Writer's Note: I haven't been in New York since September 2008 and I miss it, and miss it less than I thought I would, but much more than I can convey; and this piece, written about seven years ago, captures some of what I think there is to miss...
Memorial Day 2002
A Letter from New York: “Tomorrow Mountain”
On 13 Conversations about One Thing, Gosford Park,
Verve Remixed, Lena Horne, and Imagining a Changed World
I stood at the edge of a block looking down the street, trying to decide if I wanted to walk down this street to get to the main avenue on which I’d walk until I found a place where I wanted to eat. I stood and I watched the green car go slowly—certainly no more than twenty-five to thirty miles an hour—down the street when suddenly an East Indian girl, slim and in a purple top and black shorts, backed into the street to catch what looked like a spongy football. From my perspective she seemed far enough in front of the car to make it to the other side of the street…
I had expected it to be another quiet holiday weekend. I had made no significant plans; I rarely made significant plans these days. On Thursday, May 23rd, I saw Oliver Parker’s The Importance of Being Earnest, an entertaining movie with especially good performances by Frances O’Connor and Colin Firth, though not as well-made or as potent as Parker’s treatment of Wilde’s An Ideal Husband. (I also found Rupert Everett meretricious in both films.) On Friday, I saw 13 Conversations about One Thing, a film directed by Jill Sprecher. The film unfolds in the form of interconnected cinematic short stories set in New York and focusing on the meaning of existence and the occurrence of happiness, love, and luck. One segment featured a manager in an insurance claims office who has a rather bitter take on life, played by Alan Arkin. The manager has been work-driven, and that alienated him from his wife and son, and so he now has an ex-wife and a son who is a drug addict, thief, and subject to legal prosecution. The manager has a conversation in a bar with a successful young lawyer, played by Matthew McConaughey, in which the lawyer disputes the notion of luck, and on his way home the lawyer hits a young woman, and leaves her, but suffers guilt. The young woman, a housecleaner who had previously believed her life had a purpose even though she wasn’t sure what it was, is played by Clea DuVall. The accident is one thing that forces this young woman to reconsider her positive perspective; another more important factor is her being suspected a thief by a man whose apartment she conscientiously cleaned. The filmmaking is austere, clear, and the conversations, direct and believable, contain daily details, observations, questions, feelings, and human contradictions. The conversations are part of stories that connect and flash back on one another to create an interesting puzzle-like form in an exploration of contemporary human existence, making this the kind of film that justifies and enriches my own film-going experience.
Saturday, I took the train from Queens into Manhattan to see a personal acquaintance perform as part of a band named George in the bandshell in Central Park, near Summerstage, not far from 72nd Street. The concert started a little after noon, and the group consisted of two guitar players, a harmonica player, a drummer, a lead singer and two backup singers. The music was uptempo rock with strong rhythm and blues and folk music influences (Native American, for one; and country for another, according to the lead singer). The show was part of a Memorial Day weekend celebration. There was military personnel in attendance, with men in camouflage clothes wrestling on a mat (their faces were bland and boyish, but their eyes had a kind of hypnotized glaze that made me wonder about repressed homoeroticism); and there was also a display of guns and artillery. I enjoyed the musical performance, then walked over and spoke to the wife of the guitar player who’d invited me. She and I had met when we worked for a nonprofit corporation in the early 1990s, and had become friends, a friendship partly rooted in my sense of her as more bohemian and radical than she actually was. I hadn’t seen her or her husband in about a year, and there was now a hesitant affection and attention when we spoke. When her husband joined us, he gave her a hug, hugged me, then he picked up their daughter. They are an “interracial couple,” she African-American and he an American of European descent, and their daughter is an obviously loved child. I told him I liked the show though the acoustics weren’t good, and he agreed that the bandshell hadn’t actually been built for that kind of music (electric music?). He went back to help pack up the band’s instruments, and me and my friend talked a little before I said goodbye.
I walked through a pathway designated as a poets’ walk; it is a broad walkway lined with benches, fences, trees, and beyond the trees are lawns; and it is one of my favorite places in the park. Nearby was a large sculpture in the form of a silver tree, the kind of thing that might be seen as ugly or vulgar, but I liked it.
I began to walk out of the park. I thought about the hesitance that had hovered over my conversation with my friend. I thought about the things within me that had sometimes made my own life difficult: my idealism, my shyness, my impatience with others, and my anger at perceived misunderstandings and stupidity.
Then, I delivered a package of journals featuring my published work to an older male friend who lived near by. He’d told me when we’d had lunch in the restaurant Josephina near Lincoln Center weeks before that he wanted to see the publications. I walked around before going to see Robert Altman’s Gosford Park for the second time, this time in a theater on the upper east side of Manhattan.
The film had broken and been crudely repaired since I’d first seen it—it’s been playing for months. However, it’s a very good-looking film, well-organized, with smooth pacing. The film is set in England on a large country estate. It is a comedy of manners, a melodrama of bad marriages and relationships, a critique of class roles, and a murdery mystery, with an implicit tribute to art in the appreciated piano and singing performances of Jeremy Northam as actor-singer Ivor Novello. All the film’s performances are terrific. I especially liked Ryan Phillippe, Clive Owen, Kristin Scott Thomas, Emily Watson, Kelly MacDonald, and Jeremy Northam. If the film has a flaw, I cannot see it. Leaving I asked the concession stand operator, a very young man, if he liked working in the theater and he indicated that it was a rather mixed experience. Walking away from the theater, it occurred to me that, unlike in the past, I rarely saw films on the upper east side of Manhattan. I used to see films all over the city often, and now I’m more likely to see films in Greenwich Village, the refurbished Times Square area, the west side of Manhattan, or in Queens. I thought how easy it is to develop habits and made a small promise to vary soon the theaters I visited.
I walked around the city, and I didn’t get home until late, and I read and listened to music before falling asleep: Verve Remixed, and Lena Horne’s Stormy Monday.
The Verve album provides an opportunity for contemporary dance music producers to give the voices of singers such as Dinah Washington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Nina Simone new musical contexts, though it is a sense of emotional or social context that many of the songs lack thanks to these remixes. (The dance music is almost abstract, which gives it a likeness to some jazz; however, jazz has greater sonic texture, and one perceives more intellectual and emotional content, more humanity, in jazz.) One of the strongest productions on Verve Remixed is Dinah Washington’s “Is You Is Or Is You Ain’t My Baby?” with a remix by Rae and Christian. Washington brings the world into the song in her attitude—tough, honest. The two Nina Simone selections are probably the best. Simone is an iconoclast, and her “Feelin’ Good,” remixed by Joe Claussell, has a jazzy ambience with percussion and tinkling piano. Simone’s “See-Line Woman” is remixed by Masters at Work. Ella Fitzgerald’s “Wait Till You See Him,” remixed by De-Phazz, is terrific, enchanted and enchanting, full of desire and admiration. However, Sarah Vaughan’s “Summertime,” remixed by UFO, has the greatest of singers hardly making an impression. Nor is the Shirley Horn (“Return to Paradise”), remixed by Mark De Clive-Lowe, or Billie Holiday (“Don’t Explain”), remixed by Dzihan and Kamien, noteworthy. However, Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit,” remixed by Tricky, has a blaring trumpet and drumbeats that offer nice accents to Holiday’s dramatic reading. Possibly this album will serve as an introduction of these singers to a new generation. (Must the preferred styles of the young be utilized to attract them or are talent, intelligence, and use-value enough?)
The Lena Horne record is a pleasure. First released in 1957, the album has just been re-released with ten bonus tracks for a total of twenty-one. The original album’s highlights include: “Tomorrow Mountain,” by Duke Ellington and John LaTouche, along with “Summertime,” by Gershwin and Heyward, “Mad about the Boy,” by Noel Coward, “Baby, Won’t You Please Come Home?,” by Warfield and Williams, “Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home,” by Arlen and Mercer, and “Just One of Those Things” by Cole Porter. The bonus tracks include: “Come Runnin’,” by Roc Hillman, “Surrey with the Fringe on Top,” by Rodgers and Hammerstein II, and “Sweet Thing” by Walberg and Herget. Horne sings these songs as if they are part of her natural method of self-expression.
Many of these songs are love songs, and the secret, or the principal energy, in Lena Horne’s singing on this album might be eroticism. One of my favorite songs on the album, a bonus release, is “What’s Right for You (Is Right for Me),” written by Doris, Goodman, and Gluckman. Horne sounds charming, excited, and (to my ears) sexually greedy—she sounds almost masculine in her directness, in that usually one hears a man “on the make,” but not a woman—and it’s a funny, sexy, and wholly persuasive performance.
“Any Place I Hang My Hat Is Home” is an assertion of restless independence, but there’s a movement in the song when the music goes low and Horne’s voice turns contemplative. One hears a reflection on the lyrics, and of the self’s interpretation of phenomena, that evoke the mystery of personality.
Lena Horne was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I often think that I hear something southern in her very feminine voice. (Masculine? Forceful. Feminine? Pretty, sensitive. Horne’s singing is at once forceful, pretty, and sensitive.) Horne’s career began when she was very young, and she was performing in the chorus line at the Cotton Club by the time she was 17. She performed as a singer with several well-known bands, including those of Noble Sissle, Charlie Barnet, Teddy Wilson, and Artie Shaw. She starred in the films Cabin in the Sky and Stormy Weather. She was favored as a World War II pin-up among African-American soldiers. However, neither Horne’s career or glamour image prevented her from becoming involved in the Civil Rights movement, which she did as part of the National Council for Negro Women and as an individual. Unfortunately, her father, son, and husband died in the early 1970s and she withdrew from performing. She returned almost a decade later, co-starring in The Wiz with Diana Ross and Michael Jackson, and starring in her own one woman show on Broadway, The Lady and Her Music, which received critical and popular acclaim. Her more recent albums, such as We’ll Be Together Again, exemplify her unique talent.
In “Tomorrow Mountain,” the song that begins the Stormy Weather album, Horne sings, “Just across Tomorrow Mountain there’s a happy city, they say.” It is a happy city where people are grand and every day is Christmas, with a “scotch and soda fountain” and “cigarette trees.” Kitchens are lined with gold, it rains Chanel No. 5, and there are diamond bushes. “Can’t you see Tomorrow Mountain? Can’t you watch it glimmer and glow? It’s a wonderful town, that’s upside down…and it’s full of easy dough. Won’t you pack your bags and go?” It is, of course, a utopia: nowhere; but Horne sings this song and the other songs on the album with an enthusiasm and intensity that make the album as fresh as morning coffee, afternoon sun, or evening coolness.
Sunday, I came into the city and had a late breakfast in a pleasant diner in the upper 40s on the west side. I walked downtown and stopped at Barnes & Noble on 8th Street and read from Robin D.G. Kelley’s The Black Radical Imagination in which he argues that love and hope, a vision of changed selves and changed institutions, not oppression and anger, have most inspired political thought and social movements. Then I sat in Washington Square Park reading from The Works of Plato. Reading Plato on Socrates, I thought how interesting it was that Socrates’ attempts at acquiring knowledge and providing philosophical critique were hampered by rumor and the personal vanity and resentment of others, as well as established tradition supported by the power of the state. How little and how much has changed?
I thought about things I have hoped for over the years: intellectual comrades, and financial security.
I slept in a little late on Monday, Memorial Day. I had dreamed that I was happily helping a female relative cook a holiday meal, a pleasant dream that caused me pain upon awaking—she has, in fact, been dead for five years.
I went out for a turkey breast sandwich and sat in a park, where I ate. I thought about how being disenfranchised (not part of established systems of effort and reward) is similar to being free in that one has the time to pursue one’s inclinations—though, unlike a state of freedom, one doesn’t have the opportunity or resources. I went home, and went to bed, listening to music, reading, sleeping. I read some of Jerry Rosco’s biography of writer Glenway Wescott and a newspaper article in which someone said people should take a moment from their shopping and barbecuing to remember that Memorial Day is intended to commemorate people who gave their lives in service to their country. I woke in late afternoon, did minor chores, then felt very hungry and went out.
I stood at the edge of a block looking down the street, trying to decide if I wanted to walk down this street to get to the main avenue on which I’d walk until I found a place where I wanted to eat. I stood and I watched the green car go slowly—certainly no more than twenty-five to thirty miles an hour—down the street when suddenly an East Indian girl, slim and in a purple top and in black shorts, backed into the street to catch what looked like a spongy football. From my perspective she seemed far enough in front of the car to make it to the other side of the street, but she was not. She was hit. A small crowd began to gather, and I began to walk toward the accident. The girl—about 13?—was in a semi-fetal position on the ground, mostly unmoving. The street was one block away from the one on which I lived, parallel to it, and I often walked here but I did not know the girl who was hit nor did I know the people gathering. Someone, after hesitating to watch, went inside to call an ambulance. The tanned woman in the car, middle age, attractive with dyed blonde hair, cried out, “You see, I stopped,” then “Would someone please call my husband?” She had an accent but I’m terrible with accents: was she Latino, East European, East Indian? There are no pay phones on the street, which is lined with private family homes. I watched for a time, but didn’t like the sight of the growing crowd. Were they concerned or was this entertainment? I couldn’t do anything. I walked away, and saw an ambulance coming.
I walked to a pizza place for a couple of slices. I thought of how quickly the accident had happened and wondered how anyone who saw it could be entirely sure of what he saw: was the girl’s top purple and her shorts black? When I got back to the scene of the accident, the girl, the woman in the car, the crowd, and the ambulance were gone. I asked a man on the street, “Did the ambulance take the girl to the hospital?” He said, “I don’t know anything about that.” Neither did I. We are simply unknown and unknowing neighbors.
(c) DG
Friday, January 30, 2009
Thursday, January 29, 2009
United Daughters of the Confederacy
Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, and he is the forty-fourth president; and much has been made of him being the first African-American president, a distinction trumpeted so much on his inauguration day that it sounded like an official title. I thought the iterations of the man's ethnicity were a sign of how simple rather than how sophisticated Americans are, but days ago, I was in a south Louisiana library that is getting rid of some of its magazine stock and I saw copies of the United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine being sold for ten cents, and I looked through some of them and bought two copies as historical items. The United Daughters of the Confederacy publications are dated 1972 and they are reminders of how recently racism has been a proud fact of southern life.
The members of United Daughters of the Confederacy were not only old women whose fathers or grandfathers were involved with the American civil war on the side of slavery, but individuals who were very young, and both female and male, in 1972 (there are photographs of members in the magazine; and, I wonder, where are they now?). The September 1972 United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine issue features a "Beliefs of Our Forefathers" article on page 29 under the rubric "Children of the Confederacy," a regular feature of the publication. In the article on confederate beliefs, the writer, who goes by her husband's name, and styles herself "historian and news editor," Mrs. Charles L. Deevers, discusses a confederate "catechism" that includes a defense of states' rights, saying that what led to the war between the states was "the disregard of those in power for the rights" of the southern states, the right to self-regulation. She, Mrs. Deevers, asserts that the "people of the south did not believe that slavery was right, and many felt that the south could work out their own problems and would eventually free the slaves because they were becoming the white man's burden." The writer discusses the economic concerns of slave holders (the economic loss if enslaved Africans were freed; and the high tariff proposed by northerners) and the "historian" Mrs. Deevers insists that enslaved Africans were well-cared for because they were valuable property ("They were well cared for because they were important to their owners") and goes on to note the "many stories" of kindness shown to Negroes; but, she says the Dred Scott decision "caused more trouble" and Abraham Lincoln's election "was the final blow." These unreconstructed views are interesting to read, though repellent; and I am reminded--thanks to Wayne Parent's book Inside the Carnival: Unmasking Louisiana Politics, from LSU Press, 2004, that even after the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were passed, the south resisted respecting Africans and African-Americans; and southern states passed laws to disenfranchise blacks and prevent voting and civic participation, an exercise of states' rights, matters that made necessary the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. (I recall, too, W.E. B. DuBois's commentary on the south's behavior after the civil war in The Souls of Black Folk.)
In the November 1972 issue of the United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine, in an article under the heading "Children of the Confederacy" on education by "historian" Mrs. Charles L. Deevers (page 27), the author Mrs. Deevers notes that there were no public schools in the south before the war, that planters' children were educated at home, that northern textbooks drove "intelligent" southern male teachers out of the teaching profession (just as later, southern boys were inclined to leave the classroom for the battlefied), that a southern or confederate teaching assocication was formed in 1862, that girls schools were expensive, etc. It is a rather feeble attempt to affirm white southern intelligence and education, the kind of thing that is rebutted with even small research or logical thinking. For instance, in the book The History of Southern Literature, edited by Rubin, Jackson, Moore, Simpson, and Young, from LSU Press, 1985, Lewis P. Simpson in "The Mind of the Antebellum South" and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld in "The Civil War and Authorship" discuss the limits of southern intellectual and literary life. The south did have artists, intellectuals, and scientists, but because of their irrationalism and pride--because of their commitment to refusing to register or respect the humanity of Africans, and the southern dependence on and defense of slavery--the antebellum south had few lasting or significant intellectual or literary accomplishments. It is a great example of how response to others can lead to self-betrayal: limiting the empathy and imagination with which we view others can lead to intellectual limits that curtail what we can think and do.
It was just a few years after 1972, when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, an event I watched with my class: and one of the students, a southern white boy, said something on the order of, "Well, we have the niggers to thank for that." (It may have been the same white boy who wrote me, just weeks ago, wanting to get in touch with me, his old classmate. I wonder sometimes, more and more, if other people do not remember the things that I recall.)
Politics, the struggle over resources and values, a struggle that determines the social order, is a realm of compromise and reconciliation at its best; and Barack Obama is a figure of reconciliation. Obviously the election of Barack Obama is a sign of enlightenment, though it does not augur a perfect age or a perfect people: for one thing, the United Daughters of the Confederacy remains an active group, with an online presence, and its current leader states, "I am a member of The United Daughters of the Confederacy because I feel it would greatly please my ancestor to know that I am a member. It would please him to know that I appreciate what he did and delight his soldier love to know that I do not consider the cause which he held so dear to be lost or forgotten."
The members of United Daughters of the Confederacy were not only old women whose fathers or grandfathers were involved with the American civil war on the side of slavery, but individuals who were very young, and both female and male, in 1972 (there are photographs of members in the magazine; and, I wonder, where are they now?). The September 1972 United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine issue features a "Beliefs of Our Forefathers" article on page 29 under the rubric "Children of the Confederacy," a regular feature of the publication. In the article on confederate beliefs, the writer, who goes by her husband's name, and styles herself "historian and news editor," Mrs. Charles L. Deevers, discusses a confederate "catechism" that includes a defense of states' rights, saying that what led to the war between the states was "the disregard of those in power for the rights" of the southern states, the right to self-regulation. She, Mrs. Deevers, asserts that the "people of the south did not believe that slavery was right, and many felt that the south could work out their own problems and would eventually free the slaves because they were becoming the white man's burden." The writer discusses the economic concerns of slave holders (the economic loss if enslaved Africans were freed; and the high tariff proposed by northerners) and the "historian" Mrs. Deevers insists that enslaved Africans were well-cared for because they were valuable property ("They were well cared for because they were important to their owners") and goes on to note the "many stories" of kindness shown to Negroes; but, she says the Dred Scott decision "caused more trouble" and Abraham Lincoln's election "was the final blow." These unreconstructed views are interesting to read, though repellent; and I am reminded--thanks to Wayne Parent's book Inside the Carnival: Unmasking Louisiana Politics, from LSU Press, 2004, that even after the 14th and 15th amendments to the Constitution were passed, the south resisted respecting Africans and African-Americans; and southern states passed laws to disenfranchise blacks and prevent voting and civic participation, an exercise of states' rights, matters that made necessary the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. (I recall, too, W.E. B. DuBois's commentary on the south's behavior after the civil war in The Souls of Black Folk.)
In the November 1972 issue of the United Daughters of the Confederacy magazine, in an article under the heading "Children of the Confederacy" on education by "historian" Mrs. Charles L. Deevers (page 27), the author Mrs. Deevers notes that there were no public schools in the south before the war, that planters' children were educated at home, that northern textbooks drove "intelligent" southern male teachers out of the teaching profession (just as later, southern boys were inclined to leave the classroom for the battlefied), that a southern or confederate teaching assocication was formed in 1862, that girls schools were expensive, etc. It is a rather feeble attempt to affirm white southern intelligence and education, the kind of thing that is rebutted with even small research or logical thinking. For instance, in the book The History of Southern Literature, edited by Rubin, Jackson, Moore, Simpson, and Young, from LSU Press, 1985, Lewis P. Simpson in "The Mind of the Antebellum South" and Elisabeth Muhlenfeld in "The Civil War and Authorship" discuss the limits of southern intellectual and literary life. The south did have artists, intellectuals, and scientists, but because of their irrationalism and pride--because of their commitment to refusing to register or respect the humanity of Africans, and the southern dependence on and defense of slavery--the antebellum south had few lasting or significant intellectual or literary accomplishments. It is a great example of how response to others can lead to self-betrayal: limiting the empathy and imagination with which we view others can lead to intellectual limits that curtail what we can think and do.
It was just a few years after 1972, when Jimmy Carter was inaugurated, an event I watched with my class: and one of the students, a southern white boy, said something on the order of, "Well, we have the niggers to thank for that." (It may have been the same white boy who wrote me, just weeks ago, wanting to get in touch with me, his old classmate. I wonder sometimes, more and more, if other people do not remember the things that I recall.)
Politics, the struggle over resources and values, a struggle that determines the social order, is a realm of compromise and reconciliation at its best; and Barack Obama is a figure of reconciliation. Obviously the election of Barack Obama is a sign of enlightenment, though it does not augur a perfect age or a perfect people: for one thing, the United Daughters of the Confederacy remains an active group, with an online presence, and its current leader states, "I am a member of The United Daughters of the Confederacy because I feel it would greatly please my ancestor to know that I am a member. It would please him to know that I appreciate what he did and delight his soldier love to know that I do not consider the cause which he held so dear to be lost or forgotten."
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Draft: "Inaugurations"
Writer's Note: I scribbled these lines a couple of days ago, and I'm not sure what the sum is--verse or a story, or an outline for a short film, or all of those; and the intended meaning is fairly elemental--the difficulty of governing human emotion and impulse.
Inaugurations
The inauguration in Washington
of the elegant, smart man,
pale brown in an elegant, smart suit,
and watched by millions
will change everything tomorrow,
but now as the parade passes before him,
on a noisy New York street
a skinny boy with sandy hair waits
outside an apartment building
for a girl he likes, and likes too much,
to be sent to the corner store
by her mother,
and the boy is watched by a man
in shorts, with a rubber waist band,
despite the chill (he wears a jacket).
The man has seen the boy before
and cannot forget him--
is irritated by him--
and tries to scare him
but the boy won't scare.
Finally, the man gets the boy
to agree to share the girl's attention
and they both wait.
Unfortunately, the boy's mother
is not watching him,
but is watching men come and go
in a pornography shop,
and when the police carry her out
she explains that she'd prefer to sell coffee
but can't get hired
and as they carry the disturbed woman
past her son on the sidewalk
she is still explaining
and as her son calls one of the policemen Father
(she told him they soon would meet his unknown father)
and then as the boy calls her Mother
and asks where she is going
she is still explaining
and the boy follows
distracted from his girl
and the man in shorts and jacket waits.
Inaugurations
The inauguration in Washington
of the elegant, smart man,
pale brown in an elegant, smart suit,
and watched by millions
will change everything tomorrow,
but now as the parade passes before him,
on a noisy New York street
a skinny boy with sandy hair waits
outside an apartment building
for a girl he likes, and likes too much,
to be sent to the corner store
by her mother,
and the boy is watched by a man
in shorts, with a rubber waist band,
despite the chill (he wears a jacket).
The man has seen the boy before
and cannot forget him--
is irritated by him--
and tries to scare him
but the boy won't scare.
Finally, the man gets the boy
to agree to share the girl's attention
and they both wait.
Unfortunately, the boy's mother
is not watching him,
but is watching men come and go
in a pornography shop,
and when the police carry her out
she explains that she'd prefer to sell coffee
but can't get hired
and as they carry the disturbed woman
past her son on the sidewalk
she is still explaining
and as her son calls one of the policemen Father
(she told him they soon would meet his unknown father)
and then as the boy calls her Mother
and asks where she is going
she is still explaining
and the boy follows
distracted from his girl
and the man in shorts and jacket waits.
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
In Dreams Begin Responsibilities
I watched the inauguration today of the new president and vice-president of the United States, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden; and I thought it was a lovely, thoughtful ceremony, with the performance of "My Country 'Tis of Thee" sung by Aretha Frankiln and the closing benediction by Joseph Lowery, two people who embody history, and the classical piece by Yo Yo Ma and his colleagues, the inclusive poem by Elizabeth Alexander, and the very honest and intelligent speech by Barack Obama. It was good to see the greeting the outgoing president and his wife gave to the Obamas at the White House (following a church service and before the inauguration); and to see the goodbye that the Obamas gave to the Bushes following the inauguration. Barack Obama is an icon: he, handsome and elegant, represents intellect, political progress, and cultural complexity. He speaks now, as he has before, about the work we all must do together.
I am reminded of conversations I would have sometimes with an acquaintance in the city (there is only one city in the United States: all other towns aspire to it). We would talk about ideals and I would talk about what I would like to do: I felt as if our ideals should be lived in our own lives, must be lived in our own lives, if they were to live at all; and I think she thought of my speech as a kind of distinctive narcissism. I thought that our limitations and possibilities were the real limitations and possibilities, the kinds of things that any aspirant would face. Of course, not all of us get the encouragement or support for our dreams that we want or need: and so we may not achieve our goals, or if we do it is after long and lonely struggle and sacrifice, and sometimes the sacrifices are terrible.
When the new president speaks of the work that is to be done, I find myself hoping that a structure of support will be there for those who dare to dream: they will begin responsibilities but to complete those responsibilities, they will need help.
I am reminded of conversations I would have sometimes with an acquaintance in the city (there is only one city in the United States: all other towns aspire to it). We would talk about ideals and I would talk about what I would like to do: I felt as if our ideals should be lived in our own lives, must be lived in our own lives, if they were to live at all; and I think she thought of my speech as a kind of distinctive narcissism. I thought that our limitations and possibilities were the real limitations and possibilities, the kinds of things that any aspirant would face. Of course, not all of us get the encouragement or support for our dreams that we want or need: and so we may not achieve our goals, or if we do it is after long and lonely struggle and sacrifice, and sometimes the sacrifices are terrible.
When the new president speaks of the work that is to be done, I find myself hoping that a structure of support will be there for those who dare to dream: they will begin responsibilities but to complete those responsibilities, they will need help.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow: News
Days ago president-elect Barack Obama met with the current United States president and all still-living former presidents, including Jimmy Carter. It was, apparently, Barack Obama’s idea that this meeting take place. It is, among other things, a way of being welcomed to office and being put in an official context, as well as an opportunity to seek counsel. Yesterday the president who is leaving office gave his last press conference: a sometimes rambling reflection on a wide range of issues, marked with some honesty and humility as well as some puckish humor and unrecognized anger. Many people are looking forward to the inauguration of president-elect Barack Obama, whose cabinet nominations have been impressive and sometimes controversial: and controversial because they are not radical, but are rather centrist figures. Obama has been said to be playing it safe; whereas I think he is shrewdly picking people of knowledge and power who can get things done—who can pursue his policies with success. (I'm not an admirer of all his nominations: I still have reservations about Hillary Clinton.) Barack Obama is not only intelligent, he has good instincts, and is drawing power—and the figures and symbols of power—toward himself.
In the January 12, 2009 Wall Street Journal, in an article called “All the Presidents’ Literature,” Jonathan Raban discusses Barack Obama’s writing in a rather close, dispassionate reading. Raban, in a more complimentary passage, remarks, “Obama is a skillful realist. By day, the I of his book is a vigilant listener and watcher, a hoarder of contingent details, who hugs his observations to himself, then broods on them late into the night. It's in the insomniac small hours when -- alone except for his burning cigarette -- he comes into his own as a restless thinker, figuring out his world in passages of eloquent interior monologue. Three o'clock in the morning is a recurring time in Dreams, the hour at which patterns reveal themselves, resolutions are made and the reader enjoys the illusion of unhindered intimacy with the author.” The article notes how many people are pleased to have an educated, literary president.
“Fiction Reading Increases for Adults” reports the New York Times’ reporter Motoko Rich, January 11, 2009. Rich's article states, “The report, ‘Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,’ being released Monday, is based on data from ‘The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts’ conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.” That is important news for many of us, especially editors and writers who have worried that the distractions and resources of contemporary life (particularly the internet and television) have made reading much less attractive and even less necessary to the general public.
With the election of the new president, it can be painful to realize how much work has yet to be done in terms of ethnic diversity and acceptance. I watched a Sunday morning television news program in which African-American issues were discussed—but discussed separately from the rest of the national and international news. (I found myself thinking that there should have been an African-American commentator participating in the national discussion and more people who weren’t African-American—say, Hispanics and Asians—participating in the discussion of African-American problems.) Just as African-American problems are segregated, so, still, are some African-American accomplishments, as with a new book of African-American essays: Best African-American Essays: 2009, edited by Debra J. Dickerson, from Bantam Books. The anthology is reviewed in the Asheville Citizen-Times by its books columnist Rob Neufeld, January 11, 2009. Neufeld likes James McBride’s piece on hip-hop music, included in the anthology; and notes Martha Southgate’s remarkable, telling piece there as well: “Martha Southgate, author of the novel The Fall of Rome, was motivated to write this essay by her experiences at writers' conferences, where she encountered far too few African-American literary writers in her middle-age bracket. There's a vicious cycle at work that makes lower promotion of black writers a business decision.”
“Black directors face frustration, hope and elusive success” is a headline in the International Herald Tribune, a headline above an article by Gene Seymour on African-American film directors (Spike Lee and others), January 11, 2009. Seymour reports, “You could now count on one hand (using two fingers) the number of black directors who can get their projects made and distributed at a steady rate. One is Lee, whose 19th theatrical feature, the World War II story Miracle at St. Anna was released last fall, while the other is Tyler Perry, the Atlanta-based, one-man multimedia conglomerate whose latest blend of low comedy and moral uplift, Madea Goes to Jail, is set for release on Feb. 20.”
For the online site NewsBlaze.com the culture reporter Prairie Miller reports in the article “Women Film Critics Circle Member Sparks SLUMDOG Brouhaha in Wall Street Journal.” The film Slumdog Millionaire has been getting a lot of very favorable response, from critics and audiences, but now there is controversy too. (The world loves controversy; insists on it. Don't we?) Prairie Miller states, “Women Film Critics Circle member Jan Lisa Huttner of Films For Two and HotPinkPen.com has been instrumental in a campaign to protest denial of screen credit recognition for major awards this year to Loveleen Tandan, as female co-director of Slumdog Millionaire,” January 10, 2009.
It can be frightening to be forced to realize again and again how important money fame and money are: they are sources of freedom and power, necessary resources. Whether or not a person or institution can pursue independently preferred tastes can be, and are, determined by such resources. The current financial crisis in the United States is a wonderful or terrible teacher, depending on one’s own perspective. The more esoteric arts will be affected, as The Art Newspaper reports: “A survey of art museums across the US has found that most institutions have lost at least 20% of the value of their endowments and directors are retrenching amid the worsening economic crisis. The survey of around 40 museums, conducted by The Art Newspaper in early December, revealed that nearly all directors had begun trimming between 5% and 20% of their 2009 budgets and were preparing for deeper cuts in 2010.” (The Art Newspaper, in an article by Jason Edward Kaufman, January 8, 2009, Issue 198.)
Meanwhile, ArtDaily.org reports on “Grey Art Gallery to Show Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion,” a new exhibit.
Excerpts: “The first exhibition to be jointly presented by the Grey Art Gallery in New York City and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, Damaged Romanticism will run concurrently at the two institutions, opening January 13, 2009, at the Grey and February 7, 2009, at the Parrish.”
“According to Terrie Sultan, Director of the Parrish Art Museum and an organizer of the exhibition, ‘The artists in Damaged Romanticism do not belong to a style or school in the traditional sense, but they share an outlook that helps define the spirit of our times. Like the original Romantics, who so powerfully transformed the arts and society two centuries ago, they keenly feel the damage wrought by the forces of modernity and by our divorce from the natural world. But the fantasies of these damaged romantics are tempered by a pragmatic realism. Their sense of disillusionment and loss never stops them from clinging stubbornly to hope.’”
"Artists whose work is included in the exhibition are Richard Billingham (England); Berlinde De Bruyckere (Belgium); Edward Burtynsky (Canada); Sophie Calle (France); Petah Coyne (United States); Angelo Filomeno (Italy/UnitedStates); Jesper Just (Denmark/United States); Mary McCleary (United States); Florian Maier-Aichen (Germany/United States); Wangechi Mutu (Kenya/United States); Anneè Olofsson (Sweden); Julia Oschatz (Germany); David Schnell (Germany); and Ryan Taber/Cheyenne Weaver (United States).”
The site Qantara.de, which focuses on Middle Eastern culture and its relation to the western world and to Islam, has an article on Edward Said: “The Edward Said's Orientalism in Arab Discourse, Instrumentalised on All Sides” (January 7, 2009). It is by Markus Schmitz, and is translated by Katy Derbyshire—Schmitz is a University of Munster research fellow (School of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies); and Schmitz affirs that “The Palestinian-American intellectual Said overstepped the boundaries of his academic and national origins, his critique thus achieving recognition across the disciplines and around the world. Yet although his significance in bringing together previously separate debates is undisputed, it proves extremely difficult to determine Edward Said's precise cultural, political or theoretical locus.” The site also the covers Afghan director Siddiq Barmak (his film Osama won international awards) and his new film, Opium War, as well as Italian singer Etta Scollo and her engagement of the medieval Arabic poetry of Sicily for her new album Il Fiore Splendente.
Afropop.com's reporter Banning Eyre has conducted an interview with Vampire Weekend band member Ezra Koenig, in which Koenig says, “You know, sometimes it's funny when I see interviews where we get too intellectual about things, because the way we speak about things among ourselves, as probably is true among most bands, we start talking about vibes and all these very weird concepts that maybe only matter to people who listen to music. So to me, and this is fairly distinct from the musical side of it, I have always been very interested in kind of cultural connections. I spent a lot of time when I was in school taking especially literature courses about British India, which is in some ways a horrible time, but also important. To look back at that period helps you to understand why India is the way it is today and the way England is today, and even the way America is today. So in a cultural way, I don't think it's a paradox. This is not the first time in history that people are moving around the planet and meeting each other, and being exposed to new kinds of art.” The year 2008 interview is available now online at the web site of Afropop.com.
In the January 12, 2009 Wall Street Journal, in an article called “All the Presidents’ Literature,” Jonathan Raban discusses Barack Obama’s writing in a rather close, dispassionate reading. Raban, in a more complimentary passage, remarks, “Obama is a skillful realist. By day, the I of his book is a vigilant listener and watcher, a hoarder of contingent details, who hugs his observations to himself, then broods on them late into the night. It's in the insomniac small hours when -- alone except for his burning cigarette -- he comes into his own as a restless thinker, figuring out his world in passages of eloquent interior monologue. Three o'clock in the morning is a recurring time in Dreams, the hour at which patterns reveal themselves, resolutions are made and the reader enjoys the illusion of unhindered intimacy with the author.” The article notes how many people are pleased to have an educated, literary president.
“Fiction Reading Increases for Adults” reports the New York Times’ reporter Motoko Rich, January 11, 2009. Rich's article states, “The report, ‘Reading on the Rise: A New Chapter in American Literacy,’ being released Monday, is based on data from ‘The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts’ conducted by the United States Census Bureau in 2008. Among its chief findings is that for the first time since 1982, when the bureau began collecting such data, the proportion of adults 18 and older who said they had read at least one novel, short story, poem or play in the previous 12 months has risen.” That is important news for many of us, especially editors and writers who have worried that the distractions and resources of contemporary life (particularly the internet and television) have made reading much less attractive and even less necessary to the general public.
With the election of the new president, it can be painful to realize how much work has yet to be done in terms of ethnic diversity and acceptance. I watched a Sunday morning television news program in which African-American issues were discussed—but discussed separately from the rest of the national and international news. (I found myself thinking that there should have been an African-American commentator participating in the national discussion and more people who weren’t African-American—say, Hispanics and Asians—participating in the discussion of African-American problems.) Just as African-American problems are segregated, so, still, are some African-American accomplishments, as with a new book of African-American essays: Best African-American Essays: 2009, edited by Debra J. Dickerson, from Bantam Books. The anthology is reviewed in the Asheville Citizen-Times by its books columnist Rob Neufeld, January 11, 2009. Neufeld likes James McBride’s piece on hip-hop music, included in the anthology; and notes Martha Southgate’s remarkable, telling piece there as well: “Martha Southgate, author of the novel The Fall of Rome, was motivated to write this essay by her experiences at writers' conferences, where she encountered far too few African-American literary writers in her middle-age bracket. There's a vicious cycle at work that makes lower promotion of black writers a business decision.”
“Black directors face frustration, hope and elusive success” is a headline in the International Herald Tribune, a headline above an article by Gene Seymour on African-American film directors (Spike Lee and others), January 11, 2009. Seymour reports, “You could now count on one hand (using two fingers) the number of black directors who can get their projects made and distributed at a steady rate. One is Lee, whose 19th theatrical feature, the World War II story Miracle at St. Anna was released last fall, while the other is Tyler Perry, the Atlanta-based, one-man multimedia conglomerate whose latest blend of low comedy and moral uplift, Madea Goes to Jail, is set for release on Feb. 20.”
For the online site NewsBlaze.com the culture reporter Prairie Miller reports in the article “Women Film Critics Circle Member Sparks SLUMDOG Brouhaha in Wall Street Journal.” The film Slumdog Millionaire has been getting a lot of very favorable response, from critics and audiences, but now there is controversy too. (The world loves controversy; insists on it. Don't we?) Prairie Miller states, “Women Film Critics Circle member Jan Lisa Huttner of Films For Two and HotPinkPen.com has been instrumental in a campaign to protest denial of screen credit recognition for major awards this year to Loveleen Tandan, as female co-director of Slumdog Millionaire,” January 10, 2009.
It can be frightening to be forced to realize again and again how important money fame and money are: they are sources of freedom and power, necessary resources. Whether or not a person or institution can pursue independently preferred tastes can be, and are, determined by such resources. The current financial crisis in the United States is a wonderful or terrible teacher, depending on one’s own perspective. The more esoteric arts will be affected, as The Art Newspaper reports: “A survey of art museums across the US has found that most institutions have lost at least 20% of the value of their endowments and directors are retrenching amid the worsening economic crisis. The survey of around 40 museums, conducted by The Art Newspaper in early December, revealed that nearly all directors had begun trimming between 5% and 20% of their 2009 budgets and were preparing for deeper cuts in 2010.” (The Art Newspaper, in an article by Jason Edward Kaufman, January 8, 2009, Issue 198.)
Meanwhile, ArtDaily.org reports on “Grey Art Gallery to Show Damaged Romanticism: A Mirror of Modern Emotion,” a new exhibit.
Excerpts: “The first exhibition to be jointly presented by the Grey Art Gallery in New York City and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, Damaged Romanticism will run concurrently at the two institutions, opening January 13, 2009, at the Grey and February 7, 2009, at the Parrish.”
“According to Terrie Sultan, Director of the Parrish Art Museum and an organizer of the exhibition, ‘The artists in Damaged Romanticism do not belong to a style or school in the traditional sense, but they share an outlook that helps define the spirit of our times. Like the original Romantics, who so powerfully transformed the arts and society two centuries ago, they keenly feel the damage wrought by the forces of modernity and by our divorce from the natural world. But the fantasies of these damaged romantics are tempered by a pragmatic realism. Their sense of disillusionment and loss never stops them from clinging stubbornly to hope.’”
"Artists whose work is included in the exhibition are Richard Billingham (England); Berlinde De Bruyckere (Belgium); Edward Burtynsky (Canada); Sophie Calle (France); Petah Coyne (United States); Angelo Filomeno (Italy/UnitedStates); Jesper Just (Denmark/United States); Mary McCleary (United States); Florian Maier-Aichen (Germany/United States); Wangechi Mutu (Kenya/United States); Anneè Olofsson (Sweden); Julia Oschatz (Germany); David Schnell (Germany); and Ryan Taber/Cheyenne Weaver (United States).”
The site Qantara.de, which focuses on Middle Eastern culture and its relation to the western world and to Islam, has an article on Edward Said: “The Edward Said's Orientalism in Arab Discourse, Instrumentalised on All Sides” (January 7, 2009). It is by Markus Schmitz, and is translated by Katy Derbyshire—Schmitz is a University of Munster research fellow (School of English, Postcolonial and Media Studies); and Schmitz affirs that “The Palestinian-American intellectual Said overstepped the boundaries of his academic and national origins, his critique thus achieving recognition across the disciplines and around the world. Yet although his significance in bringing together previously separate debates is undisputed, it proves extremely difficult to determine Edward Said's precise cultural, political or theoretical locus.” The site also the covers Afghan director Siddiq Barmak (his film Osama won international awards) and his new film, Opium War, as well as Italian singer Etta Scollo and her engagement of the medieval Arabic poetry of Sicily for her new album Il Fiore Splendente.
Afropop.com's reporter Banning Eyre has conducted an interview with Vampire Weekend band member Ezra Koenig, in which Koenig says, “You know, sometimes it's funny when I see interviews where we get too intellectual about things, because the way we speak about things among ourselves, as probably is true among most bands, we start talking about vibes and all these very weird concepts that maybe only matter to people who listen to music. So to me, and this is fairly distinct from the musical side of it, I have always been very interested in kind of cultural connections. I spent a lot of time when I was in school taking especially literature courses about British India, which is in some ways a horrible time, but also important. To look back at that period helps you to understand why India is the way it is today and the way England is today, and even the way America is today. So in a cultural way, I don't think it's a paradox. This is not the first time in history that people are moving around the planet and meeting each other, and being exposed to new kinds of art.” The year 2008 interview is available now online at the web site of Afropop.com.
Monday, January 12, 2009
Old Films
This past weekend on television I saw two films I had missed, Brian DePalma's Carrie (1976) and Ron Howard's The Missing (2003).
Carrie is about a plain girl of telekinetic ability with a religious, repressed mother whose teachings leave the girl ill-prepared for school or life; and, thanks to her own lack of proper orientation and the cruelty of others, the girl's talents are used for destruction rather than anything good. The fascinating thing is how horrifying the "normal" world is in this film: though warmly photographed it is dull, and full of small-minded, cruel people. The mother is more idea and symbol than real woman, though what she symbolizes is important in a small town, such as the one Carrie (Sissy Spacek) lives in.
Cate Blanchett plays a frontier woman, honest and tough, with a father who abandoned her to join the native Americans (Indians). When her lover is killed and eldest daughter abducted, her gone-native father helps her track the girl, who is captive to a male witch and his men (they plan to sell the daughter and other girls). There were some predictable things in this film, but its spirit still seemed large. (Both the frontier woman's father and the male witch are larger-than-life, stranger-than-life figures.) The story is about accepting the difficulties of other people's choices and about making amends. The land itself is an important element; and the film is set in a time in which the land is at least as dangerous, if not more so, than the people who walk it (while, arguably now, we humans are more dangerous than the land and the other living beings to be found on it).
Carrie is about a plain girl of telekinetic ability with a religious, repressed mother whose teachings leave the girl ill-prepared for school or life; and, thanks to her own lack of proper orientation and the cruelty of others, the girl's talents are used for destruction rather than anything good. The fascinating thing is how horrifying the "normal" world is in this film: though warmly photographed it is dull, and full of small-minded, cruel people. The mother is more idea and symbol than real woman, though what she symbolizes is important in a small town, such as the one Carrie (Sissy Spacek) lives in.
Cate Blanchett plays a frontier woman, honest and tough, with a father who abandoned her to join the native Americans (Indians). When her lover is killed and eldest daughter abducted, her gone-native father helps her track the girl, who is captive to a male witch and his men (they plan to sell the daughter and other girls). There were some predictable things in this film, but its spirit still seemed large. (Both the frontier woman's father and the male witch are larger-than-life, stranger-than-life figures.) The story is about accepting the difficulties of other people's choices and about making amends. The land itself is an important element; and the film is set in a time in which the land is at least as dangerous, if not more so, than the people who walk it (while, arguably now, we humans are more dangerous than the land and the other living beings to be found on it).
Home, and Homeless
Home is the place where we wake and sleep, the place in which we wash, dress, eat, drink, and rest, the place in which we reflect and imagine, and it is more: the place in which we find acceptance, foundation, support. It cannot be home without acceptance. Sometimes acceptance comes only through pretense: we pretend to a personality and purpose we do not share and are accepted; but false acceptance cannot be depended on--it is not for us, it is for what we are pretending to be, it is for our lie. Acceptance without truth leaves one homeless. Homeless people are forced back upon their own resources, whether those resources are many or few--and, too often, they despair and rage against the isolation and poverty and the quite limited kindness of strangers. Acceptance without truth leaves one homeless. If you do not feel connected to society through traditional, or conventional, relationships, art can become a connecting thing. Human secrets are better kept, and more eloquently and wisely revealed, by art than by anyone or anything else: and it may be that the only real secrets are the exact nature and dimensions of the individual human spirit. Art feeds the imagination, the spirit, and the mind. However, in a permissive public society, a society of crudity and vulgarity, a society in which standards and values hardly seem to matter, a society in which every indulgence seems possible, the impact of the symbolic freedoms that art embodies can seem, or even be, without importance. One can feel caught between private discouragements that wound and public permissions that fail to empower. I have thought of home as a place to be found in the future rather than as a place remembered from the past or enjoyed in the present: and, as a state of being; and yet, when I have thought of a particular place as home, it has been New York I have thought of, for the cultural diversity and personal freedom it offers, for the bookstores and theaters and galleries and museums and other enclaves and streets, rather than Louisiana, the state in which I was born; and, of course, the arts have been a nearly endless resource for encouragement and spiritual renewal.
Saturday, December 27, 2008
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
New Jobs in Louisiana
Whereas, much of the country is experiencing an economic depression, and while there are state government budget concerns and cost-cutting, according to an Associated Press report circulating today Louisiana, a state with a total population of less than five million people, saw an increase of new jobs during the month of November: an increase of 6,000 jobs. Consequently, there is reason to be a little more optimistic rather than less.
Film Appreciation Societies
Writer's Note: Several weeks ago I sent out a survey of film-related questions to people involved in Louisiana culture, and one of the questions was, What is the value of film appreciation societies? Here, below, are a few answers to that question.
Alexandyr Kent, film reviewer and writer of the Louisiana Movies web log:
I value them, but I think Netflix and subscriber services supplant them. It’s now very easy to obtain classic or obscure films and consume them at my leisure. Attending a classic film – for the Millennials, at least – may no longer be a priority because of the proliferation of exhibition options. The subscriber asks, “If I can get it cheaply on DVD, on my own time, in my own home, why do I need to go to a more expensive film society screening?” I would go because I privilege movie theaters over all forms of exhibition. Is that true for everyone? I can’t answer that.
All I know is that audiences are fracturing and that it becoming harder to foster face-to-face dialogue.
Susie Labry, actress, singer, and film community activist:
I see a strong value in our meetup groups. Not only do these highlights occur, but many members testify that it is because of meetup that they get jobs and some careers. There are months and months worth of work I got because of meetups, which make it much more easier and expedient to get on. It keeps us all on the same page and it is excellent to keep a united front when it comes to legislation and issues facing those in our industry. Louisiana Produces is 1200+ Members strong, and Baton Rouge Meetup is 1100+ strong. We all stay on the same page and communicate and cross and all help one another as one.
Alexandyr Kent, film reviewer and writer of the Louisiana Movies web log:
I value them, but I think Netflix and subscriber services supplant them. It’s now very easy to obtain classic or obscure films and consume them at my leisure. Attending a classic film – for the Millennials, at least – may no longer be a priority because of the proliferation of exhibition options. The subscriber asks, “If I can get it cheaply on DVD, on my own time, in my own home, why do I need to go to a more expensive film society screening?” I would go because I privilege movie theaters over all forms of exhibition. Is that true for everyone? I can’t answer that.
All I know is that audiences are fracturing and that it becoming harder to foster face-to-face dialogue.
Susie Labry, actress, singer, and film community activist:
I see a strong value in our meetup groups. Not only do these highlights occur, but many members testify that it is because of meetup that they get jobs and some careers. There are months and months worth of work I got because of meetups, which make it much more easier and expedient to get on. It keeps us all on the same page and it is excellent to keep a united front when it comes to legislation and issues facing those in our industry. Louisiana Produces is 1200+ Members strong, and Baton Rouge Meetup is 1100+ strong. We all stay on the same page and communicate and cross and all help one another as one.
Paul Schrader's film Forever Mine
I saw Paul Schrader's film Forever Mine, which came out in year 2000, on television, and I liked it with reservations: the film Forever Mine, which I saw this past wekend, features lush locales and has warm, colorful cinematographer, rather than the dark black-and-white of film noir, but it is a suspense film as well as a love story, though some of it, as regards violence and vengeance, is too predictable. The film begins with male camaraderie, that mix of emasculating insult and mocking fliration, involving "cabana boys," men who work on a beach serving rich people. One of the young men, Alan Riply, is played by Joseph Fiennes and he meets Gretchen Mol's character, Ella Brice, a secretary who married her boss, who is played by Ray Liotta. Love and money, very American subjects. Fiennes looks boyish, slightly starved, and sensitive rather than sensual. Mol looks like a perfect blonde goddess. Her character is religious (she crosses herself; an afffirmation of faith, a seeking of protection). The two kiss within the first twenty minutes of the film, a film that seems a mix of fantasy and reality. The couple part; and the young man, Alan, cannot forget Ella and follows her. Her husband hires thugs who rough Alan up; and the husband tells his wife that Alan his dead. Her offers up the news as if it were dessert. Fiennes' Alan has been disfigured but he is recognizable to me, though not to Ella or her husband when he meets them again, after he has become an important businessman with a Spanish accent and a different name. (Fiennes slender body is unique: there aren't that many grown men who are that thin. His form would itself offer an echo of her past.) It is when Ella kisses the Spanish man (Fiennes) that she recognizes him and cries (very 1940s Hollywood melodrama there). Of course, there are a few determining confrontations before the film's end; and Schrader's filmmaking technique helps to maintain the viewer's regard.
Bike Theft; and, An Elusive Wholeness, A Paralyzed Ambition
Last Thursday, December 18, I rode bike, an old red bike in good condition, loaned to me by an aunt, to St. Martinville. There wasn't much of a wind and it was a mostly pleasant ride. I did some research and other work at the library in town. I was at the library for several hours and saw the bike shortly before I planned to leave, about 4 p.m., and I did a few more things on computer and put away a magazine and when I walked out the door, about 4:30 p.m., the bike wasn't where I left it, though it had a lock around the chain (and the wheel on which the chain turns) that made its back tire impossible to turn. I had seen a young man enter the library--wearing a black T-shirt with the word "Cajun" on it and tan pants (he was black, so that's why I noted the word Cajun and the pants may have been dirty near the leg bottoms); and he used the rest room. He might have taken it. I'm trying to recall, as well, if I saw anything else, such as a truck near the bike. From the library, I called the police department and a policeman came, took a brief report, drove alone around the nearby blocks, then took me home. He and I talked about the theft and also about the costs of being an artist. He said most of his family are educators and his wife is a writer. He said that being a policeman, he is a rarity in his family, although he did study art in school (and he couldn't see being a starving artist with three children, as he has). He told me he would keep an eye open for the bike. It is easy to feel, following the theft, both foolish and furious--and weak and wrathful. It's hard not to think that I should have gone outside to check on the bike periodically--to discourage any watchers; or that I should have left the library sooner. It's a telling thing: I had just been thinking days before that it might have been a sign of the difference between New York and Louisiana that the bike hadn't been stolen, as I had twice forgotten to put the lock on the bike, once in New Iberia, and once in Loureauville, but the bike remained where I put it both times, though I had left it for several hours each time. (The lock was on it when it was taken in St. Martinville. Following the theft, someone told me, That would happen in St. Martinville.) It's hard not to feel vulnerable and violated, and apprehensive about seeing someone with the bike. I half-hoped that the bike would be returned to the library (because the lock will make it inoperative, if it cannot be removed). I told my aunt, she who loaned me the bike; and she was understanding. My sister offered one of her family's bikes (they are in a shed on my mother's property). The theft has been unsettling; and I had trouble sleepiing for several nights afterward. The theft reminds me of some basic things: the need of personal transportation here, rather than the public transportation so easy to find in New York; my own limited funds and options (I cannot afford a car now); and the desperation and malice that often overtakes people (why steal someone else's proprerty; and why take and keep something that you cannot use?) . One keeps expecting the future to be better, for one's fortunes to rise, for one's neighbors to be transformed into a community; and the present, which is yesterday's future, remains as frustrating as ever.
Thursday, December 18, 2008
Cultural News
There are many cultural events occuring at year's end, and just as many topics for consideration and conversation...
“In Congo Square: Colonial New Orleans” is the name of an article by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in the Nation magazine, its December 29, 2008 edition (online December 10). The piece reviews two books: Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans by Shannon Lee Dawdy; and The World That Made New Orleans From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette.
The book Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans was inspired by the trouble following hurricane Katrina and people’s attempts to get back to normal life and their sharing of recipes with each other and through the New Orleans newspaper the Times-Picayune, has been getting some local Louisiana attention.
Edouard Glissant: “As a writer, I write in the presence of all the languages of the world, even if I only know one. Humanities today are developing a practical, divining sense of languages, and are using a far higher proportion of the capacities of the human brain. Multilingualism should not be boiled down to the development of the quantities of languages; it refers not only to a situation, but also to a new awareness, related to the way I frequent the poetry of the world.” Edouard Glissant wrote and said those words as part of the September 28, 2008 conference called the European Meeting of Cultural Journals in Paris; and his words were posted online by Eurozine November 26. I know Edouard Glissant’s reputation but not his most significant work, so I am pleased when I come across something short by him that I can read quickly—it’s a nice reminder to read more of his work. Glissant, who was born in Martinique and spends time there as well as in New York and Paris, is the author of fiction, poetry, and essays. (He was one of the heroes of someone I used to know.) Edouard Glissant’s commentary on multilingualism, available on the web site of Eurozine, also affirms a redistribution of the world’s wealth; the international dissemination of knowledge and the significance of journals; and the relation of each to all.
I miss visiting the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and ache a little more now, as ArtDaily.org reports that in January 2009 “The Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with the Global Film Initiative (GFI), presents Global Lens 2009, a touring film exhibition conceived to encourage filmmaking in countries with developing film communities. The selection of 10 programs, each from a different country, which include films developed with seed money from GFI, represents a concise survey of contemporary filmmaking from areas where local economic realities make such expensive and technology-driven endeavors a challenge. Accomplished, entertaining, and thought-provoking, the films are also deeply rooted in the social and political realities of the countries where their talented and resourceful makers live and set their stories. Several of the films will also be screened for participating educational institutions and schools in the New York area as part of an educational project between GFI and MoMA’s Department of Education.”
One thinks of the Europeans as accomplished in many cultural matters but, apparently, there are failures of note. The press digest Eurotopics reported December 16 about a finding in a French publication: “Le Monde newspaper discusses how French and German are being neglected as foreign languages in the neighbouring countries. ‘The bad news is that cooperation is going through hard times. There are problems with French teaching in Germany and with German teaching in France, both of which are on the decline despite repeated promises at summit meetings.’”
For the online digest Sign and Sight (following a translation from the original German publication Frankfurter Rundschau), Arno Widmann writes about a philosophical study, Kurt Flasch's book Kampfplätze der Philosophie: “Flasch’s precise readings are interrupted by thoughts, ‘about the historical role of polemics’ or ‘praise of mediocre writers’ for example. These are not digressions but thoughts which lead to the heart of the sort of history of philosophy which is not interested in systems, big names or eternal questions, but which wants to find out how people in a particular place at a particular time learned about world th[r]ough thinking and research. And this was done by debating the ideas of the time and the time that went before. Written texts played a key role but they were never set in stone.”
On the demise of newspapers and the plight of journalists, Slate’s Jack Shafer (December 16) in “The Digital Slay-Ride” says, “The only reason we're so well-informed about journalists' suffering is they have easy access to a megaphone. The underlying cause of their grief can be traced to the same force that has destroyed other professions and industries: digital technology.”
Film Journal International (Harry Haun, December 16) profiles the wonderful actress Kate Winslet, who is now appearing in two well-reviewed films, Revolutionary Road and The Reader.
There seem to be some early bad reviews for Will Smith’s new film Seven Pounds, according to Greencine Daily.
Last night, a television fiction detective program, featured a woman whose body had been thrown down an elevator shaft and totally mangled. It was one of many dismemberments that appear—that are shown in detail—on such programs. One cannot help but consider the brutality of such a vision. (What is the nature of the gratification?)
A band I’m very fond of, Death Cab for Cutie, appeared on David Letterman’s late night television show last night but I was too sleepy to watch.
Singer Chris Brown was named artist of the year by Billboard magazine.
“In Congo Square: Colonial New Orleans” is the name of an article by Joshua Jelly-Schapiro in the Nation magazine, its December 29, 2008 edition (online December 10). The piece reviews two books: Building the Devil's Empire: French Colonial New Orleans by Shannon Lee Dawdy; and The World That Made New Orleans From Spanish Silver to Congo Square by Ned Sublette.
The book Cooking Up a Storm: Recipes Lost and Found from The Times-Picayune of New Orleans was inspired by the trouble following hurricane Katrina and people’s attempts to get back to normal life and their sharing of recipes with each other and through the New Orleans newspaper the Times-Picayune, has been getting some local Louisiana attention.
Edouard Glissant: “As a writer, I write in the presence of all the languages of the world, even if I only know one. Humanities today are developing a practical, divining sense of languages, and are using a far higher proportion of the capacities of the human brain. Multilingualism should not be boiled down to the development of the quantities of languages; it refers not only to a situation, but also to a new awareness, related to the way I frequent the poetry of the world.” Edouard Glissant wrote and said those words as part of the September 28, 2008 conference called the European Meeting of Cultural Journals in Paris; and his words were posted online by Eurozine November 26. I know Edouard Glissant’s reputation but not his most significant work, so I am pleased when I come across something short by him that I can read quickly—it’s a nice reminder to read more of his work. Glissant, who was born in Martinique and spends time there as well as in New York and Paris, is the author of fiction, poetry, and essays. (He was one of the heroes of someone I used to know.) Edouard Glissant’s commentary on multilingualism, available on the web site of Eurozine, also affirms a redistribution of the world’s wealth; the international dissemination of knowledge and the significance of journals; and the relation of each to all.
I miss visiting the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan and ache a little more now, as ArtDaily.org reports that in January 2009 “The Museum of Modern Art, in collaboration with the Global Film Initiative (GFI), presents Global Lens 2009, a touring film exhibition conceived to encourage filmmaking in countries with developing film communities. The selection of 10 programs, each from a different country, which include films developed with seed money from GFI, represents a concise survey of contemporary filmmaking from areas where local economic realities make such expensive and technology-driven endeavors a challenge. Accomplished, entertaining, and thought-provoking, the films are also deeply rooted in the social and political realities of the countries where their talented and resourceful makers live and set their stories. Several of the films will also be screened for participating educational institutions and schools in the New York area as part of an educational project between GFI and MoMA’s Department of Education.”
One thinks of the Europeans as accomplished in many cultural matters but, apparently, there are failures of note. The press digest Eurotopics reported December 16 about a finding in a French publication: “Le Monde newspaper discusses how French and German are being neglected as foreign languages in the neighbouring countries. ‘The bad news is that cooperation is going through hard times. There are problems with French teaching in Germany and with German teaching in France, both of which are on the decline despite repeated promises at summit meetings.’”
For the online digest Sign and Sight (following a translation from the original German publication Frankfurter Rundschau), Arno Widmann writes about a philosophical study, Kurt Flasch's book Kampfplätze der Philosophie: “Flasch’s precise readings are interrupted by thoughts, ‘about the historical role of polemics’ or ‘praise of mediocre writers’ for example. These are not digressions but thoughts which lead to the heart of the sort of history of philosophy which is not interested in systems, big names or eternal questions, but which wants to find out how people in a particular place at a particular time learned about world th[r]ough thinking and research. And this was done by debating the ideas of the time and the time that went before. Written texts played a key role but they were never set in stone.”
On the demise of newspapers and the plight of journalists, Slate’s Jack Shafer (December 16) in “The Digital Slay-Ride” says, “The only reason we're so well-informed about journalists' suffering is they have easy access to a megaphone. The underlying cause of their grief can be traced to the same force that has destroyed other professions and industries: digital technology.”
Film Journal International (Harry Haun, December 16) profiles the wonderful actress Kate Winslet, who is now appearing in two well-reviewed films, Revolutionary Road and The Reader.
There seem to be some early bad reviews for Will Smith’s new film Seven Pounds, according to Greencine Daily.
Last night, a television fiction detective program, featured a woman whose body had been thrown down an elevator shaft and totally mangled. It was one of many dismemberments that appear—that are shown in detail—on such programs. One cannot help but consider the brutality of such a vision. (What is the nature of the gratification?)
A band I’m very fond of, Death Cab for Cutie, appeared on David Letterman’s late night television show last night but I was too sleepy to watch.
Singer Chris Brown was named artist of the year by Billboard magazine.
A Stranger on Earth (fiction excerpt)
Writer's Note: The plan for the novel A Stranger on Earth, a work in progress, is to have the work divided into two sections or books, with book one made of four parts, the first of which is the chapter "What She Thought," taking place in the summer, and about a woman named Sarah, an impoverished but gifted woman, and her work in a university, and the relationships with a professor and young scholar-musician that develop. The other sections in book one would take place in different seasons and would focus on related characters, and book two would return to Sarah and be mostly her meditation.
An excerpt from "What She Thought" in A Stranger on Earth:
Sarah was surprised to find that she woke up feeling disoriented, with pains in her joints; and when she tried to wash and felt faint, she considered seeing a doctor. She had an appointed with her new job counselor and did not want to miss that—she would have to provide documentation for why she was absent and the whole drama of the matter wasn’t worth it. The job search center was crowded. Sarah cringed. She did not want to see many people. Something in her shut down—she saw a few young, attractive people, and in another environment she might have been curious, but here she cut off eye contact and did not greet anyone. She did not want to have a conversation about her disappointments or hopes. She did not want to be vulnerable (obviously she was vulnerable—but why act it out?).
Sarah was glad to have only spent two hours at the center. She left the building, unsure of what to do—go home, walk around, do something amusing. She saw a television van on the corner, and a reporter and camera man near it. She looked around. Had something happened? She did not see protesting students or workers. What could it be? She wondered for a moment, but wasn’t interested enough to ask. Sarah heard two girls beside her talking about wanting to stop for something to eat. She heard two young men in front of her talking about international relations—one criticized Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, and the other said he didn’t think Israel would still exist as a country in twenty years, as it was antagonizing too many of its neighbors and no longer had any moral justification for its existence. Sarah walked beyond the television van, slowly, and toward the subway. How did she feel? As if she might still be weak. Was she suffering from bad nutrition, a lack of rest? Stress? It could be anything. Everything.
When Sarah finally went to the hospital days later, she was told that a lot of New Yorkers had the aches she was complaining. It seemed to Sarah like a strange thing for a doctor to say, but Sarah imagined it must be true—but then in any populous city, certain generalities could be made. The doctor gave Sarah painkillers and suggested a follow-up appointment with the hospital’s pain clinic. Sarah wondered if she wouldn’t have been better taking a couple of aspirins. She had spent a couple of hours in the emergency waiting room before seeing the doctor. It was only a little better than when she had made an appointment in the past. The appointment had to be made three months in advance. If she had been seriously ill, she might have died: but that’s the way things were with the city-sponsored medical insurance given to the indigent. Then, she wasted most of a morning, just waiting, waiting, waiting, before briefly being seen by a doctor. What they seemed to want was to keep you going back for appointments to milk the insurance. If you happened to improve your health, that was nice but not a priority. Sarah left the hospital slightly amused by how many ways there were to define poor—indigent, impoverished, needy, disadvantaged, deprived, underprivileged, less fortunate. There were some pretty ways of describing an ugly thing.
(c) DG
An excerpt from "What She Thought" in A Stranger on Earth:
Sarah was surprised to find that she woke up feeling disoriented, with pains in her joints; and when she tried to wash and felt faint, she considered seeing a doctor. She had an appointed with her new job counselor and did not want to miss that—she would have to provide documentation for why she was absent and the whole drama of the matter wasn’t worth it. The job search center was crowded. Sarah cringed. She did not want to see many people. Something in her shut down—she saw a few young, attractive people, and in another environment she might have been curious, but here she cut off eye contact and did not greet anyone. She did not want to have a conversation about her disappointments or hopes. She did not want to be vulnerable (obviously she was vulnerable—but why act it out?).
Sarah was glad to have only spent two hours at the center. She left the building, unsure of what to do—go home, walk around, do something amusing. She saw a television van on the corner, and a reporter and camera man near it. She looked around. Had something happened? She did not see protesting students or workers. What could it be? She wondered for a moment, but wasn’t interested enough to ask. Sarah heard two girls beside her talking about wanting to stop for something to eat. She heard two young men in front of her talking about international relations—one criticized Israel’s bombing of Lebanon, and the other said he didn’t think Israel would still exist as a country in twenty years, as it was antagonizing too many of its neighbors and no longer had any moral justification for its existence. Sarah walked beyond the television van, slowly, and toward the subway. How did she feel? As if she might still be weak. Was she suffering from bad nutrition, a lack of rest? Stress? It could be anything. Everything.
When Sarah finally went to the hospital days later, she was told that a lot of New Yorkers had the aches she was complaining. It seemed to Sarah like a strange thing for a doctor to say, but Sarah imagined it must be true—but then in any populous city, certain generalities could be made. The doctor gave Sarah painkillers and suggested a follow-up appointment with the hospital’s pain clinic. Sarah wondered if she wouldn’t have been better taking a couple of aspirins. She had spent a couple of hours in the emergency waiting room before seeing the doctor. It was only a little better than when she had made an appointment in the past. The appointment had to be made three months in advance. If she had been seriously ill, she might have died: but that’s the way things were with the city-sponsored medical insurance given to the indigent. Then, she wasted most of a morning, just waiting, waiting, waiting, before briefly being seen by a doctor. What they seemed to want was to keep you going back for appointments to milk the insurance. If you happened to improve your health, that was nice but not a priority. Sarah left the hospital slightly amused by how many ways there were to define poor—indigent, impoverished, needy, disadvantaged, deprived, underprivileged, less fortunate. There were some pretty ways of describing an ugly thing.
(c) DG
Poem
Writer's Note: This is a young person's poem. I wrote this poem in the 1980s. It is around the time I was particpating in a writing workshop in Harlem; and I had a young woman friend, also a poet, with whom I used to share conversations about poetry and other things.
Crisis: Covenant
And you ask, Where do I stand?
Other winters weathered left me
lean, trembling, my love mangled effort,
hurt heat behind my eyes,
wise as Socrates: ignorant and knowing it,
having been loved and loving, hated and hating,
having lain naked with truth,
having detonated so many lies
to protect my soul's cities,
risen thick smoke blinding me,
scattered rubble burying all truth,
learning again and again: defensible or defenseless,
the war is lost: life wins.
Still you ask, Where do I stand?
Have I begun to call death?
What of God?
Useless are my prayers,
desperation never being taken
for faith or love by God or men.
Though miracles fall at your feet,
like necessary tribute,
I can only believe in you,
your faith, your laying on of hands,
my body to rise, come
with my soul to cry sanctified!
walking with light.
Is there a new convenant we can make?
(c) DG
Crisis: Covenant
And you ask, Where do I stand?
Other winters weathered left me
lean, trembling, my love mangled effort,
hurt heat behind my eyes,
wise as Socrates: ignorant and knowing it,
having been loved and loving, hated and hating,
having lain naked with truth,
having detonated so many lies
to protect my soul's cities,
risen thick smoke blinding me,
scattered rubble burying all truth,
learning again and again: defensible or defenseless,
the war is lost: life wins.
Still you ask, Where do I stand?
Have I begun to call death?
What of God?
Useless are my prayers,
desperation never being taken
for faith or love by God or men.
Though miracles fall at your feet,
like necessary tribute,
I can only believe in you,
your faith, your laying on of hands,
my body to rise, come
with my soul to cry sanctified!
walking with light.
Is there a new convenant we can make?
(c) DG
The Art of Losing, A Play: Excerpt
Writer's Note: This is an excerpt from The Art of Losing, a two-act play focusing on a family of brothers and their female cousin and several friends, including two “interracial” couples. During the play these relationships are both celebrated and challenged—and challenged not only by the demands of the individual personalities and philosophies involved but also by a terrible act of police violence and an urban bombing with an international source. (The play was partly inspired by the Amadou Diallo killing and the World Trade Center attack, but it is a fictional drama.) Who are we and how do we face unexpected experiences? Do we learn and can we change? Is there an art to losing?
The Art of Losing: Cast of Characters
Patrick – professor of literature; African-American, late 30s
Margaret – Patrick’s friend and cousin, smart, pretty, strong, an assistant editor; African-American, late 30s
Adam – brilliant graduate student, agile charming; of Euro-American descent, late 20s
Raimi – Patrick’s brother, a street vendor of art, fragrances, cloth; West African, late 20s
Risku – Patrick’s brother, a businessman; West African, late 30s
Anthony and Sarah– professors; an interracial couple, black male, white female, late 30s
Maxwell and Patricia – business executives, friends of Anthony and Sarah; an interracial couple, white male, black female, mid-30s
Robert – blonde boy, about 3
Michelle – pretty brown girl, about 4
Leonard Thurman – famous writer; African-American, late 30s
Act 2, Scene 4
(A few hours later. Patrick’s apartment. Patrick, Margaret, Risku, Anthony, Sarah, Robert, Maxwell, and Patricia are there. Robert is asleep in another room.)
Margaret – Oh Sarah, those kinds of African violets only need to be infrequently watered, and then only from the bottom. If water touches the leaves it damages them.
Sarah – I didn’t know that. They didn’t say that at the plant store and of course I threw away that little card the plant came with soon after unwrapping it.
Margaret – They make nice blooms. (quietly) Raimi had given me a couple.
Sarah – I never saw it bloom. I’ll have to get another one now that I know.
Maxwell – Should we turn on the television again to hear more of the news, to see if there have been any other developments?
Patricia – I feel bad about all those people. It’s a tragedy.
(Background music: Abbey Lincoln’s “The World is Falling Down”)
Patrick – We just had the television on thirty minutes ago. Most of what we’ve seen was a repeat of what we’ve been seeing all day. (Dryly) Planes crashing into buildings, smoke, running, screams, emotion.
Margaret – The buildings falling so quickly was unusual. Maybe the engineering was bad, or there was a lot of fuel dispersed and the heat melted the beams.
Sarah – I think tomorrow we’ll call and see what we can do. Donate blood or something.
Patrick – (After watching Patricia then looking at Sarah) You heard what they said about the chemicals that might be in the air. I wouldn’t go anywhere near it.
Maxwell – It is good to do something.
Patricia – The few people I talked to who had someone in those buildings sounded totally wrecked and the ones who aren’t sure where their loved ones are…
Anthony – (getting off the phone) The dean wants to know if someone can put up Leonard Thurman for a couple of days. He was staying in a hotel near the twin towers and he can’t get anywhere near there now. Could you put him up?
Patrick – I’m not in the mood to entertain visiting literary royalty.
Anthony – He’s not like that. He’s really easy to deal with.
Patrick – Let him stay with you.
Anthony – He’d have to sleep on the sofa, and we’ve got a child.
Patrick – Oh, okay, if you can’t find anyone else, he can stay here.
Anthony – Great.
Patrick – If you can’t find anyone else. (smiles) Why don’t you make one or two more phone calls just to see if you can?
Anthony - The dean called most of the people in our department. Most either don’t have the space or don’t want to expose their private lives. (They laugh)
Patrick – Okay, he can stay. Is he going to come over tonight?
Anthony – As soon as I call his cell phone, he’ll probably be on his way.
Patrick – (to Margaret) We’ll have company.
Margaret – It’s fine with me—someone new might distract us.
Patrick – Literary people are never new in that way. They always remind me of someone else, of someone long dead.
Sarah – Patrick!
Patrick – I just mean that they’re like the reincarnation of some great writer, usually someone who influenced them a lot. Or else, they remind one of their own work—you think you’ve heard something before and then you recall an opinion piece they wrote six months ago or a book they got a lot of attention for that you merely read a concise review of. (quietly) Anyway, he can stay in Raimi’s room.
Sarah – I’ll wake Robert and straighten the bed. What time is it? (She sees a clock.)
Margaret – Benjamin Banneker made the first clock in the United States in the mid-eighteenth century. A mathematician and an African-American, he also helped design the nation’s capital, the architecture.
Patrick – He published a weather almanac too.
Anthony – I’ll call the dean, then Thurman. We can stay until he gets here.
Patrick – Yes, do that.
Patricia – You still call it Raimi’s room?
Patrick – I do, as that’s what it is. (pause) It’s kind of disgusting for me to hear you be upset about some dead white businessmen you don’t know when you weren’t as upset about the murder of my brother, whom you did know.
Patricia – I told you. They were the husbands and wives of some of the people I do business with.
Patrick – But they weren’t related to you, and you didn’t know them.
Patricia – So.
Patrick – Why are you so emotionally involved with this?
Patricia – This is a world-historical event.
Patrick – (laughs) Anything that happens to Americans are thought by Americans to be world-historical. The rest of the world experiences terrorism periodically. Bombs go off in London and Rome and Paris every year. People die for political reasons in Africa, India, and South America all the time. There’s nothing world-historical about this. This is an American event and it’s recent, that’s all.
Patricia – I’m sorry that I didn’t mourn your brother the way you thought I should.
Patrick – Did you mourn him at all?
Patrick – I didn’t know him well.
Patrick – You knew him well enough to know he should not have been killed.
Risku – Patrick, both Raimi and all those people who died in those buildings should be mourned.
Margaret – I agree.
Risku – Death is a terrible thing.
Patrick – (quietly but angrily) What I want to get at is why Patricia didn’t mourn Raimi, and I think she didn’t because she didn’t value him—he was a black man and she didn’t expect much from him.
Patricia – But I’m a black woman.
Patrick – Married to a white man.
Patricia – What does that have to do with anything?
Anthony – I don’t think that’s relevant.
Patrick – It is possible for people to take on the values of the larger society, to see only certain lives as important.
Sarah – I don’t think that Patrick thinks being married to someone who doesn’t look like you means that you’re more inclined to make errors in judgment.
Anthony – Of course not.
Patrick – (laughs) Why don’t you let me say what I mean? I mean exactly what I said. Patricia has the values of the larger society—they are white bourgeois heterosexual values, utterly conventional and predictable.
Patricia – (stunned) I am old-fashioned in some ways, and I do believe in ordinary decency and I wouldn’t intentionally insult a visitor to my home and I know that for you to describe me as you have, short of calling me stupid, is probably the most damning thing you could say. It may be, in fact, just another way of calling me stupid.
Maxwell – Let’s not all react.
Patrick – (laughs) Why not?
Maxwell – We’re friends and we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
Patrick – Max, we’re beyond that. Feelings have been hurt and on both sides.
Maxwell – That’s not funny.
Patrick – What’s funny is this unwillingness to hear the truth, to explore what’s true. You want to cover it up before we’ve even gotten a good look at it. (He puts on Ice-T’s “Straight Up Nigga”)
Anthony – Not everyone who worked in those towers were executives. There were people at all professional levels, people from different countries, with different skin colors.
Patrick – Those other people are not the ones Patricia is thinking about—and I’m interested in why. I think that this country still manages to get us to idealize Americans of European descent, white men. We see them as having greater complexity, greater possibilities, greater worth than others.
Patricia – Do you think we should still be angry at white men for what happened years ago?
Patrick – I’m not talking about being angry about the hundreds of years of slavery, social ostracism and prejudice that African-Americans have been subjected to. I’m talking about seeing Africans and African-Americans as fully human, as having as much potential value as anyone.
Maxwell – Potential value and actual value are not the same.
Patrick – Especially if you don’t believe in potential value. Raimi had both potential value and actual value.
Anthony – It would be easier to talk about this if it weren’t so personal.
Patrick – This kind of conversation is always personal for someone—for someone present or absent, whether we know it or not. What’s abstract about talking about how we see people? I don’t think Patricia is guilty of anything most of us haven’t thought at one time or another.
Patricia – That’s a small justice, though I may not be as guilty as you think. I’ll admit that the spouses of colleagues have concerned me and I’ve expressed that concern in a way that may be more vivid than what I showed for—Raimi. I didn’t like running through the streets not knowing what was happening. I feel as if I could have been in one of those towers. I feel that what disturbs my colleagues will affect me and what I do. I’ve also been trained to demonstrate—to dramatize—concern for colleagues whether or not I care. That’s the business world. I wanted you to feel I supported you after Raimi died but I also thought if I made a big deal over his death it would just make you feel worse, that the awfulness of it would have just been confirmed. It seemed better to be a strong person rather than a mournful person, a person of resource rather than a weakened person.
Patrick – I see.
Maxwell – It wasn’t some kind of depraved indifference to your brother’s life or death.
Patrick – No.
Margaret – (mildly) I still don’t know what Patricia actually does. I never seem to understand what people with high-level administrative jobs in large corporations actually do.
Maxwell – We’ve explained it—more than once.
Margaret – (smiles) I still don’t get it.
Patricia – (softly) I didn’t think of Raimi as anything more than your half-brother who was a street vendor and an obscure musician. I did not see more than that in him. You were right about that.
Patrick – What might we have done to change that? What can we do in the future—so that we really see?
Anthony – You’re asking a lot of human perception, of the world.
Sarah – Even when most of this society begins to see African-Americans differently, there’s still likely to be prejudice still regarding one group or another.
Patrick – What do we do until then? And after? (pause) Why is it that when I see interracial couples on the street they ignore me?
(Margaret laughs)
Patricia – We’re so used to being stared at that we just try to focus on each other and on safe things, buildings and stuff that won’t object to our being together.
Patrick – Why do spouses in interracial couples seem to go out of their way to adopt what they think of as the culture of the other and end up with peculiar tastes, like Patricia’s love of country music and Maxwell’s taste for only traditional African music and disregard for modern African music?
Maxwell – It’s very subjective to call something peculiar. Certainly you like all kinds of things.
Patrick – Yes.
Maxwell – Traditional African music seems very…pure.
Patrick – Modern Africans are the same inheritors of history and technology and diverse cultural influences as the rest of us and that’s what comes up in their music. To be preoccupied with only the traditional seems like an exoticism, a denial of the complexity of modern Africans.
Maxwell – It’s what I like.
Patrick – Okay, but taste is something that we develop, isn’t it? It has origins, and we can subject our taste to questions, to criticism, to standards, even though we can like whatever we choose.
Maxwell – We are changed by the people we love. They open us. I’ve been changed by you Patrick, and I hope you’ve gotten something from me.
Patrick – Anthony, did you play golf before meeting Sarah?
Anthony – Two words. Tiger Woods.
Patricia – I love Maxwell and we understand and misunderstand each other and have good times and argue and negotiate—it’s love.
Patrick – (wistfully) Did you know right away that it was love, when you met?
Patricia – We enjoyed each other.
Maxwell -- I asked myself whether I wanted to live with her or without her, which would be the better life.
Anthony –What are you doing Patrick, reducing us to specimens?
Patricia – He’s judging us.
Patrick – I’m trying to understand something.
Sarah – Some things cannot be asked of one’s friends. There has to be trust.
Patrick – None of my questions are as bad as the insane interviews and comments directed at me. I’ve been asked by someone who worked in a library whether there are any black writers. Someone else asked me if I ever cut my hair. The things people let slip. And in job interviews, it’s worse—the interviewers think every line on the resume is a lie or a miracle. (pause) I’m trying to understand something.
Anthony – What?
Patrick – What makes us who we are, why we stay that way.
(End of scene)
(c) DG, 2002
The Art of Losing: Cast of Characters
Patrick – professor of literature; African-American, late 30s
Margaret – Patrick’s friend and cousin, smart, pretty, strong, an assistant editor; African-American, late 30s
Adam – brilliant graduate student, agile charming; of Euro-American descent, late 20s
Raimi – Patrick’s brother, a street vendor of art, fragrances, cloth; West African, late 20s
Risku – Patrick’s brother, a businessman; West African, late 30s
Anthony and Sarah– professors; an interracial couple, black male, white female, late 30s
Maxwell and Patricia – business executives, friends of Anthony and Sarah; an interracial couple, white male, black female, mid-30s
Robert – blonde boy, about 3
Michelle – pretty brown girl, about 4
Leonard Thurman – famous writer; African-American, late 30s
Act 2, Scene 4
(A few hours later. Patrick’s apartment. Patrick, Margaret, Risku, Anthony, Sarah, Robert, Maxwell, and Patricia are there. Robert is asleep in another room.)
Margaret – Oh Sarah, those kinds of African violets only need to be infrequently watered, and then only from the bottom. If water touches the leaves it damages them.
Sarah – I didn’t know that. They didn’t say that at the plant store and of course I threw away that little card the plant came with soon after unwrapping it.
Margaret – They make nice blooms. (quietly) Raimi had given me a couple.
Sarah – I never saw it bloom. I’ll have to get another one now that I know.
Maxwell – Should we turn on the television again to hear more of the news, to see if there have been any other developments?
Patricia – I feel bad about all those people. It’s a tragedy.
(Background music: Abbey Lincoln’s “The World is Falling Down”)
Patrick – We just had the television on thirty minutes ago. Most of what we’ve seen was a repeat of what we’ve been seeing all day. (Dryly) Planes crashing into buildings, smoke, running, screams, emotion.
Margaret – The buildings falling so quickly was unusual. Maybe the engineering was bad, or there was a lot of fuel dispersed and the heat melted the beams.
Sarah – I think tomorrow we’ll call and see what we can do. Donate blood or something.
Patrick – (After watching Patricia then looking at Sarah) You heard what they said about the chemicals that might be in the air. I wouldn’t go anywhere near it.
Maxwell – It is good to do something.
Patricia – The few people I talked to who had someone in those buildings sounded totally wrecked and the ones who aren’t sure where their loved ones are…
Anthony – (getting off the phone) The dean wants to know if someone can put up Leonard Thurman for a couple of days. He was staying in a hotel near the twin towers and he can’t get anywhere near there now. Could you put him up?
Patrick – I’m not in the mood to entertain visiting literary royalty.
Anthony – He’s not like that. He’s really easy to deal with.
Patrick – Let him stay with you.
Anthony – He’d have to sleep on the sofa, and we’ve got a child.
Patrick – Oh, okay, if you can’t find anyone else, he can stay here.
Anthony – Great.
Patrick – If you can’t find anyone else. (smiles) Why don’t you make one or two more phone calls just to see if you can?
Anthony - The dean called most of the people in our department. Most either don’t have the space or don’t want to expose their private lives. (They laugh)
Patrick – Okay, he can stay. Is he going to come over tonight?
Anthony – As soon as I call his cell phone, he’ll probably be on his way.
Patrick – (to Margaret) We’ll have company.
Margaret – It’s fine with me—someone new might distract us.
Patrick – Literary people are never new in that way. They always remind me of someone else, of someone long dead.
Sarah – Patrick!
Patrick – I just mean that they’re like the reincarnation of some great writer, usually someone who influenced them a lot. Or else, they remind one of their own work—you think you’ve heard something before and then you recall an opinion piece they wrote six months ago or a book they got a lot of attention for that you merely read a concise review of. (quietly) Anyway, he can stay in Raimi’s room.
Sarah – I’ll wake Robert and straighten the bed. What time is it? (She sees a clock.)
Margaret – Benjamin Banneker made the first clock in the United States in the mid-eighteenth century. A mathematician and an African-American, he also helped design the nation’s capital, the architecture.
Patrick – He published a weather almanac too.
Anthony – I’ll call the dean, then Thurman. We can stay until he gets here.
Patrick – Yes, do that.
Patricia – You still call it Raimi’s room?
Patrick – I do, as that’s what it is. (pause) It’s kind of disgusting for me to hear you be upset about some dead white businessmen you don’t know when you weren’t as upset about the murder of my brother, whom you did know.
Patricia – I told you. They were the husbands and wives of some of the people I do business with.
Patrick – But they weren’t related to you, and you didn’t know them.
Patricia – So.
Patrick – Why are you so emotionally involved with this?
Patricia – This is a world-historical event.
Patrick – (laughs) Anything that happens to Americans are thought by Americans to be world-historical. The rest of the world experiences terrorism periodically. Bombs go off in London and Rome and Paris every year. People die for political reasons in Africa, India, and South America all the time. There’s nothing world-historical about this. This is an American event and it’s recent, that’s all.
Patricia – I’m sorry that I didn’t mourn your brother the way you thought I should.
Patrick – Did you mourn him at all?
Patrick – I didn’t know him well.
Patrick – You knew him well enough to know he should not have been killed.
Risku – Patrick, both Raimi and all those people who died in those buildings should be mourned.
Margaret – I agree.
Risku – Death is a terrible thing.
Patrick – (quietly but angrily) What I want to get at is why Patricia didn’t mourn Raimi, and I think she didn’t because she didn’t value him—he was a black man and she didn’t expect much from him.
Patricia – But I’m a black woman.
Patrick – Married to a white man.
Patricia – What does that have to do with anything?
Anthony – I don’t think that’s relevant.
Patrick – It is possible for people to take on the values of the larger society, to see only certain lives as important.
Sarah – I don’t think that Patrick thinks being married to someone who doesn’t look like you means that you’re more inclined to make errors in judgment.
Anthony – Of course not.
Patrick – (laughs) Why don’t you let me say what I mean? I mean exactly what I said. Patricia has the values of the larger society—they are white bourgeois heterosexual values, utterly conventional and predictable.
Patricia – (stunned) I am old-fashioned in some ways, and I do believe in ordinary decency and I wouldn’t intentionally insult a visitor to my home and I know that for you to describe me as you have, short of calling me stupid, is probably the most damning thing you could say. It may be, in fact, just another way of calling me stupid.
Maxwell – Let’s not all react.
Patrick – (laughs) Why not?
Maxwell – We’re friends and we don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings.
Patrick – Max, we’re beyond that. Feelings have been hurt and on both sides.
Maxwell – That’s not funny.
Patrick – What’s funny is this unwillingness to hear the truth, to explore what’s true. You want to cover it up before we’ve even gotten a good look at it. (He puts on Ice-T’s “Straight Up Nigga”)
Anthony – Not everyone who worked in those towers were executives. There were people at all professional levels, people from different countries, with different skin colors.
Patrick – Those other people are not the ones Patricia is thinking about—and I’m interested in why. I think that this country still manages to get us to idealize Americans of European descent, white men. We see them as having greater complexity, greater possibilities, greater worth than others.
Patricia – Do you think we should still be angry at white men for what happened years ago?
Patrick – I’m not talking about being angry about the hundreds of years of slavery, social ostracism and prejudice that African-Americans have been subjected to. I’m talking about seeing Africans and African-Americans as fully human, as having as much potential value as anyone.
Maxwell – Potential value and actual value are not the same.
Patrick – Especially if you don’t believe in potential value. Raimi had both potential value and actual value.
Anthony – It would be easier to talk about this if it weren’t so personal.
Patrick – This kind of conversation is always personal for someone—for someone present or absent, whether we know it or not. What’s abstract about talking about how we see people? I don’t think Patricia is guilty of anything most of us haven’t thought at one time or another.
Patricia – That’s a small justice, though I may not be as guilty as you think. I’ll admit that the spouses of colleagues have concerned me and I’ve expressed that concern in a way that may be more vivid than what I showed for—Raimi. I didn’t like running through the streets not knowing what was happening. I feel as if I could have been in one of those towers. I feel that what disturbs my colleagues will affect me and what I do. I’ve also been trained to demonstrate—to dramatize—concern for colleagues whether or not I care. That’s the business world. I wanted you to feel I supported you after Raimi died but I also thought if I made a big deal over his death it would just make you feel worse, that the awfulness of it would have just been confirmed. It seemed better to be a strong person rather than a mournful person, a person of resource rather than a weakened person.
Patrick – I see.
Maxwell – It wasn’t some kind of depraved indifference to your brother’s life or death.
Patrick – No.
Margaret – (mildly) I still don’t know what Patricia actually does. I never seem to understand what people with high-level administrative jobs in large corporations actually do.
Maxwell – We’ve explained it—more than once.
Margaret – (smiles) I still don’t get it.
Patricia – (softly) I didn’t think of Raimi as anything more than your half-brother who was a street vendor and an obscure musician. I did not see more than that in him. You were right about that.
Patrick – What might we have done to change that? What can we do in the future—so that we really see?
Anthony – You’re asking a lot of human perception, of the world.
Sarah – Even when most of this society begins to see African-Americans differently, there’s still likely to be prejudice still regarding one group or another.
Patrick – What do we do until then? And after? (pause) Why is it that when I see interracial couples on the street they ignore me?
(Margaret laughs)
Patricia – We’re so used to being stared at that we just try to focus on each other and on safe things, buildings and stuff that won’t object to our being together.
Patrick – Why do spouses in interracial couples seem to go out of their way to adopt what they think of as the culture of the other and end up with peculiar tastes, like Patricia’s love of country music and Maxwell’s taste for only traditional African music and disregard for modern African music?
Maxwell – It’s very subjective to call something peculiar. Certainly you like all kinds of things.
Patrick – Yes.
Maxwell – Traditional African music seems very…pure.
Patrick – Modern Africans are the same inheritors of history and technology and diverse cultural influences as the rest of us and that’s what comes up in their music. To be preoccupied with only the traditional seems like an exoticism, a denial of the complexity of modern Africans.
Maxwell – It’s what I like.
Patrick – Okay, but taste is something that we develop, isn’t it? It has origins, and we can subject our taste to questions, to criticism, to standards, even though we can like whatever we choose.
Maxwell – We are changed by the people we love. They open us. I’ve been changed by you Patrick, and I hope you’ve gotten something from me.
Patrick – Anthony, did you play golf before meeting Sarah?
Anthony – Two words. Tiger Woods.
Patricia – I love Maxwell and we understand and misunderstand each other and have good times and argue and negotiate—it’s love.
Patrick – (wistfully) Did you know right away that it was love, when you met?
Patricia – We enjoyed each other.
Maxwell -- I asked myself whether I wanted to live with her or without her, which would be the better life.
Anthony –What are you doing Patrick, reducing us to specimens?
Patricia – He’s judging us.
Patrick – I’m trying to understand something.
Sarah – Some things cannot be asked of one’s friends. There has to be trust.
Patrick – None of my questions are as bad as the insane interviews and comments directed at me. I’ve been asked by someone who worked in a library whether there are any black writers. Someone else asked me if I ever cut my hair. The things people let slip. And in job interviews, it’s worse—the interviewers think every line on the resume is a lie or a miracle. (pause) I’m trying to understand something.
Anthony – What?
Patrick – What makes us who we are, why we stay that way.
(End of scene)
(c) DG, 2002
Poem
Writer's Note: I wrote this poem in the early 1990s, and it was inspired by different ideas and perceptions and the fact of a new friend, whose acquaintance I renewed this year.
A Classical Simplicity
My friend, I lived through the age of superstition
fear ignorance youth the rule of nature
and the age of reason
coldness knowledge maturity the rule of man
and each has it own monsters
monsters glimpsed through the night blinds
of partially closed windows
monsters glimpsed through the lines
of partially wise manifestoes
and still I'm trying to guess what come next
by closely reading each new text
thrilling at words whose realities I recognize--
ambiguity, fragmentation, the price of progress.
You return me to my younger self
with questions of a classical simplicity:
What are you feeling?
What does she mean to you now?
What will you do?
You have begun to live in me now
like a man in a story I must write or tell,
and this is my desire, this is my fear.
Let us not be those hollow men
for whom only words are alive.
Let us cling to the truths of our differing
ages, and create anew with each other and others.
(c) DG
A Classical Simplicity
My friend, I lived through the age of superstition
fear ignorance youth the rule of nature
and the age of reason
coldness knowledge maturity the rule of man
and each has it own monsters
monsters glimpsed through the night blinds
of partially closed windows
monsters glimpsed through the lines
of partially wise manifestoes
and still I'm trying to guess what come next
by closely reading each new text
thrilling at words whose realities I recognize--
ambiguity, fragmentation, the price of progress.
You return me to my younger self
with questions of a classical simplicity:
What are you feeling?
What does she mean to you now?
What will you do?
You have begun to live in me now
like a man in a story I must write or tell,
and this is my desire, this is my fear.
Let us not be those hollow men
for whom only words are alive.
Let us cling to the truths of our differing
ages, and create anew with each other and others.
(c) DG
Wednesday, December 17, 2008
The World of Literature and Ideas
The poet and Yale professor Elizabeth Alexander has been selected to participate in President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama’s inauguration.
In her December 4 Washington Post interview with journalist Bob Thompson, Toni Morrison discussed her own work, her perception of personality, and Barack Obama; and she said that she wished that some of her friends and colleagues, such as James Baldwin, were still around to see Barack Obama, whose writing talent and wisdom she admires. Asked what James Baldwin’s response might have been to Barack Obama, Toni Morrison said, “I think he would be desperately, desperately in love.”
Robert Draper is planning to write a forty-year history of race in America, beginning with Martin Luther King’s death and ending with Barack Obama’s election, according to Politico.com and Publishers Weekly.
“The publication this month of the first volume of Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a significant event in the literary world,” begins Daniel Horowitz’s piece on Susan Sontag for the December 19 Chronicle Review (Chronicle of Higher Education). The journals document Sontag’s early life and education, and display Sontag’s intellectual ambition and commitment to experience (accepting both pain and pleasure as part of life), as well as her response to aesthetics and sexuality. Horowitz notes some of the editing errors regarding facts and chronology that might lead to confusion in interpreting Sontag, yet finds that the journals convey “the sources of Sontag’s transformation into a powerful writer and major celebrity.”
The online international publication Words Without Borders’ December issue focuses on “the home front,” the struggles of home life.
Paul Greenberg’s December 9 essay (“Bail Out the Writers!”) in the New York Times considers how plentiful the number of writers are and how the rewards for most writers have little to do with plenty.
The organization Poets and Writers has received a grant of two-million dollars from New Jersey’s Liana Foundation.
Poets from Australia, Ireland, Portugal, and South Africa are featured on the web site of Poetry International for December.
“The nonpartisan Council for A Better Louisiana has updated its Louisiana Fact Book with the latest data on demographics, economic activity, education, health care and public safety,” according to the December 17 Associated Press (and Baton Rouge Advocate).
The Center for Louisiana Studies was scheduled to hold a holiday celebration and book signing for yesterday, December 16th, featuring Barry Ancelet, Darrell Bourque, Carl Brasseaux, Ray Brassieur, Richard Campanella, Fred Daspit, Philip Gould, Greg Guirard, Reinhart Kondert, Dave Pierce, and May Waggoner.
In her December 4 Washington Post interview with journalist Bob Thompson, Toni Morrison discussed her own work, her perception of personality, and Barack Obama; and she said that she wished that some of her friends and colleagues, such as James Baldwin, were still around to see Barack Obama, whose writing talent and wisdom she admires. Asked what James Baldwin’s response might have been to Barack Obama, Toni Morrison said, “I think he would be desperately, desperately in love.”
Robert Draper is planning to write a forty-year history of race in America, beginning with Martin Luther King’s death and ending with Barack Obama’s election, according to Politico.com and Publishers Weekly.
“The publication this month of the first volume of Susan Sontag’s Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), edited by her son, David Rieff, is a significant event in the literary world,” begins Daniel Horowitz’s piece on Susan Sontag for the December 19 Chronicle Review (Chronicle of Higher Education). The journals document Sontag’s early life and education, and display Sontag’s intellectual ambition and commitment to experience (accepting both pain and pleasure as part of life), as well as her response to aesthetics and sexuality. Horowitz notes some of the editing errors regarding facts and chronology that might lead to confusion in interpreting Sontag, yet finds that the journals convey “the sources of Sontag’s transformation into a powerful writer and major celebrity.”
The online international publication Words Without Borders’ December issue focuses on “the home front,” the struggles of home life.
Paul Greenberg’s December 9 essay (“Bail Out the Writers!”) in the New York Times considers how plentiful the number of writers are and how the rewards for most writers have little to do with plenty.
The organization Poets and Writers has received a grant of two-million dollars from New Jersey’s Liana Foundation.
Poets from Australia, Ireland, Portugal, and South Africa are featured on the web site of Poetry International for December.
“The nonpartisan Council for A Better Louisiana has updated its Louisiana Fact Book with the latest data on demographics, economic activity, education, health care and public safety,” according to the December 17 Associated Press (and Baton Rouge Advocate).
The Center for Louisiana Studies was scheduled to hold a holiday celebration and book signing for yesterday, December 16th, featuring Barry Ancelet, Darrell Bourque, Carl Brasseaux, Ray Brassieur, Richard Campanella, Fred Daspit, Philip Gould, Greg Guirard, Reinhart Kondert, Dave Pierce, and May Waggoner.
Tuesday, December 16, 2008
Book Notes
Today there is rain and fog, although there are weather forecasts of bright, warm days ahead. Last week, it snowed in Louisiana for the first time in years, and many people were excited by that. It was briefly cheering as the late autumn/winter landscape here can be bleak, with the brown grass and browning trees and the mostly bare cane fields, the large combine tractors and their drivers having done their work. Books offer, still, some news of the larger world, past and present; and they can help a man to see the present a little more clearly. I have been reading two books offering a perspective on Louisiana politics: Louisiana: A History, edited by Bennett Hall, from Harland Davidson Inc. (1984/2008), and Inside the Carnival: Unmasking Louisiana Politics, by Wayne Parent, from LSU Press (2004). The latter mentions a popular Louisiana T-shirt, “It’s Not the Heat. It’s the Stupidity.” The book informed me also that in 1930, the black population in Louisiana was 50% but only 1% were registered voters, a fact which says much about the balance of power in that time; and in 1980 the black population was 30% and 70% were registered voters. Of course, in the recent election, most African-Americans in Louisiana voted for Barack Obama; and the balance of the state's votes went to John McCain, who was not the victor in the national election. Times have changed, though not every mind reflects that change; and history, for better and worse, has had its effects…I have been reading parts of Richard Megraw’s Confronting Modernity: Art and Society in Louisiana, on the New Deal, modernity, and the relationship of modernity to local values. In the last few months and weeks, I have been “looking at” or reading various books, including Clarence Major’s novel My Amputations, a novel about identity, literature, ambition, despair, and conflict (FC2/University of Alabama Press, 1986/2008); and another fiction, Toni Morrison’s novel A Mercy (Knopf, 2008), in which she fills the absences and silences of early American literature. The Oxford American Book of Great Music Writing, edited by Marc Smirnoff, has articles such as Peter Guralnick’s commentary on music and career, Carol Ann Fitzgerald on Bessie Smith, love, and sex, and Mike Powell on Fred Neil (Everybody’s Talkin’”), and Elizabeth Wurtzel on R.E.M., and other pieces (University of Arkansas Press, 2008). I liked Fitzgerald and Wurtzel’s work very much. The book is better than much of what passes for music criticism today, too much of which is the promotion of attitude and cliques rather than the exploration of music or its makers. Sarah Vowell’s historical research book, The Wordy Shipmates (Riverhead/Penquin, 2008), on New England and early American intellectual and political history, could be a companion piece to the Morrison novel. It captures something contentious and progressive in early American life. The photo book with text that is The Black List, by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and Elvis Mitchell, is a great reminder of the progress that has been made by some African Americans and the work yet to be done; and it displays the images and words of Toni Morrison, Vernon Jordan, Serena Williams, Louis Gossett Jr., Lorna Simpson, Karem Abdul-Jabbar, Thelma Golden, Sean Combs, Colin Powell, Bill T. Jones, and others (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2008).
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
What's Going On?
I had a very peculiar dream last night, involving passports, a chase-and-run through a cane field, and violent persecution, a dream that seemed the result of various anxieties as well as recent television viewing; and when I woke I thought about freedom and slavery, peace and war. I thought about the choices we want and the situations in which we do not have choice. How are our rights ensured? Our rights are ensured by those who make a commitment to those rights, just as culture is advanced by those who make it and support it. It is now an important year for the advancement of human rights: the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted by the United Nations on December 10, 1948; and this year is the sixtieth anniversary. The declaration affirmed freedom, and justice, and asylum, for all regardless of social categories. However, some countries abuse those rights still. “In situations of serious abuse, the human rights movement often cannot rely on local courts to enforce rights. Abusive governments have long figured out that killing, corrupting or compromising a few judges and lawyers is enough to secure impunity for human rights abuse. Instead, the human rights movement has developed the capacity to put intense pressure on abusive governments with the goal of forcing them to resist the temptation to violate human rights,” states Kenneth Roth in “The Price of Rights” on the web site of Human Rights Watch, commemorating the sixtieth anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights. As strategies to protect human rights, the human rights movement uses diplomatic pressure, and advances legal prosecution of individuals who have violated human rights, and encourages military intervention in extreme situations (such as genocide).
In “Social Networks and Happiness” by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, a piece that appears online at the online site of Edge: The Third Culture (December 5, 2008), the authors Christakis and Fowler report that “We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.” These findings seem to be in line with common sense—we think, often, that like attracts like.
The online web magazine The Daily Voice reported yesterday, December 9, that Julian Bond has said that he will seek re-election as chair of the NAACP, the civil rights group. Previously, he had said that he would not seek the chairmanship again.
President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama has proposed a public works program that calls to mind the celebrated and useful projects of Franklin Roosevelt, and Obama’s proposals as reported are very practical, positive, and promising news, but today Barack Obama has made news by calling for Illinois governor Rod R. Blagojevich to resign, following reports of the governor’s seeking personal benefits for an appointment to replace the Illinois senate seat recently held by Obama, a corruption case that Jesse Jackson’s son has been implicated in, as a possible candidate for that seat.
Corruption is not unique to Illinois and in the past it has been notorious in Louisiana (Who can forget Edwin Edwards bragging about voters’ tolerance? Edwards said that he would get in trouble only if he were found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. And, more recently, a Louisiana politician was found to have thousands of dollars stored in a fridge, leading to various legal charges). However, following an investigation into a business decision of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco shortly before she left office, the December 10, 2008 New Orleans Times-Picayune (correspondent David Hammer) reports that “Former Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s 25-percent raise to the Road Home contractor went unquestioned and largely unnoticed a year ago, but not because of any intent to conceal the $156 million increase, according to a state inspector general's report released today.” Reporter David Hammer writes, “The change raised the amount that private contractor ICF International Inc. could be paid for its work administering the program by $156 million -- to a $912 million cap,” but “Inspector General Stephen Street, an appointee of Gov. Bobby Jindal, said he found no evidence that the Blanco administration was trying to hide the raise she gave ICF, even though the media and key figures in the Legislature didn’t know about it until long after she left office.”
Science Daily has a report on software being devloped to aid security (“Keeping Track: Software Locates People And Objects, Immediately Detects Unauthorized Persons”), as well as reports on smart fabrics that monitor health and plastic that conducts electricity. Science News reports on an imaging study that examines the parts of the human brain (and emotion) involved in legal decisions affecting punishment (in the article titled “In the brain, justice is served from many parts”).
The southern Louisiana newspaper The Daily Iberian (reporter Holly Leleux-Thubron) announces that “The ancient statue of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, a tourist attraction in the Teche Area for more than 40 years, was sold for almost $1 million Tuesday”at the New York auction house Christie’s.
I have not seen any films in a theater recently, something I regret, but I am reminded that are now good things to see, and will be more, in some theaters, though not necessarily any that are near me in Louisiana: “Milk and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button dominated the nominations Tuesday for the Broadcast Film Critics Assn.’s 14th annual Critics’ Choice Awards, receiving eight nods each,” reports Susan King of the Los Angeles Times, December 10. “Joining Milk and Benjamin Button in the best picture category are Changeling, The Dark Knight, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire, Wall-E and The Wrestler. (Note: The New York Film Critics Circle has picked Milk as best film, and its lead actor Sean Penn as best actor.)
One of the films I want to see is The Reader, starring Kate Winslet, which Film Journal International reviews. It is set in Germany and is about a young man and an older woman, and contains a significant historical theme. “On his way home from school, the young Berliner is taken ill and stumbles into the vestibule of a shabby tenement where he vomits. Resident Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a 30-year-old tram conductor, comes to his rescue, helping Michael return to his comfortable but stern Berlin family,” describes Doris Toumarkine, Film Journal International, December 10. “Working from Hare’s chronologically scrambled and energized adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s bestseller, director Stephen Daldry (The Hours) delivers a handsome and thought-provoking package that will attract critics’ praise and droves of quality-seeking audiences. Daldry also draws superior performances from his cast, especially principals Winslet, Fiennes, Olin and young German newcomer Kross.”
In New York, Renee Fleming performed at the Metropolitan Opera in Massenet’s “Thaïs.” “Ms. Fleming justified the company’s faith by delivering a vocally sumptuous and unabashedly show-stealing Thaïs. A glamorous courtesan in fourth-century Alexandria, Thaïs undergoes a spiritual transformation when confronted by an ascetic monk, Athanaël, whose fierce religiosity cannot contain his erotic desires,” comments the New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini, December 9.
In “Social Networks and Happiness” by Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, a piece that appears online at the online site of Edge: The Third Culture (December 5, 2008), the authors Christakis and Fowler report that “We found that social networks have clusters of happy and unhappy people within them that reach out to three degrees of separation. A person’s happiness is related to the happiness of their friends, their friends’ friends, and their friends’ friends’ friends—that is, to people well beyond their social horizon. We found that happy people tend to be located in the center of their social networks and to be located in large clusters of other happy people. And we found that each additional happy friend increases a person’s probability of being happy by about 9%. For comparison, having an extra $5,000 in income (in 1984 dollars) increased the probability of being happy by about 2%.” These findings seem to be in line with common sense—we think, often, that like attracts like.
The online web magazine The Daily Voice reported yesterday, December 9, that Julian Bond has said that he will seek re-election as chair of the NAACP, the civil rights group. Previously, he had said that he would not seek the chairmanship again.
President-Elect Barack Hussein Obama has proposed a public works program that calls to mind the celebrated and useful projects of Franklin Roosevelt, and Obama’s proposals as reported are very practical, positive, and promising news, but today Barack Obama has made news by calling for Illinois governor Rod R. Blagojevich to resign, following reports of the governor’s seeking personal benefits for an appointment to replace the Illinois senate seat recently held by Obama, a corruption case that Jesse Jackson’s son has been implicated in, as a possible candidate for that seat.
Corruption is not unique to Illinois and in the past it has been notorious in Louisiana (Who can forget Edwin Edwards bragging about voters’ tolerance? Edwards said that he would get in trouble only if he were found in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. And, more recently, a Louisiana politician was found to have thousands of dollars stored in a fridge, leading to various legal charges). However, following an investigation into a business decision of former Louisiana governor Kathleen Blanco shortly before she left office, the December 10, 2008 New Orleans Times-Picayune (correspondent David Hammer) reports that “Former Gov. Kathleen Blanco’s 25-percent raise to the Road Home contractor went unquestioned and largely unnoticed a year ago, but not because of any intent to conceal the $156 million increase, according to a state inspector general's report released today.” Reporter David Hammer writes, “The change raised the amount that private contractor ICF International Inc. could be paid for its work administering the program by $156 million -- to a $912 million cap,” but “Inspector General Stephen Street, an appointee of Gov. Bobby Jindal, said he found no evidence that the Blanco administration was trying to hide the raise she gave ICF, even though the media and key figures in the Legislature didn’t know about it until long after she left office.”
Science Daily has a report on software being devloped to aid security (“Keeping Track: Software Locates People And Objects, Immediately Detects Unauthorized Persons”), as well as reports on smart fabrics that monitor health and plastic that conducts electricity. Science News reports on an imaging study that examines the parts of the human brain (and emotion) involved in legal decisions affecting punishment (in the article titled “In the brain, justice is served from many parts”).
The southern Louisiana newspaper The Daily Iberian (reporter Holly Leleux-Thubron) announces that “The ancient statue of the Roman Emperor Hadrian, a tourist attraction in the Teche Area for more than 40 years, was sold for almost $1 million Tuesday”at the New York auction house Christie’s.
I have not seen any films in a theater recently, something I regret, but I am reminded that are now good things to see, and will be more, in some theaters, though not necessarily any that are near me in Louisiana: “Milk and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button dominated the nominations Tuesday for the Broadcast Film Critics Assn.’s 14th annual Critics’ Choice Awards, receiving eight nods each,” reports Susan King of the Los Angeles Times, December 10. “Joining Milk and Benjamin Button in the best picture category are Changeling, The Dark Knight, Doubt, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire, Wall-E and The Wrestler. (Note: The New York Film Critics Circle has picked Milk as best film, and its lead actor Sean Penn as best actor.)
One of the films I want to see is The Reader, starring Kate Winslet, which Film Journal International reviews. It is set in Germany and is about a young man and an older woman, and contains a significant historical theme. “On his way home from school, the young Berliner is taken ill and stumbles into the vestibule of a shabby tenement where he vomits. Resident Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), a 30-year-old tram conductor, comes to his rescue, helping Michael return to his comfortable but stern Berlin family,” describes Doris Toumarkine, Film Journal International, December 10. “Working from Hare’s chronologically scrambled and energized adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s bestseller, director Stephen Daldry (The Hours) delivers a handsome and thought-provoking package that will attract critics’ praise and droves of quality-seeking audiences. Daldry also draws superior performances from his cast, especially principals Winslet, Fiennes, Olin and young German newcomer Kross.”
In New York, Renee Fleming performed at the Metropolitan Opera in Massenet’s “Thaïs.” “Ms. Fleming justified the company’s faith by delivering a vocally sumptuous and unabashedly show-stealing Thaïs. A glamorous courtesan in fourth-century Alexandria, Thaïs undergoes a spiritual transformation when confronted by an ascetic monk, Athanaël, whose fierce religiosity cannot contain his erotic desires,” comments the New York Times’ Anthony Tommasini, December 9.
Poet John Koethe
John Koethe. North Point North: New and Selected Poems. New York. HarperCollins Publishers. 2002. 254 pages. ISBN 0-06-620982-X.
John Koethe is one of the most distinctive poets of our time: his work presents ordinary life and its’ contemplation with eloquence; it’s a philosophical poetry of deep feeling and true tones—and yet reading his book North Point North: New and Selected Poems was sometimes painful. The pain was not his fault: I kept remembering formerly well-forgotten feelings regarding two unresolved relationships with uniquely intelligent and sensitive acquaintances. The honesty of Koethe’s work calls forth one’s own honesty—and I remembered lies I told myself and believed (one, that we had understood each other and achieved a genuine intimacy; and two, that I no longer loved them after I realized we had not understood each other). I had shared with one of these acquaintances Koethe’s The Constructor, specifically a poem (“Threnody for Two Voices”) that concludes: “I want to see myself as I am, and look at you the way you are—/Is that a form of hatred? Or an intricate form of care/That lets another person be? Or a form of self-deception/Leaving both of us alone, but with our disparate lives/Uneasily together at the end, within a blank and/Intimate expanse? Maybe now you see.” And the acquaintance said he thought the poem brutal, while I said I thought it tender—two different ways of seeing that mirrored what Koethe himself was writing about.
John Koethe, educated at Princeton and Harvard, is a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and he wrote The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought. In the essay “Poetry and the Structure of Speculation” Koethe wrote, “I think that poetry and philosophy are both speculative activities, in that both involve the entertainment of propositions in the absence of certainty about their truth and often the absence of any means of even establishing their truth.” Koethe names as his influences John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot, and makes reference in his poetry to art and music (Satie and the Supremes), childhood, family, marriage and separation, work and teaching, and cities and neighborhoods—and Koethe’s voice, simultaneously critical, affectionate, and melancholy, seems its own confirming evidence and inspires belief in the significance of Koethe’s observations. Koethe has gained a growing readership, including the appreciation of other poets and also leading critics. His handling of language is so deft that it took me a while to realize that some of his poems contain rhymes. His poems are a means of facing the world and also fruits of “evasions” that are full of “melodramas of the mind” in a world that often “remains indifferent to our needs.” Koethe’s words are a splash of cool water from an elegant pitcher. In “Argument in Isolation” he writes, “I think the truest language is the one translated by the leaves/When the wind blows through them, and the truest/Statement is the one asserted by the sun/That shines indifferently on loneliness and love;/And that neither one is bearable…”
Koethe’s North Point North is a book that illuminates; it is also as satisfying as it is chilling.
(c) DG, 2002/2003
John Koethe is one of the most distinctive poets of our time: his work presents ordinary life and its’ contemplation with eloquence; it’s a philosophical poetry of deep feeling and true tones—and yet reading his book North Point North: New and Selected Poems was sometimes painful. The pain was not his fault: I kept remembering formerly well-forgotten feelings regarding two unresolved relationships with uniquely intelligent and sensitive acquaintances. The honesty of Koethe’s work calls forth one’s own honesty—and I remembered lies I told myself and believed (one, that we had understood each other and achieved a genuine intimacy; and two, that I no longer loved them after I realized we had not understood each other). I had shared with one of these acquaintances Koethe’s The Constructor, specifically a poem (“Threnody for Two Voices”) that concludes: “I want to see myself as I am, and look at you the way you are—/Is that a form of hatred? Or an intricate form of care/That lets another person be? Or a form of self-deception/Leaving both of us alone, but with our disparate lives/Uneasily together at the end, within a blank and/Intimate expanse? Maybe now you see.” And the acquaintance said he thought the poem brutal, while I said I thought it tender—two different ways of seeing that mirrored what Koethe himself was writing about.
John Koethe, educated at Princeton and Harvard, is a philosophy professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and he wrote The Continuity of Wittgenstein’s Thought. In the essay “Poetry and the Structure of Speculation” Koethe wrote, “I think that poetry and philosophy are both speculative activities, in that both involve the entertainment of propositions in the absence of certainty about their truth and often the absence of any means of even establishing their truth.” Koethe names as his influences John Ashbery, Wallace Stevens, and T.S. Eliot, and makes reference in his poetry to art and music (Satie and the Supremes), childhood, family, marriage and separation, work and teaching, and cities and neighborhoods—and Koethe’s voice, simultaneously critical, affectionate, and melancholy, seems its own confirming evidence and inspires belief in the significance of Koethe’s observations. Koethe has gained a growing readership, including the appreciation of other poets and also leading critics. His handling of language is so deft that it took me a while to realize that some of his poems contain rhymes. His poems are a means of facing the world and also fruits of “evasions” that are full of “melodramas of the mind” in a world that often “remains indifferent to our needs.” Koethe’s words are a splash of cool water from an elegant pitcher. In “Argument in Isolation” he writes, “I think the truest language is the one translated by the leaves/When the wind blows through them, and the truest/Statement is the one asserted by the sun/That shines indifferently on loneliness and love;/And that neither one is bearable…”
Koethe’s North Point North is a book that illuminates; it is also as satisfying as it is chilling.
(c) DG, 2002/2003
Literary Artist Gina Berriault
Writer's Note: We seem to live in a time when, for many though thankfully not all, art is an irrelevance at worst and an entertainment at best, rather than a necessity: a fundamental resource of beauty, inspiration, thought and truth. There are artists who remind us of the best that art can be and in her work Gina Berriault, now deceased, is one of them. I was first introduced to her work (The Infinite Passion of Expectation) many years ago (in the 1980s) by a new friend, a young woman who had lived in Boston and who was attending an "ivy league" school; and it was one of the best introductions anyone ever gave me...
Gina Berriault. The Tea Ceremony. Washington, D.C. Shoemaker & Hoard/Avalon. 2003. xiv + 200 pages. ISBN 1-59376-004-3.
A teacher who has enjoyed Japan returns to her American classroom full of memories and souvenirs, including a kimono; and one of her students, a boy, inquires about its price, in “The Tea Ceremony,” one of Gina Berriault’s well-observed, delicately written stories. “It’s not polite to ask those kinds of questions, she said, so we don’t answer them,” reports the narrator. (pg. 3) Money, like passion, is the fundamental stuff of social life—and literature. “The Tea Ceremony,” the story that gives its title to the book currently under review, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, is actually focused on the friendship of two girls, one outwardly beautiful and one more ordinary but in whom there are apprehensions of various kinds of beauty, the beauty of creativity and of human connections. It is also a story about how adult standards of value begin to be imposed on children even as adults fail to live up to those standards (a teacher shows a favoritism that might be wounding to others, though this is also a genuine affection that helps a particular child sustain a sense of self during a difficult time; and a status-discerning mother wants her lovely daughter to pick more obviously impressive friends, and this mother is publicly embarrassed by disclosure of her own sordid, adulterous affair). The injury and resentment one initially expects to occur between the girls does not occur, and instead one is made to see how strength in one area may be accompanied by vulnerability in another; and this personal meaning is shadowed by a great public event, the Japanese attack on the United States.
Berriault, born of Latvian and Lithuanian parents, lived in California, and was influenced by Chekhov, and appreciative of various writers—including Turgenev, Ivan Bunin, Nabokov, Primo Levi, Raymond Carver, and black and Hispanic writers. In an interview, “Don’t I Know You?,” near the end of the book The Tea Ceremony, Berriault remarks about her own work, “If there is a recurring theme, it’s an attempt at compassionate understanding. Judgement is the prevalent theme in our society, but it’s from fiction we learn compassion and comprehension.” (186)
In one of her stories, “The Vault,” Berriault deals with an obscure writer who receives an invitation to donate his manuscripts to a university collection, something that reveals his small lonely life, anticipation of death, pride, and a wry humor. Berriault is truthful. A proposed novel’s first chapter, “The Flood Again,” is here—and that, about a young actress’s affair with a powerful man, offers a mild but genuine intimacy. “The Naked Luncheon,” on the beginning of topless bars, is a piece of social history, while “The Last Firing Squad,” about executioners is, inevitably, about humanity’s darker corners, and “The Essential Rumi” is about the difficulty of picking a favorite book, three pieces of nonfiction that indicate the scope of this collection, which would seem random were it not for the unique consciousness and talent of the writer that pervade it.
(c) DG, 2004
Gina Berriault. The Tea Ceremony. Washington, D.C. Shoemaker & Hoard/Avalon. 2003. xiv + 200 pages. ISBN 1-59376-004-3.
A teacher who has enjoyed Japan returns to her American classroom full of memories and souvenirs, including a kimono; and one of her students, a boy, inquires about its price, in “The Tea Ceremony,” one of Gina Berriault’s well-observed, delicately written stories. “It’s not polite to ask those kinds of questions, she said, so we don’t answer them,” reports the narrator. (pg. 3) Money, like passion, is the fundamental stuff of social life—and literature. “The Tea Ceremony,” the story that gives its title to the book currently under review, a collection of fiction and nonfiction, is actually focused on the friendship of two girls, one outwardly beautiful and one more ordinary but in whom there are apprehensions of various kinds of beauty, the beauty of creativity and of human connections. It is also a story about how adult standards of value begin to be imposed on children even as adults fail to live up to those standards (a teacher shows a favoritism that might be wounding to others, though this is also a genuine affection that helps a particular child sustain a sense of self during a difficult time; and a status-discerning mother wants her lovely daughter to pick more obviously impressive friends, and this mother is publicly embarrassed by disclosure of her own sordid, adulterous affair). The injury and resentment one initially expects to occur between the girls does not occur, and instead one is made to see how strength in one area may be accompanied by vulnerability in another; and this personal meaning is shadowed by a great public event, the Japanese attack on the United States.
Berriault, born of Latvian and Lithuanian parents, lived in California, and was influenced by Chekhov, and appreciative of various writers—including Turgenev, Ivan Bunin, Nabokov, Primo Levi, Raymond Carver, and black and Hispanic writers. In an interview, “Don’t I Know You?,” near the end of the book The Tea Ceremony, Berriault remarks about her own work, “If there is a recurring theme, it’s an attempt at compassionate understanding. Judgement is the prevalent theme in our society, but it’s from fiction we learn compassion and comprehension.” (186)
In one of her stories, “The Vault,” Berriault deals with an obscure writer who receives an invitation to donate his manuscripts to a university collection, something that reveals his small lonely life, anticipation of death, pride, and a wry humor. Berriault is truthful. A proposed novel’s first chapter, “The Flood Again,” is here—and that, about a young actress’s affair with a powerful man, offers a mild but genuine intimacy. “The Naked Luncheon,” on the beginning of topless bars, is a piece of social history, while “The Last Firing Squad,” about executioners is, inevitably, about humanity’s darker corners, and “The Essential Rumi” is about the difficulty of picking a favorite book, three pieces of nonfiction that indicate the scope of this collection, which would seem random were it not for the unique consciousness and talent of the writer that pervade it.
(c) DG, 2004
International Music
All texts (c) DG
Excerpt from “The Search for Home: Dee Dee Bridgewater, Red Earth”
Dee Dee Bridgewater traveled to Africa and found herself drawn to Mali, and many people told her of her resemblance to the Peul people there; and this album, recorded in Mali, is the result of her quest for a spiritual home. (She is reported to be building a house there too.) I have reservations about Red Earth, but I think it is, for the most part, wonderful!... “Red Earth” is about a childhood in Tennessee, blues music, a life of searching, of finding, with connections seen between America and Africa: “the red earth has always been so good to me.” (That affirmation reminds me of the book African American Environmental Thought by Kimberly Smith, published by the University Press of Kansas, 2007, a book that argues that the African-American response to nature—a philosophical and spiritual ethos regarding how land is lived on and with, how land is a vital part of private and public life—is a unique resource for the conservation movement.) That is recognition of the earth’s splendor that sees an individual human life as part of a larger whole.
Excerpt from “Reconciliations: Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale, Breathing Under Water”
Traditional and modern music, eastern and western, acoustic and electric, male and female: they are all to be found on the recording by Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale, Breathing Under Water….She is associated with classic Indian music, and he with contemporary electronic music. Each has spoken of how natural their collaboration has been, allowing them to explore new aspects of their talents, while making a statement about how complementary different forms of music are: on Breaking Under Water, she, as composer and instrumentalist, handled some of the electronic productions and worked as a pianist, and he composed, and played guitar, drums, and even sang. Yet, her sitar is central to all the music they have made.
Excerpt from “Difference Is No Threat: Angelique Kidjo, Djin Djin”
Angelique Kidjo is one of those people who seems to have a destiny; who seems to have expected respect and success. Her albums—including Logozo (1991), and Aye (1994), and Fifa (1996), and Oremi (1998), and Black Ivory Soul (2002)—have won her a loyal international audience. I recall being excited about Aye in the mid-1990s, and having a conversation with one person who was skeptical about Kidjo’s Prince influence (she apparently recorded Aye at Prince’s Paisley Park studio), someone who found her African essence compromised; and I recall speaking with another person who attended a Kidjo performance and championed Kidjo’s authenticity: I found the artificiality/authenticity question a bore. The only thing that mattered to me was that Angelique Kidjo’s music sounded good. Angelique Kidjo is a dynamic, intelligent, and intense performer; and with Djin Djin Angelique Kidjo may be posed to consolidate and expand her popularity.
Excerpt from “Comic Voice, Tragic Vision: Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”
What is there but abundance, calculation, death, futility—and the subterfuge with which we approach or disguise them in the western world? What but consciousness and pleasure? In “We’ve Got Everything,” the narrator admits, “We’ve tried everything half-assed and as liars. That’s how we got everything.” One life can embody the consciousness of a world. One hears the triumph of a man who has gone through the worst, and maybe been the worst, and survived, still able to laugh—at the world and at himself. It is the triumph not of morality, not even of mind, but the triumph of spirit.
Excerpt from “Cuban Pianist, International Treasure: Bebo Valdés”
Even knowing that many of the associations one has with the island of Cuba are clichés of a vintage to turn wine into vinegar, much of Bebo Valdés music on the solo recording Bebo sounds like a lost score for an ideal life. Bebo Valdés has said that he absorbed all kinds of music, not only classical music but jazz, boogie, the danzon, and the rumba (with danzon being the name for the ballroom dance music, featuring brass, tympani or kettledrum, and woodwind instruments, played by Cuban musicians; and danzon had European roots, as did some of the other early Cuban music). Bebo Valdés played music in Cuba, working in clubs and for a radio station, but he, like some other musicians, did not feel as welcomed in Cuba after the Cuban revolution. He spent many years in Sweden, living the life not of a famous man but of a working musician, though he is now much acclaimed.
Excerpt from “Instruments Made of Ice: Terje Isungset, Two Moons”
Terje Isungset’s Two Moons is likely to ring still as one of the most interesting musical recordings I have ever heard: all the instruments played on the album were made with Norwegian ice, and the music was recorded in an igloo and at an ice festival. On Two Moons, the musicians are Terje Isungset, who sings and performs with ice percussion and an ice horn, and Per Jorgensen, who sings and plays ice trumpet. Such stark and somber music is an affirmation of nature and of nation.
Excerpt from “The Beautiful Music of the Son of Ali Farka Toure: Vieux Farka Toure”
Vieux Farka Toure, a musician of guitar and calabash, studied at the Arts Institute in Bamako, and Vieux Farka Toure considers his own music a force that can oppose hypocrisy and speak for truth. I do not know the language, or languages, in which Vieux Farka Toure’s songs are written so I cannot discuss their meaning: I can only suggest something of what they sound like and their effect on one listener. This is music of many delicate notes, notes like softly splashing rain, refreshment for a dry season.
Excerpt from “We Are Not the Same: U2's Achtung Baby”
“You’re dangerous ‘cause you’re honest. You’re dangerous ‘cause you don’t know what you want,” begins the song “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” about an acquaintance who is both attraction and trouble, like a glimmering piece of glass on a beach, very similar to the person described in “So Cruel,” someone with a lack of appreciation for love: “The men who love you, you hate the most.” I like the shimmering rhythm in “So Cruel,” a shimmer I identify with Daniel Lanois, who worked on Bob Dylan’s great album Time Out of Mind, and who is fond of imbuing music with—or finding within music—a rare mystique. The narrator of “So Cruel” concludes, “Between the horses of love and lust we are trampled underfoot.”
Excerpt from “African Rhythms, World Sensibilities: Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Afro Celt Sound system, Femi Kuti, and Angelique Kidjo”
Listening to the latest Ladysmith Black Mambazo recording Long Walk to Freedom is like a visit to a grandparent one has not seen in a while, a visit that was occasioned by other concerns but a contact for which one is very grateful. I had been listening to the music group Afro Celt Sound System, and that reminded me of Ladysmith and other African musicians, such as Femi Kuti and Angelique Kidjo. One of the most fascinating recordings I have heard in a long time is Anatomic, the album by Afro Celt Sound System, a band that mixes Irish and African music. The word experiment is used to describe works that are little more than pastiche, but Afro Celt Sound System is genuinely experimental, and its experiments, inventions and explorations of technique and sounds, are beautiful successes.
Excerpt from “The Search for Home: Dee Dee Bridgewater, Red Earth”
Dee Dee Bridgewater traveled to Africa and found herself drawn to Mali, and many people told her of her resemblance to the Peul people there; and this album, recorded in Mali, is the result of her quest for a spiritual home. (She is reported to be building a house there too.) I have reservations about Red Earth, but I think it is, for the most part, wonderful!... “Red Earth” is about a childhood in Tennessee, blues music, a life of searching, of finding, with connections seen between America and Africa: “the red earth has always been so good to me.” (That affirmation reminds me of the book African American Environmental Thought by Kimberly Smith, published by the University Press of Kansas, 2007, a book that argues that the African-American response to nature—a philosophical and spiritual ethos regarding how land is lived on and with, how land is a vital part of private and public life—is a unique resource for the conservation movement.) That is recognition of the earth’s splendor that sees an individual human life as part of a larger whole.
Excerpt from “Reconciliations: Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale, Breathing Under Water”
Traditional and modern music, eastern and western, acoustic and electric, male and female: they are all to be found on the recording by Anoushka Shankar and Karsh Kale, Breathing Under Water….She is associated with classic Indian music, and he with contemporary electronic music. Each has spoken of how natural their collaboration has been, allowing them to explore new aspects of their talents, while making a statement about how complementary different forms of music are: on Breaking Under Water, she, as composer and instrumentalist, handled some of the electronic productions and worked as a pianist, and he composed, and played guitar, drums, and even sang. Yet, her sitar is central to all the music they have made.
Excerpt from “Difference Is No Threat: Angelique Kidjo, Djin Djin”
Angelique Kidjo is one of those people who seems to have a destiny; who seems to have expected respect and success. Her albums—including Logozo (1991), and Aye (1994), and Fifa (1996), and Oremi (1998), and Black Ivory Soul (2002)—have won her a loyal international audience. I recall being excited about Aye in the mid-1990s, and having a conversation with one person who was skeptical about Kidjo’s Prince influence (she apparently recorded Aye at Prince’s Paisley Park studio), someone who found her African essence compromised; and I recall speaking with another person who attended a Kidjo performance and championed Kidjo’s authenticity: I found the artificiality/authenticity question a bore. The only thing that mattered to me was that Angelique Kidjo’s music sounded good. Angelique Kidjo is a dynamic, intelligent, and intense performer; and with Djin Djin Angelique Kidjo may be posed to consolidate and expand her popularity.
Excerpt from “Comic Voice, Tragic Vision: Modest Mouse, We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”
What is there but abundance, calculation, death, futility—and the subterfuge with which we approach or disguise them in the western world? What but consciousness and pleasure? In “We’ve Got Everything,” the narrator admits, “We’ve tried everything half-assed and as liars. That’s how we got everything.” One life can embody the consciousness of a world. One hears the triumph of a man who has gone through the worst, and maybe been the worst, and survived, still able to laugh—at the world and at himself. It is the triumph not of morality, not even of mind, but the triumph of spirit.
Excerpt from “Cuban Pianist, International Treasure: Bebo Valdés”
Even knowing that many of the associations one has with the island of Cuba are clichés of a vintage to turn wine into vinegar, much of Bebo Valdés music on the solo recording Bebo sounds like a lost score for an ideal life. Bebo Valdés has said that he absorbed all kinds of music, not only classical music but jazz, boogie, the danzon, and the rumba (with danzon being the name for the ballroom dance music, featuring brass, tympani or kettledrum, and woodwind instruments, played by Cuban musicians; and danzon had European roots, as did some of the other early Cuban music). Bebo Valdés played music in Cuba, working in clubs and for a radio station, but he, like some other musicians, did not feel as welcomed in Cuba after the Cuban revolution. He spent many years in Sweden, living the life not of a famous man but of a working musician, though he is now much acclaimed.
Excerpt from “Instruments Made of Ice: Terje Isungset, Two Moons”
Terje Isungset’s Two Moons is likely to ring still as one of the most interesting musical recordings I have ever heard: all the instruments played on the album were made with Norwegian ice, and the music was recorded in an igloo and at an ice festival. On Two Moons, the musicians are Terje Isungset, who sings and performs with ice percussion and an ice horn, and Per Jorgensen, who sings and plays ice trumpet. Such stark and somber music is an affirmation of nature and of nation.
Excerpt from “The Beautiful Music of the Son of Ali Farka Toure: Vieux Farka Toure”
Vieux Farka Toure, a musician of guitar and calabash, studied at the Arts Institute in Bamako, and Vieux Farka Toure considers his own music a force that can oppose hypocrisy and speak for truth. I do not know the language, or languages, in which Vieux Farka Toure’s songs are written so I cannot discuss their meaning: I can only suggest something of what they sound like and their effect on one listener. This is music of many delicate notes, notes like softly splashing rain, refreshment for a dry season.
Excerpt from “We Are Not the Same: U2's Achtung Baby”
“You’re dangerous ‘cause you’re honest. You’re dangerous ‘cause you don’t know what you want,” begins the song “Who’s Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses,” about an acquaintance who is both attraction and trouble, like a glimmering piece of glass on a beach, very similar to the person described in “So Cruel,” someone with a lack of appreciation for love: “The men who love you, you hate the most.” I like the shimmering rhythm in “So Cruel,” a shimmer I identify with Daniel Lanois, who worked on Bob Dylan’s great album Time Out of Mind, and who is fond of imbuing music with—or finding within music—a rare mystique. The narrator of “So Cruel” concludes, “Between the horses of love and lust we are trampled underfoot.”
Excerpt from “African Rhythms, World Sensibilities: Ladysmith Black Mambazo, Afro Celt Sound system, Femi Kuti, and Angelique Kidjo”
Listening to the latest Ladysmith Black Mambazo recording Long Walk to Freedom is like a visit to a grandparent one has not seen in a while, a visit that was occasioned by other concerns but a contact for which one is very grateful. I had been listening to the music group Afro Celt Sound System, and that reminded me of Ladysmith and other African musicians, such as Femi Kuti and Angelique Kidjo. One of the most fascinating recordings I have heard in a long time is Anatomic, the album by Afro Celt Sound System, a band that mixes Irish and African music. The word experiment is used to describe works that are little more than pastiche, but Afro Celt Sound System is genuinely experimental, and its experiments, inventions and explorations of technique and sounds, are beautiful successes.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Music by Death Cab for Cutie; The Dears; and Isobel Campbell and Mark Lanegan
I listen to the musical group Death Cab for Cutie's album Narrow Stairs and I hear intimacy, tenderness, drama, and honesty conveyed with musical clarity, a rhythmic strength that balances light and dark, and structure with energy. I like the lead singer's slightly boyish voice, even as I wonder if it is too ideal a sound. The changes in melody and rhythm and volume in the songs actually seem to have emotional correspondents. The work, the album, which is human and artistic accomplishment, seems both natural and beautiful.
It is easier to hear human lives, not just very intelligent minds, or well-constructed melodies, in the songs of the band The Dears, in the group's collection called Missiles. There is bitterness and fear as well as a commitment to one's own integrity in these songs. The album is coherent and is perceptible as a whole, though each song is distinct and works on its own; and, there is a fulfilling variety. The work acknowledges isolation and the fact that isolation is a state of being that can be creative or destructive but is not itself a goal.
Isobel Campbell's album with Mark Lanegan, Sunday at Devil Dirt, a generous supply of songs, is sometimes spooky. The album has qualities that seem both traditional and contemporary, and its beauty, which includes unexpected harmonies, can seem elaborate.
These three albums are pleasing to listen to, and interesting to think more about: Narrow Stairs, Missiles, Sunday at Devil Dirt.
It is easier to hear human lives, not just very intelligent minds, or well-constructed melodies, in the songs of the band The Dears, in the group's collection called Missiles. There is bitterness and fear as well as a commitment to one's own integrity in these songs. The album is coherent and is perceptible as a whole, though each song is distinct and works on its own; and, there is a fulfilling variety. The work acknowledges isolation and the fact that isolation is a state of being that can be creative or destructive but is not itself a goal.
Isobel Campbell's album with Mark Lanegan, Sunday at Devil Dirt, a generous supply of songs, is sometimes spooky. The album has qualities that seem both traditional and contemporary, and its beauty, which includes unexpected harmonies, can seem elaborate.
These three albums are pleasing to listen to, and interesting to think more about: Narrow Stairs, Missiles, Sunday at Devil Dirt.
New Orleans Art Exhibit!
ArtDaily.org, Excerpt
("Prospect .1 New Orleans: A New International Contemporary Art Biennial")
"New Orleans was the first U.S city to host a recurring international art exhibition, beginning in 1887 with the Exhibition of the Art Association of New Orleans. In this tradition, Prospect.1 features art originating from New Orleans and Louisiana within an international context and provides the Louisiana public with new art conceived and developed for the city. 81 local, national, and international artists, hailing from over thirty countries, have been selected to participate in the inaugural edition of the biennial. Their works are being shown in museums, art centers, warehouses, and public spaces throughout the city, for a combined total of more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space."
The exhibit opened November 1, 2008; and it continues until January 18, 2009.
("Prospect .1 New Orleans: A New International Contemporary Art Biennial")
"New Orleans was the first U.S city to host a recurring international art exhibition, beginning in 1887 with the Exhibition of the Art Association of New Orleans. In this tradition, Prospect.1 features art originating from New Orleans and Louisiana within an international context and provides the Louisiana public with new art conceived and developed for the city. 81 local, national, and international artists, hailing from over thirty countries, have been selected to participate in the inaugural edition of the biennial. Their works are being shown in museums, art centers, warehouses, and public spaces throughout the city, for a combined total of more than 100,000 square feet of exhibition space."
The exhibit opened November 1, 2008; and it continues until January 18, 2009.
News Good and Bad
I received different messages yesterday, which I only read today: a local weekly southern Louisiana newspaper is open to my doing some freelance work, and welcomes me to visit the office; and a friend of mine, an older man, smart and kind, is ill in New York.
The Land Has Its Secrets, and Some of Them Are Ours
There was a small wilderness behind the house and across the coulee (a large ditch) from where we lived when I was a boy; and it was there when I arrived in Louisiana from New York in September. I walked through it four or five times since I have been back--but for the last three weeks or so a bulldozer has been plowing down the trees, clearing the lot. I find it painful and pointless. Apparently, my grandmother's sister wants to leave a clean lot for her daughter, so the daughter can do something with it, easily, if she wants to. I must admit, however, that the land here has seen all kinds of changes. There is another bit of wilderness nearby and walking through it, I realized the ground showed a pattern despite the thicked of trees--it looked like somewhat flattened rows. I asked my mother about it and she said that, Yes, years ago, in the 1930s or 1940s, a woman neighbor had planted a crop there to make money to pay for her own wedding. Riding my bike again to a nearby town, I passed a spot that used to be a garbage dump but is now used for crops, though the dump became known as a poisoner of groundwater: a boy in my class died of cancer as a result, years after I left Louisiana. I wondered if all the poisons had been removed from the soil--and who was growing, selling, and buying the crops from it. An irony, possibly: on my first day back in the area, I remarked to the aunt and uncle who picked me up from the depot that there was so much land here and so much opportunity for development; but, now I am reminded that not all development is good.
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