Context & Continuity

J. D. Salinger, ע״ה

It would be entirely inappropriate for me to not mention the passing of J. D. Salinger especially as he has an important influence on my own writing.  But I'm an odd fan.  Catcher in the Rye is my least favorite of the Salinger canon.  Nine Stories, Raise High the Roofbeams... and Frannie and Zooey all appear on my list above Catcher in the Rye. 

For me, Salinger captured the isolation and frustration of gifted people making their way through a world that didn't quite live up to their exceptions and hopes.  In less capable hands, this friction between the world of the mind and the world of the real could come off as essentially elitist.  But Salinger was able to present different ways people can deal with that friction, from something self-destructive as a bullet to the brain to simple mental breakdowns, to finding a way to pass in this world.  Being smart, really smart wasn't necessarily an asset in Mr. Salinger's work. 

My guess is that Salinger will become part of the Canon.  My second daughter is taking her turn at Steinbeck's The Pearl.  How that became part of the curriculum, I'll never know.  I can hope that one day Steinbeck's seat will be vacated and Salinger can enjoy the view from he orchestra. 

Color me surprised...

As I skipped through the pages of this past Sunday's New York Times Book Review, I reached the final article, an essay that's usually worth the look.  And this week did not disappoint. 

I can't remember when I became attached to Fowler but I suspect it has something to do with one of the many articles I've read about the inner workings of the New Yorker.  But it had to be during my undergraduate days because the fly-leaf is inscribed with my name and student ID number.  One of my dearest friends from those halcyon days sent me a gift of three books, one being The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary, and this book I've torn through and have re-read several passages already.  What's fascinating about the book is the comparision and contrast is makes between English and other languages. 

And what we find is that few, precious few of the wise people in positions of influence put their foot down and try to stomp out a certain type of usage.  For example, I recently became obsessed with the usage of "more: and "over."  Example:

The charity raised more than $3,000 for the orphans.

The charity raised over $3,000 for the orphans.

If you look it up in any book you'll probably find the same thing I do:   The second construction is not correct, but if you try to change it people will think you're a prig so get over it. 

NYTimes, 11.3.9: Lament on the Fading Culture of the Printed Word

Goodbye to All That

Over the years, how many people have read Joan Didion’s pointed, moody, celebrated essays and come to New York in the hope of writing some of their own? The path of those would-be writers is patently stubborn, given the tone Ms. Didion strikes in the essay so many name as their favorite, “Goodbye to All That.” It is a famous elegy for the passing of youth, but also a catalog of Manhattan’s enervating clichés, and, implicitly, a rejection of the New York literary scene she inhabited.

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I arrived in NYC in 1981 along with most of the rest of the herd from the Radcliffe Publishing Procedures Course.  Most of us found work.  I think I held the record for one of the first to find a job:  three weeks.  Bad then, everyone was incessantly talking about how bad things were, but, in reflection, they were so bad afterall, not compared to today. 

Overall, I feel the same way I did then:  If one is very smart and is willing to work very hard, one can find work.  For everyone else, not so much. 

I might have found someone even more obssessed about Tom Stoppard than I am.

The Daily Telegraph, 7.6.9:  Tom Stoppard is the greatest living playwright

A while ago, I blogged effusively about Tom Stoppard. I recalled, in particular, staggering out of a performance of Arcadia 15 years ago, convinced that it was the supreme theatrical work of our era. One or two of you felt I was laying it on a bit thick so, now that the play has reopened, I thought I’d have another go.

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Flannery O'Connor: On Mystery.

The New York Review of Books has the Obligatory Large Roundup Following a New Biography of an Author.  This issue, it's Flannery O'Connor's turn following the publication of the new biography by Brad Gooch, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor.  There are a couple of gems in the article by the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates.  (What a great pairing:  Oates and O'Connor.) 

Here's what I want to pass on to you:

First, Oates comments on the fact that of O'Connnor's milleiu, including Capote and McCullers, O'Connor seems to be the one that is surviving into another generation. 

Then, there's this from one of Ms. O'Connor's letters:

If the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious, if he looks upon us as beings existing in a created order to whose laws we freely respond, then what he sees on the surface will be of interest to him only as he can go through it into an experience of mystery itself. His kind of fiction will always be pushing its own limits outward toward the limits of mystery....

Then, there's this:

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.

After reading Ms. Oate's piece, I was struck by how hard O'Connor struggled with a lifetime of illness, how devoted she was to her Catholicism and how solitary and isolated she was from the rest of the world.  It seems to me to be a life that was ripe with tragedy and yet, she created works of art that transcend time, space, background and so much more.  That's a life any one should be proud to live. 

Passport, please: Travels in the Republic of Letters.

I read a review of this book in the Wall Street Journal, where one frequently finds thoughts about thoughtful books.  This book is Worlds Made by Words and everything about it strikes me as very interesting.  this is from the Wall Street Journal review:

From the early 15th century until late in the 18th, such scholars formed what Anthony Grafton, in "Worlds Made by Words," calls the "Republic of Letters." It was a peculiar republic: "

It had no borders, no government, and no capital." It fostered a lofty notion of equality among the learned but stooped at times to "grubby practices," ostracizing those who seemed to flout its (unwritten) protocols.

And this there's this bit of description Amazon posts about the book:

In this book Anthony Grafton lets us in on one of the great secrets of scholars and intellectuals: although scholars lead solitary lives in order to win independence of mind, they also enjoy the conviviality of sharing a project sustained by common ideals, practices, and institutions. It’s like Masonry, but without the secret handshakes.

Grafton reveals the microdynamics of the scholarly life through a series of essays on institutions and on scholars ranging from early modern polymaths to modern intellectual historians to American thinkers and writers. He takes as his starting point the republic of letters—that loose society of intellectuals that first took shape in the sixteenth century and continued into the eighteenth. Its inhabitants were highly original, individual thinkers and writers. Yet as Grafton shows, they were all formed, in some way, by the very groups and disciplines that they set out to build.

In our noisy, caffeinated world it has never been more challenging to be a scholar. When many of our fellow citizens seem to have forgotten why we collect books in the buildings we call libraries, Grafton’s engaging, erudite essays could be a rallying cry for the revival of the liberal arts.

Now that's reads very appealing.

And then there's this bit, again, from the Wall Street Journal review:

In "The Public Intellectual and the Private Sphere," Mr. Grafton evokes the intense reaction that Hannah Arendt's "Eichmann in Jerusalem" provoked among Jewish intellectuals when it began appearing in 1963. He even revisits his own family table. Samuel Grafton, the author's father and a respected journalist, tried to interview Arendt for Look magazine, sending her pages of hard questions. Arendt refused to meet with him.

Mr. Grafton reconstructs this episode through his father's letters and notes -- the article was written but never published -- and his own recollections. Mr. Grafton is fair to Arendt, perhaps too fair, acknowledging her formidable intellect while attempting to set her outraged attacks on the Judenrat -- the Jewish councils compelled by the Nazis to assist in selections for death-camp transports -- in some sort of nuanced context. Strangely, he fails to mention her postwar, behind-the-scenes efforts on behalf of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, an unrepentant Nazi who had once been her lover. Arendt's arrogance comes through in his essay but not her duplicity.

Oh, my.  We like that last line, don't we? 

Okay, let's put this book on our list. 

James Purdy, of blessed memory.

I must confess straightaway, that I haven't read any of Mr. Purdy's work.  I think I'll fix that, and I'll let you know how that works out.  But in the meantime, I came across Mr. Purdy's obituary and found within it certain gems such as this:

Wayward and unclassifiable, Mr. Purdy, the author of the novels “Malcolm” and “The Nephew,” labored at the margins of the literary mainstream, inspiring veneration or disdain. His nearly 20 novels and numerous short stories and plays either enchanted or baffled critics with their gothic treatment of small-town innocents adrift in a corrupt and meaningless world, his distinctive blend of plain speech with ornate, florid locutions, and the hallucinatory quality of his often degraded scenes.

My goodness.  what wouldn't any of us give to leave this as a legacy?  So we should note that William Grimes wrote the obituary, someone who writes restaurant reviews and obituaries for the NYTimes.  (And there must be a story in Mr. Grimes, chosen specialization.) 

Here's another extract from the obituary:

Mr. Purdy, whose view of American culture was not optimistic, seemed to regard rejection as a badge of honor. “I don’t think I’d like it if people liked me,” he told one interviewer. “I’d think that something had gone wrong.”

And this:

“Reputations are made here, as in Russia, on political respectability, or by commercial acceptability,” he once said. “The worse the author, the more he is known.”

[Link to the obituary in the NYTimes.]

Harlan Ellison: The Irritable Man

It's probably been too long since I've read science fiction.  I took an exit off that highway when I reached Kurt Vonnegut and never really returned to that road.  Bethatasitmay, I quite enjoyed Harlan Ellison who has consistently and persistently complains that he doesn't write science fiction but then again, it turns out he complains about a lot of things and that's the topic of a very nice profile about Harlan Ellison in the blog, Nextbook and you can read it here.  Here's an excerpt: 

He writes shtick. “I’m Looking for Kadak” (a story in Wandering Stars) follows Evsise, a blue, eleven-armed Jew, as he travels around the planet of Zsouchmuhn searching for Kadak, who hasn’t been seen since he got fed up and renounced his faith, seventeen years before, during Purim services. The nine remaining (blue, eleven-armed) Jews on Zsouchmuhn need Kadak to complete their minyan so that they can sit shivah for the planet, which is soon being hauled to another solar system.

And here's a bonus:  This is an interview conducted by Kurt Andersen of Harlan Ellison.  Kurt Andersen is another of my favorites and always puts a very nice finish on all his work. 

 

The Mechanics' Institute Library: Forgotten Classics.

The Mechanic's Institute Library is almost the last of the indulgences I allow myself.  It is a private library in San  Francisco, located at Fifty-Seven Post Street.  I justify my membership by using the library rather like an shared office in downtown San Francisco, a place to meet people and relax before or after meetings elsewhere in the city.

The library has many charms, chief among them is that it's the home of the oldest chess club in North America (take that, New York) and it has some very lively book groups especially including a long-standing Proust book group. 

The library has just announced the formation of another book group, this one titled Forgotten Classics and I'm positive you can divine the focus of the group from its appellation (eventhough I think there's an inherent contradiction).  This stalwart band of readers are tackling Vanity Fair on the evening of February 5th and I applaud them for their dedication to their mission.  Next up are Alessandro Manzoni's The Betrothed, Honore de Balzac's Pere Goriot and Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavrandatter:  The Bridal Wreath, The Mistress of Husaby and The Cross.  (We think there's a comparative lit major in the room.) 

Should you ever find yourself in San Francisco and you need to retreat to a swath of civilization to catch your breath, find your bearings and collect yourself, you certainly could do worse than The Mechanic's Institute Library, my desk in San Francisco.

Stoppard in Conversation with the Hartford Courant.

Another posting in the vein of All Things Stoppard.

Stoppard has an affection for the newspaper profession, having left school in England at 17 to be a journeyman journalist in Bristol in 1954. "I loved it," he says. "Being a junior reporter on a morning newspaper in a city of a quarter of a million is pretty glamorous compared with being in boarding school. People I went to school with all disappeared into offices."

When asked if his news writing shaped his playwriting, he says, "I may be the last person to know that answer because I'm not that self-aware. But just the daily practice and necessity of making decent sentences and finding the right word for something, that in itself must have been helpful.

...

"But more than that, I think the arts come from somewhere else. A meaningless phrase, I know. But. I don't think the arts are something you teach and learn. But. I'm missing the point I'm trying to make — which is that there is something about creativity that escapes the physical world, even escapes mathematical law. Artists aren't subject to that. It's hard to explain."

But that doesn't stop Stoppard from trying.

"When you're working well, and this may be true for all kinds of disciplines, you take leave of yourself in some sense in order to make that [thing happen]. I think one benefits from the subconscious in a very important way when you do creative work. What I'm aware of is that I don't know how I do what I do. I really don't know how it's done."

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Wall Street Journal: Lessons From The Great Books Generation.

These were not just any books, but "Great Books of the Western World," marketed by Encyclopaedia Britannica. The authors included Aristotle, Aquinas, Milton, Locke, Hume and Mill along with some especially dense texts such as Apollonius' "On Conic Sections." The celebrities who bought the special Founders' Edition at $500 per leather-bound set included David Ben-Gurion, Frank Capra, Marshall Field, Conrad Hilton, Henry Luce and Walter Lippmann.

The rest of the article.

Dear Mr. Crovitz: 

In 1975, I was a sophomore at Northside High School in Fort Smith, Arkansas and intensely aware that I was well beyond the pale of intellectual America and, probably, the civilized world.  Then, I found "that low door in the wall" through which I gained admittance into that world I yearned for.  In my sophomore year, I took an advanced placement English class based on The Great Books. 

That year, we followed a program leading us through those Great Books and the course resolved with each of us using the Syntopicon to study a single great idea through history.  In my case, the idea was truth.  And I'm writing to tell you this about the experience:

Standing in front of a set of Great Books, even in the foothills of the Ozarks, I could see the breadth and depth of What Is Important.  It brought all the best and greatest ideas, literally, into my grasp and suddenly, I knew it might be possible to learn something that could get me somewhere.  The Great Books defined what it was to be learned and illuminated a path leading towards that destination.  Taking that course gave me the confidence that "I can do this." 

Due to an early romance with Journalism, I attended the University of Missouri and promptly enrolled in its two-year Humanities program, a study of Western Thought.  And following my years in Missouri, I confidently enrolled at Radcliffe to learn how books are published.  And I held my own in a small class of enormous intellects gathered up to be shepherded into Book Publishing and become its stewards.

Today, I just read too much and try my best to pass along my enthusiasm.  Alas, it is a challenge.  My daughter doesn't "get" Romeo and Juliet even when I screen the Bas Luhrmann vision.  And when I review the table of contents of her English reader, I admire the work done to make it up-to-date, but sigh about what's been left behind.

Last week, I read that Milton's Paradise Lost has been translated into English prose to make it easier for people to read.  Oh dear.  This month, Book Publishers are deciding to stop buying manuscripts.  Oh dear.  And one of my colleagues from Radcliffe sent me a DVD of the movie Fahrenheit 451 for my birthday this year.  --And the sly joke wasn't lost on me at all.

Best regards,
Brian D. Johnson
California.

Lost in Translation.

As I've been following the adventures of my sophomore-year (high school) daughter studying Shakespeare, I've been given again to think about the language, its meaning and accessibility.

In the study of Torah, we learn -- very quickly -- that any translation out of Hebrew is reading an entirely different text -- all but stripped of the meaning except for the grossest elements of plot and character.  Adding even vowels and cantillation mutes the original. 

Having read Proust and Cervantes in translation, I am convinced that I haven't read these masters at all.  In school, I read Chaucer in Middle English and, apart from feeling quite smug about that, I can now bore people at cocktail parties by reciting the first forty lines in a sonorous and  ponderous voice.  But I do feel that reading it in the 'original' gave me a much better understanding of the work.  (Ask me about The Faerie Queene and I'm likely to give you a different answer.) 

Then comes along this bit of news recently posted on a New York Times blog:  Paradise Lost has just been published into translation. 

From the article: 

Danielson is well aware that it might seem odd to translate a poem into the language in which it is already written. Dryden turned some of “Paradise Lost” into rhymed verse for a libretto while Milton was still alive; but that was an adaptation, not a translation. There are of course the Classic Comics and Cliff Notes precedents; but these are abridgments designed for the students who don’t have time to, or don’t want to, read the book. Danielson’s is a word-for-word translation, probably longer than the original since its prose unpacks a very dense poetry. The value of his edition, he says, is that it “invites more readers than ever before to enjoy the magnificent story — to experience the grandeur, heroism, pathos, beauty and grace of Milton’s inimitable work.

Danielson borrows the word “inimitable” from John Wesley, who in 1763 was already articulating the justification for a prose translation of the poem. Wesley reports that in the competition for the title of world’s greatest poem, “the preference has generally been given by impartial judges to Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost,’” but, he laments, “this inimitable work amidst all its beauties is unintelligible to [an] abundance of readers.” Two hundred and fifty years later, Harold Bloom made the same observation. Ordinary readers, he said, now “require mediation to read ‘Paradise Lost’ with full appreciation.”

I am vain, but I'm not so stupid as to disagree with Harold Bloom, but you must forgive me a moment to mourn the passage of another great work into the mists. 

The Guardian, 9.6.8: You can't help being what you write

After 40 years, the problem remains, each time. You can't start writing until you know what you're doing, and you don't know what you're doing until you start writing. I still have to resist the false intuition that I need to know as much as possible in advance. The essential thing is to know as little as possible. Ideally, when things fall out well, you shouldn't feel clever, you should feel lucky.

Highly recommended. 

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The Carnegie Library.

I grew up in the Carnegie Library in Fort Smith.  Now, it's the Fort Smith Library.

I remember the wooden floors, the enormous wooden rails on the stairs leading up to the children's room, and the fact that it was so convient that the Dr. Seuss books were shelved so that I could easily reach them.  My favorite was his first book, And to Think That I Saw it on Mulbury Street.  My second favorite book was his second, The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins.  I regarded the Green Eggs and Ham, The Cat in the Hat, and its successors as the author lowering his sights and playing to the crowd.  My library card was pale blue with rounded corners and there was a metal tag affixed to it.   I can remember exactly how the library smelled. 

Books also give off special smells. According to a recent survey of French students, 43 percent consider smell to be one of the most important qualities of printed books—so important that they resist buying odorless electronic books. CaféScribe, a French on-line publisher, is trying to counteract that reaction by giving its customers a sticker that will give off a fusty, bookish smell when it is attached to their computers.

From The Lbrary in the New Age, The New York Review of Books, Volume 55, Number 10, June 12, 2008

The Carnegie Library in Fort Smith was one of four libraries endowed by Carnegie in Arkansas.  The four Carnegie Libraries in Arkansas pale in comparison to the the 165 Carnegie Libraries in Indiana. 

And in 1919, when the last grant was given, more than half (1,689) libraries in the U.S. were Carnegie Libraries. In all, Carnegie endowed 2,509 libraries around the world. 

Carnegie Libraries advanced the innovation of open stacks, shelved books open to the public, something we all take for granted now.  Imagine. 

Andrew Carnegie was a wicked man in many respects, but I can't help but second the person who called him the patron saint of the library.  I would not be me, if it weren't for the Carnegie Library and the Fort Smith Public Library.  It's impossible for me to calculate how many hours, days I spent there.  For my mother, it was a combination of childcare and a priceless gift that created ... me. 

In New York, the first place I lived was the Harvard Club which is, basically, a library.  It was all leather and cozy and that summer tasted like Tom Collins.  The New York Public Library had a system whereby the copy machines worked when a special token was inserted in it, a token the library sold.  I discovered, by accident, that the token was identical to a subway token in every respect except for it's price which was fifteen cents less and I arbitraged that spread to pay for my newspapers and magazines and coffee.

Now, in my wallet I only keep three cards:  My Amex, bank card, insurance card and my Library card and I keep the library card so that its covers the others and it is the first thing someone sees when I open my wallet.

In San Francisco, the metropolitan center I live next to, it took me some years before I discovered The Mechanic's Institute Library, a private library I joined about four years ago.  Professionally, I was in need of something like a office pied-a-terre, someplace quiet where I could cool my heels, perhaps do some work, and maybe even use for meetings.  Hotel lobbies are sometimes good for this and I've used many fine hotel lobbies in my time, but there's something about San Francisco hotel lobbies that don't especially strike me as welcoming or conducive to day-long sitdowns the way many NYC hotel lobbies are.  Coffee shops are far to noisy, and the rent on a chair measured in vente lattes is neither healthy for my physical or financial self.  I was familiar with the idea of private libraries and was glad of heart when I discovered The Mechanic's Institute Library as it is Very Affordable, centrally located, chock-ful of character, has requisite technological conveniences and is quite lovely to lounge around in.  I've taken the family there for some of the events hosted there and almost joined the Proust Society that meets there every month (but declined as I had finished my marathon and, frankly, needed to put that obsession behind me for a while).  The oldest chess club is affiliated with the library and meets in rooms that are consecutive from the library and the players there add even more color to the library.  I keep my library card to Mechanic's Institute Library in my back-up wallet in my bag.   Everyone  reading this who lives in  or  near San Francisco should subscribe to and support the library.   

Finally (and I almost forgot this), I've embarked on a project for my synagogue's library.  As the library is without a set of Talmud, and as Talmud is almost essential to the deep study of Torah, I've launched a fundraiser to acquire a set of the "Oral Torah" and perhaps even contract with student librarian to help our library along a bit.

And this is all true.

Regarding Elizabeth Hardwick...

The following is from  Darryl Pinckney's essay in the Valentine's Day edition of the New York Review of Books.  This is what it means to read.   He quotes Ms. Hardwick in her class at Barnard: 

"The only way to learn to write is to read." She brought in Boris Pasternak's Safe Conduct, translated by Beatrice Scott. She said she hated to do something so "pre-Gutenberg," and then began to read to us in a voice that was surprisingly high, loud, and suddenly very Southern:

The beginning of April surprised Moscow in the white stupor of returning winter. On the seventh it began to thaw for the second time, and on the fourteenth when Mayakovsky shot himself, not everyone had yet become accustomed to the novelty of spring.

When she got to the line about the black velvet of the talent in himself, she stopped and threw herself back in her chair, curls trembling. Either we got it or we didn't, but it was clear from the way she struck her breastbone that to get it was, for her, the gift of life.

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Necessary Reading...

Wow.  The New York Review of Books discovers that writing for a blog is different from writing for almost anything else.  Hmmm.  There might be something to all this blog stuff afterall.

Finally, I think I get the superhero fixation. It's the flying. It's the suspension of punctuation and good manners and even identity. Bloggers at their computers are Supermen in flight. They break the rules. They go into their virtual phone booths, put on their costumes, bring down their personal villains, and save the world. Anonymous or not, they inhabit that source of power and hope. Then they come back to their jobs, their dogs, and their lives, and it's like, "Dude, the ball."

Blog writing is id writing—grandiose, dreamy, private, free-associative, infantile, sexy, petty, dirty. Whether bloggers tell the truth or really are who they claim to be is another matter, but WTF. They are what they write. And you can't fake that. ;-)

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As I Am A Man of Words...

I believe in words and language more than I believe in most laws of physics.  And my particular affinity with Judaism / Religiou has much to do with worlds.   So then I stumble across something quite interesting that I pass along to you today:  Visuwords calls itself an online graphic dictionary.  And it seems to be precisely that.  I think it would be quite fascinating to put the entierity of the OED into this framework and them wander through, strolling through our language.  So happy am I. 

The Coast of Utopia Opens in Moscow

Today, on The World, there was a very nice report on The Coast of Utopia opening in Moscow. 

You can here it here. 

I'm trying to blog about something other than Tom Stoppard, but current events are conspiring against me. 

Just when I thought it was safe...

Found another very interesting article about Stoppard.  This one is in the Wall Street Journal.  This is from the October 11, 2007 edition of the Journal and describes the staging of the Russian production of The Coast of Utopia. 

Vanity Fair, November 2007: Here's Looking at You, Syd.

Well, just as I thought my jag about Tom Stoppard had come to a resting place, I find a lovely little story in this month's Vanity Fair.  Here's Looking at You, Syd is what the Harold Ross would call an "occasional" and the story is all about the conception of his new play, Rock 'n Roll. 

I love this little story.  I've read Rock 'n Roll already and reading this little story was a lovely digestif.  I think that if I hadn't read the play (or seen it) the article would have made just as lovely aperitif. 

The story is also an occasion to comment on another one of Stoppard's qualities I find so endearing;  he appears to be humble.  I've seen many interviews with him, including a live interview on stage in San Francisco, and he consistently presents himself as ordinary and not the greatest living playwright.  In fact, he is usually able to find some way to make a self-deprecating remark.  In an interview with Charlie Rose, he compared they way he writes to urinating.  In the Vanity Fair article, he goes on about how he loves music but has an almost biological inability to understand the simplest things about music. 

With each play, I tend to become fixated on one particular track and live with it for months, during the writing—my drug of choice, just to get my brain sorted. Then I'd turn off the music and start work. I wrote most of "The Coast of Utopia" between listening to "Comfortably Numb" on repeat. With another play, Arcadia, the drug was the Rolling Stones' "You Can't Always Get What You Want," and since that play ends with a couple waltzing to music from an offstage party, I wrote the song into the ending and stayed high on that idea till I'd finished. It was inspiring. When, in rehearsals, it was pointed out to me that "You Can't Always Get What You Want" isn't a waltz and that, therefore, my couple would have to waltz to something else, I was astonished, uncomprehending, and resentful.

From Stoppard's "The Invention of Love"

Towards the end of the play.  Houseman and Wilde, on the banks of the Styx, waiting for the boatman to carry them across.  They are summing up. 

Houseman to Wilde:  I'm very sorry.   Your life is a terrible thing.  A chronological error.  The choice was not always between renunciation and folly.  You should have lived in Megara when Theognis was writing and made his lover a song sung unto all posterity ... and not now! -- when disavowal and endurnce are in honour, and a nameless luckless love has made notoriety your monument. 

Wilde:  My dear fellow, a hundred francs would have done just as well.  Better a fallen rocket than never a burst of light.  Dante reserved a place in his Inferno for those who willfully live in sadness -- sullen in the sweet air, he says.  Your "honour" is all shame and timidity and compliance.  Pure of stain!  But the artist is the secret criminal in our midst.  He is the agent of progress against authority.  You are right to be a scholar.  A scholar is all scruple, an artist is none.  The artist must lie, cheat, deceive, be untrue to nature and contemptuous of history.  I made my life into my art and it was an unqualified success.  The blaze of my immolation threw its light into every corner of the land where uncounted young men sat each in his own darkness.  What would I have done in Megara!?  -- think what I would have missed!  I awoke the imagination of the century.  I banged Ruskin's and Pater's head together, and from the moral severity of one and the aesthetic soul of the other I made art a philosophy that can look the twentieth century in the eye.  I had genius, brilliancy, daring, I took charge of my own myth.  I dipped my staff into the comb of wild honey.  I tasted forbidden sweetness and drank the stolen waters.  I lived at the turning point of the world when everything was waking up new -- the New Drama, the New Novel, New Journalism, New Hedonism, New Paganism, even the New Woman.  Where were you when all this was happening?

Houseman:  At home. 

Wilde:  Could you at least have go a New Tailor?  Are we going together? 

Aggregate Novelty

I'm reading the new William Gibson novel and am enjoying it quite a bit.  It is very much in keeping with his last novel, Pattern Recognition which is my favorite of his ... so far.  I'm also listening to a very nice interview with him that you can hear here.   Highly recommended. 

Flashes of Lightning

Shabbat Beha’alotchah, June 2, 2007, is memorable for Congregation Beth Emek. That was the day Rabbi Lawrence Kushner, author of more than twenty books, some of the books I love the most, came to our shul and read from his most-recently-published book and his first novel, Kabbalah: A Love Story. 

Rabbi Kushner currently serves as the Emanu-El scholar at Congregation Emanu-El in San Francisco. Rabbi Kushner, and his wife and sometimes co-author, Karen Kushner, have ties to the Bay Area. Their daughter, Rabbi Noa Kushner, is married to Rabbi Michael Lezak, the associate rabbi at Congregation Rodef Sholom in San Rafael. 

Before moving to the Bay Area, Rabbi Lawrence Kushner worked and lived on the East Coast. There, he created many of the things we might take for granted in our Jewish life, things that have probably touched and moved all of us. For example, my family has been blessed to participate in a few havurot over the years, and it was Rabbi Kushner who is credited with the idea for these groups that become extended Jewish families for us as we wander in diaspora. Rabbi Kushner created the first gender-neutral siddur so that we are reminded that God isn't George Burns or Morgan Freeman or even Alanis Morissette. And like many others, I've been touched by The Jewish Catalogue, required reading for many of us on our way home to Judaism. That book pointed me towards new, spiritual horizons and it was Rabbi Kushner who was instrumental in creating the ferment and the firmament that gave us that book -- and more broadly -- the Jewish Renewal movement. And Rabbi Kushner has written some of the bedtime stories I've read to my daughters. 

Dayenu. 

But there's just a bit more. 

A few years ago, the summer of 2002, David Silberman and I attended a Union for Reform Judaism Kallah, kind of a Jewish summer camp for adults. We both had a great time and highly recommend you give it a try too. The year we attended, it was held on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and we met so many amazing people like Laura Barnard's mother and Ellen Bob, the lady that runs Bob and Bob. The teachers were amazing and included Rabbi Lawrence Kushner and Karen Kushner. I attended a class that Karen Kushner led about The Song of Songs and I still blush when I think about it. Every night there was some activity and one night Rabbi Kushner read from a work in progress, Kabbala: A Love Story. You can ask David Silberman, if you don't believe me: I was moved beyond words by Rabbi Kushner's reading. And I began stalking him on Amazon so I would be first in line to get a copy of that story.
 

And then the book was published. And I got it right away. And I read it straight through. Twice. 

And then, at the regional URJ biennial a couple of months ago, Congregation Beth Emek was well represented and Rabbi Kushner was there too. And at the biennial, Rabbi Kushner read from his book accompanied by our very own Rabbi Richard Winer. President Carrie Arndt was so moved by the performance she immediately invited Rabbi Kushner to read at Congregation Beth Emek -- and he did, on Shabbat Beha’alotchah, June 2, 2007. 

Kabbalah: A Love Story is a story about everything all at once: God, love, sex, mystery, loneliness, quantum physics, book binding, death, jealousy, friendship, time, space, infinity and the stars. The book either reminds us or teaches us that all these things -- and everything else -- is held in God's mind all at the same time. The characters in the book all yearn for something that might -- or might not -- be within their grasp. They yearn for something they believe will complete them and mend their broken-ness. God and man, woman and man, rational and magical -- all of these and more. And the book is a page-turner too. I couldn't wait to find out what was going to happen next. And I shouldn't spoil it for you because you should read it for yourself already. 

For me, that evening when Rabbi Kushner came to Congregation Beth Emek was a blessing wrapped in a blessing wrapped in a blessing. Five years ago in Santa Cruz, I heard Rabbi Kushner read to us fragments from a story that was in creation, ideas that arced like lightening across the room and made us all hold our breath so we wouldn't miss a word. And one of those flashes that night included the premise for the story: A scholar, Rabbi Stern, has in his possession (how it got there is a puzzle) a volume from the Zohar that was printed in Spain, 1697. And the binding of this book begins to delaminate revealing a letter that will change his heart. And that fragment from Rabbi Kushner's story, the one I heard five years ago that summer night in Santa Cruz, that fragment stayed sealed in my heart until I read the book. But when I was reading it I could hear Rabbi Kushner read it to me in my imagination. And then I wasn't imagining it anymore. It was Shabbat. The sun was setting and Rabbi Kushner was reading from a finished book and Rabbi Winer tuned us into that moment when Shabbat fades away from us as the stars peep   through the closing darkness. Our heads are filled with the sweet scent of spice. We see the bright, braided flame. And we sip just a bissel more of the sweetness that God provides. And all this is true. 

And, if there's a moral tacked on to the end of this story, a prescriptive post script, it is this: If you want a religious experience in your life, attending religious events and going to shul and studying Torah just might be like standing yourself beneath a lightening rod so that, perhaps, one night, everything will be illuminated if only for an instant.

Moby Dick: Into the Wonder-World, Audaciously

I heard this last week on All Things Considered and it caught my ear almost at once as it is all about Moby Dick, one of my favorite books, and mentions not just in passing, Tristram Shandy, another one of my favorite books and one that I linked together to Moby Dick for my senior paper as an undergrad.

From the story on NPR: 

I've been re-reading Moby-Dick for years since I first discovered it in my 20s, and I still don't know quite what it is. There's nothing like it in the history of literature, except perhaps Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, with its eccentric characters, plotless episodes, entangled digressions, puns, obsessions and tricks.

In Moby-Dick truths are phantoms, not without existence, nor unimportant, but always insubstantial, always seen only as flashings-forth, glimpses, snow hills in the air. I try in my own stories to capture the elusiveness of truth by conjuring figures who exist in the interstices of history, who move between past and present, who can only ever be seen on the edges of vision.

Here is the posting on NPR.  And I highly recommend the audio of the segment.

PS - The illustration for this posting is the jacket from the University of California press edition of the famous Arion edition of the book.  I recommend the Norton critical edition as it has all the references one needs for a thorough understanding of this great novel.

Observations: The Coast of Utopia.

I don't call this a review as I know, for a fact, I haven't processed nearly enough of what I experienced at The Coast of Utopia marathon at the Vivien Beaumont Theater this past Shabbat.  --But it might generally characterize the experiences at Very Special. 

The play is so amazingly densely written that I was quite overwhelmed by the torrent of language -- and the duration of it.  I arrived at the theater at 10:00a and left the grounds of Lincoln Center @ ~11:00p. 

Looking around the lobby, I realized that, whatever the ground zero of Stoppardia might be, tonight and right now it was at the Beaumont. 

By the third scene of the first act of the first play, Voyage, one realizes this experience will be Great.

For me, I was also instructed on a key difference between literature and theater:  in literature, one may pause, contemplate, and ruminate.  In theater, one must just hang on. 

I was also impressed by the range of emotions Mr. Stoppard works with.  During the first and second play, Shipwreck, I fell in love and had my heart broken into two. 

We had impromptu yoga in the hall behind the seats, where the lockers are.  I used it a lot between acts and shows. 

I only ate two pears, drank three hot teas and three eight-ounce glasses of water. 

It was cold but not unbearable.  I spent about half my time outside and half in during breaks. 

Ethan Hawke has a great role, Bakunin, and he  makes the most of it.   Billy Crudup was Belinsky and beloved.  He carried much of the weight for the required number of Stoppard Self-Referential Sermons (monologues) about Writing and Art.  Jennifer Ehle was the love of my life and the fire of my etc.  Brian F. O'Byne was brilliant as Herzen. 

It's interesting to consider that the American production of the play went through some significant cutting.  Reading the play,  The Coast of Utopia, will be interesting.  I hope to notice the cuts as well as better understand the monologues. 

I would do it again and whole-heartedly recommend the experience to anyone. 

Theater Fans Endure, Enjoy at 'Utopia' Marathon

This weekend, I'll be attending The Coast of Utopia, the Tom Stoppard theatrical trilogy at the Vivian Beaumont theater at Lincoln Center.  The first curtain goes up at 11:00a and the last curtain drops @ ~11:30p.  A veritable marathon.  Stoppard is, according to my estimation, the greatest living English playwrite and I've enjoyed everything he's written. 

A fe w years back I enjoy essing the English and the the U.S. productions of The Real Thing within a week of each other.  That play remains one of my all time favorites. 

This morning, National Public Radio had a very nice report on the experience and you can listen to it here.  I'll let you know what I think. 

Within the Context of No Context.

During the summer of 1980, I spent my evenings working as a tutor for the University's athletic department and during the day, I was enrolled in two graduate-level American Lit. classes.  It was the summer I sailed on the Pequod.  One of my professors was electric and profound.  The other was profoundly dull and his temperament, combined with the heat and humidity of an un-air conditioned Missouri summer was a dangerous combination.  Except for one day. 

The professor came into the classroom trailing dandruff and clouds of chalk dust with papers tumbling out of his moist, fleshy hands.  And then he announced he would read to us an article that had just been published in The New Yorker.  And he read to us every word of George W. S. Trow's article, The Context of No Context and the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight out and a chilly came over me.  --This was the most profound piece of exposition I had ever been exposed to.  After he finished reading to us, he handed out copies of the article.  He had photocopied Trow's essay and carefully covered up all the ads and cartoons with blank pieces of paper so we wouldn't be distracted by them  The columns of type ran here and there are on the pages.  It must have taken him hours to put together this hand out, this gift to us. 

1980 was the end of the summer of Mr. Shawn's reign at The New Yorker.  I had been a reader for years and had become lost more than once in the Very Long Tales of Geology by Mr. McPhee.  It was all brilliant but never exactly ... electric.  Until Mr. Trow's essay appeared.  --Nothing quite like that essay has ever appeared since.  Anywhere.  It was finally turned into a slight volume and I bought many copies and gave them all away to people I cherished as much as the essay. 

And Mr. Trow remained a mystery.  I found a few other articles and essays here and there, but not very much.  He had bottled lightening once, and only once. 

And then, in a recent issue of New York magazine, a article told us the rest of the story.  And it isn't particularly flattering.  You can read it here.  But if you do read about the man behind the essay, you are obliged to read the essay itself.  That's only fair. 

Trow's essay references some items of popular culture that are but distant memories for some of us and completely opaque to our younger friends.  Be that as it may, the essay's real power is that all of it is completely and obviously true.  Trow notices that our culture and civilization was spiraling down into an abyss of irrelevancy -- and that this was a pity.  And as sharp as his observations was his prose -- telegraphic epigrams, a long string of densely-packed firecrackers exploding onerightaftertheother on the page.  The book makes me very sad for our culture, and very glad that someone can put together such as astute observation that touched me almost thirty years ago.  And the inky fingerprints linger on and on.  Amen.

A Legacy of ....

In today's Wall Street Journal, James Grant reviews the "Adams Unbound" exhibit at the Boston Public Library.  The exhibition of Adam's library, 3,510 volumes, is a remarkable insight into the mind, attitude and progress of a rare mind.  And this caused me to pause and consider this:  Bless our digital age, but what will be our personal intellectual and literary legacy enduring unto the fourth, fifth, sixth and subsequent generations?

I stand with one foot firmly planted in the world of books and the other foot on top of the uncertain and shifting dunes of pixels and bits.  I spent my formative years surrounded by books.  I slept beside an edition of the World Book Encyclopedia.  I spent ages at the Carnegie Library.  I was an English Lit. major and, as if that wasn't enough, I attended graduate school to study the business of book publishing and then toiled therein for a bit.  My own library that survives is well organized and contains most of what has made me, me. 

The books from college are inscribed with my name and student ID, so that they might be returned to me if we ever became separated.  The books I read now, I inscribe them with my name and the month and the year because I daydream that, someday, my children or their children might line them all up in chronological order then stare at their spines and see the path of my interests and the not so random forces that sculpted whatever intellectual character resides herein.  --Or not. 

I've noticed how my relationship with the book has changed and how I've come to appreciate it more than ever before.  This pixellated exposition flowing into a sea of machine consciousness seems to me to be a faint shadow of something not quite solid.  Here, upon the bitstream, we can easily see the quantum effects of time bending and shape shifting reality.  This is real and insubstantial all at once.  It is a sterile field compared to the rich loom of the book.

Think on it.  Today, we can hold a volume from John Adams' library in our hands and turn the pages and smell the parchment and read his marginalia.  His hand, moved by that rare mind, marked the page, emending it and marking this territory as discovered and conquered and civilized. 

A very dear friend, someone from my book days, urged me to read The Education of Henry Adams, so I did.  Henry was the great grandson of President John Adams and, through his book, evidenced his own rare intellect.  And so we wonder how much time Henry spent in his great-grandfather's library.  How many rainy Boston afternoons were spent surrounded by the musty, well-used volumes that were a catalog of how to become ... someone. 

When I consider the time we spend enthralled around cold fire of the television and computer screen, I grieve.  It seems to me that they may shine some sort of light, but rarely warms us up to take on today's challenges.  Rather, that cold light seems to numb us and hypnotize us and makes heroes of the popular and ordinary and vain and mean and those with the loudest voices in a land where Adams and Jefferson and Franklin once ruled in Enlightenment.

Jean Baudrillard, of blessed memory

Based on my experience, most public relations professionals have not studied the works of Jean Baudrillard, which is just an observation and not an accusation.   However,  most successful  practitioners  probably  have an implicit understanding of his work.  So we all owe him a debt. 

Baudrellard has passed and so we will notice that. 

The discourse of truth is quite simply impossible. It eludes itself. Everything eludes itself, everything scoffs at its own truth, seduction renders everything elusive. The fury to unveil the truth, to get at the naked truth, the one which haunts all discourses of interpretation, the obscene rage to uncover the secret, is proportionate to the impossibility of ever achieving this. …But this rage, this fury, only bears witness to the eternity of seduction and to the impossibility of mastering it.

--From the Ecstasy of Communication, 1987.

NYTimes, 1/11/04: Questions for Wallace Shawn

QUESTIONS FOR WALLACE SHAWN
Stage Leftish
Interview by DEBORAH SOLOMON

Published: January 11, 2004

...

Do you follow Broadway theater?

No. I don't see that many plays, and for me, musicals are rarely pleasing. I feel the actors are being put through a kind of nightmarish labor. They're like animals being forced to pull heavy carts of vegetables at incredible speeds.

...

So you take some pride in American culture.

To be honest, I see myself as a citizen of the planet. Even as a child, I always found it mindless to root for your own team. I was puzzled by the fact that people said their own team was better than other teams simply because it was theirs.

But it would be even odder and potentially self-destructive if we assumed that our own team was inferior to other teams.

Well, there is a reason my brother and I are taking care of our own mother first, before we worry about your mother. It's great to love your own mother, but I sincerely believe that if Bush and Cheney recognized the full humanity of other people's mothers around the world, they wouldn't commit the crimes they commit.

...

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