un-right combination of herb, tomato, and….what, exactly? What’s that sweetness? Then I realized that the restaurant had passed off unused maple-flavored breakfast links as “Italian sausage” at the pasta bar.

The food was by no means spoiled, but the experience was one of shock rather than satisfaction, and I resolved to go there no more during a four-day stay. Even worse for them, the experience gave me a 24-karat conversation item with the convention-goers I was there with. Bad news has a way of multiplying faster than good news, which is why smart managers try to get it right on the first try.

“My product is a memory” turns out to apply to a variety of venues. Over the weekend as I raked a mountain of leaves into the street, my neighbor was doing the same with his two young boys. My neighbor seems like such a gifted and resourceful dad. He made the work of gathering leaves a memorable and fun social experience. He and his wife seem to have a knack for creating great memories while getting work done. No household chore is done without child participation with Mom or Dad. Dad involves the kids in thinking about what sort of care the deck will need in the spring. Naturally, they will scrub the deck together; they will brush on the sealer together, some with large brushes and some with small ones.

My college choral director learned from one of his mentors that “every rehearsal must be a musical experience.” That means that no rehearsal is devoted simply to learning diction, rhythms, or pitches. The group has to sing whole passages in a musical way at some point, and that experience has to be memorable. The consequences of it not being memorable are (1) having to do the same work over again, and (2) a decline in morale. I think this applies to all forms of instruction. Whether we are talented or not, when we are in the role of teacher, our product is memory of some kind. We have to do something to shape it.

Why leave out friendships? Our product is a memory. If we neglect those we associate with, at any level of the love continuum, we are negatively investing in memories. Those are the ones that begin to ache.

Cranberry Memories

2007-11-21T16:38:00.002-06:00

This morning I helped San make the “Cranberries Grand Marnier” that we have made almost every Thanksgiving for twenty-five years or so. Then she made the sweet potato casserole with sherry and walnuts. Tomorrow we’ll make the turkey stuffing from an issue of Gourmet magazine way back when, 1981? When first we made it, I would have happily made a meal of only the stuffing. It involved sausage, prunes soaked in Madeira, this and that. These days we substitute chopped mushrooms for the sausage.

I copied out the cranberry recipe this noon:

1 cup sugar
½ cup orange juice (fresh-squeezed on my watch!)
2 cups cranberries (red!)
¼ cup chopped, seeded, peeled (membrane-free) orange
1 T grated or zested orange peel
¼ cup Grand Marnier

Heat sugar and orange juice in a large saucepan over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the sugar dissolves, 3 to 4 minutes. Stir in cranberries, orange pulp. Add orange peel. Heat to boiling; reduce heat. Simmer uncovered until juice is released from the cranberries, about 10 minutes. Add the Grand Marnier. Simmer 2 minutes. Refrigerate over night, and then don’t hog it all for yourself!

Cranberries are part of my family history. My grandfather, Bill Feaster, set up a trucking company in the 1920s to move the produce of central New Jersey to cities in the region. He lived near the cranberry bogs and would truck empty tin cans into the cranberry factories and truck canned cranberry products out.

Trucking was his second career. He was legendary in his region of New Jersey as a veterinarian. He had studied through correspondence courses at McGill University in Montreal. I don’t know the story of why he quit the veterinary work and set out to build a trucking enterprise. I’ve probably heard the story; maybe it’s in the notebook I filled when I got Mom talking about the old days.

My grandfather had already retired when I was born. I knew him as a hunter, landlord, and avid vegetable gardener. He hunted raccoons for the sport of it. He shot squirrels, too, from time to time for a dish my grandmother made. It was called “squirrel pot pie” but was no such thing. “Pot pie” was an expression meaning “stew with delicious dumplings.” I could have made a meal of those dumplings, and my grandparents would have encouraged me to do so, because to them, eating was a wonderful thing to see, even in a child who was developing into Baby Huey.

Though there were shotguns leaning next to the phone in their house, my grandparents never so much as hinted about teaching me to use a gun or to hunt. I have long imagined this was a result of the sternest possible warning from Mom, but I never asked her if it was true. I had any number of toy revolvers, but never owned so much as a B-B gun. Guns belonged in some other world.

Plants were another thing entirely. My grandfather grew a patch of blueberry bushes, and my sister and I were chief among the pickers. He grew a patch of strawberries in that rich black earth. He grew sweet corn, asparagus, peas, lima beans, pole beans, cabbages, cucumbers, squash, and majestic Jersey and Beefsteak tomatoes. My Aunt Millie, who lived with them, grew row upon row of gladiolus for cutting and maintained a big wire cage of parakeets (briefly, when they were in vogue).

Thanksgiving was always a large festival in our family. My mother’s family included her parents and half-sister, my Aunt Millie; her other half-sister, my Aunt Gertrude, and her husband, Uncle Bill Ellis, who prospered as a small-town commercial printer near Fort Dix; and Gertrude’s foster parents, Aunt Cora and Uncle Winfield Morris. Aunt Cora was the sister of my grandmother’s ill-fated first husband, the father of Gertrude and Mildred, who died of an ailment around the age of 20, leaving my grandmother unable to support two babies. So she gave one to Cora and Winfield, who raised but never adopted her in Cookstown, where my grandmother found work as a chamber maid in a country hotel.

Uncle Winfield had a resonant bass speaking voice, a beautiful, broad smile, and attentive eyes. Aunt Cora had a reedy voice and faintly purple white hair. Aunt Cora and Uncle Winfield raised only Gertrude. Winfield was a plumber and a town constable.

Aunt Gertrude and Uncle Bill had no children, but they had a small poodle. Uncle Bill was enthusiastic about model railroading and music. He had worked before the War as a banjoist in a pit orchestra.

Aunt Millie lived at home all her life, appears from skimpy evidence to have had an abruptly terminated courtship at some point, never married, wore a mannish hair style and mannish clothes, liked to bowl, liked Eddy Arnold’s singing, painted by numbers and hung her paintings around the house, read Popular Mechanics and Confidential, made her living driving a high school bus route, and loved me dearly. My grandfather legally adopted her around the time of his retirement. I don't know why he waited so long to do that, or what or who prompted him, but it was some kind of "statement" in the family and was a big deal, considering that Gertrude had something like orphan status by comparison.

Mom was the only child of my grandfather, Bill Feaster. She never learned much about cooking and hated to cook. She was fiesty and adventurous as a girl and young woman. She was also the first person in the family to go off to college. When she landed her first job at a publishing house in New York, my grandfather was heartsick at the loss of her. He cried when he saw her off at the Trenton depot.

New York was what Mom and Dad had in common. It was magic for both of them. Both of them had been raised in rural towns, too. Before she met Dad, a serious ailment ended her New York days and plunged her back into the obscurity of New Egypt. I imagine she felt cheated by fate. A door had closed, that’s how I imagine it, having never asked her about the emotional side of her history. (Why?)

The war came, she got a job as a secretary at Fort Dix, a good job because she looked glamorous. She told me about a promotion to a job held by a less gorgeous woman, who was transferred to Newark. Then one day, in walked youthful Herman Bouman, architect working in a New York office and involved in the expansion of Fort Dix. He must have seemed Deliverance to her. I can’t think of the word for what she must have seemed to him, but the fact that this beauty was also a confirmed member of the Lutheran Church led to a moment of “reduced expectations” that my mother told me about decades later: his idea of a date was to attend church together.

But they married, and then I came along, and then Chris, my sister, and every Thanksgiving and Christmas all of us would enjoy each other’s company, the sounds of our speech, the feast dishes on the table with the turkey, the pumpkin pie after. I am thankful to have such warm memories to go with the cold seasons of the year. I am one of the lucky ones for that. I look outside at the chilly rain, and I know there are people not far away who don’t have a warm or a safe home to return to; or they don’t have anyone who loves them dearly; or they haven’t had much luck. Bless them all, Lord. Take care of them. Give them hope.

Talk Show

2007-11-20T10:25:00.001-06:00

I hope to enchant you with a gallery of prose passages that are sheer wonder to me. It’s a futile exercise, I think, because excerpting a large work seems a bit like playing sections of several arias from a Verdi opera. That could be frustrating! I’d want to have you hear how Violetta breaks my heart with the phrase, “Alfredo, Alfredo,” but then I’d have to play another 30 seconds so you could hear where that goes, and then you’d sneak a look at your watch and begin to concoct your exit lines.

So here I am, dearest reader, if you’re still with me, about to ask you to take off your watch and put it away. Put away the sense that you have other things to do. Sit down with me and consider some of the most refreshing and amazing writing I’ve come across in the past twelve months.

I’m talking about Roberto Bolaño’s novel, The Savage Detectives. It is a book about words and sentences, poems and talk, friendships and memory, sound and smell. It is a book without a plot, a book that breaks the usual sequence of time, a book composed of monologues, missing people, delusion, hope, tears, sex, and loss. It is a book about broken frames of reference, displacement, and the world of literature. It is a book with no narrative from an unseen and all-knowing author. Anything and everything we learn or think we learn in this book is the product of a monologue. The book is composed of many monologues, like a Mozart opera without any recitatives or ensembles. And yet there are ensembles in the book; they are groupings of monologues. Except for two long sections of diary entries, the book reads like the verbatim transcripts of oral history interviews, capturing all sorts of nuances and idiosyncracies of personality. The author’s ear for habits of speech is one of the most beguiling and amazing features, which is why I’m going to quote more than you imagine appropriate.

But I must digress for a moment, as the book does, and recall an acting class I took when I was a young teacher in Santa Fe. We learned to analyze a character by keeping three lists as we read through the play. On one list, we wrote down what the author says about our character; on another, what our character says about himself; and on a third, what the other characters say about our character. Despite my height and weight, I had decided to study the part of Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman. Willy, the “low man” in the system, a person described in the play as “a shrimp,” has been played by big men, but I think Dustin Hoffman is about the right stature for that role. I made my three lists, though, and I have them yet. What a wonderful way to study!

In The Savage Detectives, the author says absolutely nothing about the characters, and only the secondary characters have anything to say about themselves. The main characters deliver no monologues at all, so they are known only through what others remember about them. They are known, in other words, only through the refraction of multiple memories. I think it is not a coincidence that one of the characters in the book repeatedly refers to Marcel Duchamp’s painting, Nude Descending a Staircase.

The book is a detective story of a special kind. All sorts of people and things turn up missing in the book, and there are stories within stories of the search for what has been lost. The book begins as comedy, wry comedy, and as it progresses, a sadness flows into every nook and cranny of it. There are broken or lost frames of human reference throughout, yet because the story of the central characters must be deduced and inferred from monologues of others, the book is also about how people remember each other and the small dramas of the moments they shared. The book is often cinematic in how we are made to see and sense what is inside the current frame of reference.

We open the book to a section titled “Mexicans Lost in Mexico” and find ourselves in the 1975 equivalent of a blog, a sequence of diary entries:

NOVEMBER 2

I’ve been cordially invited to join the visceral realists. I accepted, of course. There was no initiation ceremony. It was better that way.

Cordially. A word with spin, right away in the first sentence, and within two lines, something intriguing is afoot.

NOVEMBER 3

I’m not really sure what visceral realism is. I’m seventeen years old. My name is Juan García Madero, and I’m in my first semester of law school. I wanted to study literature, not law, but my uncle insisted, and in the end I gave in. I’m an orphan, and someday I’ll be a lawyer. That’s what I told my aunt and uncle, and then I shut myself in my room and cried all night. Or anyway for a long time. Then, as if it were settled, I started class in the law school’s hallowed halls, but a month later I registered for Julio César Álamo’s poetry workshop in the literature department, and that was how I met the visceral realists, or viscerealists, or even vicerealists, as they sometimes like to call themselves. Up until then, I had attended the workshop four times and nothing ever happened, though only in a manner of speaking, of course, since naturally something always happened: we read poems, and Álamo praised them or tore them to pieces, depending on his mood; one person would read, Álamo would critique, another person would read, Álamo would critique, somebody else would read, Álamo would critique. Sometimes Álamo would get bored and ask us (those who weren’t reading just then) to critique too, and then we would critique and Álamo would read the paper.

It was the ideal method for ensuring that no one was friends with anyone, or else that our friendships were unhealthy and based on resentment….

We imagine this is going to be García Madero’s story of university life. He identifies the visceral realists as two men in their early twenties, a Chilean named Arturo Belano, and a Mexican who adopted the name Ulises Lima several years earlier at the prompting of a high school girlfriend. The November 3 entry continues:

I still don’t really get it. In one sense, the name of the group is a joke. At the same time, it’s completely in earnest. Many years ago there was a Mexican avant-garde group called the visceral realists, I think, but I don’t know whether they were writers or painters or journalists or revolutionaries. They were active in the twenties or maybe the thirties, I’m not quite sure about that either. I’d obviously never heard of the group, but my ignorance in literary matters is to blame for that (every book in the world is out there waiting to be read by me). According to Arturo Belano, the visceral realists vanished in the Sonora desert. Then Belano and Lima mentioned somebody called Cesárea Tinajero or Tinaja, I can’t remember which (I think it was when I was shouting to the waiter to bring us some beers), and they talked about the Comte de Lautrémont’s Poems, something in the Poems that had to do with this Tinajero woman, and then Lima made a mysterious claim. According to him, the present-day visceral realists walked backward. What do you mean, backward? I asked.

“Backward, gazing at a point in the distance, but moving away from it, walking straight toward the unknown.”

I said I thought this sounded like the perfect way to walk. The truth was I had no idea what he was talking about. If you stop and think about it, it’s no way to walk at all.

Now the diarist sketches the gritty environs where aspiring poets meet:

NOVEMBER 4

I went back to the bar on Bucareli, but the visceral realists never showed up. While I was waiting for them, I spent my time reading and writing. The regulars, a group of silent, pretty grisly-looking drunks, never once took their eyes off me.

Results of five hours of waiting: four beers, four tequilas, a plate of tortilla sopes that I didn’t finish (they were half spoiled), a cover-to-cover reading of Álamo’s latest book of poems (which I only brought so I could make fun of Álamo with my new friends), seven texts written in the style of Ulises Lima, or rather, in the style of the one poem I’d read, or really just heard. The first one was about the sopes, which smelled of the grave; the second was about the university: I saw it in ruins; the third was about the university (me running naked in the middle of a crowd of zombies); the fourth was about the moon over Mexico City; the fifth about a dead singer; the sixth about a secret community living in the sewers of Chapultepec; and the seventh about a lost book and friendship. Those were the results, plus a physical and spiritual sense of loneliness.

A couple of drunks tried to bother me, but young as I may be, I can take care of myself. A waitress (I found out her name is Brígida; she said she remembered me from the other night with Belano and Lima) stroked my hair. She did it absentmindedly, as she went by to wait on another table. Afterward she sat with me for a while and hinted that my hair was too long. She was nice, but I decided it was better not to respond. At three in the morning I went home. Still no visceral realists. Will I ever see them again?

We turn the pages and meet the people García Madero hangs out with, and we learn that he is a virgin. On November 10 he narrates a scene of his first sexual experience, in which he is the baffled recipient of a favor from Brígida. But the favor, which occurs in the supplies closet of the bar, is interrupted by an emergency. Later, he wonders if he is still technically a virgin. Somewhat later, the question ceases to matter.

For the first two hours of reading, this is García Madero’s life and García Madero’s book. Through his sensibilities, we enter a circle people who are at least five years older. It is a circle in which people talk to each other about literature or politics for hours at a time. Everyone in the circle is somehow caught up in a love of poetry or a desire to write it or publish it. We meet Maria and Angelica Font, the daughters of a deranged architect, Joaquin “Quim” Font. Maria and Angelica share a “little house” behind the main Font residence, where they obtain privacy for sexual adventures by drawing a curtain across the single room.

We meet Maria’s friend, Lupe, who is a prostitute aspiring to enter dance school, and through Lupe’s conversations we hear about her pimp, Alberto, and his peculiar obsession involving a knife. We meet a strange, haunted bi-sexual youth who has named himself Luscious Skin, and we meet a variety of homosexuals. It’s an accepting circle of people. Sexual orientation is of no particular interest to any of them, and sexual curiosity is an unremarkable part of everyday life. We meet a couple of young poets who are expecting a baby, Jacinto Requena and Xóchitl García. (Her name is pronounced SO-cheetl, the Nahuatl word for “flower.”) (“Oh what a pompous know-it-all,” you’ve just thought. Before I Goggled for “Mexican X pronounce”, I don’t think I had ever seen the word, “Nahuatl.” I’m wearing it like a new watch today! Trying to find a use for it in an ordinary sentence several times. Not getting far.)

So we’re carried along through this new world that García Madero entered when he enrolled at the university, taking in all sorts of rich detail about everyone’s manners and lifestyles, and we can’t help wondering why these Mexicans are “lost,” or in what sense they are lost, or where the detectives are. Then things turn dangerous. Lupe decides to pursue an education and quits working for Alberto. Quim Font hides her in a hotel room, and later in his home, where Alberto mounts a siege as New Year’s Eve approaches. The cast of characters assembles at the Font home, and we know we’re in for a Mozart finale. Just after the turn of the year, it is decided that Belano and Lima will break the siege by speeding Lupe away in Quim Font’s new Impala. García Madero narrates what happened in his diary:

As Quim explained some of the finer points of the car to Ulises, Jorgito said that we should hurry up because Lupe’s pinp had just come back. For a few seconds everyone started talking in normal voices and Mrs. Font said: the shame of it all, to be reduced to this. Then I hurried off to the Fonts’ little house, got my books, and came back. The car’s engine was already running and everyone looked frozen in place.

I saw Arturo and Ulises in the front seats and Lupe in back.

“Someone will have to go open the gate,” said Quim.

I offered to do it.

I was on the sidewalk when I saw the lights of the Camaro and the lights of the Impala go on. It looked like a science fiction movie. As one car left the house, the other approached, as if the two were magnetically attracted to each other, or drawn together by fate, which the Greeks would say is the same thing.

I heard voices. People were calling my name. Quim’s car passed me. I saw the shape of Alberto getting out of the Camaro and the next moment he was alongside the car my friends were in. His friends, still sitting in the Camaro, yelled at him to break one of the Impala’s windows. Why doesn’t Ulises hit the gas? I thought. Lupe’s pimp started to kick the doors. I saw María coming through the garden toward me. I saw the faces of the thugs inside the Camaro. One of them was smoking a cigar. I saw Ulises’s face and his hands, which were moving on the dashboard of Quim’s car. I saw Belano’s face looking impassively at the pimp, as if none of this had anything to do with him. I saw Lupe, who was covering her face in the backseat. I thought that the window glass couldn’t withstand another kick and the next moment I was up next to Alberto. Then I saw that Alberto was swaying. He smelled of alcohol. They’d been celebrating the new year, too, of course. I saw my right fist (the only one I had free since my books were in my other hand) hurtling into the pimp’s body and this time I saw him fall. I heard my name being called from the house and I didn’t turn around. I kicked the body at my feet and I saw the Impala, which was moving at last. I saw the two thugs get out of the Camaro and I saw them coming toward me. I saw that Lupe was looking at me from inside the car and that she was opening the door. I realized that I’d always wanted to leave. I got in and before I could close the door Ulises stepped on the gas. I heard a shot or something that sounded like a shot. They’re shooting at us, the bastards, said Lupe. I turned around and through the back window I saw a shadow in the middle of the street. All the sadness of the world was concentrated in that shadow, framed by the strict rectangle of the Impala’s window. It’s firecrackers, I heard Belano say as our car leaped forward and left behind the Font’s house, the thugs’ Camaro, Calle Colima, and in less than two seconds we were on Avenida Oaxaca, heading north out of the city.

That’s the end of the section titled, “Mexicans Lost in Mexico.” The next section is titled, “The Savage Detectives (1976-1996)” We turn the page and the diary has vanished. Instead, we’re looking at text that begins with a formality:

Amadeo Salvatierra, Calle República Venezuela, near the Palacio de la Inquisición, Mexico City DF, January 1976

My dear boys, I said to them, I’m so glad to see you, come right in, make yourselves at home, and as they filed down the hall, or rather felt their way, because the hall is dark and the bulb had burned out and I hadn’t changed it (I haven’t changed it yet), I skipped joyfully ahead into the kitchen, where I got out a bottle of Los Suicidas mezcal, a mezcal only made in Chihuahua, limited run, of course, of which I used to receive two bottles each year by parcel post, until 1967…

This is evidently an interview taken in the same month Belano and Lima drove away with Lupe and Juan García Madero. Salvatierra is one of the earlier visceral realists, and the “dear boys” turn out to be Belano and Lima in the autumn of 1975. They are trying to track down Cesárea Tinajero, the “lost” mother of visceral realism, and are taping interviews with all the surviving members of her circle who they can locate in Mexico City.

We don’t know who is conducting this interview, though. Is it another group of university students on a quest, like Belano and Lima? Is it a team of policemen, or gangsters? Is Mexico City teeming with twenty-somethings armed with cassette recorders, taking oral histories of obscure poets? All we know is that the interviewers are male, plural, and young. The formality of the heading suggests a formal taking of information.

The next interview, also taken in January 1976, follows the same pattern; a formal opening giving name, location, and month, followed by a verbatim transcription. The purpose of the interview is to develop background information on Belano or Lima, or both. This one is with Perla Avilés, who shares a memory of horseback riding with Belano in 1970, when they were both in high school. Remember, we’re mentally making a list of things said by others that reveal a character we’re studying. And remember, too, that just like a scene in Verdi, there is a harmonic vocabulary in the fabric of this prose, a sense of pacing, a sense of where the weight will fall; and that like a screenplay or a good poem, it must seed our imagination with “sticky” images. (I couldn’t help noticing the unintended rhyme of Tlaxcala with the opera house, La Scala!)

…My father had some land in Tlaxcala and had bought a horse. He said he was a good rider and I said this Sunday I’m going to Tlaxcala with my father, you can come with us if you want. What bleak country that was. My father had built a thatched adobe hut and that was all there was, the rest was scrub and dirt. When we got there he looked around with a smile, as if to say, I knew this wasn’t going to be a fancy ranch or a big spread, but this is too much. Even I was a little bit ashamed of my father’s land. Among other things, there was no saddle, and some neighbors kept the horse for us. For a while, as my father was off getting the horse, we wandered the flats. I tried to talk about books I’d read that I knew he hadn’t read, but he hardly listened to me. He walked and smoked, walked and smoked, and the scenery was always the same. Until we heard the horn of my father’s car and then the man who kept the horse came, not riding the horse but leading it by the bridle. By the time we got back to the hut my father and the man had gone off in the car to settle some business and the horse was tied up waiting for us. You go first, I said. No, he said (it was clear his mind was on other things), you go. Not wanting to argue, I mounted the horse and broke straight into a gallop. When I got back he was sitting on the ground, against the wall of the hut, smoking. You ride well, he said. Then he got up and went over to the horse, saying that he wasn’t used to riding bareback, but he vaulted up anyway, and I showed him which way to go, telling him that over in that direction there was a river or actually a riverbed that was dry now but that filled up when it rained and was pretty, then he galloped off. He rode well. I’m a good horsewoman, but he was as good as I was or maybe better, I don’t know. At the time I thought he was better. Galloping without stirrups is hard and he galloped clinging to the horse’s back until he was out of sight. As I waited I counted the cigarette butts that he had stubbed out beside the hut and they made me want to learn to smoke. Hours later, as we were on our way back in my father’s car, him in front and me in back, he said that there was probably some pyramid lying buried under our land. I remember that my father turned his eyes from the road to look at him. Pyramids? Yes, he said, deep underground there must be lots of pyramids. My father didn’t say anything. From the darkness of the backseat, I asked him why he thought that. He didn’t answer. Then we started to talk about other things but I kept wondering why he’d said that about the pyramids. I kept thinking about pyramids. I kept thinking about my father’s stony plot of land and much later, when I’d lost touch with him, each time I went back to that barren place I thought about the buried pyramids, about the one time I’d seen him riding over the tops of the pyramids, and I imagined him in the hut, when he was left alone and sat there smoking.

Did you notice how much you have learned about Belano in this one, vivid memory of him as a teen? Smokes like a fiend, superb horseman, seems off in some other world, makes unique sorts of comments you never forget. And while you learn these things, you also retain the vivid details that Perla remembers, and you are left with that image of the superb young horseman alone in a hut, chain smoking.

Quim Font is interviewed many times during the book. In this monologue from October 1976, shortly before his family commits him to a mental institution, he responds to a question about Belano’s and Lima’s characters:

Now that the days are going by, coldly, in the cold way that days go by, I can say without the slightest resentment that Belano was a romantic, often pretentious, a good friend to his friends, I hope and trust, although no one really knew what he was thinking, probably not even Belano himself. Ulises Lima, on the other hand, was much friendlier and more radical. Sometimes he seemed like Vaché’s younger brother. Other times he seemed like an extraterrestrial. He smelled strange. This I know, this I can say, this I can attest to because on two unforgettable occasions he showered at my house. More precisely: he didn’t smell bad, he had a strange smell, as if he’d just emerged from a swamp and a desert at the same time. Extreme wetness and extreme dryness, the primordial soup and the barren plain. At the same time, gentlemen! A truly unnerving smell! It bothered me, for reasons that aren’t worth getting into here. His smell, I mean. Characterologically, Belano was extroverted and Ulises was introverted. In other words, I had more in common with Belano. Belano knew how to swim with the sharks much better than Lima did, no doubt about that. Much better than I did. He came across better, he knew how to handle things, he was more disciplined, he could pretend more convincingly. Good old Ulises was a ticking bomb, and what was worse, socially speaking, was that everyone knew or could sense that he was a ticking bomb and no one wanted him to get too close, for obvious and understandable reasons. Ah, Ulises Lima… He wrote constantly, that’s what I remember most about him, in the margins of books that he stole and on pieces of scrap paper that he was always losing. And he never wrote poems, he wrote stray lines that he’d assemble into long, strange poems later on if he was lucky…Belano, on the other hand, wrote in notebooks…They both still owe me money…

The memory of exceptional personal odors is a curious secondary theme throughout the book. It seemed to me that the accounts of odors were an embodiment, to choose a word, of “visceral realism.” After both men move to Europe, stories of Lima’s squalid living conditions are countered by stories of his bathing. Here is one sequence, from his time in Paris, a year after the New Year’s Eve escape from the Font home. The first voice is Hipólito Garces, a Peruvian who Lima had met in Mexico. It is very late at night, Garces has been waiting outside Lima’s room for hours, hoping to restore his parasitic relationship with Lima. Lima arrives and lets Garces in. Garces sells him a pile of books for an outrageous sum, which Lima pays, and then Garces begins to rant as Lima stands and stares him down. Garces:

And then I couldn’t take it anymore and I collapsed on the bed like a slut and I said: Ulises, I feel like shit, Ulises, man, my life is a disaster, I don’t know what’s wrong with me, I try to do things right but everything turns out wrong…I’m not the same person I used to be, and on and on I went, letting out everything that was torturing me inside, with my face in the blankets, in Ulises’s blankets, I have no idea where they came from but they smelled bad, not just the typical unwashed smell of a chamber de bonne, and not like Ulises, but like something else, like death, an ominous smell that suddenly wormed its way into my brain and made me sit up, holy shit, Ulises, where did you get these blankets, causita, from the morgue? And Ulises was still standing there, not moving, listening to me, and then I thought this is my chance to go and I got up and reached out my hand and touched his shoulder. It was like touching a statue.

Next, the testimony of one of the Peruvian women, Sofia Pellegrini:

They called him the Christ of the Rue des Eaux and they all made fun of him, even Roberto Rosas, who claimed to be his best friend in Paris…..I never went to see his place. I know people said horrible things about it, that it was a filthy hole, that the worst junk in Paris piled up there: trash, magazines, newspapers, books he stole from bookstores, and that all of it soon began to smell like the place and then rotted, blossomed, turned all kinds of crazy colors. They said he could spend whole days without eating a thing, months without a visit to the public baths, but I doubt it because I never saw him looking especially dirty.

Then Simone Darrieux:

Ulises Lima showered at my house. I was never thrilled about it. I don’t like to use a towel after somebody else, especially if we aren’t intimate in some way, physically and even emotionally, but still I let him use my shower, then I would gather up the towels and put them in the machine. It helped that he tried to be neat in my apartment. In his own way, but he tried and that’s what counts. After I shower I scrub the bathtub and pick the hair out of the drain. It may seem trivial but it drives me up the wall. I hate to find clumps of hair clogging the drain, especially if it isn’t mine. Then I pick up the towels I’ve used and fold them and leave them on the bidet until I have time to put them in the machine. The first few times he came he even brought his own soap, but I told him he didn’t have to, that he should feel free to use my soap and shampoo but that he shouldn’t even think about touching my sponge….He was a strange person. He wrote in the margins of books….You won’t believe this, but he used to shower with a book. I swear. He read in the shower. How do I know? Easy. Almost all his books were wet. At first I thought it was the rain. Ulises was a big walker. He hardly ever took the metro. He walked back and forth across Paris and when it rained he got soaked because he never stopped to wait for it to clear up. So his books, at least the ones he read most often, were always a little warped, sort of stiff, and I thought it was from the rain. But one day I noticed that he went into the bathroom with a dry book and when he came out the book was wet. That day my curiosity got the better of me. I went up to him and pulled the book away from him. Not only was the cover wet, some of the pages were too, and so were the notes in the margins, some maybe even written under the spray, the water making the ink run, and then I said, for God’s sake, I can’t believe it, you read in the shower! have you gone crazy? and he said he couldn’t help it but at least he only read poetry (and I didn’t understand why he said he only read poetry, not at the time, but now I do: he meant that he only read two or three pages, not a whole book), and then I started to laugh, I threw myself on the sofa, writhing in laughter, and he started to laugh too, both of us laughed for I don’t know how long.

Several dialogues by and about two of Belano’s lovers revolve around offensive odors. These are vivid enough to balance the book’s primary emphasis on the sounds of human speech. One of these scenes is in an interview with a self-absorbed Spanish ambulance-chaser and poet who sprinkles his conversation with quotes from Latin classical authors:

Xosé Lendoiro, Terme di Traiano, Rome, October 1992. I was no ordinary lawyer. Lupo ovem commisisti or Alter remus aquas, alter tibi radat harenas: either could be said of me with equal justice. And yet I’ve preferred to adhere to the Catullian noli pugnare duobus. Someday my merits will be recognized.

In those days I was traveling and conducting experiments. My practice as a lawyer or jurist afforded me sufficient income so that I could devote ample time to the noble art of poetry. Unde habeas quaerit nemo, sed oportet habere, which, simply put, means that no one inquires as to the source of one’s possessions, but possessions are necessary. An essential truth if one wants to devote oneself to one’s most secret calling: poets are dazzled by the spectacle of wealth…

Let us not lose sight of the fact that the purpose of the interview with this blowhard is to find out another scrap of information about either Arturo Belano or Ulises Lima. The comedy of blowhardiness has Lendoiro describe his post-divorce liberation as the release of a “giant” that was within him. The “giant” then inhabits the narrative like a third party.

Lendoiro’s tells of meeting Belano during travels through Spain in 1977. He stops at a campground where Belano has found work as a watchman after leaving Mexico for Europe. Lendoiro witnesses Belano perform a remarkable feat of heroism and offers him a job writing monthly literary reviews for Lendoiro’s poetry magazine. What follows is a love affair between Belano and Lendoiro’s daughter, who is also a poet as well as the principal contributor to the magazine. Lendoiro discovers their affair in the most shocking way, vividly evoked in one of the best single sentences in the novel, which I will let you find for yourself.

Lendoiro’s salf-absorption diverts that tale of woe back to himself and his riches, and we enter a sub-narrative about wealth and stink, in “visceral realist” style:

Regarding money, naturally, I have indelible memories. Memories that glisten like a drunkard in the rain or a sick man in the rain. There was a time when my money was the object of jokes and ridicule. I know that. Vilius argentums est auro, virtutibus aurum. I know there was a time, at the beginning of my magazine’s run, when my young collaborators mocked the source of my money. You pay poets, it was said, with the money you make from crooked businessmen, embezzlers, drug traffickers, murderers of women and children, money launderers, corrupt politicians. I never dignified this slander with a reply. Plus augmentantur rumores, quando negantur. Someone has to defend the murders, the crooks, the men who want divorces and aren’t prepared to surrender all their money to their wives; someone has to defend them. And my firm defended them all, and the giant absolved them and charged them a fair price. That’s democracy, you fools, I told them, it’s time you understood. For better or for worse. And instead of buying a yacht with the money I made, I started a literary magazine. And although I knew that the money troubled the consciences of some of the young poets of Barcelona and Madrid, when I had a free moment I would come up silently behind them and touch their backs with the tips of my fingers, which were perfectly manicured (no longer, since even my nails are ragged now), and I would whisper in their ears: non olet. It doesn’t smell. The coins earned in the urinals of Barcelona and Madrid don’t smell. The coins earned in the toilets of Zaragoza don’t smell. The coins earned in the sewers of Bilbao don’t smell. Or if they smell, they smell of money. They smell of what the giant dreams of doing with his money. Then the young poets would understand and nod, even if they didn’t entirely follow what I was saying, even if they didn’t comprehend every jot and tittle of the terrible, timeless lesson I’d meant to drum into their silly little heads. And if any of them failed to understand, which I doubt, they understood when they was their pieces published, when they smelled the freshly printed pages, when they saw their names on the cover or in the table of contents. It was then that they got a whiff of what money really smells like: like power, like the gracious gesture of a giant. And then there were no more jokes and they all grew up and followed me.

All except Arturo Belano, and he didn’t follow me for the simple reason that he wasn’t called. Sequitur superbos ultor a tergo deus. And everyone who had followed me embarked on a career in the world of letters or cemented a career already begun but still in its infancy, except for Arturo Belano, who buried himself in a world where everything stank, where everything stank of shit and urine and rot and poverty and sickness, a world where the stink was suffocating and numbing, and where the only thing that didn’t stink was my daughter’s body. And I didn’t lift a finger to put an end to their unnatural relationship, but I bided my time. And one day I discovered (don’t ask me how because I’ve forgotten) that even my daughter, my beautiful older daughter, had begun to smell to that wretched ex-watchman of the Castroverde campground. Her mouth had begun to smell. The smell worked its way into the walls of the apartment where the wretched ex-watchman of the Castroverde campground was living. And my daughter, whose hygiene I refuse to let anyone question, brushed her teeth constantly: when she got up, at midmorning, after lunch, at four in the afternoon, at seven, after dinner, before she went to bed, but there was no way to get rid of the smell, there was no way to eliminate or hide the smell that the watchman scented or sniffed like a cornered animal, and although my daughter rinsed her mouth with Listerine between brushings, the smell persisted. It would go away for a moment only to appear again when it was least expected: at four in the morning in the watchman’s big castaway bed…It was an unbearable smell that chipped away at his patience and tact, the smell of money, the smell of poetry, maybe even the smell of love.

My poor daughter. It’s my wisdom teeth, she said. My poor daughter. It’s my last wisdom tooth coming in. That’s why my mouth smells, she would protest, when faced with the increasing coolness of the ex-watchman of the Castroverde campground. Her wisdom tooth!...

You may wonder how I could recommend that you read an entire book that is populated with people and events the such as these. But if you glossed over the passages, I hope you go back into them slowly, and resolve to read each sentence and absorb it for just what it is, and then read the next, and so on. Do not race to the “conclusion,” because it’s one of the things that has gone missing.

So we have sound and smell. What of taste? Nothing. Touch? Nothing. Sight? Very little. But the sense of triste? That permeates the monologues, especially in the way they end, without punch, as if the bottom line in these memories is “so what?”

Lima is the gravitational center of this sadness. It infuses people’s memories of him throughout the book. Hugo Montero remembers a moment with Lima on a plane to Managua with a group of Mexican poets. “…and then he said, in a voice that broke my heart: let me read it.” Clara Cabeza, Octavio Paz’s secretary, remembers a meeting between Lima and Paz. “Then Don Octavio looked at me with those pretty eyes of his and said Clarita, back in the days of the visceral realists I would hardly have been ten years old, this was around 1924, wasn’t it? he said, addressing Lima. And Lima said yes, more or less, the 1920s, but he said it with such sadness in his voice, with such. . .emotion, or feeling, that I thought it was the saddest voice I would ever hear. I think I even felt ill."

You can’t write about someone named Ulises and omit an odyssey, can you? Lima’s odyssey is encapsulated in a scintillating monologue by Jacinito Requena:

One day I asked him where he’d been. He told me that he’d traveled along a river that connects Mexico and Central America. As far as I know, there is no such river. But he told me he’d traveled along this river and that now he could say he knew its twists and tributaries. A river of trees or a river of sand or a river of trees that in certain stretches became a river of sand. A constant flow of people without work, of the poor and starving, drugs and suffering. A river of clouds he’d sailed on for twelve months, where he’d found countless islands and outposts, although not all the islands were settled, and sometimes he thought he’d stay and live on one of them forever or that he’d die there.

Of all the islands he’d visited, two stood out. The island of the past, he said, where the only time was past time and the inhabitants were bored and more or less happy, but where the weight of illusion was so great that the island sank a little deeper into the river every day. And the island of the future, where the only time was the future, and the inhabitants were planners and strivers, such strivers, said Ulises, that they were likely to end up devouring one another.

Loss. People lose touch with each other. They drop out of sight; they move to places they don’t belong; they try to return; their friendships dissolve, they move on with their lives. Jacobo Urenda, a foreign correspondent, in 1996, recalls a dangerous night in an African village in the midst of a civil war. He has known the mature Arturo Belano for several years and has run into him again in the thick of this war. It is late at night, and in the morning the people will leave in two directions, either or both of which could prove fatal.

So I started to think about my wife and my home and then I started to think about Belano, how well he looked, what good shape he seemed to be in, better than in Angola, when he wanted to die, and better than in Kigali, when he didn’t want to die anymore but couldn’t get off this godforsaken continent, and when I’d finished the cigarette I pulled out another one, which really was the last, and to cheer myself up I even started to sing very softly to myself or in my head, a song by Atahualpa Yupanqui, my God, Atahualpa Yupanqui, and only then did I realize that I was extremely nervous and that if I wanted to sleep what I needed was to talk, and then I got up and took a few blind steps, first in deathly silence (for a fraction of a second I thought we were all dead, that the hope sustaining us was only an illusion, and I had the urge to go running out the door of that foul-smelling house), then I heard the sound of snoring, the barely audible whispering of those who were still awake and talking in the dark in Gio or Mano, Mandingo or Krahn, English, Spanish.

All languages seemed detestable to me just then.

To say that now is silly, I know. All those languages, all that whispering, simply a vicarious way of preserving our identity for an uncertain length of time. Ultimately, the truth is that I don’t know why they seemed detestable, maybe because in an absurd way I was lost somewhere in those two long rooms, lost in a region I didn’t know, a country I didn’t know, a continent I didn’t know, on a strange, elongated planet, or maybe because I knew I should get some sleep and I couldn’t. And then I felt for the wall and sat on the floor and opened my eyes extrawide trying and trying to see something, and then I curled up on the floor and closed my eyes and prayed to God (in whom I don’t believe) that I wouldn’t get sick, because there was a long walk ahead of me the next day, and then I fell asleep.

When I woke up it must have been close to four in the morning.

A few feet from me, Belano and López Lobo were talking. I saw the light of their cigarettes, and my first impulse was to get up and go to them. I wanted to share in the uncertainty of what the next day would bring, join the two shadows I glimpsed behind the cigarettes even if I had to crawl or go on my knees. But I didn’t. Something in the tone of their voices stopped me, something in the angle of their shadows, shadows sometimes dense, squat, warlike, and sometimes fragmented, dispersed, as if the bodies that cast them had already disappeared.

So I controlled myself and pretended to be asleep and listened….

Bolaño is able to extend the magic of this scene for six more, absolutely spellbinding, pages.

Throughout the long middle section of the book, we are brought back to excerpts from the January 1976 interview with the old visceral realist poet, Amadeo Salvatierra. He may be one of your favorite voices if you read the book. Salvatierra has lost two things. It is hard to tell which is the more important, his connection to Cesárea Tinajero or his connection to poetry:

Life left us all where we were meant to be or where it was convenient to leave us and then forgot us, which is as it should be…I remember her laugh, boys, I said, night was falling over Mexico City and Cesárea laughed like a ghost, like the invisible woman she was about to become, a laugh that made my heart shrink, a laugh that made me want to run away from her and at the same time made me understand beyond the shadow of a doubt that there was no place I could run to….and then she looked at me, without seeing me at first, then seeing me, and she smiled and said goodbye, Amadeo. And that was the last time I saw her alive. Cool as could be. And that was the end of everything…
Everyone forgot her, boys, except me, I said. Now that we’re old and past hope maybe a few remember her, but back then everyone forgot her and then they started to forget themselves, which is what happens when you forget your friends. Except for me….Like so many Mexicans, I too gave up poetry. Like so many thousands of Mexicans, I too turned my back on poetry. Like so many hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, I too, when the moment came, stopped writing and reading poetry. From then on, my life proceeded along the drabbest course you can imagine.

Without any inherent reason, Salvatierra’s 1976 monologues appear in sections that contain later and later interviews. They stitch the book together, and then, when all the 1996 interviews have been presented, “The Savage Detectives” section ends, and we see a title page for the next section that says, “The Sonora Desert (1976)”

JANUARY 1

Today I realized that what I wrote yesterday I really wrote today: everything from December 31 I wrote on January 1, i.e., today, and what I wrote on December 30 I wrote on the 31st, i.e., yesterday. What I write today, I’m really writing tomorrow, which for me will be today and yesterday, and also, in some sense, tomorrow: an invisible day. But enough of that.

It’s you-know-who again, but I won’t tell you what transpires in the final fifty pages. What I will tell you is that, after two full readings of the book and a third skimming of the countless passages I marked for later review, I could reenter this world and read it all again many more times.

I hardly ever read a book twice. The author I’ve reread more than any other is Homer. I have five translations of The Odyssey.

Baby Steps

2007-10-19T14:09:00.001-05:00

In so many aspects of our lives, the hill we have to climb seems huge. I would like to lose more than 50 pounds, for example. I have lost them before, but they find me again. I can’t lose them in a day. Well, to be perfectly honest, I can, but I wouldn’t survive what it would take to do that! I can’t lose them in a week or a month. But I can lose them, every one of them, if I change some fundamental “practices”, starting now and continuing to the end of today and then starting again tomorrow and continuing to the end of tomorrow, and so on. I can lose 50 pounds in six months if I make small changes in my practices and stick to those changes. The weight I have lost by tomorrow this time will be measured in ounces. By this time next week, we’ll be measuring pounds, and a month from now, we’ll be thinking in terms of tens of pounds.

This kind of thinking also applies to the vast idea of creating an entire state in which every child is read to. The project has to be broken down into a workable unit in which some fundamental practice changes, and then the unit has to be enlarged. Our READ from the START program changes the practice of one parent. When the other adults in that family network see the change in the toddler, their practices change, too. Voila! Out of “baby steps” of change undertaken by one individual, as many as sixteen adult relatives see something they want a part of.

We don’t teach family reading one-on-one. We teach classes of twenty at a time. The instruction is so easy to learn to do that the program is easy to copy. How many new parents live in your neighborhood, village, or town? If you offered READ from the START once a year, could you change the practices in every family with a new baby? If you think this way, in baby steps, you can imagine how feasible and practical it can be to create a state that has the highest literacy rate in the world, right up there with Japan and Iceland!

This kind of thinking belongs in local museums, too. Thinking in baby steps, you can move from boring to fascinating in the space of a few minutes, and you can remain there. Your museum doesn’t have to change over night, either. You can achieve “fascinating” in the midst of appalling clutter, the wrong lighting, poor sense of focus, deteriorating textiles and paper goods, you name it! You can achieve the most important thing by changing your practices. The rest of the necessary adjustments can come later.

These days I see baby steps nearly everywhere I look. Things appear to be on the move in Missouri’s local museums. The other day I stopped in to see the Kingdom of Callaway Historical Society’s storefront museum and had a wonderful surprise. I walked in and started to look around and one of the volunteers walked from the back of the room to greet me and make me feel welcome. Then she showed me a bit of what’s new. She pointed out a trunk full of objects at “kid level” that people are allowed to touch and handle. I saw a yo-yo. I asked her if she knew how to demonstrate it. She took it out, backhanded it up and down, and I was instantly transported to an ancient memory of myself, age eight or nine, competing without warrant in a yo-yo contest on the stage of the Isis Theatre in New Egypt, New Jersey. It was one of those on-stage moments when you realize, too late, what the “real” artists are able to do.

That lovely little moment was made possible by someone who used social skills in a teaching environment. History, after all, is a social field. Our knowledge of basic friendliness is so much more pertinent to working in museums than our knowledge of history or of conservation methods. When you volunteer in a museum, your most important product is a memory. As you greet the visitor, you are the museum's most important asset. What sort of experience will you shape for your visitor?

I had another great time recently at the Harlin Museum in West Plains. This is another place with challenges, and yet there is a sense there that all challenges can be broken down into things that are possible by individuals working in small, useful steps. Does this space look too cluttered? Reduce the number of objects competing for space and lighten the color of the walls! Problem with these textiles? Let the air circulate better! Baby steps, baby steps; that’s the way to think about it. Select a scale of work where you can see improvement by next week. Change practices, reap the rewards.

God's Instrument

2007-09-07T12:50:00.001-05:00

St. Francis Day is October 4. I have just learned that today. I looked it up because a prayer that is commonly attributed to St. Francis has been with me all my adult life and it’s time to share what I found in it. When I first heard it, I thought there was only one “Prayer of St. Francis.” It was sung at my first wedding, and I later paid an artist to do a calligraphy rendition of it for my wife.

Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
where there is hatred, let me sow love;
where there is injury, pardon;
where there is doubt, faith;
where there is despair, hope;
where there is darkness, light;
and where there is sadness, joy.

O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love;
for it is in giving that we receive,
it is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.
Amen.

Around the time I turned 50 and came to Missouri, I told my late cousin, Walt Bouman, who was a prominent theologian, that I had come to realize I had a calling as a “secular minister.” He chuckled and replied in his rich and resonant voice, “to those who are called, there is no distinction between the sacred and the secular. A minister is a minister.”

In the last couple of decades, I have developed some altogether contradictory religious ideas. I even hesitate to say “I” developed them. Maybe they developed me. I’m not being cute when I confess that I don’t know if there is a boundary that separates “my” action from action I do at the prompting of “that.”

I once began a journal, several years ago, lost in a computer failure, in which I was prompted to begin with the sentence, “God is not human” and go on from there. Though my religious tradition asserts that “God” is not subject to definition, we use the metaphors of humanity to express our sense of that which is beyond understanding. So when I speak of “God,” I am not suggesting that “he” has a gender, an age, or a point of view. I don’t know anything and yet I have something to say about this.

In the midst of a charette in Osage County, Missouri in 2001 I suddenly connected religious tradition to the work of a county historical society. Religion is prominent in the social customs of the people in Osage County. They even asked me to sing the Doxology as a blessing for our parting meal. I realized in the midst of a brainstorming session with them that the stewardship we know from our religious education is identical with the stewardship we must exercise in our voluntary associations.

Remember the Bible story of Cain and Abel? After the Bible’s first recorded murder, Cain barks back at an inquiring God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Of course, the lesson of this tale is, Yes, we are our brother’s keeper. We are the keepers of endangered species, as Noah discovered, much to his inconvenience. We are the keepers of strangers, and even reviled populations are composed of people who possess divine goodness, as Jesus taught in the parable of The Good Samaritan.

This sense of wide-ranging stewardship extends to historical work. A county historical society is inherently married in a relationship of stewardship of both the intelligence of the population and that population’s sense of relationship with place. No other entity in a county is so intimately connected with the stories that pertain to this place or to the things that distinguish this place from any other places.

If we are stewards of place, what may we do to increase people’s appreciation of all the beauties, virtues, sorrows, and other meanings that belong here and nowhere else? That was the question I posed in the charette in Osage County, Missouri, and the people there reached into their store of social skills, creativity, and kindness and developed a new form of activity that would engender love of place. For me, it was a religious experience. It was beyond “business as usual,” and it changed the way I see the work I do.

One of my avocations is singing. I keep in shape by vocalizing every morning during my 20-minute drive to work. One day as I approached the office I took the most remarkable breath I have ever drawn, and suddenly the opening of the Prayer of St. Francis popped into mind, and it occurred to me that God had just drawn that breath, through me. I had experienced the feeling of being the instrument of God’s breathing. One thought led to another, and before you know it, I’d embraced an idea that “God loves to sing, and I’m the only opportunity for God to sing in the space I occupy.” So I became the instrument of God’s love of singing, and that concept rippled out in all directions until virtually everything I touch or do is touched or done with a sense of a divine presence not of my making, but which inhabits and uses me. And what is true in my thinking about me, is true in my thinking about you. My sense of the divine is much more immediate since these ideas were granted to me by some deity called “Holy Spirit” in one tradition, or “Athena” in another.

Three years ago I quoted the opening line of The Prayer of St. Francis at a charette in the Champ Clark House in Bowling Green, Missouri. “This house may be thought of as an instrument of God’s purpose,” I said. “What sort of purpose becomes divine participation?” Something to that effect. I wasn’t implying that the trustees convert the house into a place of worship, but that they see the house as an instrument of active energy rather than as a stationary object intended as a container of various items and the occasional visitor. A historic house is a tool of education. The prayer might be extended this way: “Lord make us and this historic house the instruments of a learning that is worthy of divine participation. Where there is hesitancy, let me extend a hospitable greeting; where there is befuddlement, an opening moment of focus; where there is indifference, let me spark interest; where there is too much to tell; help me talk less, and listen more!”

I know an instrument of learning that is also the product of prayer. It’s the touring exhibit on Sac and Fox heritage. The exhibit contains and communicates a Sac and Fox story about “Twelve Boys” and their sacrifice of self to provide enduring aid to the people. Sandra Massey, who served as the lead tribal liaison in developing the exhibit content, recently wrote me an eloquent letter about the meaning of the exhibit as a tangible thing. She said, “Because the exhibit is the result not only of tribal history but prayer, it has taken on a spirit of its own. It is connected to the heart of the people through the Twelve Boys, who have found a modern venue through which to help the Sac and Fox survive in more than a physical sense….The Missouri Humanities Council did not form a partnership with the Sac and Fox to facilitate the return to our homelands, but through the “Homeland” exhibit it happened. Where the exhibit may stand so also is our presence as a people.”

Seven years ago I was among crowds of visitors in the Basilica of St. Francis in the town of Assisi in Italy. Inside that space I felt positively infused with the hopeful and holy energy that pilgrims had brought there. I have not had such a feeling before or since. It opened me to considering another indefinable and indescribable “that,” which some refer to as “the power of prayer.” I sensed that power as an environment that day in Assisi. I believe now that it radiates outward like radio waves, such that the thing we pray for may or may not be the thing affected by the energy we release and receive in the mental stance of a prayer. Indeed, this text is a prayer. You don’t have to relay it to 16 friends. If you got this far, the energy is already at work.

Hands-On, Body-Engaged Learning

2007-08-23T20:28:00.001-05:00

Recently I stopped in to see what was going on at an outdoor entertainment venue. I’m glad I had my camera, because what I thought would just be a quick look around became what can only be called staring. I realized that although people of all ages appeared to be enjoying themselves, the play environment seemed like a history park.

The area where I stopped was devoted to the experience of getting into something unusual and getting the feel of it. Here’s a wagon, or half of one, designed for photo ops. People couldn’t resist trying it on for size.

And here’s a dugout canoe that made me wonder of Lewis and Clark’s party had traded for something like this with the tribes along the Missouri River. While I stood there with my camera, the canoe was almost never empty!

You can see in this next shot that the space people enter is designed in several levels, even though it didn’t have to be. The visitor not only enters the space horizontally, but must ascend and descend to gain passage through it. There is no direct route. Yonder, near a replica Mississippi River boat, I saw children playing in the dirt by a simulated stream. Were they “panning for gold?” I didn’t get over there to find out.

And here, bordering this zone of play is an old-fashioned split-rail fence and a big windmill. What museum is this?

Not many paces beyond this area, I spotted parents and children of all ages enjoying some water jets that were clearly designed to be part of the hands-on experience of this place.

I started to see this environment with new eyes, the eyes of someone who’s trying to teach “visitor-centered thinking.” Here is an environment designed to absorb the energy of children and to gratify the adults who are hoping the kids will have a good time.

What history museum is this? It’s not! It’s a new learning environment at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis. It is not only hands-on, but body-involved. I saw some kind of tree house that was accessible by a sturdy walkway. Under the tree house hung simulated “jungle vines” that children grabbed and swung on. On the other side of a walkway was a rope bridge between one tree and another, with rope mesh on the sides to prevent any falls. It was not a stable walk, and the instability tempted parents as well as kids.

A botanical garden is a prime example of a space that has traditionally served self-guided individuals and couples. In recent years, this garden has devoted enormous attention to the cultivation of tomorrow’s members and patrons. They have invested in family-friendly experiences that are physical, creative, social, and fun. All of this fun impinges not a bit on the self-guided people who are seeking the pleasures of seeing the ever-changing face of this planted environment.

If you are involved in a local museum or historic house, I hope you see something you can use in this photo-blog. Whether you sell cars or operate a museum, your most important product is a good memory. You’ve got to put the visitor’s experience at the center of your thinking. Museum work these days is not about your skill in displaying objects for self-guided learners. It is about your ability to translate everything you know about good hospitality to the cultivation of people’s interest.

Graphic Artist in the Garden

2007-08-01T12:43:00.001-05:00

My long-term friend, David Watkins, was already a fine graphic designer when I knew him as an undergraduate at Penn State in the 60s. He married the love of his life, Susan, and moved to make a family, a life, and a career with her at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

That’s David a couple of weeks ago with his granddaughter, Lily. His garden has been a living work of graphic art as long as I’ve made the nearly-annual visits there with San.

This is a blog about David’s artistic gift, how he creates interest by the art of selecting and composing what is in the frame, for David is an art photographer, too, and we had gone to Ithaca for his big gallery opening there.

Outside, the “frame” is what is on the boundary of the residential lot. Within the lot, David has created a variety of garden beds near a large deck, so those beds have become the “frame” for human interaction on the deck. The beds themselves are framed by deck, lawn, and a pathway. There is reciprocity there. In the small zone where human space meets plant space, David has arranged potted plants as well as a small arrangement of smooth rocks. This part of the garden frame has more human presence than the part beyond it. See here, what you face while standing on the edge of the deck and look toward the slight rise to the back yard:

Shift perspective just a tad, and you see David’s eye for color, form, and texture capture your attention. Your eye is compelled into the center of the space by that beautiful rose purple coleus in that rustic-looking pot.

Ascend into the yard and look at that big lime-green hosta, and see how he “frames” the key feature with variety on one side – more kinds of potted coleus – and consistency on the lawn side – a border or silvery purple heucheras, not in pots but “grounded.” We are now in the zone of the yard.

Looking beyond this view, the visitor sees a steep slope down to a pathway that runs the length of the house out to the street. As the overhead canopy produced too much shade for daylilies, David converted the planting to a hosta gallery, each variety planted next to a dissimilar one, the whole bed tied together with large juniper bushes above and small begonias below, with a small border of hand-set stones to buffer the more austere texture of the poured concrete walkway.

Color, form, texture, composition: the elements of my friend's special talent. In the art gallery, those gifts produce wonderful evocations of what is magical in the zone where the natural meets the man-made. Here is a detail David noticed while visiting somewhere; some tulips drooping next to a plaster wall, like something you would see in a painting by one of the Dutch masters. He made the picture, cropped it to balance the flat surface above the flowers with the place where the wall's man-made curvature meets the natural floral curves, balanced the illumination just so….and it was breathtaking!

Here is a large photograph he printed on canvas rather than paper, a pond somewhere in Vermont, utterly simple as a graphic statement.

Finally, here is an example of graphic manipulation of the image to move along the path from realism toward abstraction. He has used computer software to subtract visual detail and enhance what remains, but not so much that you have left realism entirely. I have watched him work on images in his studio, tweaking this and that to see how it will affect the image, and finally settling on an array of choices that represent what the artist’s eye sought out.

Suggestive Pacing

2007-07-25T11:55:00.001-05:00

If you’ve read more than one of my blogs, you know that I pay special attention to how a book begins. I didn’t learn to read entirely by reading. There were helpful voices along the way, such as Ezra Pound’s book An ABC of Reading, or Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, or my weekly poetry tutorial with Hayden Carruth back in 1975. We’d sit outside on balmy afternoons that fall, wild Asters in bloom by the bubbling brook beside his house in Johnson, Vermont, and he would show me what he noticed in my poems. He always noticed more than what I was conscious of writing. In that process of simple affirmation, he taught me to appreciate what was truly “mine” in the way I set things down. He did this in such a way that I didn’t have to force what was natural to me. I just had to open a door and get “myself” out of the way, and then see the sorts of things he had seen in the results. He found it remarkable that I was an aspiring poet who didn’t read much poetry. I tried to, I really did, but I am drawn more to narrative writing. That’s what I like to read.

Here is the beginning of a haunting narrative:

When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he’d reach out to touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream from which he’d wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and loped soundlessly into the dark.

With the first gray light he rose and left the boy sleeping and walked out to the road and squatted and studied the country to the south. Barren, silent, godless. He thought the month was October but he wasnt sure. He hadnt kept a calendar for years. They were moving south. There’d be no surviving another winter here.

When it was light enough to use the binoculars he glassed the valley below. Everything paling away into the murk. The soft ash blowing in loose swirls over the blacktop. He studied what he could see. The segments of road down there among the dead trees. Looking for anything of color. Any movement. Any trace of standing smoke. He lowered the glasses and pulled down the cotton mask from his face and wiped his nose on the back of his wrist and then glassed the country again. Then he just sat there holding the binoculars and watching the ashen daylight congeal over the land. He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke.

The author is Cormack McCarthy. The book is The Road. We enter the story in a factual statement about a man and a child sleeping for an undefined number of nights, cold, outside in the woods. Their environment is unnaturally dark and growing darker all the time. The man apparently touches the child to see if he is still alive. Each small breath is “precious.” The two people stink. The man has dreamed of them “like pilgrims in a fable swallowed up and lost…”

In this first paragraph, there is something strange about the rhythm of the sentences. Some have a gesture of length to them, and then come some that begin with a stark noun, like the second sentence, “Nights dark beyond darkness…” Words left out, as if “saving breath” for the minimum number to get an idea out. The third sentence works the same way, saving breath. Then two longer sentences followed by the need to “catch breath,” in a manner of speaking. Back and forth it goes, moderately long sentences and “catching breath” sentences.

By the second paragraph, the writer is not just saving words, he is saving apostrophes. The man “wasnt” sure of the month. He “hadnt” kept a calendar for years. Years: the strange situation of the man and the child, in a dimming environment, has been an extended time. The geographical location of the two has become critical to their survival.

In the third paragraph, we see “the soft ash blowing in lose swirls over the blacktop.” The man keeps his face covered with a white cotton mask. In the last sentence of the third paragraph, we learn that the child is a boy, and the boy is the “warrant” for the man. And even a comma is spared in the last sentence of that paragraph: “If he is not the word of God God never spoke.”

The white cotton mask suggests that breath is not “precious” only because it is a child’s breath. ALL breath is precious when the air is full of “soft ash blowing in loose swirls.” Anyone who has ever cleaned the ash out of the fireplace knows how fine it is, how you don’t want to take a lungful of it as you sweep. The environment the man and child inhabit is dark and growing darker, and fine ash covers everything, and they have to be wary as they make their pilgrimage south to warmer country.

If the boy is the warrant for the man, what would the man do without the boy? Is the theme of this story what Albert Schweitzer called his central tenet, the “reverence for human life?” Why is the landscape “godless” while the man considers the child the virtual “word of God?”

A few pages later McCormack brings religion back into this godless landscape:

It took two days to cross that ashen scabland. The road beyond ran along the crest of a ridge where the barren woodland fell away on every side. It’s snowing, the boy said. He looked at the sky. A single gray flake sifting down. He caught it in his hand and watched it expire there like the last host of christendom.

They pushed on together with the tarp pulled over them. The wet gray flakes twisting and falling out of nothing. Gray slush by the roadside. Black water running from under the sodden drifts of ash. No more balefires on the distant ridges. He thought the bloodcults must have all consumed one another. No one traveled this road. No road-agents, no marauders. After a while they came to a roadside garage and they stood within the open door and looked out at the gray sleet gusting down out of the high country.

Again the narrative pace has to “conserve its breath.” There could have been a comma after “the tarp pulled over them.” Instead, there is a pause for breath and a continuation, each phrase a sentence in its own right, allowing for shortness of breath.

A little later, before we’ve read much more than half an hour into this tale, we get a picture of what the human environment was like several years earlier.

In those first years the roads were peopled with refugees shrouded up in their clothing. Wearing masks and goggles, sitting in their rags by the side of the road like ruined aviators. Their barrows heaped with shoddy. Towing wagons or carts. Their eyes bright in their skulls. Creedless shells of men tottering down the causeways like migrants in a feverland. The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look around you. Ever is a long time. But the boy knew what he knew. That ever is no time at all.

I thought of the “death of the humanities” when I read that reference to “old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night” at a time when all people appeared to be “creedless shells of men.” My late cousin Walt, the theologian, once quipped that “God is what’s left after everything else is gone.” In the narrative at hand, the life of the boy is the warrant for the life of the man, and it becomes apparent that the man has trouble breathing and that they are both slowly starving.

Halfway into the story,

They scrabbled through the charred ruins of houses they would not have entered before. A corpse floating in the black water of a basement among the trash and rusting ductwork. He stood in a livingroom partly burned and open to the sky. The waterbuckled boards sloping away into the yard. Soggy volumes in a bookcase. He took one down and opened it and then put it back. Everything damp. Rotting. In a drawer he found a candle. No way to light it. He put it in his pocket. He walked out in the gray light and stood and he saw for a brief moment the absolute truth of the world. The cold relentless circling of the intestate earth. Darkness implacable. The blind dogs of the sun in their running. The crushing black vacuum of the universe. And somewhere two hunted animals trembling like groundfoxes in their cover. Borrowed time and borrowed world and borrowed eyes with which to sorrow it.

Despite the desperation of the situation, this tale moves fast on a concentrated fuel that is McCormack’s imagination. The environment may be in the last stage of collapse, but the energy that sustains a consistent narrative “voice” is perfectly focused and tuned. I felt I was breaking the spell every time I had to set the story down, and I finished it in a single day’s reading. There is something affirmative in this bleak and hopeless tale, or you wouldn’t keep turning the pages. It shapes an answer to the puzzle of faith when everything around is “godless” or “creedless.” When you read it, let the sentences guide your speed. They will set your pace. Hold to the pace they set. Absorb. Reflect.