At Odds (on G. W. Sebald's Vertigo)

W. G. Sebald Vertigo, translated from the German by Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 2000).

The death by a car accident on December 14 of this year (2001) of W. G. Sebald led me to read his first fiction, Vertigo, a book, along with his The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn many of my friends have long championed.

In many respects Sebald might remind one of his younger contemporary, Javier Marias. Like Marias, Sebald does not so much tell a single story than observe and seek out a series of coincidental events, historical and personal, which he weaves together through photographs and linguistic images from literature, history, his travels and his own past. All of these aspects, superficially similar to Marias' narratives, exist in Vertigo, as the narrator moves from Marie Henri Beyle's (better known as Stendhal) terrifying memories of crossing St. Bernard pass with Napoleon's army to the Sebald's own journeys from Venice to Verona, from the journey of Kafka to Riva, near Desenzano, to a recounting of Sebald's youth in the German village of W.

Through the numerous events in each of the book's four parts, Sebald explores amazing coincidences: for example, a fellow traveler reads Leonardo Sciascia's book 1912 + 1 soon after a friend reminds Sebald that on the journey Kafka took to Riva in 1913, where he may have witnessed that year's Verona opera festival's first production, Aïda. Later, in the town of W, Sebald sees the numbers 1913 over a doorway, and the book ends with a passage from the 1913 version of Samuel Pepys's diary, found in the attic of a building in which he had lived as a child.

Again and again, there is an eerie connection between unrelated things, seeming to present a puzzle for which there is no solution. The various gaps between these events or pieces of information create a sense of dislocation and confusion, as remembered scenes are revealed as false, and what appear as dreams become reality. There is, in short, a sense of dizzying vertigo throughout Sebald's book, as if places, objects, and events have a reality separate from the people who are involved with them.

It is just this sense of vertiginous reality that separates Sebald's literary world from Marias's. Where Sebald actively attempts to connect or at least to understand these "coincidences," Marias often seems just as happy to simply witness and point them out. And there is, accordingly, numerous moments of stupor, of a sickening sense of irreality, in Sebald's work that is fortunately lacking in Marias's writings. One might simply chalk it up to the radically different sensibilities of the Germans and the Spaniards, but there seems to be something else that lies behind the differences which also subtracts from the personal joy I might have expected from reading just such a text.

Perhaps it emanates from the much more academic interest Sebald takes in these strange occurrences. Unlike Marias, who declares that he is often a passive observer of the unusual facts and texts he discovers, at several instances Sebald actively researches the past, visiting libraries and friends with special information with whom he attempts to make sense of these puzzles. The fact that no coherent truth is ever possible, however, appears to take on disorienting aspects, almost haunting his life. Marias is far more like a kind of amateur sleuth, who will gladly take on his adventures, but is more often just has happy to find no apparent answer.

In short, there is a sense of angst to Sebald's world, and the writers he features, Stendhal and Kafka, share his feelings of displacement. It is as if Sebald were a high modernist who has discovered himself in a postmodern world, and he is not at all happy about that fact. He often seems to be working at odds to his own tales, as if all the disconnections, accidental photographs, and odd peregrinations he recounts were an expression of his failure to create a more coherent whole.

Yet, there is another perspective about this; for at several points, particularly in recounting his childhood, we know or at least suppose a coherent reality to explain away the strangeness. But he cannot or will not speak out to those around him or even attempt to explain the story to himself. One of the best examples of this is his witnessing the beautiful barmaid at the Alderwirt, Romona, having sex in the back of the building with a isolate former hunter, Schlag. The next morning he discovers the bar's owner has utterly destroyed everything in the place, and later in the day, Schlag's body is found at foot of an icy cliff, where, so it is believed, he inexplicably (he is a seasoned walker in this territory) has fallen to his death. Sebald recounts these events just as if they were as oddly coincidental as all the others he relates. But we suppose, at least, that here there is a connection, that somehow that the Alderwirt landlord, Sallaba, also discovered the sexual act, reacting with rage against the old sinner. In this and other cases, accordingly, it feels as if the author was purposely withholding information, refusing to reveal any logic in a world where he has painfully determined to be utterly mystifying.

It is this desperate search for coherence under conditions where memory and significance are so vague, I believe, that draw so many readers to Sebald's books. Like Sebald, they feel utterly ill-at-ease, even sickly, when they face the inexplicably dangerous terrain standing before them. I simply do not share the great dis-ease, and somewhat irritated for having to endure it.

Los Angeles, December 23, 2001

Letting Go (on Public Enemies)

John Dillinger


Johnny Depp as John Dillinger

Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale)

Ronan Bennett, Michael Mann, and Ann Biderman (writers) (based on a book by Bryan Burrough), Michael Mann (director) Public Enemies / 2009

Michael Mann's Public Enemies begins with an intricately-planned and violent prison escape filmed with a hand-held digital camera presenting the up-close, wildly shifting movements of John Dillinger and several fellow prisoners (who later become his "gang") as they break from the dark confines of the prison into the bright sunlight, a pattern repeated throughout the work as Dillinger alternates between dark restaurants, bank lobbies, and hotel rooms to sunny streets and race tracks in his numerous swings between imprisonment and escape. While Dillinger (excellently acted by Johnny Depp) often argues for a life in the sun, symbolized by South America where he plans to escape after a daring train robbery, it is clear that he almost addicted to the dark.

Even his beautiful girlfriend, Billie Frechette (played by French actor Marion Cotillard), is described as a "blackbird," since she is, she declares, part American Indian (a ridiculous proposition given Cotillard's appearance). Like the heists he hauls from bank vaults, Dillinger steals her love simply by declaring she's the girl for him; she has, evidently, little choice in the matter, and winds up in prison for a two year term for lying to the police about Dillinger's whereabouts.

Indeed all those who surround Dillinger are doomed, in part because of the ridiculous obsession of the then young Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover (somewhat tongue-in-cheekly played here by Billy Crudup). Through his stand-in, Chicago agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), Hoover is determined to put the Bureau on the map, resulting in greater respect and Congressional funding, which means, in his own terms, that it is "time to take the gloves off." It is almost as if Dillinger and his crime sprees were perfectly timed with the changes in the FBI to make it a national institution.

Just as Dillinger, who brutally kills while seeming, in the public consciousness, as a kind of Robin Hood—in part for stealing what he calls "bank money" as opposed to the money of everyday investors—so the FBI (and by extension, Hoover) demands both blind obedience and love. One of Mann's major themes concerns the growing violence of the FBI, as men dedicated to scientific methods increasingly find themselves on the streets armed with machine-guns. Torture follows, as the agents round up anyone even vaguely connected to Dillinger, demanding information that the detainees often do not have. And one of the most painful scenes in the film is the brutal facial beating of Billie by an FBI interrogator who, when he discovers she has lied to him, is almost ready to kill her until Purvis arrives in time to stop him.

Dillinger, it is clear, is a man on the "go," a man who wants "Everything. Right Now." But like so many American would-be adventurers, unfortunately he does not truly know what he wants and has nowhere to go. He can hardly imagine the life he promises in Buenos Aires or Caracas. Indeed, as Depp plays him, Dillinger is a man with few deep thoughts, and is forced by the very speed of his living to deliver any ideas up in one-line quips. In a conversation with Purvis in which Dillinger describes the horrible vision of a dying man, suggesting that the memory will keep Purvis awake nights, Purvis asks: "What keeps you up nights, Mr. Dillinger?" to which Dillinger replies "Coffee." In another instance, when Billie complains that she knows nothing about him, Dillinger answers: "I like baseball, movies, good clothes, fast cars... and you. What else you need to know?"

Accordingly, while the movie is spell-bindingly watchable in its dark moments, from the interiors of the banks, hotel halls, and the inky shootout at the Little Bohemia Lodge in Northern Wisconsin—where it is almost impossible to tell the difference between Dillinger's gang members and the FBI agents—to Dillinger's final moments in a movie theater, Mann's fable falls apart every time it attempts to establish any aspect of character or explore its simple ideas in any depth. In fact, one might almost argue that although Public Enemies is often lovely and exciting to watch (Depp plays Dillinger, at times, with a balletic beauty), there is little story, and even less substance, to ponder. In short, one might describe Public Enemies as a film without a script. And, in that sense, it might as well have been a silent film instead of one with three listed writers! Like Dillinger, Mann is so determined to get there fast that when, at the end, one of the agents visits Billie in her prison cell determined to tell her that Dillinger's last words were "Bye, Bye Blackbird," the myth (in fact, Dillinger, like the victims he describes in the film simply slipped away without saying anything) falls apart, and we find no meaning in the act, particularly because he has reported to Purvis that he couldn't hear what Dillinger said. Is that last sentimental gesture meant to show there is a heart beating in this empty kettle?

At several times in Public Enemies John Dillinger is told that he has to learn how "to let go," to let go of his girlfriend, his actions, and, at some point, his very life. Mann has grabbed on to the Dillinger fable as if it were a bronking bull and rides it for its two hours and twenty-three minutes as if that achievement might create something of great signification; but in the end, all we have witnessed is a mighty blur of leg and hide. If only for an instant he had let go and fallen off we might have witnessed a bruised human being upon the screen.

Los Angeles, July 7, 2009

Discovering What Everyone Never Remembered (on Lawrence Wright's The Looming Tower)

Sayyid Qutb


Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden

John O'Neill

Lawrence Wright The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2006)

Perhaps no book more clearly details the US's determination to keep history a secret than Lawrence Wright's brilliant post-9/11 study of the Muslim terrorist world and its interaction with the American FBI, CIA, and other government organizations, The Looming Tower.

Wright begins by lucidly outlining the various terrorist organizations and the individuals who led them, starting with a young Egyptian student studying in the US at what is now the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. Sayyid Qutb had mixed feelings in this community, originally planned as a temperance colony by Nathan Meeker. Greeley was a planned community that "would serve as a model for the cities of the future," drawing from the virtues of "industry, moral rectitude, and temperance." Accordingly, Qutb, a devout young Muslim, had, as Wright describes it, "stumbled into a community that exalted the same pursuits that he held dear: education, music, art, literature, and religion." But just as Qutb had found New York life frantic and unfamiliar, he found disturbing forces at work in this small Western Eden as well. Although the community had been founded on prohibition, students in the summer of 1949 could easily procure alcohol for their weekly parties, and Qutb perceived the fall of prohibition an American failure. As a man of color, Qutb witnessed a black man beaten by a white mob, and, although in the summers students from many different racial backgrounds attended, in the regular season there were only a couple of black students, one of whom, Qutb noted could not get a haircut in the local community. At one point, Qutb and a friend were turned away from a local theater because the owner saw them as being black. Although the theater owner ultimately apologized, Qutb refused to return.

Even the sport of football "confirmed Qutb's ideas of American primitiveness," since he felt it less a team sport, like soccer, than a game in which one player attempts to run with the ball, while others try "kicking him in the stomach, or violently breaking his arms and legs...." Women teachers outraged him. Accordingly he returned to Egypt more radicalized in relation to his religion than he left it. Qutb went on to establish the Muslim Brothers, the first of a series of radical reactionary groups against what they felt was Egypt's failure to keep the tenants of the Muslim faith.

The pattern was to become a quite typical one, with many of the well-educated and often wealthy young radicals receiving their educations in the West, opening them to experiences that only hardened them in their beliefs. The fascinating story of Ayman Al-Zawahiri, who grew up in a planned community, Maadi, Egypt—that in its conception, at least, was not so very different from Greeley, Colorado—is a high point of the book. With his father working as a doctor and his mother a professor of pharmacology at Ain Shams University, Al-Zawahiri was raised in one of the most liberal and prominent families in Egypt. But as he grew older, Al-Zawahiri, influenced, in part, by Sayyid Qutb's writings, became more and more dissatisfied with the Egyptian government, ultimately creating, along with others, the al-Jihad movement, and involving himself, if only through his friendships, with the assassination of Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat. Through his friendship with Abdullah Azzam Al-Zawahiri was ultimately drawn to Afghanistan, there befriending the charismatic Osama bin Laden.

Wright outlines these and numerous other relationships, introducing us, one by one, to most of the major figures and their families of the Muslin Brothers, Al-Jihad, the Taliban, Al-Queda, and other terrorist groups, including the numerous young, violent, and dissatisfied youths that eventually would make up the growing world-wide attempt to destroy anything American. It is Osama bin Laden, obviously, who through his early financing of terrorist activities and his gathering of many of these forces in Sudan to train them, who is the most fascinating—and puzzling—of figures. Even Wright's extensive presentation of bin Laden's family history and other major Saudi figures reads like an account by T. E. Lawrence. Through bin Laden's machinations, what began as fairly local attempts in the Muslim world to rid individual countries of Western influences, became a general call to destroy what they came to see as the common enemy: the United States.

Through hundreds of interviews gathered over a five-year-period, Wright brilliantly puts all the pieces of the puzzle together, so that the reader can discover that what seems to be a myriad of terrifyingly unrelated events grew, as the millennium approached, into an interwoven skein with the aim of strangling what all Muslim radicals began to see as the cause of all their misfortunes.

Of course, hindsight is always a superior position than that of suffering blindly through history. But how one wishes that minds like Wrights might have been employed in the very organizations whose function it was to piece these threats together! Instead, we are shown American fact gathering organizations such as the CIA, the FBI, and White House itself, begin by doubting any real threat, and later, when it was almost too late to change course, deliberately withholding information from each other. Given a directory intended to protect later court hearings, the various organizations perceived the so called "wall" as a barrier to any shared knowledge. FBI Chief of Counterterrorism, John O'Neil was perhaps the one man who had the tenacity and intelligence to bring the data together that might have saved the nation from the events of September 11, 2001. However, his own often dictatorial methods, his far flung affairs with various women, and even his dashing way of dressing, made for many enemies, including coworkers in the FBI and, in particular, the director, Michael Scheuer, of the so-called Alec Station in the CIA, which was also attempting to track the activities of Osama bin Laden and Al-Queda.

In the rivalry between the two, O'Neill ultimately won, with Scheuer suffering a psychological breakdown. But O'Neill's breaches of security—at one point he had brought one of his mistresses into FBI headquarters and, at another event, his computer, filled with sensitive information, was temporarily stolen—also brought reprimands and possible termination of his job. Yet, even in those difficult days, had the CIA reported to other organizations that Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khaled al-Mihdhar, both Al-Queda operatives, had entered the US on January 2001, and lived for a while in San Diego, O'Neill likely could have acted, spoiling bin Laden's plans.

O'Neill's abilities are outlined throughout Wright's book, capsualized, perhaps, in his clever extraction of information from figures involved with the bombing of the U. S. Cole without any torture, tracing, with the help of his Yemeni specialist Ali Soufan, the first real connection between the Cole and Al-Queda. But even in Yemen O'Neill was dogged by personality differences, in this case with US ambassador to Yemen, Barbara Bodine, who forced him exit the country.

Even as O'Neill was scheduled to leave the FBI to become—in one of the most ironic situations in American history—head of security for the World Trade Center, he sensed something very large was the wind. "We're overdue," O'Neill told friends.

Only a week before O'Neill's retirement, a report from a flight school in Minnesota to the FBI noted that one of their students, Zacarias Moussaoui, was asking suspicious questions about flight patterns and locked cockpit doors. When the agent in Minnesota asked permission to search Moussaoui's computer, he was told he was "trying to get people 'spun up.'" His answer: "I am trying to keep someone from taking a plane and crashing into the World Trade Center."

Wright asks several of his interviewees why the CIA had been so determined to keep the crucial information that two Al-Queda operatives had been in the country secret, particularly since the men had been discovered on US soil, where the CIA had no jurisdiction. The answers range from the belief in CIA plans to use them as potential informants to the often stated argument that for legal reasons they simply could share that knowledge. But the truth, perhaps, is what Wright describes simply as the radically different make-up of the two major information-gathering organizations, the CIA consisting of internationally-seasoned individuals who often gathered information as a kind of protective act, using it only behind-the-scenes, so to speak, to influence the actions of other countries. The FBI world, Wright suggests, was made up primarily of Italo-American and Irish-American men, who much like the immigrant communities out of which they came, believed in information as a justification to act; from the earliest Hoover days, as Michael Mann's recent film, Public Enemies, reiterates, they were men of action. Each organization highly suspected (and perhaps still do) the other as being ineffectual. Their failures to work together, however, along with a weak grasp of the situations by the Bush administration—which clearly led to thousands of deaths—should be repeatedly retold and remembered by all.

O'Neill survived the original attack, running, as bodies fell from the towers into the plaza below, to access the damage. He reentered the South Tower, which, a short while later, collapsed, entombing him within.

Los Angeles, July 4, 2009

How to Save the World (on "end of the world" films)

Edmund H. North (screenplay), based on a story by Harry Bates, Robert Wise (director) The Day the Earth Stood Still / 1951

Barré Lyndon (screenplay), based on the novel by H. G. Wells, Byron Haskin (director) War of the Worlds / 1953

Daniel Mainwaring and Richard Collins (screenplay), based on a story by Jack Finney, Don Siegel (director) Invasion of the Body Snatchers / 1956

Stirling Silliphant, Wolf Rilla, and Ronald Kinnoch (as George Barclay) (screenplay), based on a novel by John Wyndham, Wolf Rilla (director), Village of the Damned / 1960

Irwin Allen and Charles Bennett (screenplay), based on a story by Irwin Allen, Irwin Allen (director) Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea / 1961

Walter Bernstein (screenplay), based on a novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Sidney Lument (director) Fail-Safe / 1964

Stanley Kubrick, Terry Southern, and Peter George (screenplay), Stanley Kubrick (director), Dr. Strangelove or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb / 1964

Nelson Gidding (screenplay), based on a novel by Michael Crichton, Robert Wise (director) The
Andromeda Strain / 1971

Steve De Jarnatt (screenplay and director) Miracle Mile / 1988

Dean Devlin and Roland Emmerich (screenplay), Roland Emmerich (director) Independence Day / 1996

Anyone who is at all knowledgeable about film history knows that there are numerous movies devoted to the subject of the world's destruction. And recent examples such as Independence Day, Armageddon, Deep Impact, The Core and the remake of War of the Worlds have been enormously successful with younger audiences.

I have chosen to focus, however, on a few films, primarily from the 1950s through the early 1980s in an attempt to discern the varying views of how our earth might be destroyed and what are possible solutions in those scenarios. I am sure some of this has been discussed before—perhaps in greater depth—but my current focus on these films is to explore if there are any coherent answers for our own times.

Given my smaller selection of choices, moreover, there is a kind of strange chronology concerning the possibilities of salvation available to mankind. In the 1951 classic, The Day the Earth Stood Still, for example, there is actually no immediate fear that the planet we live on will be destroyed. Klaatu (in the form of British actor Michael Rennie), along with fearsome doomsday machine Gort, descend to earth simply to warn us that if we continue on our ways we are doomed to destruction. The masses are always dangerous in these films of possible annihilation, and the Americans of The Day the Earth Stood Still are no exception, individuals, along with soldiers and police gathering in violent groups around the space craft, while authorities try to capture and kill the peaceful messenger. Helen Benson (Patricia Neal) and her son are among the few examples of human kindness in this picture, but even her boyfriend, Tom Stevens, is determined to turn in the alien and perhaps get rich in the process.

Klaatu quickly realizes that he cannot trust the "people," and turns instead to the help of world scientists—who today, in the frictional world of various oppositions to scientific experimentation (activists against the use of animals in experiments and Christian fundamentalists who outright oppose and disbelieve in the science itself) might more likely be represented as the least worthy of trust—who find it difficult even to come together in Washington to hear out Klaatu's warnings. But Prof. Jacob Barnhardt (played by Sam Jaffe as a kind of Einsteinian mathematical genius) at least reassures us that, if only the authorities will listen before shooting, they may be a hope for our survival.

By 1953, however, the filming of H. G. Wells's War of the Worlds offers no such easy out. Here the aliens attack and win, implanting their colonies filled with their oddly tentacled bodies across the globe. While science again tries to win the war, frenzied mobs erupt in the streets, destroying everything in their path, including the vital findings of the scientists at work on the alien's destruction. While the masses huddle against the Hollywood Hills, the world's destruction appears imminent, without a hope in sight.

My companion Howard, witnessing this movie as a child, recounts his utter horror at such a breakdown in global authority, and as he walked home from the showing, his imagination conjured up a spacecraft in the skies. He was unable to sleep for nights. In the film, however, we are saved as suddenly the alien ships begin, one by one, to fall from the skies. If scientists cannot save us, science itself as represented by our natural world does; oxygen is fatal to these celestial intruders.

Once again in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we witness an outside force, this time in the form of an alien bacteria that grows into giant pods ready to take over and imitate the very form of man himself, successfully overcoming a population, if only the people of a small region of California.

I have already written on some of this film's implications in My Year 2004, so I will not repeat the underlying hysterias of the time that energize Siegel's fascinating work. What is important for my purposes is that only a triumvirate of medical doctors, the military, and police working together can save the day, one presumes, by destroying the seemingly normal but inwardly empty people of Santa Mira and the surrounding villages.

Once again the masses have to be staid before order can be restored, but in this 1956 fantasy, the destructive military is turned against its own citizens, and there is the uneasy feeling that somehow the salvation of the world may be botched. Certainly that was conveyed in Phillip Kaufman's 1978 remake. If in the original Dr. Matthew Bennell stays awake long enough to make a run for it, convincing the outside world of the dangers ahead, in Donald Sutherland's portrayal, years later, he himself screams out as an alien against a surviving human friend. In Kaufman's version it is apparent that the world may be taken over after all.

Similar, in some respects, to Invasion of the Body Snatchers are the strange births of blond-haired, blue-eyed children in the village of Midwich, England in the 1960 film, Village of the Damned. It is not apparent whether these gifted monsters intend to take over the world or not, but it is clear that in their supernatural powers they have made it nearly impossible to be a normal citizen of Midwich, and in their stolid attempts at education these children clearly have grander plans. Like the scientists and doctors of the previous movies, Gordon Zellaby (George Sanders) at first attempts to investigate these incidents within a rational context, but it quickly becomes apparent, given the young terrorists' ability to read minds, that the only way to destroy them is to give up rationality and blow them (and himself) up.

The masses at are it again in Irwin Allen's Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961), where in the person of Admiral Harriman Nelson we have both a military man and a scientist at the helm in his attempt to save the world from the Van Allen radiation belt, which has caught fire and is quickly scorching and torching the planet. Nelson (Walter Pidgeon) and his able assistant (the oddly cast Peter Lorre) are convinced that the only way to save the planet is to blow up the belt near Mauritius island on an specific day and time. Despite the continued destruction of earth, numerous other scientists, joined by the masses, disagree and plan to scuttle the attempts of Nelson's nuclear submarine. Eventually, he is almost brought down by the machinations of his own medical doctor, Susan Hiller (Joan Fontaine) with her psychological aspersions, directed to Captain Lee Crane (Robert Sterling), against the Admiral. The imperiled world is saved, once again, by a kind of violence, an explosion that jettisons the radiation belt into outer space. How that might effect our continued survival is never revealed.

By 1964 the military increasingly becomes the enemy itself. That year's Fail Safe and the darkly comic Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb both feature a military world out of control and ready to release nuclear weaponry upon the enemy, resulting obviously in the total world destruction of which The Day the Earth Stood Still's Klaatu had warned. The plot to bomb Russia by military higher-ups in Fail Safe is foiled by a saner head, in the form of the President (Henry Fonda), who, however, must allow millions of New Yorkers (including his own wife) to be killed in retaliation for the destruction of Moscow. The earth is saved in Fail Safe, but at what expense?

Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove took that world destruction to its obvious conclusion. In this mad world of both military and political leadership, there is no "fail-safe," and the planet, quite obviously, is up for a totally dark comic annihilation. I have never been a fan of Kubrick's work, perhaps because it allows for no possible solution.

The 1971 motion picture The Andromeda Strain continues to explore the madness of the military, but also points its fingers at the scientific world. Discovering a small desert town completely destroyed (except for two seeming unconnected individuals, a crying baby and an alcoholic addicted to antifreeze), even the plane flying over the site is downed, its pilots' blood turned to dust. Obviously, a massive bio-chemical accident has occurred. The always malicious military suggests bombing the site to smithereens, but scientists warn that will only spread it across the area. Meanwhile, the dangerous chemicals may be caught up in the winds, killing millions, if an antidote cannot quickly be discovered. Noted scientists, already slated for this job, are gathered in a forbidding, chemically impenetrable bunker to seek an answer. For 96 critical hours in man's history (so claims the film's tagline) these specialists struggle to analyze the dangerous bio-chemical. They nearly fail, but as in War of the Worlds they ultimately discover that the natural world may provide the salvation, that heavy doses of oxygen will ultimately destroy the new virus. In their explorations, however, they also reveal the cozy—and dangerous—interplay of politics and science of which most of these films have previously hinted.

Finally, in Steve De Jarnatt's 1988 offbeat Miracle Mile, filmed almost entirely in my own neighborhood and including images of my office and home, mass hysteria is all we have left. Neither the military nor scientists appear on the horizon. We never, in fact, discover the reason for the impending nuclear bombing of Los Angeles; indeed, it is only by a fluke—a wrong number to public phone picked up by an unsuspecting visitor—that forecasts what will surely result in the end of the world. Escape to an isolated spot (as in the 1959 film On the Beach) is only a temporary salvation. And the "hero" falls, just before the bombs, into the La Brea Tarpits to be embalmed in water and tar like the mammoths of ancient days.

Most of the contemporary "end of the world" films are not as bleak. The 1996 film Independence Day, for example, returns to a triumvirate of the President, military, and scientists to save the day. But there is a strong feeling, particularly in more dystopian works such as the Mad Max movies (1979 and 1981), the Japanese animated film Akira (1988) and Ridley Scott's brilliant 1982 film Blade Runner that government, the military, and science will only make matters worse.

If in 1951, we might be have been able to hope our scientists, if only left alone, could have saved us, over the next few decades it became clearer that we the people, the military, the political forces we elect, as well as the scientific world would be in collusion to fail in the fight against any real global threat to our existence—a skepticism, I suggest, that is a horrific specter of what might happen in any natural or terrorist threat we may soon face.

Yet someone must take leadership and, although—along with most of the films I have discussed and, I might add, our founding fathers—I am somewhat doubtful that answers to any global threat will come from the "common folk." The events of 9/11 demonstrated, however, that it was the everyday fast-responding firefighters and fellow workers who saved the most lives. Scientists would only show up at the World Trade Towers in retrospect. The President remained protected in a Florida classroom and Air Force One. Even New York mayor Rudy Giuliani could do little but declare his good intentions after the fact. And that event, we must remember, threatened only a few New York City blocks, not an entire planet.

And it was "common folk," after all, who prevented United Airlines Flight 93 from crashing into the USA Capitol or White House.

Accordingly, I might now argue that the struggle to save the world depends upon everyone of us—not in the way the New Jersey Transit suggests, urging us to "Report any suspicious acts"—but by becoming involved in the world around us and acknowledging our lives as being linked to global events.

Los Angeles, December 12, 2001

Ritualizing the Rite (on Yvonne Rainer's RoS Indexical and The Rite of Spring)

Scene from ROS Indexical

Yvonne Rainer on the set of ROS Indexical

Original costumes (Himalayan chorus)

from The Rite of Spring

The chorus momentarily rests

Valery Gergiev (director), with the cast of the Marinsky Theatre Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes

Yvonne Rainer (choreographer, after Millicent Hodson), with Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, and Sally Silvers RoS Indexical and Spiraling Down / RedCat (Roy and Edna Disney/ CalArts Theater, at the Disney Center, Los Angeles / the performance I attended was the Los Angeles premiere, Thursday, June 25, 2009

By intentional coincidence, a few weeks before attending Yvonne Rainer's RoS Indexical and Spiraling Down, Howard and I attended a high definition showing of Emerging Pictures's Stravinsky and the Ballets Russes at the Music Hall Theater in Beverly Hills. That film included performances of three Stravinsky ballets by the Marinsky Ballet Company with the Marinsky Theater Symphony Orchestra, restaged in 2003 from the original choreography and danced in the original costumes. The three ballets included The Firebird, The Rite of Spring, and The Wedding, all of which were high engaging reconstructions of the originals.

Of particular importance for me, however, was seeing The Rite of Spring just previous to Rainer's homage, dissection, and spoof of that great work. The day after seeing the Rainer piece, moreover, I watched the tape of the first reconstruction of Nijinsky's original, performed in 1987 by the Joffrey Ballet in Los Angeles.

From a corps de ballet of several dozens of dancers, Rainer slimmed down her company to four dancers, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer, Sally Silvers, and Pat Catterson, the last of whom was replaced in the production I saw by Rainer herself, now age 75.

The tone of Rainer's version was established almost immediately by the four sitting around a card table, listening to something on head phones. They begin by humming and thrumming the overture to The Rite of Spring, droned so out of tune it is barely recognizable.

As the First Act, L'adoration de la Terre, begins, three of the women (in the original, many of the group dances were split by Nijinsky into groups of three) gather, as the old men do in the original, to celebrate the spring with the heavy stamp of their booted feet. Here, in spritely colored work-out clothing, the woman start by imitating but quickly move to other positions as, sometimes working in unison, but more often splitting apart into ones or twos, they reiterate some of the hand, arm, and head-gestures of the Nijinsky choreography. To her "indexing" of the original, Rainer adds often hilarious and touching riffs from Groucho Marx's daffy backward shuffles (remember his incredible dancing in the movies?) and Robin Williams (presumably from his Bob Fosse imitations in The Birdcage) to Sarah Bernhardt's melodramatic gestures. Every so often, the exhausted dancers—they are, after all, performing all the various chorus numbers—retire to a couch, where they temporarily rest, change from shoes to Kleenex boxes (suggesting, I gather, the various different tribal outfits of the original dancers) and appear to be deciding what to do with the dreadful audience response.

For Rainer has layered her performance to include the riots of the original. Early in their dances, various placards fall from the ceiling dangling like posters in the sky, announcing possible responses to the work. From the soundtrack of the BBC rendition, Riot at the Rite, we hear various shouts and hateful remarks, Nijinsky counting loudly to his performers so that they, unable any longer to hear the music, might continue the dance. At one point a mob of planted actors, a couple in the costumes of the original designer Nicholas Roerich, rush to the stage, demanding the company return to TriBeCa, where Rainer's New York home is located.

Certainly this historical intervention adds further dimension to the work. But the high British accents declaring their dismissal and outrage made the reactions seem arch and absurd; certainly French must have been more to the point, and, like others in the audience, I wish we might have had the "riot" performed in the original language.

The unflappable dancers, however, ultimately maintain their demeanors, bending down occasionally to return, in mime, some of the missiles presumably hurled their way. As the performers began the memorable "Dance of the Virgins," those terrifying figures who ultimately decide which of their member is to be sacrificed, Sally Silvers falls to the floor in a faint, referencing the original fall of the young woman selected to die. Throughout, Silvers humorously huffs and puffs her way through these dances, sometimes in Marx brothers style, leaving everything out that the others do except for the final position (the other two dancers are younger by at least two decades), lending her highly satiric dancing style (Silvers is also a noted choreographer) to the whole. Not to be outdone, however, the other two later fall, and in lieu of the final end of the sacrificial victim—raised in her death above the heads of the original male chorus—each of Rainer's women take turns at demonstrating their dramatic skills in dying by falling upon the couch, Silvers most riotously clumsy, with Rainer almost unable, it appears, to climb over its arms.

Yet, throughout this exhausting dance, these four women stomp, march, float through the air, twist, turn, and gesture with arms, hands, and fingers along with Stravinsky's raw, barbarously rhythmic, and often blaringly atonal chords, with an incredible energy and beauty that might almost be said to have outdo any large corps de ballets. Rainer declared at the beginning of the work that her performance might be seen as "geriatric," but if her graceful movements represent the consequences of old age, bring it on! We should all be so beautifully lithe.

Los Angeles, June 27, 2009

Nostalgia for an Imagined World (on Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven)

Todd Haynes (writer and director) Far From Heaven / 2002

Haynes' suburban 1950s couple, Cathy and Frank Whitaker, blessed with a son and a daughter, a beautiful home, lovely friends, and a bank account that might easily see them through retirement, seem absolutely blessed; "You're the luckiest guy in town!" insists Frank's friend, Stan Fine. But anyone who has seen a Douglas Sirk movie or any other soap opera about that period, knows even before the movie has begun that, a Frank says to Stan: "It's all smoke and mirrors, fellas." Like numerous films of that period such as Sirk's All That Heaven Allows, clearly a model for Haynes' film, Peyton Place, The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and Imitation of Life, we quickly perceive that something else is going on beneath the placid surface of cocktail parties and pleasant shows of art.

Before we can even say "I've Got a Secret" (the name of the popular weekly 50s panel show), Cathy witnesses her husband in the midst of a passionate kiss with another man. He admits his problem, of course, and is determined through the help of a psychiatrist to overcome his homosexual "predilections." But only a few scenes later, after continuing to work late most nights and consuming enormous amounts of alcohol, Frank, we perceive, isn't succeeding in his "transformation."

A vacation imposed upon him by his employers sends the lucky / unhappy family to Miami, where he meets up with another man, this time falling in love. A divorce is the reward of his painful admission of his new love to his wife.

Meanwhile, Cathy has befriended her Black gardener, Raymond Deagan, who not only creates beautiful flower arrangements, but is able to intelligently comment on Joan Miró and other painters in a local art show. He is also a gentle listener, particularly for a woman who has no others with whom she can communicate her marital problems. But Hartford, like any good 1950s city, is abuzz with gossip of their interracial friendship, and the women of her set have telephoned one another with the shocking news almost before she has returned home. Their condemnation only further assures her isolation as she is forced to fire the man upon whom she increasingly has come to depend.

Soon after Raymond's daughter is hit with a rock thrown by malicious boys, punishing the child for the father's apparent infraction of the rules. When Cathy hears of the news, she runs to his side, but he, too, now foresees no future in their love. He is leaving for Baltimore, and suggests to Cathy that life would be no better for them there than in Hartford: "I've learned my lesson about mixing in other worlds. I've seen the sparks fly. All kinds."

Despite such heavy-laden dialogue, Haynes' bland restatement of 1950s stereotypes, like Sirk's films, is beautifully filmed with the warmest reds, brightest oranges, lyrical lime-greens, and brooding browns of wide-screen cinema's palette. The acting is resplendent, with Dennis Quaid, Julianne Moore, and Patricia Clarkson all receiving numerous award nominations.

I wonder, however, how anyone could describe this picture, as many critics did, as representing a "cruel honesty" (Geoff Andrew, Time Out) about "the repressive taboos of a past decade" (Judith Egerton, Courier-Journal). For, while we all know that for many such taboos did and do still exist (we need only remind ourselves of recent outing of evangelist Ted Haggard, who also, incidentally, is attempting to change his sexuality through psychiatry) that such things have happened, it almost appears as if, in his homage to this period, Haynes is not simply reiterating those facts, but reviewing them through a lens of nostalgia. Any truths this film reveals are "cruel" only because the writer and director makes no attempt to comment on them.

I think I have made it clear by this time in my several volumes of My Year, moreover, that I do not see the 1950s as the void of hypocrisy that Hollywood has long portrayed it as being. While there was—just as today—open racial bigotry, homophobia, and sexual role playing and stereotyping, there was much else going on. Indeed, throughout the decade there was a growing repeal in state after state of anti-miscegenation laws, and in 1958, only one year after the events supposedly portrayed in Far From Heaven, Hannah Arendt passionately wrote that the right to choose a mate is "an elementary human right": "Even political rights, like the right to vote, and nearly all other rights enumerated in the Constitution, are secondary to the inalienable human rights to 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness' proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence and to this category the right to home and marriage unquestionably belongs." By 1967 the Supreme Court, in the case of "Loving v. Virginia," struck down he anti-miscegenation law in Virginia, responding in language very similar to Arendt's; and most Southern states—the last bastion of such laws—quickly followed.

If Haynes was truly interested in these issues, one wonders why he didn't more thoroughly explore them. Perhaps by following Frank Whitaker's relationship with his male lover, we might discover how his life was changed for better or worse. If Cathy had been allowed to make the decision to join Raymond Deagon in Baltimore, we might discover more about the dangers or possible joys of an interracial marriage. As presented in this film, there is no future for either Cathy or her totally ignored children (throughout the film they are repeatedly told to go upstairs and be quiet, both Cathy and her husband abusing them through silence). Her final train station wave to Raymond is a goodbye to any possibilities of love, leaving its audience with nothing to say or do but wipe away a tear or two and "tsk" the situation away.

One has to ask, why in 2002 is a film director interested in merely representing a past that primarily existed only in Sirk's and other such directors' imaginations. At least we can understand why filmmakers such as Sirk carefully tiptoed around these explosive issues of the day. Haynes' refusal to speak out now seems, at best, a coy retreat into those beautifully colored fantasies.

Los Angeles, December 14, 2002

Forces of Gravity (on The Wooster Group's La Didone)

Giovanni Francesco Busenello (libretto), Francesco Cavalli (music), additional text: Terrore nello spazio (Planet of the Vampires), a film by Mario Bava, 1965 and Queen of Outer Space, a film by Edward Bernds, 1958 La Didone / Redcat-Roy and Edna Disney-CalArts Theater, Los Angeles / the performance I saw was on June 14, 2009

Known for its innovative retellings of major dramas and events (Hamlet, The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, etc.) The Wooster Group has moved into even more challenging territory with their newest extravaganza, La Didone, a retelling, in operatic form, of Francesco Cavalli's 1641 opera of the Carthagian Queen Dido and her new lover, Aeneas.

Not only has director Elizabeth LeCompte taken on the challenges of opera in this work, but has overlaid the Cavalli work (unknown to most opera-goers) with a grade-B science fiction story, directed by the Italian film maker Mario Bava, Terrore nello spazio, known in this country as Planet of the Vampires. The film has it fans, Ridley Scott among them, whose film Alien was obviously influenced by this campy movie.

On some levels it seems quite justifiable—and may have appeared to be absolutely "brilliant" in the early inception of the work—to bring the two, what used to be called "high culture" and "low culture" together, allowing them to comment on each other and to elucidate related themes. Both worlds, Dido's Carthage and the planet Aura, are visited by outsiders: Aeneas, prince of Troy, washes up upon the shores of Africa after the a deadly sea storm; the spaceships Argos and Galliot, investigating mysterious signals coming from Aura, are caught in a force of gravity and plummet quickly to the new planet's surface, the Galliot destroyed in the process.

That same kind of gravitational pull seems to happen to Aeneas, as Cupid (disguised as Aeneas' son Ascanius) plunges an arrow into Dido's breast, who, having remained true to her the memory of her dead husband, suddenly finds herself madly in love with the visiting stranger.

The worlds for both sets of explorers suddenly shifts, as the remaining members of the Argos crew senses strange beings around them who they cannot see, and Aeneas is drawn into a boar hunt—presented almost as a frenzied sexual prelude—during which he and Dido retire to a cave to make love.

The inhabitants of the planet Aura, in turns out, are invisible beings whose sun is dying, and who can survive only by taking over the bodies of their visitors. As in Invasion of the Body Snatchers, these beings become the people whose bodies they invade; and, as the now-repaired Argos takes off into space, there appears to be only one "real" survivor left, the others having been transformed to Aurans.

Similarly, Dido hopes by conquering the heart of Aeneas to lure him into Carthage society. But the gods call him back to Italy, and Dido is left alone with a broken heart. In the Aeneid she commits suicide, but in Cavalli's version, she regains her sanity, marrying the nearby King Jarbas, who has long been in love with her.

The Argonauts, in a Rod Serling-like plot development, realizing they do not have the energy to return home, choose a planet on which to settle: the third planet from the sun. We realize that either we are already the ancestors of these alien zombies or are about to be invaded.

As always, The Wooster Group performs all of this lunacy with great seriousness, and that, in turn, saves most of this work from simply becoming camp. The singing, particularly Hai-Ting Chinn's Dido, John Young's Aeneas, and Andrew Nolen's Jarbas, was excellent and entices one to see the complete Cavalli opera (the original lasts 4-5 hours, while this production ran for about an hour and a half). Yet for all of the bravado and talent of the company, there remained something about the production that left one feeling that the connections were frail and facile.

Certainly, it challenged its audience. Just the attempt to keep two simultaneous stories—the one in Italian, the other in a quietly-spoken film jargon—both of whose words often scrolled quickly forward at the same moment that computer screens deliver up various images, was, as Los Angeles Times theater critic Charles McNulty described it, "an exhausting cerebral spin." Experienced often enough, such intellectual activity could possibly save one from early dementia.

Yet, at heart, I felt this work was intellectually empty, and spiritually had no real soul. The laughter it evoked was from the bland sci-fi jargon ("How do we repair the meteor rejector, Mark?), while the delight it offered was only of the musical sort. Between the two lay a hollow art.

Los Angeles, June 18, 2009

Twelve Tales of Another Town: The Third Tale (The Desks)

Nissen Trampoline Company, Cedar Rapids, Iowa

Throughout these memoirs I have maintained that until my days in college, I was close to a model child, obedient and well-behaved; and I truly believe to this day that I was an almost saintly son. Some memories, however, seem to contradict this vision of myself, a couple of which I shall now reveal for the first time.


I recall myself as being a fairly unreflective child, living in a world I only vaguely understood. The world about me, particularly the world I experienced in the small town of Newhall, was filled, accordingly, with a kind of magical possibility. Since I saw everything by the light of a slightly darkened bulb, I seldom comprehended the significance of things. I believe this kind of determined innocence was inculcated into my young life, encouraged, so to speak, by my parents, who themselves—when I think back on their behavior—were less sophisticated, perhaps, than many of today’s children. Like my nephews, growing up in a similar world, if an adult were to tell me to go climb a tree, I would go climb a tree—unless I was fearful of falling.


One morning, however, I awoke and in that half sleeping, half awake condition of all transcendent revelations, I suddenly arrived at a wondrous conclusion. At that time I was six years old; the year was 1953, the year of Queen Elizabeth’s coronation, of Harry Truman’s announcement that the United States had developed a hydrogen bomb; the North Sea flooded Zeeland and other parts of the Netherlands, killing over 1,800 people; in Denmark, George William Jorgensen became Christine.


So excited was I with my sudden revelation that I immediately jumped up and ran into my parents’ bedroom, where they were still asleep. “Mom, Dad,” I called out. “Mom, Dad.” I can imagine them opening their eyes in slight startlement: “What is it, Doug? What’s wrong?”


I paused. “There’s no Santa Claus, is there?”


They took a few moments to digest my statement.


“You’re Santa Claus, aren’t you?”


My father awkwardly spoke. “Well, there is Santa Claus in a sort of way, the spirit of Christmas. That’s Santa Claus.”


“And there’s no Tooth Fairy either?


I don’t think they even had an answer for that one.


I merrily skipped out of their room, not disturbed, as they might have feared, in the least. It didn’t matter to me a wink. I still got gifts. How nice, I must have concluded, that my parents had given me all those things.


No sooner had they served me breakfast than I ran out to tell the neighborhood. Fortunately, I got only as far as the girl next door, Gretchen Grover. I joyfully shared my enlightenment, but she was not as pleased to hear what I had to say, and ran off into her house, crying. I was confused. And by the time I returned home my parents had already received a telephone call from her father, reporting my reprehensible behavior.


“Doug,” my mother scolded, “you can’t go around telling your friends this information.”


“Why not?”


“Because they’ll be hurt. They’ll be disappointed.”


“Why?” I exploded. “It’s the truth, isn’t it?”


“Yes,” my father added, “but it’s a truth that for now only you can know. You can’t tell your friends or your brother or sister either. Just keep it to yourself.”


Perhaps that was when I learned how to lie. I kept it a secret for years, often helping my parents hurry the gifts under the tree before we took our Christmas Eve rides. By the time we returned, so my brother and sister were always convinced, Santa had arrived.

By this time I began to realize that knowing things was not always a pleasant experience, that the confusion I’d felt as a younger child was perhaps a preferable sensation. With knowing came responsibilities.


When I was in first grade, 1954, I began to take piano lessons after school with our music teacher. My lesson was Tuesdays and Thursdays just after school let out, and immediately after Marcia Boddicker, my dearest friend, had her lesson; so I usually waited around to hear her play at a more advanced level than I, for she clearly practiced what I never did.


The Boddickers, who lived a just a few doors from our house, had a modernized farmhouse; indeed their place, although located just at the edge of our town, was still an active farm. Marica’s older sister, so I had heard my parents whisper between themselves, had had to get married while still in high school—and, more shockingly still, to the school coach, ending in her expulsion and his being fired. “What an unfortunate event to happen to such a nice couple as Marcia’s parents, Cyril and Louella,” my mother had concluded her household gossip.


I also went to school with Vincent Boddicker, a cousin, who lived a few miles away on a “real” farm (as opposed to the citified version) with six or seven brothers. I once stayed overnight with Vincent, and the next day we rose before five o’clock, ate a huge breakfast of eggs, pancakes, and various meats before we helped with the haying. I hated farms.


Years later, my companion Howard worked with one of these cousins at the University of Wisconsin library. One might say of the Boddickers, as Harvey’s Elwood P. Dowd remarked of his school friend and Vern MacIlhaney and family “there were a lot of them and they circulated. Very nice people.”


After Marcia’s lesson, we would generally play, just the two of us, on the trampoline in the school gym. I believe nearly every school in Iowa had a trampoline, and particularly every school in my hometown of Marion and nearby Cedar Rapids—for we were the home of the Grisson-Nissen Trampoline and Tumbling Company, the inventors of the trampoline and largest producer of trampolines in the world. We never once thought of the dangers that the two of us might have faced.


One evening, Marcia suggested that we visit our classroom.


“Why?”


“I just want to see it when no one is there,” she innocently declared.


We crept into our room through the still-open door.


“I have an idea,” I said—or perhaps Marcia came up with the plot. Does it matter? “Let’s change around all of the desks.”


“Won’t that surprise everyone tomorrow morning,” she or I added.


We did just that.

Now, I have forgotten to mention that my father was Superintendent of Schools. That night, after my homework, I began to feel the call of a guilty conscience; and finally as my brother and I, who shared bunk beds (Dave at the bottom, me at the top), were being tucked in, I admitted to my father what I had done.


Within seconds he had dragged me out of bed and commanded I get dressed. Together we returned to the school, where I was told to put all the desks in their proper place.


“I can’t remember where they go,” I cried out.


“You better, and quick!” he retorted.


I put them back as best I could.


“And in the morning, I want you to report to your teacher just what you have done.”


I don’t recall anything else. I must have reported early the next morning to Miss Donlinger. I know that I cried all the way home that night on account of the terrible thing that I had done.


Why had I performed this Ionescoian act, I now ask? Had Marcia and I placed all those desks the way we desired reality to be, putting the desks of friends next to our own? Or had we simply pulled them into a helter-skelter order? I have no answer. The only one surprised come morning was Marcia herself.


“What happened?” she disappointedly queried during recess.


“I don’t know,” I lied. “Maybe Miss Donlinger put them all back again.”


“How could she have found out?” the young Eve suspiciously wondered. “You must have told her. Did you tell her?”


As I had learned a few weeks before, it was best to keep quiet. So I said nothing for a very long while.

Los Angeles, February 20, 2003


Three years after writing the piece above, it suddenly dawned on me that, while working on a series of poems for an annual of poetic writing, produced in monthly installments by Paul Vangelisti in a Xerxoed format, Lowghost (1999), I had described my poems with the same subtitle of this essay, “Desks.” The “Desks” poems begin with a visit to Joe Ross and Laura Wilber (who later was webmaster of my Green Integer site) at their then-new home in San Diego, where I stayed the night. Left alone in their apartment for the day, I took down several of the volumes of poetry from Joe’s shelves and wrote poems—using the processes I have described in my 2004 interview with Charles Bernstein [My Year 2005]—while also attempting to put myself in the mindset of Joe while writing. Over the several months of Paul’s innovative and stimulating forum, I worked through writings in this manner of several poets and friends—Leslie Scalapino, Barbara Guest, Robert Creeley, Dennis Phillips, Ray DiPalma (producing from Ray’s work what I think is one of my most notable poems, “The Secret Saint”) and others, poems which presaged my collaborative writing of Between.


One can obviously invest too much meaning into innocent and often intuitive childhood acts, but I now wonder, was my transformation of that childhood classroom a simple act of malice or an attempt to comprehend and reformulate my relationships with my fellow students—the very proximity to one another being so important to school-age children? In reorganizing my friends’ desks, perhaps I was seeking a new definition of their relationships with me. Certainly, in later attempting to re-imagine my fellow poets’ approaches to language, I was doing precisely that. My father’s insistence that I recreate the previous order—despite my obedience of his dictate—was, accordingly, an untenable demand. For me, there was no possible return to the past.


At an early age, I now realize, I had already shaken up my world, a process later symbolized by Stacey Levine’s gift of a snow-plagued nun [see My Year 2005].

Westchester, November 20, 2006

Sparks (on Giuseppe Verdi's opera Il Trovatore)

Salvador Commarano (libretto), Giuseppe Verdi Il Trovatore / The Metropolitan Opera, May 8, 2009

My seeing Verdi's operatic warhorse Il Trovatore at the Metropolitan Opera had more to do with contingency than with choice (it was the only production I could see during the few days of my stay in the city). But as with many of my activities it now seems, in the context of the concerns of My Year 2009, appropriate. Like so many of the essays of this year, the plot of Verdi's opera is also about "facing the heat," the characters having to endure the punishments for their own present errors and judgment as well as the sins of their ancestors of the past.

In this case, the gypsy woman Azucena's mother has been burned at the stake for "bewitching" an infant in her care, the current Count di Luna's infant brother. To avenge her mother's death, Azucena apparently kidnapped the young boy and threw him into the flames that burned her mother to death. Only the charred remains of a baby were discovered on the pyre, and since that day the Count has sought out the murderer with intention of confirmation or further revenge.

Meanwhile, the Count has fallen desperately in love with a young woman serving his wife in the court. The woman, Leonora, meanwhile, is smitten with wandering troubadour, Manrico, who also happens to be the leader of the partisan rebel forces threatening the Count's rule—who is, incidentally, Azucena's son. Discovered in Leonora's presence, Manrico is challenged by the Count to a duel, a fight unto death. Manrico quickly overpowers the Count, but strangely resists murdering him. He releases the Count. The war between the two forces continues, with the Royalist forces winning, and resulting in Manrico's near-death. He lives only because he has been dragged from the battlefield by his mother and nursed by her back to health.

In the gypsy camp the gypsies sing of their tireless work, their spirits raised only by the site of a pretty woman, the famed anvil chorus, performed in this production as an almost sexual assertion of masculinity. Indeed, the strikes of the hammers upon the anvil sent almost real sparks into the audience, and certainly Verdi's joyous chestnut does foretell of the fire of the past and of the future.

For, as almost anyone can foretell from the brief and somewhat absurd plot spelled out above, Manrico is doomed in his love for Leonora. Azucena is captured near the camp and is held captive in di Luna's castle, and when Manrico's army is defeated, he too joins his mother within the cells of the castle.

Leonora escapes, returning to the castle and promising herself up to di Luna if he will release his prisoners. Di Luna agrees to release Manrico, and Leonora rushes to tell him. Manrico, however, is outraged at what he believes to be her betrayal of their love. Leonora, having planned all along to cheat di Luna of her presence, has taken a poison which acts faster than she has expected, and she dies in Manrico's arms. Di Luna, witnessing the death, sends Manrico to his execution, while Azucena reveals the truth: mistakenly she had thrown her own son onto the pyre and, accordingly, Manrico is di Luna's long-sought brother. Her revenge has at last been accomplished.

Yet, despite these facts, Il Trovatore is not really a revenge tragedy but a story of four failed human beings who all come together in the "Moon Count's" castle (di Luna), creating a kind of lunatic world. Three commit unspeakable acts and the fourth is apparently incompetent. Azucena has been so caught up in revenge that she has, "accidentally"—a nearly unthinkable word in the context— murdered her own son, and although she has been a loving mother to Manrico, we nonetheless must recognize her as a reprehensible being. The Count, for his part, is also caught up in the past, becoming so determined to find his brother's killer that he destroys the sibling in the act. Manrico, the troubador, is a terrible warrior, unwilling even to kill a brutal enemy in a duel; he is, moreover, a man who loses all battles, evidently, in which he participates. He is not even a good "troubador"—a devotee of courtly love—attacking Leonora at the very moment that she has sacrificed her own life for him. Leonora, in turn, enacts a suicide that has no positive results, resulting a death that saves neither her lover nor his gypsy mother. The fires within each of them, fueled by love, envy, anger, and hate, sparks each other's inevitable destruction.

The production I saw at the Met, with Hasmik Papian as Leonora, Želijo Lucic as the Count, Marco Berti as Manrico, and Mzia Nioradze as Azucena was a superb rendition of this opera, with Papian (better known for her Norma) and Niordze as standouts for their performances.

New York, May 9, 2009

Why the Hell Did You Come? (on the composer Harry Partch)

Harry Partch Partch Dark, Partch Light, performed by the group Partch at Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall on May 29, 2009

A true American musical maverick similar in some respects to Charles Ives, composer Harry Partch was born, the son of Presbyterian missionaries, in Oakland, California in June 1901. Much of his youth was spent in isolated Arizona and New Mexico towns, where, reportedly, he heard and sang songs in Spanish, several American Indian languages, and Mandarin, sung to him by his mother, who had spent time in China.

He attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with the intention of a musical career; but in 1925 he discovered the book On the Sensations of Tone by the German physician and physicist Hermann Helmholtz, a study of the psychological effects of musical tones, and soon after dropped out of school to study by himself, exploring the musicality of speech and constructing his own instruments that "underscored the intoning voice." As Partch wrote:

I came to the realization that the spoken word was the distinctive expression my
constitutional makeup was best fitted for, and that I needed other scales and other
instruments. this was the positive result of self-examination—call it intuitive,
for it was not the result of any intellectual desire to pick up lost or obscure
historical threads. for better or for worse, it was an emotional decision.

His first instrument was the "Monotone," an "adapted viola," which later joined with numerous others including The Diamond Marimba, The Quadrangularis Reversum, the 11-key Bass Marimba, Bamboo Marimbas (nicknamed "Boo" and "Boo II"), Cloud Chamber Bowls, an instrument he called "The Spoils of War" (which included Cloud Chamber Bowls, artillery shell casings, metal whang-guns, and wooden piecings), The Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs, an xylophone augmented with tuned liquor bottles and hubcaps (The Zymo-Xyl), Kitharas, and Harmonic Canons (played with fingers, picks or mallets).

Receiving a Carnegie grant in the early 1930s, Partch traveled to London, meeting the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who game him permission to set his translation of Sophocles' Oedipus as an opera. Transcribing the inflections of the Abbey Theatre actors, Partch performed his piece on Monophone, intoning "By the Rivers of Babylon." Yeats was delighted by the effects.

Yet the grant soon ran out, and the following year, 1935, Partch returned to the US at the height of the Great Depression, and lived for nine years wandering as a hobo, doing odd jobs and designing his instruments.

Important works of this period were "Dark Brother," performed at the concert I saw by the Partch group, a piece from Thomas Wolfe's "God's Lonely Man," which reiterates Partch's own sense of isolation and separateness. Most of Partch's relationships were with males, and his feelings of disengagement with the whole of society were obviously intense.

Yet many of the works of this period are brilliantly comical, including the "Yankee Doodle Fantasy," sung in accompaniment with tin oboes and other instruments, that satirizes patriotism, serious club women, and even his 43-tone note system. Similarly lighter Partch pieces, two based on James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake, "Isobel" of 1944 and "Annah the Allmaziful" of the same year, were, along with his utterly charming tribute to Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky," ("O Frabjous Day!"), highlights of the evening.

One of Partch's most strange but yet arresting works is his "Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions," based on messages left by hitchhikers just outside the Mojave Desert junction of Barstow:

The scribbling is in pencil. It is on one of the white highway railings just outside
the Mojave Desert junction of Barstow, California. I am walking along the highway
and sit down on the railing to rest.
Idly I notice the scratches where I happen to drop. I have seen many hitchhiker's
writings. they are usually just names and addresses—there are literally millions of them,
or meaningless obscenities, on the highway signs, railings, walls.
But this—why, it's music. It's both weak and strong, like unedited human
expressions always are. It's eloquent in what it fails to express in words. And it's
epic. Definitely, it is music....

Indeed, upon first hearing each of these numbered pieces, presented in a kind of sprechstimme-like performance by guitarist John Schneider, the words are almost laughable. But Patrch allows us after the original statement to hear the echoes of those words, by repeating them with emotionally-charged aftertones and dramatic additions ("ha-ha-ha," "dum-de-dum," etc) that transforms them into haunting expressions of fear and joy. The first one, for example, begins with a young man returning to Boston, Massachusetts, wishing he were dead, yet oddly adding "Today I am a Man." Is his manhood defined by his desire for death or for some sexual encounter that he has recently had? There is no one answer; but the echo of the two, filled in by Partch's joyful exclamations, alter the whole, and suddenly what might have been simple banality is awash with glorious possibilities.

Similarly, the young girl of "Considered Pretty," whose name and Las Vegas address appears merely to be a sexual invitation, is transformed by the final statement: "objective matrimony," while the sly admission that she is "considered pretty," pulls at our hearts when connected with her obvious desires.

"Jesus Was God in the Flesh" begins as a simple announcement of belief, repeated over and over like a prayerful charm song instead a statement of faith. "You Lucky Woman" recounts the self-described charms of a passing man, whose braggadocio might be completely disgusting were it not for his final challenge to the opposite sex that "all you have to do is find me." And the final piece "Why in Hell Did You Come?" is shouted out almost in irritation for those hitchhiking complaints of the writer and others suffering the itinerant life. Yet in that ironic cry we hear the numerous echoes of drifters catalogued by John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie, and others.

The evening began with Eleven Intrusions of 1950, written while Partch was staying in Gualala, on California's northern coast, at a ranch owned by pianist Gunnar Johansen. There, among the redwoods, Partch created many of his instruments and worked in relative splendor in comparison to his earlier days. But the isolation apparently became oppressive, and the darkness of these Japanese-inspired works, almost haiku-like studies—each piece generally performed by two instruments that present a sequence of microtonal dissonances—of a rose, a crane, a waterfall, the wind, the street, the lover, soldiers, and other concerns reveal the darkness of a life that formerly seemed to be able to survive great depredations.

This was, I am sorry to say, my first encounter with the music of Harry Partch, a man who, as I described in an earlier essay, was rescued later in his life by my friend Betty Freeman. It will not, however, be my last Partch concert. And the day after this event I listened with wonderment to Partch's "Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales" and, again, to "Barstow" on the record Just West Coast with great pleasure.

Los Angeles, May 31, 2009

Archetypal America (on Thornton Wilder's Our Town)

Thorton Wilder Our Town / Barrow Street Theatre, New York; the production I saw was on the evening of May 10, 2009

Few American plays can lay claim to being almost a dramatic "national anthem" other than Thornton Wilder's Our Town. Susan Bee recently suggested that everyone of a certain age who performed in high school theater was, at one time or another, in Our Town. I performed as a minor character in just such a production.

Over the years, however, it has seemed to me that this archetypal drama without sets or costumes has gotten a little stale. Howard and I attended a production at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C. around 1973, when they also performed that work, among others, in the Soviet Union.

I remember that production primarily for the acting by Robert Prosky as the stage manager. Prosky performed it in a manner that was so "folksy," I could hardly bare the sentimentality of the piece. A 2003 television production starring Paul Newman and directed by James Naughton seemed even more uninspiring.

I also have the feeling that over the years that in some productions more and more props have crept onto the stage despite Wilder's insistence that the play use only three props at most. But perhaps this is just an illusion brought about by the busy verisimilitude of the productions I've seen.

The 2009 production at the Barrow Street Theater in New York, accordingly, was a welcome change. Directed by David Cromer, this Our Town was a dusted-off rendition, where part of the audience, an important feature of the script, appeared on stage (me among them), several of whom were asked to read the questions in response to the academically inclined lecture of Professor Willard, who describes the geological history of Grovers Corners and surrounding territory.

The stage manager of this version, Scott Parkinson, lost the New England accent usually lathered on in heavy doses, and spoke in a more appealing everyday quality, sometimes injecting energy through his hurried asides into a work that has a tendency in its slow spin of story-telling to fall into lethargy. With only two tables, and four chairs Cromer created a believable pair of houses in which live the Gibbs and the Webbs, whose children grow up, marry, and die in a few short hours. The abandonment of the New Hampshireisms was a particular advantage, I felt, since the play is so universally "American"—however one defines that—that this work has always seemed to be more at home in the author's home state of Wisconsin. Wherever Grovers Corners is, it exists more in the mind that in reality, and to place it in any particular locale seems to me beside the point.

So casual were the actors, dressed in mostly contemporary clothing, that even the heart-rending wedding scene and the nearly impossible-to-perform cemetery conversation among the dead lost a great deal of its sentimentality.

Interestingly, after paring down the characters lives and actions to almost abstract imitations of life, Cromer pulled out the naturalistic stops, so to speak, for the famous final scene when Emily Webb (Jeniffer Grace in this production) asks to go back "home" for one day in her life. Suddenly a curtain behind the stage was opened to reveal an entire kitchen, with a table set with plates, silverware, napkins, a working water pump and a stove where Emily's mother fries up bacon and pancakes. The startling comparison of the abstractness of the rest of the production with this highly realist scene brought home, with amazing results, one of Wilder's major themes, that we are too busy living life to really see it. Perhaps only the dead can truly smell the coffee, but on the Mother's Day Sunday I visited this play, the entire audience shared in the experience, as tears fell from nearly everyone's eyes. In a strange way, it was if Wilder had restated, within a narrow realist context, Ionesco's absurdly comic observations about living and death.

Los Angeles, May 29, 2009

Sweating It: Three Mid-20th Century Tragi-comedies (on Waiting for Godot, West Side Story, and Exit the King)

Samuel Beckett Waiting for Godot / Studio 54, New York City; the production I saw was a matinee on Saturday, May 9, 2009

Arthur Laurents (book), Stephen Sondheim (lyrics), Leonard Bernstein (music) West Side Story / Palace Theatre, New York; the production I saw was Thursday, May 7, 2009

Eugène Ionesco Exit the King / Ethel Barrymore Theater, New York; the production I saw was a matinee on Sunday, May 10, 2009

Through accidental intent I saw three plays on my recent trip to New York City, all works from the 1950s through the early 1960s that revealed not only Auden's description of that period as "The Age of Anxiety," but reiterated from me the dramatic tensions at play in 1950s society. All three works might be described by the subtitle of Waiting for Godot (1953), a "tragicomedy," although one does not necessarily think of that phrase in relationship with West Side Story. Yet its appropriateness became clearer than ever upon seeing Arthur Laurent's new production.

The terrified participants of Beckett's landscape—in this production presented as an inhospitable plain surrounded by rocks—have seemingly nowhere else to go, although they incessantly speak of "going." Although Vladimir (stunningly played by Bill Irwin) and Estragon (Nathan Lane) spend each night separately (sleep is probably the most isolated activity that man endures), they gather each morning to discuss, in the absurd language of Laurel and Hardy, their possible alternatives and attempt entertain themselves until the arrival, promised each day to Didi (Vladimir), of Godot.

Numerous readers and critics of Beckett's work have speculated that Godot is God. He is, after all, seen as the agent of their salvation; at the end of the play, as they discuss possible suicide, the two speak:

Vladimir: We'll hang ourselves to-morrow. (Pause.) Unless Godot comes.
Estragon: And if he comes?
Vladimir: We'll be saved.

Even the child who reports each day that Godot (pronounced in this production as Godot) will not arrive describes his master in the standard Christian manner: a man with a white beard. Yet if this elusive Godot is God, perhaps we would be better without him, or, at least better off not spending our entire lives in wait.

The conditions of their lives—both are tramps who apparently recall a previous life in which they were better off—is abhorrent. Gogo, in particular, is plagued by swelling feet, and is often unable to remove his shoes. Each night, so he tells Didi, he is beaten while he sleeps. So too is the child's brother beaten by Godot.

The appearance of a passing landowner (he claims to own all the land about), Pozzo (grandly performed by John Goodman) and his slave, Lucky (John Glover) demonstrates the scandalous condition of others. Carrying Pozzo's dinner, table, and folding chair, Lucky stumbles about on a chain, whipped from behind by Pozzo. Both Vladimir and Estragon are horrified to discover someone worse off than themselves, but gradually perceive that Pozzo is completely dependent on Lucky; and when Lucky is commanded to dance and to think, we discover he is such a clumsy oaf and academic bore, that he is perhaps more useful to the world in his subjugation than in freedom.

Even more disconcerting is the Alzheimer's-like condition of all Beckett's figures save Didi. When Pozzo meets up with the two on the second day, he is even more dependent on others than previously, but has no memory of meeting the two tramps a day earlier. Estragon must be reminded each day of the previous day's events and is often incredulous of Didi's recountings. Even the child who reporting for Godot cannot recall seeing Didi each day. For Didi it is as if what he perceives is eternally in question, and he spends much of the play trying to uncover evidence that his vision of reality is correct.

But that is just what makes this work a tragedy: there is no reality. And it is also that which makes it comedy, which induces us to laugh: because there is no reality, these beings have nowhere else to go. Their entreaty to "go," "Yes, let's go," results only in stasis. They have no choice but to return day after day to their rocky lives to wait for someone who may beckon, but will probably never come. In Beckett's final stage instruction, They do not move, even the most determinist of us realizes that we are all "frozen" into our own ridiculous lives. Like figures of the commedia dell'arte, we can only pull up our trousers and wait for the inevitable end of existence.

Ionesco's less performed Exit the King (1962) explores just that end. King Berenger's (Geoffrey Rush) empire has, over his long rule, shrunken extensively. The sun has frighteningly diminished and a large sinkhole threatens to suck up the entire kingdom. As Queen Marguerite (Susan Sarandon) recognizes: "The party's over," reporting to her husband that by the end of the play he will die.

Terrified by that fact, Berenger fights his approaching death with the tenacity of a spoiled child let loose at a table of doting adults. The palace maid (Andrea Martin)—although complaining of the endless burdens of her job (she is only one of three who continue to serve the court)—servilely straightens his winding robe, picks up the crumpled carpet, cooks, and performs thousands of other chores. The King's younger consort, Queen Marie (Lauren Ambrose) coos her love, insisting that he continue to fight his inevitable death.

Fight he does, but with the attacks coming every few moments, Berenger's absurd pleadings and rush of memories become more and more ridiculous. What may seem to be a topic that would send most audiences fleeing from the theater is here transformed into a long-standing joke (almost overplayed in this production), as the King dies and dies and dies, Marguerite cheering him on as Marie tenderly dotes on his numerous last gasps.

One of the difficulties in this play (as in Beckett's) is to keep those laughs coming while, at the same moment, the audience grows uneasy in its recognition that it, like the characters, simply must wait and die. And although Ionesco could be as wickedly ironic as Beckett at times, Beckett's crisper diction—which at nearly every moment seems to combine the tragic with the comic—allows his play to better function than Ionesco's broader farcical conceits. Still, in all, Exit the King is a brilliant play that tenderly takes the King (and we, his consorts) from living into death.

Both of these plays, accordingly, offer us a world in which its characters are literally forced to face the void, nearly swooning in its heat.

Based as it is on Shakespeare's great tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story at first appears to be without the comic redemption of the Beckett and Ionesco plays. Yes, there are comic moments in Laurent's script, the self mockery of the Jet's psychologically frenzied lives expressed in "Gee, Officer Krupke" and the equally playful putdown of the Shark women against a girl who wants to return to Puerto Rico in "America" (note: unlike the great dance scene in the motion picture version of the musical, in which both Shark males and females dance "America," the stage version includes only women). And there are those tender and light moments "Something Coming," "One Hand, One Heart," and "I Feel Pretty"(sung in this production in Spanish). But for most viewers, I suggest, West Side Story would not seem to be properly described as a tragicomedy. Where's the comedy? many might ask.

If we recognize, however, that West Side Story presents us with a society with hardly no adult moral examples (Doc is so passive he is completely ineffectual, the police are as nearly as disgusting in their prejudices against the Puerto Ricans as the Jets), it becomes clear that the given world of this musical is as absurd as that presented in both the Beckett and Ionesco works. Living is being part of a gang, and being part of a gang is to be willing to fight, kill, or be killed. Although both Maria and Tony attempt to live outside that reality, they have no other choice, and are inevitably pulled in through the vortex of love and hate into the absurd world surrounding them.

On the streets of the upper West Side, New York, Tony has no choice but to fight for his own kind, even if it means destroying, in the process, the woman he loves. Only Maria seems intellectually to be able to create a different reality, a reality not based on territorial and familial domains, but on love; despite the fact that Tony has killed her own brother, she insists that her love for Tony takes precedence.

Obviously Tony's inevitable death produces no laughter. But in terms of the play's inverted realities, his death returns that world to normality.

The singing and dancing of this production was excellent, and the leads, Matt Cavenaugh and Josefina Scaglione were far better than Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood. But I still prefer the movie version, simply because its characters are better delineated than the stage production, and Jerome Robin's filmic dances, particularly "America" and "Cool" (which on the is performed in the drugstore early in the play), are simply masterpieces which are nearly impossible to match. Although Laurent's new direction brought two of the songs into Spanish, it had no great effect on the timbre of the piece, and the cute dancing chorus members detracted from the anxiety of the world the script expressed.

As the film's Baby John made clear through his tears and the gang's pent up fears released in "Cool" evidenced, the young men and women of Bernstein's West Side New York were also forced to live in a sweat. Even the innocent Maria has now learned "how to hate."

Los Angeles, May 30, 2009

Exploring Fictions

I've begun a new blog, a statement about which I've posted below. The Green Integer Blog will continue to feature cultural events and information on new Green Integer titles, but most new fiction and many of the essays I write on fiction will appear on the blog, devoted only to
fiction: http://exploringfictions.blogspot.com

Introductory Statement

Exploratory fiction, at least in the United States, is arguably near death. Determinedly mediocre American publishing aligned with tepidly written and rapidly disappearing critical commentary has left us instead with a seemingly endless series of dispirited personal narratives, flat-footed fantasies, and sentimentalized social statements.

By exploratory writing I do not merely mean "experimental writing," but works that in their language and structures challenge our thinking, surprising and sometimes even mystifying readers, who are left not with simple comprehension but with wonderment. When I first began publishing in the mid-1970s there were a substantial number of writers of such fictions (Walter Abish, Tom Ahern, David Antin, Paul Auster, Russell Banks, Michael Brownstein, Robert Coover, Guy Davenport, Lydia Davis, Jaimy Gordon, Marianne Hauser, John Hawkes, Spencer Holst, Fanny Howe, Steve Katz, Tom La Farge, Nathaniel Mackey, Clarence Major, Harry Matthews, Mark Mirsky, Toby Olson, James Purdy, Gilbert Sorrentino, Johnny Stanton, Robert Steiner, Ronald Sukenick, Rosmarie Waldrop, Wendy Walker, Lewis Warsh, Curtis White, and Dallas Wiebe, to name just a few) to choose from. Indeed, my Sun & Moon Press published several of these figures. But since that time, many of these writers have died or ceased writing, and only a handful of younger writers have joined the active among them. Accordingly, the great tradition of US writing, from Gertrude Stein to William Faulkner, from Flannery O'Connor to Vladimir Nabokov, is in danger of disappearing. What to do?

One person or perhaps even a small group cannot resolve the situation. But I can, as I have attempted to do in my activities as a publisher, present and reveal such writing. exploringfictions, my new on-line magazine devoted to narrative writing, is another such attempt. Perhaps by simply standing in the path of the dart [see photograph above] I can deflect those whose attention is centered only on a single point in time and space and help to refocus their vision upon the wide world about them.

Clearly such a publication will be strongly dependent upon my own contributions, but I hope the entire literary community interested in fiction will join me in presenting (living and dead, US and international) writers, reviews, short essays on (new and older) fictions (in English and translation), interviews, news and other related commentaries.

I must emphasize that the title of this publication is purposely plural, and will be edited with the recognition that fiction is not merely a Gemini (the novel or short story), but is a many-headed beast made up of numerous forms including epistolary writing, picaresques, anatomies, fables, pastorals, encyclopedias and other such structures.

exploringfictions will be published daily or weekly, depending upon when I write or receive appropriate new works. Perhaps, if it functions as I hope, Green Integer may collect each year into a single paperbound volume.

—Douglas Messerli, Publisher

I invite new works sent either by e-mail (to douglasmesserli@gmail.com) or by regular mail (to Green Integer, 6022 Wilshire Boulevard, Suite 202C, Los Angeles, CA 90036 USA)


52409

Twelve Tales in Another Town: The First Tale (The Mad Woman Across the Street)

As a child I lived in a small Iowa town, population 400, named Newhall, in honor—evidently—of its largest structure. My father began his career there as the basketball coach, was quickly promoted to the principal of the school, and within a year or two of our arrival, became the Superintendent of Schools.

In small towns everyone is strange, since everyone knows everyone so well but not, evidently, enough. It’s that space between knowing and not knowing which is at the heart of events in such towns. And there are so many events, ultimately, that you realize very quickly that not knowing people is what knowing people is all about. Living in a town where you know nearly everyone around you, you quickly comprehend that no one can ever be known very well. So confusion sets in, and in that confusion you try to explain to yourself what is the difference between knowing someone and not. Perhaps you can fill that gap between not knowing and wanting to with what you imagine is really there to be known. And that is at the heart of gossip, at first a friendly act and, later—when the not knowing persists—an act of malice for not being able to know about one so close. This is always how love and desire quickly turn into fear and hate.

The lady across the street was a very nice woman, an elderly woman living in what seemed to my childish eyes a mansion—in reality just a two-storey house. When my parents needed a babysitter on those two or three nights a year they determined to celebrate the fact that they were a married couple still in love, it was she to whom they turned. And it was Mrs. Heffner to whom we awoke, accordingly, when my mother—so our sitter proclaimed—had gone to the hospital to pick up my new baby sister. I knew better, that my mother had gone to “have” my sister—even if I didn’t know what “having” meant—so I kept quiet about the old woman’s mistake. Besides my brother was too young to know anything!

In all the years we knew her, my parents expressed an opinion of her life only twice. The first time was the morning her brother, with whom she lived, came out of the house and sat under the tree in the front yard on a Sunday morning dressed only in his pajamas. He often sat upon her porch, gently rocking in the swing, so I found nothing at all out of the ordinary in his pleasure. I knew, however, that, had I attempted to find such enjoyment in our front yard, my parents would have made me dress for the occasion. “Why doesn’t she do something about him?” my mother asked of no one in particular.

Occasionally Mrs. Heffner was visited by her sister, but nothing was ever said about this sibling, even though she was far stranger, to my way of thinking, than Mrs. Heffner’s brother. One time when I was playing about the “mansion,” Mrs. Heffner invited me in for lemonade. The moment I took a sip, her sister began to shout: “Where’s that damn bread man? Why hasn’t he come? Where has he gotten to, I wonder? That lazy ass.”

I had never heard anyone swear at a bread man; I had never heard anyone swear. Just as importantly, I had never seen a bread man and never known one to visit our town. What was a bread man? I wondered. Upon my asking my parents, they explained that a bread man was a man who used to deliver bread. “But nowadays we buy bread in the grocery store,” my mother consolingly spoke. “Mrs. Heffner’s sister is a not a well woman,” she added. “She lives in an institution.”

“Oh,” I responded. For I knew what that meant. My grandfather’s daughter by his first marriage had lived in an institution too.

“They should send her brother there as well,” my father chimed in.

“Poor Mrs. Heffner,” my mother ended their talk.

As I have reported, Mrs. Heffner herself was very nice, so different from the man next door to her, who often shouted at us children when we passed his place and one time killed a giant black snake, the body of which he displayed for weeks in his front yard. No one would go near his house.

Indeed, “nice-ness” is an important commodity in small towns, as it stands for everything from “minding your own business” to being kind and generous to your neighbors, the second representing the behavior of the Gertsons, the childless couple next door to our house.

One day they told me they were planning to mix some cement, so I should come by and play in the sand before they used it up.

A few days previous I had been so bored I had complained to my mother, who, as she hung clothes upon the back yard line, suggested that I begin collecting shells. Collecting shells! How ridiculous, I thought to myself. “Where would I get shells!” I wailed to my mother. Suddenly she bent down and brought up a small snail shell, one of the most beautiful shells I have to this day seen in my life! “Here,” she said. “Your first shell.” I have never received a greater gift.

In the sand beside the Gertson’s garage I found numerous shells, marvelous seashells: a Strombus Sinuatus, a White Spindle, a Perry’s Triton, a Rams Murex. What were they doing there? This sand must be from the sea, I responded upon the incredible discovery. “No, just from a river bank,” Mr. Gertson said. When I showed Mrs. Gertson all the shells I had uncovered, she pinched herself in disbelief.

To this day, I still can’t fathom the extraordinary kindness of these neighbors, who obviously had brought in sand and filled it with the imported treasures just for my delight. I kept this sacred collection, along with others sent to me by my uncle in California, in a box that one day simply disappeared, never to be seen again. I used to suspect my brother was behind its disappearance; knowing him as I do today, I cannot imagine his involvement, unless he gave the shells as a surrogate gift—like the Gertsons had given me—to his younger friends.

The Gertsons were the first people in town to buy a television set, and invited my brother and me to witness its inauguration. After Mr. Gertson fiddled for what seemed like forever with the rabbit ears, they plugged the huge behemoth into the wall, and an image magically appeared: it was Liberace! How awful, I remember feeling, television was. Even then I recognized that his great displays of piano bravura were the ultimate of kitsch—even if I didn’t have a word for it.

The first day of school was a snowy one. Winter bore down hard upon this small Iowa village in September that year. I didn’t want to go to school—two long blocks away from our house—but my mother literally pushed me out the door. I went and turned back. “The wind blew me home,” I announced.

“You go on now,” she laughed. Evidently she called my father to report my obstinateness; the man was understandably irritated by her call—having spent his entire morning attempting to reassign buses stuck in the snow drifts along the backcountry roads. That day must have been behind my parents’ determination that I would never miss a day of class.

Indeed, for most of my life lived in the confines of educational institutions, I was a near-perfect student. I liked school well enough, save that the teachers, who—given the fact that father had employed them—went out of their way to make sure that I was treated just like everyone else. They never called on me when I raised my hand. When in music hour each week one student was selected to sing a special chorus, I was overlooked. For grades I received B’s only, never a coveted A. Their fairness outraged my inborn sense of justice.

I hated recess, for then the school bully controlled my life. Jimmy Good pushed and pulled, spouting every mean thing his little mind conjured up until I was nearly in tears. Children, it is clear, do not have a sense of irony, for no one ever thought his last name inappropriate. I tried to ignore him, but everywhere I turned on the playground there he was to threaten my existence. Often times, I just hid near the door. But even there I wasn’t entirely safe. One or another teacher was always attempting to push me back into the other children’s games.

News spreads quickly in small towns; no need for newspapers or television sets. The news that day was awful: Jimmy Good had been hit by a car downtown, three blocks from our house. The reporter of this news must have been quite graphic, for, although I did not witness the event, I can remember to this moment the image of Jimmy sprawled upon the street, a box of broken eggs beside him, where they had spilled from his grocery sack.

Now it was safe to go out to play. But by that time I had learned to live inside my imagination and was awkward in group games. I was almost relieved when Jimmy came hobbling back. Besides, I was no longer afraid. And Jimmy, as everybody knew, had now learned what fear felt like. I began my long retreat from the world where everybody knew or wanted to know everything about everyone into a world where no one could know anything about anyone—a retreat into my head, where for ten years or more I hid out.


Los Angeles, May 28, 2003

Roman Fantasies (on the art show Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples at LACMA)

Photographs by Douglas Messerli

Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples, on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from May 3-October 4, 2009 / I saw the show at the press preview of April 29, 2009

Given my Ischian isolation, my busy schedule, and the misgivings we all had that summer about Naples, I did not have the opportunity to visit the highly recommended National Archeological Museum of Naples and other major museums in Pompeii and the coastal villas. How wonderful, accordingly, that many of the treasures of those locations showed up this year—the year I had determined to publish my experiences in Ischia, Pompeii, Naples, and the Compania region—at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, across the street from my both our condominium and my office.

Unlike the previous show of some years earlier, which focused on Pompeii, this was centered on the Roman Villas around Naples and the neighboring cities of Pompeii, Herculaneum, Stabiae (now Castellamare di Stabia), Surrentum (Sorrento), Capreae (Capri), Pausilypon (Posillipo), and Puteoli (Pozzuoli)—where, as I describe above, my journey to Ischia began.

Selecting from the villas of the wealthy Romans, particularly the ruling families of the emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero, Pompeii and the Roman Villa: Art and Culture Around the Bay of Naples, represents powerful sculptures, frescoes, interiors, courtyards and gardens, as well as more modern representations of the great volcanic eruption of Vesuvius that ended this region's cultural dominance.

The model for these wealthy patrons was clearly Greek, and many of the subjects and references of their art were to Greek figures of history, such as the beautiful sculpture of Homer of the 1st century, borrowed from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Similarly, Plato's Academy, a mosaic from the Pompeian Villa of T. Siminnius Stephanus, and the marble Panel with a Dionysiac procession from Herculaneum, both also of the 1st century, attest to the Romans' commitment to Greek figures and themes.

Yet, it is through the detailed sculptures of the family members themselves that we come to recognize just how different these Greek-inspired works came to be in the Roman artists' depictions. The beautiful Aphrodite/Venus, discovered in Puteoli (Pozzouli), with its voluminous folds of dress and densely curled hair topping the head, and the striking head of the dreaded emperor Gaius (Caligula), also from Pozzouli, make clear that while the models for these works may have been from the Hellenic culture, the Roman artists themselves found new expression in their renderings.

Perhaps some of the most spectacular work in this show is the recreation of a Garden, including a magnificent fresco, Garden Scene, from Pompeii, House of the Golden Bracelet. At once the viewer feels as if he has entered the garden itself, and is awed by the theatrical-like settings.

A couple of the pieces, particularly the black basanite sculpture of Livia (from the Paris Louvre museum) seem almost art deco in their modernity. The small paintings and frescoes of these villas themselves are worth the ticket of admission.

It is little wonder that when the excavations of Pompeii and Herculaneum were begun in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the whole world became fascinated and enchanted by the vast numbers of antiquities unearthed, creating a whole new round of expressions of the cities and villas caught in the unfortunate drama of nature.

None of these, of course, can compare with the ancient art discovered in Naples and the surrounding region, but their dramatic expression of that violent end to these great cities and villas, such as Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes' 1813 canvas Eruption of Vesuvius, continues to awe us still today, creating myths larger than those even of the Italian citizens, great storytellers though they be, who continue to endure life in this region.

It is clear, after seeing this show and reading Shirley Hazzard's apologia for Naples (The Ancient Shore, a review to follow) that I shall have to return to the city, if for no other reason than to pay homage to such a splendorous past.

Los Angeles, May 17, 2009