Green Integer Blog

Green Integer ON NET ("Go In")

2011-12-10T12:29:00.000-08:00

Green Integer On Net ("Go In") is proud to announce its new series of book publications on line, a series that will include free and reasonably priced books of poetry and poetics, new and older, from around the world.

In conjunction with our educational efforts, these books will be offered free or for reasonable prices for our visitors: students, scholars, and readers of modern and contemporary poetry. Please note that any money we receive for books will go toward the maitenance of our site and for royalty payments for authors and translators. I do not receive a salary for my ongoing and quite endless activities.

Order through our website: http://www.greeninteger.com/

Books now available:
[alphabetical by author]

[ordered PDF files ship within 24 hours]

Djuna Barnes The Book of Repulsive Women [USA] free

Charles Bernstein Dark City [USA] free

Robert Bresson Notes on the Cinematographer [France] $7.00

Domício Coutinho Duke, the Dog Priest [Brazil] $5.00

JeanFrémon The Botanical Garden [France]$5.00

Julien Gracq The Peninsula [France] $5.00

Lyn Hejinian My Life [USA] $5.00

Ko Un Himalaya Poems [South Korea] $5.00

Ko Un Songs for Tomorrow: A Collection of Poems 1960-2002 [ South Korea] $5.00

Douglas Messerli, ed. The PIP Anthology of 20th Century Poetry: Volume 8 [international] $7.00

Douglas Messerli My Year 2004: Under Our Skin [USA] $5.00

Douglas Messerli My Year 2006: Serving [USA] $5.00

Jules Michelet The Sea [France] $5.00

Ivo Michelis Book Alpha and Orchis Militaris: The Alpha Cycle, vols. 1 and 2 [Belgium] $5.00

Christopher Middelton Depictions of Blaff [England] $5.00

Tom Raworth Eternal Sections [England] free

Joe Ross Wordlick [USA/lives France] $5.00

Arthur Schnitzler Dream Story [Austria] $5.00

Gertrude Stein Tender Buttons [USA] $5.00

Guiseppe Steiner Drawn States of Mind [Italy] free

John Wieners 707 Scott Street [USA] free

The Conscience of a King (on Handel's opera Rodelinda)

2011-12-10T07:37:00.000-08:00

the conscience of a king

Nicola Francesco Haym (libretto, based on a libretto by Antonio Salvi), George Frideric Handel (composter) Rodelinda / the performance I saw as a live HD broadcast from the Metropolitan Opera of New York on December 3, 2011

On the surface Rodelinda seems a somewhat confusing story about a King, Bertarido (Andreas Scholl) who has just been defeated, and presumably killed, by Grimoaldo (Joseph Kaiser). The former queen, Rodelinda (Renée Fleming) and her son Flavio have been immediately arrested and put into chains, sequestered away—at least in the Met production—in what seems like an abandoned bedroom somewhere in the bowels of the castle.

Before Grimoaldo's usurpation of the throne he had been offered the hand of Bertarido's sister, Eduige (Stephanie Blythe), which would have made him the heir apparent to the throne, but she has several times denied him, and now that he has illegally taken over, he lusts for Bertarido's widow, Rodelinda. When he approaches her with his desires, however, she is outraged and insists upon her devotion to her former husband and the protection of his child.

Meanwhile Grimoaldo's advisor Garibaldo (Shenyang) prods his master on to more evil deeds, insisting that only the forceful, even the brutal are fit to rule. He has his own plans, moreover, to take the throne for himself, by marrying Eduige and becoming the rightful ruler.

Only the court advisor Unulfo (Iestyn Davies) knows that Bertarido is still alive, pretending death in order to evaluation the situation and retrieve Rodelinda and his son from harm's way.

Through her lovely arias we know that Rodelinda is loyal to her husband, denying the approaches of Grimoaldo. But when Bertarido shows up, to be hidden away in a nearby horse barn by his friend Unulfo, he overhears yet another encounter between Rodelinda and Grimoaldo in which she first insists of her love for her dead husband, but then suddenly seems to change heart, accepting Grimoaldo's proposal for marriage. What the two men hiding in the barn have not seen is that Garibaldo has threatened to kill her son if she does not give in, the knife put to the son's neck.

Suddenly Bertarido's world collapses around him as he believes that his wife has not been able to remain faithful. Unulfo attempts to cheer him with an aria that relays the underlying theme of Handel's work: what seems unbearable today will look different in the future. Performed as it is between the two countertenors there is a slightly homoerotic suggestion in the plea that Bertarido should try to forget his wife's faithlessness.

Unulfo suggests that Bertarido tell his wife that he is still living, an idea which, at first, Bertarido rejects, but then perceives that it will help to torture her for her deeds. It soon becomes apparent, however, that Rodelinda has no intentions of becoming Grimoaldo's wife, insisting that if she is to marry him that he must personally kill her young son, that she cannot be a mother to the boy would have been king and wife of the throne's usurper both. The ploy works, as Grimoaldo backs down, and Rodelinda is freed, temporarily at least, from any vows.

Meanwhile, Eudige discovers that her brother is still alive, meeting him upon a pathway in the night, reassuring Bertarido of his wife's constancy. Unulfo brings Rodelinda to him, and the two are lovingly united, joyful to be in each other's company again. At that very moment, however, they are discovered by Grimoaldo, who orders Bertarido's arrestment and death.

In collaboration, Eduige and Unulfo plan Bertarido's rescue, she secretly passing him a sword, Unulfo determined to lead him through a secret garden passage to his son, Rondelinda and escape. However, when he comes to guide Bertarido to safety, in the dark room where he lies Bertarido mistakes the intruder as one of Grimoaldo's henchmen come to kill him, and he stabs Unulfo, who, although badly wounded, still pulls Bertarido to safety.

Grimoaldo, meanwhile is in deep torment. All that he has sought has slipped his fingers. His first love Eudige has rejected him and Rodelinda has declared him a monster. Power has not fulfilled him, and he is tormented by conscience and his dark deeds. Finding him in such despair, Garibaldo his disgusted with his lack of will and determines to put a sword through his heart. At that very moment Bertarido and his family are passing, and the former king leaps into action, killing Garibaldo and, in so doing, saving Grimoaldo's life.

Recognizing his position, Grimoaldo is only too happy to give up the throne to its rightful king. Turning again to Eudige she finally accepts his apologies, and the happy survivors sing in celebration of the future.

Just recounting this breathless plot nearly exhausts me. One by one each of the major performers sing marvelous arias revealing their feelings and situations. This production was particularly blessed with the glorious soprano of Renée Fleming who premiered Rodelinda at the Met in 2004. Both countertenors were splendid, while Stephanie Blythe performed with her usual high artistry. The surprise of the opera, to me, was the tenor voice of Joseph Kaiser, who as the opera proceeded changed in both costume and voice from a seemingly pompous and puffed up murderer to a handsome man of sorrow and conscience. It was a remarkably revealing performance both in its musical expression and acting abilities.

In all this was a marvelous opera. If only the director, Stephen Wadsworth—who the singers all highly praised—had not felt it necessary to keep everything in motion by bringing in and out ancillary individuals during each aria, and arming his singers with flowerpots, books, even toys which at some point were often flung or crashed into the set. We understand that Handel's arias are structured with a beginning theme that elaborated on and repeated several times before returning us again to the original theme to be repeated once again, but that does not mean that we need be continually distracted. If the singers are good enough actors—as all of these were—to revitalize and slightly revise each repeated phrase, the music enwraps us into a kind of trance that works against this production's realist interruptions.

Although the set was quite lovely, and the concept of moving horizontality through different sets across the gigantic Met stage worked well in several scenes, it appeared that the designers and director feared that the audience might fall asleep without the constant interruptions of everyday life. Although he is a powerful storyteller and a masterful dramatist, Handel is not Verdi.

Nonetheless, with such great singers I would love to see the Met look into yet more Handel and other Baroque operas. Rodelinda was a joy.

Los Angeles, December 9, 2011

Separating Language from Meaning (on Philip Glass' Satyagraha)

2011-11-22T08:40:00.000-08:00

separating language from meaning

Constance DeJong (vocal text), Constance DeJong and Philip Glass (libretto), Philip Glass (music)

Satyagraha / the production I saw was an HD, live production broadcast from The Metropolitan Opera in New York, on November 19, 2011

In many respects Philip Glass' pageant opera, Satyagraha, is one of the most frustrating of all opera experiences. It is not that the work isn't, at times, musically splendiferous and even powerful—at least in the MET high definition live broadcast I saw in 2011. But Glass takes away so much of what opera is really about drama, language, and, at times, musical comprehension—that it is difficult to get one's bearings.

I don't mean that the opera, itself, is difficult. The plot, if it can be said to have one, is quite apparent if you have a program. The seven scenes in three acts of the work represent significant moments in the early career of M. K. Gandhi, as he transformed himself in South Africa from a Western-dressed lawyer to a political advocate for the poor and suffering. Beginning with an imagined scene from the battle field of Bhagavad Gita (The Kuru Field of Justice), Glass and his co-librettist, Constance DeJong, take us from 1910 to 1913 in Gandhi's life, exploring his attempts at collective farming on his Tolstoy Farm (named after the great author and social experimenter), through the "vows" of South African Indians to resist registration, to Gandhi's return to South Africa greeted with violence, from a view of his newspaper activities on Indian Opinion in which he first expressed his concepts of "satyagraha" ("insistence on truth"), to the 1908 protest against the Black Act, in which his supporters burned their government certificates, and through to his final strike march to the Transavaal border, where many were arrested.

Each of Glass' acts are overseen, furthermore, by an historical figure who influenced Gandhi or over whom he would have an influence. From the past, we see Leo Tolstoy, from the present, Gandhi's close friend, the Nobel-prize winning Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore, and from the future, Martin Luther King.

The program notes explain in some detail what we are experiencing. However, that experience itself is much less lucid. As Richard Croft (playing Gandhi) explained in an intermission interview, it is difficult to act because what is occurring is happening inside, not in the actual drama on the stage. The chorus, and more important, the Skills Ensemble, often play out—in a highly imaginative use of masks, puppets, and through staged acts—what is symbolically occurring, but the actors, somewhat like those of Wagner, are allowed little movement. Yet, unlike Wagner's figures, the major actors here are not even communicating with the audience in a language they can comprehend, since they sing the entire opera in Sanskrit, quoting spiritual fragments of the Bhagavad Gita.

I am sure that when he first got the idea to use the language and images from a book which Gandhi knew intimately, it must have seemed a brilliant concept to separate language from meaning, but it ultimately cuts us off from true communication and, more importantly, given Glass' minimalist repetitions, presents us with long passages in which we only have a vague idea what is happening—not that it would help to know, at any moment, that Gandhi, for example, is reaffirming his ideals...or whatever. We sense the emotional impact, and Glass' simmering music often seduces us, but, nonetheless, it is sometimes a long endurance test, particularly in the last act, when Glass almost sentimentally links Gandhi with the future American racial revolutionary King—over and over again, so that eventually we must ask whether Gandhi or what he has wrought.

The most successful act of this opera is Act II, when puppets, chorus, and major singers all come together to create the horror of the wealthy Dutch landowners and the busy industry of putting together the newspaper, and the dramatic bonfire of government issued certificates.

The cast, including Croft, Rachelle Durkin as his secretary, Miss Schlesen, Kim Josephson as a supporter, Mr. Kennenbach, and Alfred Walker as Parsi Rustomji were all quite adept, and the Met chorus was absolutely stunning in its ability to learn the Sanskrit score while counting Glass' tricky rhythms. The costumes and settings by Julian Crouch and Kevin Pollard, as well as the stage direction of Phelim McDermott and conducting of Dante Anzolini were all spectacular.

The Met audience seemed thoroughly charmed by the opera, remaining through the entire series of applauses. Yet, for me, that was just the problem: long on charm, the opera was too short on substance, despite focusing on such a substantial historical figure. But then it is difficult, if not impossible, to think without language.

Los Angeles, November 20, 2011

So Are We All (on Mozart's opera Cosí fan tutte)

2011-10-13T08:12:00.000-07:00

so are we all

Lorenzo da Ponte (text), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (music) Cosí fan tutte / LAOpera, at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion (the performance I saw was on Sunday, October 2, 2011)

Despite the often splendiferous musical beauty of da Ponte's and Mozart's wise comic satire, there is something patently unfair about the major series of events. Yes, we easily conclude with Don Alfonso, "Women are like that," but so too, do we comprehend, are men. And it is the men in this opera who truly step out of bounds in testing their sweetheart's faithfulness.

To be fair, the two young soldiers, Ferrando (Saimir Pirgu in the production I saw) and Guglielmo (the handsome Ildebrando D'Arcangelo) begin the opera singing endless praises of their loves, Fiordilgi (Aleksandra Kurzak) and Dorabella (Ruxandra Donose). We immediately recognize their naiveté; and when I say we, I think I can speak for the whole of USA culture given that the current divorce rate is 50% which rises substantially with second and third marriages. Although divorce may be caused by many things other than unfaithfulness, it appears that, in the US at least, Americans are fickle.

But the young men are easily challenged and persuaded into obedience to their friend Don Alfonso (Lorenzo Regazzo), who, without much difficulty, convinces them to lie to their sweethearts by pretending to go off to war, and to themselves play cheats. After all, to dress up in the costumes of other men, taking on their very different personalities and to court each other's fiancées certainly suggests that they are willing to be guilty of behavior they do not hope to find in their fiancés Costumes are extremely important in Cosí fan tutte (and, of course, in the whole of the commedia dell'arte tradition, on which much of this opera is based); a slight costume change, an attached moustache, a bit of acting immediately convinces others that a familiar figure is someone else. Even women like the maid Despina can easily dupe their employers, dressed like a man (she becomes in the opera both a mesmerist doctor and a notary). In short, by donning costumes they temporarily become another person, and so too are these young soldiers allowing themselves in their transformations to become unfaithful seducers of the two sisters they proclaim to love.

Moreover, Mozart gives his sweet heroines a great deal of reverence and fortitude in which to protect them. The celestial song they sing as their lovers go off to war, "Soave sia il vento" ("May the wind be gentle") is almost enough to convince the most hard-hearted realist that these two mean what they say. And to back it up, Fiordiligi sings the powerful "Come scogli" ("Like a rock") pledging her love to Guglielmo.

The weaker of the two is obviously Dorabella who must be reminded consistently by her sister of the role she should play, and seems, quite early on, more distressed by being left alone than by the absence of Ferrando. Yet, despite her obvious interest in the two strange Albanians who suddenly appear in the sister's home, she also remains impervious throughout Act 1.

The Albanians, on the other hand, although declaring their love for the two beauties, seem more interested in their own prowess than in the women they are trying seduce. A great part of the humor of da Ponte's text lies in the constant metaphors that point up their endowments, Guglielmo, in particular, pointing up his masculine attributes in "Non siate ritrosi" ("Don't be shy").

In the production I saw this was reiterated by their attempt at suicide by arsenic poisoning, wherein their dying bodies were laid out upon a chaise longue, the two men almost on top of one another, hinting at a greater interest in their own bodies than in the two of what they later relate as "the fair sex." If nothing else, the scene suggested an long homoerotic embrace between Ferrando and Guglielmo, made even more apparent when the women come to revive them, all four crawling over and under one another.

Clearly they are not "playing fair," forcing the women to brush against and touch them—often in somewhat lewd positions. These are beautiful young people, all four of them, and like most young people, are easily aroused.

What Mozart and da Ponte also make clear is just how boring these wealthy sister's lives are. Except for the excitement through sexual flirtation, there is little do in their house, as Dorabella, in particular makes clear. Despina serves them meals and sweets such a chocolate, they play puzzles, and, mostly, sit discussing their situations. Might it not be fun to do something else since their soldier's have gone off?

Even when Dorabella despicably gives in, exchanging a necklace, containing Ferrando's picture, for a gift from the Albanian Guglielmo, Fiordiligi runs away from her temptation, desperately trying to regain control of the situation through her consciousness ("Per pietà, ben mio, perdona," "Please, my beloved, forgive"). Her brief decision to dress up like a soldier and run off to war to find her lover is absurdly touching, if ludicrous. There is, obviously, no war, and one wonders to where she might run. And if she were to find Guglielmo, how could she show him her love dressed—like Isaac Bashevis Singer's Yentl—as a man? The opera, fortunately, does not take us down that path. Instead, Ferrando challenges her again with suicide. What is a woman to do, given that she has already tried to save him as chastefully as she can? Her only choice apparently is to give in.

The men, all ego, are furious with the obvious turn of events, but fortunately Don Alfonso is wise enough to insist that they accept the natures of their loved ones, without mentioning their own obvious failures and deceits. "Marry them," he advices, and so, apparently they do, both symbolically, with the fake notary marrying Dorabella and Fiordilgi to the Albanians (each linked to the opposite of their lovers in their previous existences) and then, again—at least in promise—to the miraculously returned soldiers. What does it matter, truly, who marries whom, when a simple moustache and coat can alter any personality. And, in that sense, Cosí fan tutte, is neither a celebration of faithfulness or even a return to order, but a joyful tribute to sexually-inspired love.

Los Angeles, October 3, 2011

Missing Entries?

2011-09-25T08:17:00.000-07:00

If over the past months you have found that some of my essays are missing from this site, please note that I have moved many of the film essays to my film site: International Cinema Review
http://internationalcinemareview.blogspot.com/

You may find some of my essays on fiction have been transferred to my Exploringfictions blog:
http://exploringfictions.blogspot.com/

Theater essays have and will continue to be moved to my theater site, USTheater, which also contains plays and pieces on theater by other writers as well.
You can visit it at http://ustheater.blogspot.com/

And finally, several essays on poetry are now located at my very popular poetry blog: The PIP
Poetry Center: http://pippoetry.blogspot.com/

A few other essays are now at American Cultural Treasures: http://americanculturaltreasures.blogspot.com/

I will continue to post regularly at this site was well, so keep tuned, as one might say. I hope this variety of cultural experiences will provide readers with interesting insights into contemporary cultural events.

Douglas Messerli

2011 America Award announced

2011-09-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

THE AMERICA AWARD
FOR A LIFETIME CONTRIBUTION TO INTERNATIONAL WRITING
Awarded by the Contemporary Arts Educational Project, Inc.
in loving memory of Anna Fahrni

The 2011 Award winner is:
Ko Un (Korea) 1933

Previous winners:

1994 Aimé Cesaire [Martinique] 1913–2008
1995 Harold Pinter [England] 1930–2008
1996 José Donoso [Chile] 1924-1996 (awarded prior to his death)
1997 Friederike Mayröcker [Austria] 1924
1998 Rafael Alberti [Spain] 1902-1999
1999 Jacques Roubaud [France] 1932
2000 Eudora Welty [USA] 1909-2001
2001 Inger Christensen [Denmark] 1935–2009
2002 Peter Handke [Austria] 1942
2003 Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said) [Syria/Lebanon] 1930
2004 José Saramago [Portugal] 1922-2010
2005 Andrea Zanzotto [Italy] 1921
2006 Julien Gracq (Louis Poirier) [France] 1910-2007
2007 Paavo Haavikko [Finland] 1931
2008 John Ashbery [USA] 1927
2009 Günter Kunert [GDR/Germany] 1929
2010 Javier Marías [Spain] 1951

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

2011-09-05T11:49:00.000-07:00

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

Remembering What Everyone Might Like to Forget (on the 9/11 attack of the World Trade Towers)

2011-09-05T08:06:00.000-07:00

During the seven years since the horrific events of what are generally referred to these days as simply “9/11,” I have resisted writing about the subject, in part because it seemed to me that nearly everyone in the United States had experienced the destruction of the World Trade Towers, the attack upon the Pentagon, and the crash of United Airlines Flight 93—which was to have been crashed into the U.S. Capitol building—near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and there could not possibly be anything new I might say.

I still believe that to be so. Any of us might write about our experiences on that morning and throughout that September day—and many have. Moreover, with the confirmed deaths of 2,974 individuals, and the subsequent illnesses of fireman, police, and other workers who tried to help individuals to safety and later worked in cleaning up the disastrous collapse of both towers, there are hundreds of individuals who have much deeper experiences than my distant witnessing of events.

What we all generally forget, however, is precisely that—our general forgetfulness. Howard reminded me last night that most of his students at SCI-Arc (the Southern California Institute of Architecture), where he is teaching this semester, were only 11 years of age when these events took place, and, accordingly, their memories of it were those of children rather than adults. Millions of grade-school children today could not possibly comprehend how far-reaching those events, occurring before their births, have been upon their lives: that the war we continue to fight in Iraq was a indirect result of that terrible day in 2001 and that some of their individual freedoms have been permanently curtailed because of those events in the years since.

Perhaps we owe it to our future generations, even to ourselves, to once again share our experiences of that day. And in a series of books such as my cultural memoirs, I now perceive it absolutely necessary to remember my own experiences of that day—even if they might vary little from millions of other folks and I, like most others, might like to forget.

Howard and I arise fairly early, he at 5:00 each morning, I at 6:00. Accordingly, when a short time after 5:46 Pacific Time on September 11th Howard heard the news report and saw the image on television of American Flight 11 embedded in the North Tower of the World Trade Center, he quickly awoke me to tell what had happened. I ran to the television set to see the same image.

Although we now know that many people working on the 95th to the 103rd floors and dining in the Windows on the World restaurant were killed immediately, it looked eerily quiet from the camera’s vantage point. I commented to Howard that obviously the crash had killed people, but we were uncertain even how the large the plane was. It looked almost like a small engine plane on our TV set.

“How could such an accident happen?” asked Howard in a tone that sounded more like a lament.

“People don’t just accidentally fly into The World Trade Center,” I answered, with suitable bluff. “No planes are allowed in that air path.” And immediately we both contemplated the possibility of a terrorist attack.

For a few minutes we sat spellbound by the scene before us. We were nearly speechless. “I have to go to the bathroom,” I reported, as if somehow seeking Howard’s permission.

As I began my walk down the hall, Howard screamed out: “Come quickly, come quickly. Another plane has just crashed into the other tower!”

I hurried back, to watch the scene replayed, a clearly full-sized jet crashing into the South Tower. Now we and everyone knew: these were terrorist acts.

Our eyes were cemented to the television, when a few minutes later an ABC newscaster announced that they were temporarily switching to a developing story in Washington, D.C., where it appeared that the Executive Office Building, near the White House, was on fire.

The D.C. newscaster, however, soon reported that from a distance it appeared that it was the Executive Office Building, but it was believed to be coming from the area of The Pentagon, across the Potomac in Virginia. And soon we saw a fire billowing from the Pentagon itself, where, we now know, American Airlines Flight 77 crashed, killing another 189 individuals.

“What’s happening?” I asked in utter disbelief.

And a few minutes later, as if in answer, it was reported that yet another plane apparently had been hijacked.

In Los Angeles, September 11th was a voting date, and the front of my Sun & Moon Press offices was a polling place. I was forced to abandon the television to shave, shower, and dress. By 6:45 Pacific Time, I was opening up my office for the voting registrars.

I greeted them and briefly helped to set up the voting booths. We all expressed the hope that the local election would be called off. But, by the time we were to open, we had still received no word of cancellation.

I was almost angered by all the noise of the gossipy women behind the voter sign-in desk, and retreated to my back office to watch my office television set. Although it was illegal of bring a television into the voting area, one of the women working there, called to ask her daughter to bring in a set.

At almost the moment they opened the doors to voters, I witnessed the South Tower of the World Trade Center collapse, people running in absolute horror in all directions. I was incredulous. Peter Jennings, the ABC newscaster, was nearly in tears. He would continue to report all day and into the night, in all for 17 hours straight, and I watched almost every moment.

About eleven minutes after the collapse of the South Tower, it was reported that the missing hijacked flight, United Airlines Flight 93, had crashed into a hillside in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.

When the North Tower collapsed at 7:28, I finally began to cry. I was now worried for friends. Playwright Jeffrey Jones worked in the Towers; I had met with him there on one trip to New York to discuss theater. Poet Tan Lin (brother of Viet Nam Memorial sculptor Mya Lin), whose book, Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe I published, lived nearby. Artist Susan Bee’s studio was within visual distance of the Towers. Fortunately, these friends all survived.

As I report in “Death of the Father” [My Year 2002], I called my parents, who at the time had still not heard what was happening. How could anyone not know what was going on? I wondered.

Yet the television showed even President George Bush peacefully sitting in a classroom at Emily E. Booker Elementary school in Sarasota at a time when one imagined he might instead be rushing back to Washington; evidently the President did not know what millions of others in his country did, and like Howard, when his advisors heard the news of the first crash several of them, including his Chief of Staff Andrew Card, presumed it was simply an accident: Card is quoted, “It was first reported to me… that it looked like it was a twin-engine prop plane, and so the natural reaction was—‘What a horrible accident. The pilot must have had a heart attack.” After being taken aside in the school corridor by Karl Rove, where Bush was told of the crash, Bush himself reportedly replied: “What a horrible accident!”

While Bush was on route to the school photo opportunity, Condoleeza Rice made a urgent call to the President, but even upon hearing of that call, he took time out to talk with Florida Congressmen and the Teacher of the Year before returning Rice’s call, and once he had heard from her, he continued to the classroom, remaining there to hear the story of a pet goat even after the second jet had completed its mission, despite the fact that the newest information was relayed to the President in front of the classroom students and millions of watching Americans.

For a number of reasons, including arguments between Bush and Cheney and indecision of his staff concerning where Air Force one should travel, Bush’s flight was diverted to the Louisiana Air Force Base before flying on to the Strategic Air Command at Nebraska’s Offutt Air Force Base. As the press attempted to follow the various maneuvers of Air Force One and the President, rumors grew, at one point some reporters even suggesting that his plane had crashed near Camp David. It was clear to nearly anyone who could read the signs that neither Bush nor his administration knew how to proceed.

Moreover, as the details of deaths and destruction became more and more apparent over that horrific day, there was a continued feeling, registered even the faces and voices of news commentators like Jennings of being caught up in a nightmare from which one couldn’t awaken.

In the weeks following, it was gradually revealed that not only were the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center destroyed, but 7 World Trade Center, 6 World Trade Center, 5 World Trade Center, 4 World Trade Center, the Marriott World Trade Center and St. Nicholas Greek Orthodox Church were also destroyed or severely damaged. The Deutsche Bank Building and Fiterman Hall of the Borough of Manhattan Community College were con-demned and torn down.

In short, a whole section of the U.S.’s most populous city was devastated; and one only can wonder what might have happened in the Washington, D.C. had Flight 93 been successful in its attack. It still today seems nearly impossible to imagine that four American Airplanes could have been utilized to bring about such widespread destruction, resulting in so many deaths.

Los Angeles, September 11, 2008

Being There (on Edward Kienholz's "Five Car Stud")

2011-09-04T07:56:00.000-07:00

"Back Seat Dodge '38"

"Five Car Stud"

BEING THERE

Edward Kienholz, restored by Nancy Reddin Kienholz Five Car Stud / Los Angeles County Museum of Art, opened September 4, 2011 / I saw the installation on September 2, 2011 and again on September 3, 2011

Artist Edward Kienholz gained enormous notoriety as far back as 1966 for his "Back Seat Dodge '38," an assemblage that included part of a Dodge car with the backseat door opened, within which manikins portrayed a couple "making out." Today one can hardly imagine the furor it caused upon its Los Angeles County Museum of Art showing, when the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors declared it as "pornographic" and attempted to shut the show down. A compromise was reached wherein the back seat door would remain closed, to be opened only by a guard when requested and no children were within the gallery! The uproar determined that the piece must be seen by everyone, and opening day more than 200 people lined up to see it.

In September 2011 Kienholz, who died in 1994, is sure to cause some controversy again with the presentation of his 1972 piece, viewed publicly in Germany at Documenta that year, and never again seen. The piece, purchased by a Japanese museum has been hidden away in storage and only recently, through LACMA and the Getty Museum's collaboration, has been restored by Kienholz's second wife and collaborator, Nancy Reddin Kienholz.

If the earlier piece shocked some with its sexual content, this should stun us all for its portrayal of violence. Certainly there are sexual elements; a Black man who has obviously been discovered in a truck with a white woman has been pulled from the car by six men, who, when we look closely at the scene, are in the process of castrating him. But the horror of this assemblage is not just the act, but the dramatic terror of the entire scene. The men are more bestial than human, their faces covered with horrific masks: one, pulling the ropes taught has his face covered with a mask that will remind some of the great circus clown Emmett Kelly; another, standing outside of the victim's truck, wherein a white woman sits vomiting, has a mask studded with horrific warts. The couple has evidently been caught by these brutes in an act of miscegenation. It is difficult to stare too closely at each of these men, even though the audience of 15 individuals allowed into the room at a time must pass close to them in purveying the entire scene.

It is interesting that these men had chosen "clown" masks or something close to them to hide their identities. It reminds us of the role James Stewart played in The Greatest Show on Earth, in which he dressed in clown makeup throughout to hide his identity—even though his crime was evidently an attempt to save someone's life. Further, it will bring to mind for some the serial killer of young boys, John Gacy, who worked as "Pogo the Clown," designing his own clown costumes, and sometimes enticing his victim's through charitable events. Gacy's first assault took place a year before Kienholz's installation.

Remaining within the surrounding cars are not only the sickened white woman, but, in another, a young boy, whom Kienholz describes as "sissy boy," modeled, in part, upon the face of his own son. The horror which this child is witnessing, unlike the sexual acts of Kienholz's earlier piece, is truly devastating, a vision that we recognize will never allow this fearful boy to live anything but a haunted life. These men are not only destroying a man and a woman, but robbing joy and innocence from the entire society in which they exist.

The victim himself is no longer a man, his torso having been transformed by the artist into a receptacle of fluids, a trough of water in which float the letters that occasionally spell out the word through which these men have justified their torture: "nigger."

Walking through this darkened exhibition, I was terrorized, awed even by the devastating act I was observing in tableau. But for me, even worse, was my own "being there," the sense of my voyeuristic fascination with the observation of it all. I could not bring myself to turn my eyes from the series of tragic events being played out before me, and I walked again and again round the circle of the five cars, peering into them, listening to the soft Delta music emanating from one. That can be understood as something good or bad. Perhaps in witnessing such a scene I could serve as a sensitive historian of such events in our own past, reminding others—those even today who might wish to harm people for racial or political differences—of what these actions mean to the individual and the society at large. Yet I might also simply be seen—in my inability to change history, in my own viewer passivity—to be merely an unwilling participant to such events. Only my actions in life can determine which kind of witness I might be. But I was there and cannot hide that fact. On the gallery floor the artist has laid down a carpet simulacrum of a dirt road, into which each viewer's footprints are embedded. I saw my own!

Los Angeles, September 4, 2011

Fractures of Self (on David Antin's Radical Coherency)

2011-06-26T07:30:00.000-07:00

FRACTURES OF SELF

David Antin Radical Coherency: Selected Essays on Art and Literature, 1966 to 2005 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011)

One of the first things anyone approaching David Antin's marvelous new collection of essays on art and literature will notice is the striking image on the book's cover, a photograph that depicts David Antin, looking perhaps a bit more Buddha-like than he does in real-life, walking toward another image of himself, this from the back side of the face. There is something arresting about this image, even a bit eerie, but I made little of it when I first saw it, except to register that it represented an image of the author, symbolically speaking, of 1966 coming towards his current being. A few friends, however, found that image quite disturbing, one suggesting he had to keep the book face down on his coffee table. Perhaps it was just the oddity of having a photograph, which we associate with the real world, representing something that we know cannot truly happen, one aspect of self meeting up with the other.

Yet, if we read on in Antin's book, particularly in his essay "The Beggar and the King," we recognize that this transaction between two aspects of the self is precisely what the author projects as being behind the narrative genre he has created in the "talk poem." Speaking of his early work, generated by a kind of collage sensibility, Antin observes:

...I started out in the 1950s like many young experimental artists
with a strong commitment to most of the received ideas of early-
twentieth-century modernism, the most important of which for a
artist was the idea of the exhaustion, experimental and aesthetic, of
the representation in all its forms. For a language artist this mostly
meant the uselessness of narrative.

Antin goes on to suggest that over the years, as he recognized the exhaustion "of nearly all the modes of experimental communication," that he began to reexamine narrative, exploring worlds of folklorists and ethnographers (the Grimm brothers, Afansiev, etc.) as well as V. Propp's structural study The Morphology of the Folktale, and others as far-reaching as Zuni Tales and Bernardino de Sahagun's definitions compiled from survivors of the Aztec culture. What Antin finally determined is that some narratives are not stories, and some stories have no narrative, coming eventually to articulate a definition of narrative:

a narrative requires a sense of something at stake for somebody in
some particular subject position, which is what characterizes the stake.
It is this sense of stake that should be taken as the center of narrative.

Like dreams, Antin argues, narratives build bridges across change.

The act of reconnecting subject positions across the gulf of
change is what constitutes the formation of self. All self is built
over the threat of change. There can be no self until there is an
awareness of one's subject position, which can only be created
by the threat of change or the memory of change. Every change
creates a fracture between successive subject states, that narrative
attempts and fails to heal. The self is formed over these cracks.
Every self is multiply fractured, and narrative traversal of these
fracture planes defines the self. Narrative is the traditional and
indispensable instrument of self creation.

It is this definition of narrative and Antin's own exploration of that genre in his "talk poems" that came eventually to define his art. One must understand the picture on the cover, accordingly, not just as an encounter of an older Antin with a newer one, but one kind of self facing the spectre of another and redefining that vision of self in the process. And in that sense, the image on the cover is a slightly disturbing vision of these two selves coming together almost to duke it out over the changes that have obviously occurred in the writer's own life, one might say, another kind of "radical coherency."

Yet I was struck in these revelatory essays, at how much continuity Antin demonstrates in a writing that bridges 39 years. There are only four works that actually fit the format of what the author describes as "talk poems" here ("the existential allegory of the rothko chapel," the title piece, "radical coherency," "the death of the hired man," and "john cage uncaged is still cagey," although Antin tells me that "Fine Furs" was originally written in the form, but later transformed into an essay), but I would argue that all of the pieces in this volume have the same Antin inflections of voice and structural patterns as his later works. Antin's is a voice filled with pauses, not always at the place one might suspect, but as in Stein, always there as part of the syntax itself. These caesuras are a product of Antin's whole process, which is so different from most critical writing that it is sometimes difficult to think of Antin setting out to write an "essay." For Antin does not "answer" anything, but poses of each artist, poet or groups of these, questions which he then ponders and pauses over in sentence after sentence, wandering and wondering aloud in astoundingly profound ways, how and why certain things are being said or done. Occasionally, for Antin is a true wit, these can be somewhat whimsical—in "Warhol: The Silver Tenement," for example, Antin's major summary is that in order for Warhol's beautiful creations to succeed, they must necessarily develop "scuffs," transforming his paintings, films, novels, soap operas, and even his planned "silver tenement" into a kind of "precisely pinpointed defectiveness," a kind of tawdry version of glamour—but by and large, no matter what his own position about the quality or purposefulness of the various art and poetic endeavors upon which he focuses, Antin asks serious questions, challenges set notions, and makes us rethink our assumptions.

In order to cover a large range of territory, Antin has clearly winnowed down what was to have been a far bigger book with numerous other essays (sometimes on the same artist at different periods in his or her career) into a whole that explores various aspects of the art scene from the mid-1960s through today. From Pop art, Antin moves on to the new representational work of artists like Alex Katz, taking out time in a wonderfully, slightly daffy piece to consider the work of machine-builders such as Jean Tinguely, before turning his attention to a "Pollution Show" in Oakland, California, consisting of photographs, drawings, kinetic junk sculpture, funk, discreet piles of rubbish, and even a dead seagull.

From these "earthwork" pieces, the author turns his attention to different kinds and traditions of constructivism and the issues of flatness in contemporary art, moving through Sol Lewitt, Robert Irwin, Michael Asher, Carl Andre and others. This is followed by a bruising criticism of the famed "Art and Technology," show, organized by Maurice Tuchman at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1971. Later essays include discussions of video art, an hilarious consideration—using the example of artist Robert Morris—of how one might comprehend the "proprietary rights" of an artist, followed by a sensitive evaluation of the color fields of Rothko's art in Houston's Rothko Chapel, often viewed under the light of clouded skies, and ending with a reevaluation of performance artist Allan Kaprow. In short, Antin's writing serves almost as a textbook, without textbook-like presentations and conclusions, of what art meant throughout the 1960s and 1970s.

I should add that not only can I hear Antin's voice in all these pieces but I perceive his various viewpoints as splendidly personal appreciations or disparagements. Reading Antin on art is as if one were accompanying a lively friend or uncle on trips to the museums and galleries throughout the country over a period of several years, the only way one can truly come to know and appreciate art.

Miraculously Antin does the same thing for literature, beginning with a substantial essay exploring issues of modernism and postmodernism in American poetry long before, 1972, anyone else had thoroughly considered these issues in depth. I remember sitting in Marjorie Perloff's class—Marjorie being one of Antin's first major critical supporters—four years later, where we still hadn't accepted the idea of there being a "postmodern" poetry. Antin was there first! His "Some Questions about Modernism" bravely explores, again long before it had been done by others, notions of different kinds of modernism, opening up all kinds of literary texts that move away from the Pound-Williams-Eliot-Stevens kind of poetic genealogy.

"Radical Coherency" humorously discusses the concept through a visit to a large shopping mall store where he attempts to help his elderly mother pick out some undergarments, priced at the amount she has been used to paying for years. That metaphor, of bargain shops within large clothing sections, striated by aisles and aisles of other ready-to-purchase goods, probably does more to explain what we might mean by a coherent thing that has radically exploded to contain all sorts of strange categories and subdivisions to meet the needs of contemporary culture.

Essays like "The Stranger at the Door," the already-discussed "The Beggar and the King," and "Fine Furs," open up the whole notion of what a poem is or might be understood to be. In one of the funniest works of the entire book, "the death of the hired hand," Antin deconstructs some of the poetry of Robert Frost (and incidentally, of my artist acquaintance, Siah Armajani's poetry room, in which Antin speaks). Antin's discussion of the kind of dishonesty—a "wearing of hats" as he terms it—of Frost's diction and poetic positioning will forever change, I can assure you, the way you see this plain carpenter of imitative New England poetic dialogues.

The penultimate essay is a brilliant reconsideration of Wittgenstein's work in the context of some critics' contention that his philosophical studies are also works of poetry. Antin dares to ask and attempts to explain just what that poetry might consist of, and how, sometimes rather strangely, it functions as such. In the last essay, "john cage uncaged is still cagey," Antin takes on work that has perhaps been very influential to his own writing, suggesting how the performances of this "cagey" composer, collector of mushrooms, and sometimes unofficial manager of Merce Cunningham's dance company, function as poetic events.

There are a few minor quibbles with Antin's book, namely concerning the lack of information the author provides about some of the artists and events on which writes. It would be useful to know the names and places of the shows he reviewed, in one case in particular, Antin, a close friend of the artist, does not ever mention Allan (Kaprow's) last name! It occurs only in a footnote. But these are small matters that might have been ameliorated by more editorial involvement.

The book as a whole is a stunning summary (although there are dozens of other works by Antin remaining to be republished) of one of our most engaging and challenging intellects. Radical Coherency is filled with the goods you can enjoy again and again.

Los Angeles, May 17, 2011

Amsterdam--Bicycling

2011-06-13T08:24:00.000-07:00

AMSTERDAM—BICYCLING

With its often overcast sky, its tall houses reflecting into the canals, and with streets dedicated more to bicycles than either cars or pedestrians, Amsterdam is a nearly impossible city to experience. There seems to be no way to see it.

When I checked into my hotel, the Eden—comfortably located in the midst of nearly everything—my room was not ready, so tired as I was from the travel, I determined to take a look at the renowned red light district nearby. But hardly had I got out of the hotel door, when a bicycle crashed into me, throwing both me and the rider onto the concrete. "Watch where you're going," he shouted out in English.

"Are you okay?" I asked, checking my own pained limbs simultaneously. He stood, shook himself off and sped away.

I had not noticed that what I thought was a walkway for human beings was the lane for masses of speeding bikes. At some points in the narrow streets, it was safer to duel with the car than with the revered two-wheeler.

The red light district, so I discovered, no longer exists—except for heterosexual men desperate for a quickie. I should have realized that there is no longer any need of printed pornography since the computer stores images and even whole movies so conveniently. The entire area is on the remake, slowly gussying itself up as a tourist destination, with only some isolated back lanes of glass covered booths wherein dreadful looking prostitutes await, pounding the glass as any man passes. Busloads of tourists were told that "here you can get whatever you seek," but I no longer believed them. There were only a few gay stores left, and some of them were now sleek boutiques filled with Sadomasochistic costumes and machines for which I could not even imagine a use.

I visited a couple of lovely bookstores, and returned to my hotel, which was certainly not elegant, but comfortable enough, even if I had to sit at the lobby-located bar to use my laptop. But then, I like to write and drink.

For dinner, I asked the concierge to suggest an old-fashioned Dutch restaurant that might serve fish, since I was in the mood for it, and could only imagine that with all the water hereabouts fish should be as bountiful as in Scandinavia. He suggested Sluizer on Utrectsestratt, perfect for my taste!

I saw wonderful platters of fish being served, but inexplicably ordered Weinerschnitzel with pommes frites. What I hadn't expected, but quickly perceived, was that nearly any food in both the Netherlands and Belgium would be accompanied by mayonnaise and other sauces. I chose not to participate in the national passion for cholesterol.

The next day, I would be leaving by an afternoon train to Paris, so, after an early continental breakfast, I hiked about the neighborhood in search of another room, since I'd been told that when I planned to return to Amsterdam for a few days after my travels in France and Belgium, the hotel was booked up. Several other hotels looked suitable enough and were accommodatingly priced, but they also had no rooms available. Finally, I spotted a small hotel facing the same canal opposite the Eden. The man behind the counter, who seemed also to own the small establishment, appeared to be gay, and rooms were available, so I booked.

Returning more than a week later, I was asked by the same gentleman if instead of a room I might like to stay in a nearby apartment the hotel owned or even on the houseboat docked in the canal in front. I was tempted by the latter just for the oddity of it, but the weather look chancey, and a bobbing, rain-splattered night appeared in store, so I chose the apartment. It was not elegantly decorated, but certainly had a sense of student-like flair, with furniture, it appeared, like the kind you find at Ikea. A rather large living room faced the kitchen and dining room, with a commodious bedroom with a large double and single beds behind sliding doors. It was perfect, I realized, since I was too tired to walk endlessly about the city in search of something to do. Most of the museums, I was told, were being restored, and had closed down large numbers of their galleries. Amsterdam still seemed bleak and difficult to get an image of.

I walked the flower market, I marched through Rembrandt Square, I wandered the opera house nearby, dropped into pubs, and met for lunch with Tom Möhlmann from the Dutch Translation offices, along with the vivacious Diane Butterman, who was translating the complete poems of Lucebert for us. At that pleasant lunch, on the top of a department store, I could, for the first time, actually glimpse a vista of the city. Perhaps I should have visited several churches, seeking out their bell towers. But I was happy at the large, circular table the hotel had provided for the apartment, upon which I had placed my laptop.

I wrote several pieces and, in pausing, stared down from the flower-leaden balcony at the mobs of soccer fans below, totally pleased with myself.

Bicycles spun down the streets with an abandon I no longer had to dodge.

One evening I ate what amounted to a feast at a nearby Indonesian restaurant, a delicious meal. I returned to Sluizer, this time to eat the previously-proffered fish, and the next night dined upon an overly rich meal of French oysters followed by veal medallions smothered in a sauce of mushrooms and sweetbreads with mashed potatoes patterned into small, dumpling-like mounds at Flo Brasserie. An economics professor and his psychologist wife conversed with me from the next booth over. Hearing I was a poet, he informed me that one of his colleagues uses Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" as the perfect metaphor for economic theory. I laughed, thinking to myself, "Oh, those clever Dutch. They've found the perfect role for Frost!

The next morning a taxi appeared, the driver helping me carry the big suitcase I'd come to call my "maiden aunt" down the stairs, maneuvering it into the trunk, then whisked me away to Schipol Airport, where I was charged $100 for the burdensome aunt.

Amsterdam, June 8, 2010

Casting Out the Self (on Wagner's Die Walkure at the Met)

2011-05-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

CASTING OUT THE SELF

Richard Wagner Die Walküre / The Metropolitan Opera, New York, live in HD broadcast, May 14, 2011

One of the major questions of Wagner's great opera, Die Walküre, is how it is possible to cast out or renounce oneself, and a great deal of the argumentative and pleading discussion between Wotan and his warrior daughter, Brünnhilde, is precisely about this issue. She claims, rightfully, that in protecting Siegmund she has only followed the will of Wotan, even if it is no longer his stated command. She is, she argues, only a manifestation of his will, and has no other existence. On his part, Wotan must suffer the strictures of his own laws, particularly since he has himself ignored those laws in search of power and love. Fricka, who insists on his destroying Siegmund in favor of Hunding, may seem unable to comprehend love or even less, unable to forgive, but she is right: Wotan has disobeyed his own rules, and so too have his offspring, the brother and sister lovers Siegmund and Sieglinde.

In this opera, Wotan painfully loses those whom he loves most, Siegmund and Brünnhilde, in order to obey his own proclamations. Suddenly the omnipotent god must be punished for his own sins. And, in that sense, he is, symbolically speaking, renouncing his own power; by casting out Brünnhilde from Valhalla, he is also assuring his own destruction and, ultimately the fall of the gods.Brünnhilde, now human, becomes a kind of Christ-like figure who shifts the center of reality from heaven and the underworld to earth itself.

It is for these very reasons, I would argue, that, although there is great music and drama in the other operas of the Ring cycle, Die Walküre is the most poignant, the easiest of all to hear and love.

Strangely, a similar "outcasting" almost happens with the god of this new Met production, director Robert Lepage, and most of the opera's characters. The final Met live-in-HD broadcast production of the season began 45 minutes late, having suffered, we were told during the first intermission, computer difficulties of the great, galumping, set of 24 rotating planks at the center of this production.

People patiently waited it seemed, both inside the opera house and at my movie theater, yet there was a sense, that only grew as the production got underway, that the wonderful performers— Deborah Voigt (Brünnhilde), Eva-Maria Westbroek (Sieglinde), Stephanie Blythe (Fricka), Jonas Kaufmann (Siegmund), Bryn Terfel (Wotan), and Hans-Peter König (Hunding)—were now subject to the directorially created machine. Kaufmann was a stunning Siegmund, portraying a character with whom the audience could not help but be sympathetic, as he and the lonely wife of Hunding, Sieglinde, slowly fall in love. The planks, standing linearly to suggest a forest of trees, was quite effective, except that the image projected upon them was also reflected across the faces of singers (primarily Hunding).

The great ride of the Valkyries was quite terrifying given the see-saw movements of Brünnhilde and her sisters, particularly after we had been told, during another intermission, that in some of the early productions dresses had been caught in the apparatus. I am afraid that I missed a few of the Valkyrie's cries simply worrying about the actors as they slid one by one down the planks to the floor.

At one stunning moment, as Brünnhilde was left by Wotan on her burning rock, the apparatus rose to the heavens, with a body-double Brünnhilde suspended upside down over the fire, one felt that the machine had finally done something, created a kind of cinematic effect, that would have been otherwise impossible.

Yet for all that, I was, as my companion Howard had noted about Das Rheingold, under-impressed by this expensive machine (estimated at costing over forty million dollars), so heavy that the Met needed to reinforce the underpinnings of the stage itself. As some critics have suggested, it seems that the singing, excellent as it is in this production, was sacrificed to the art of staging.

It seems to me, moreover, that the kinds of effects achieved—far tamer than the recent Archim Freyer production in Los Angeles—might have been accomplished with more standard stage devices, light, scrims, etc.

Let us hope that in Siegfried and Götterdammerung Lepage might find a way to justify the immense cost of his device without ousting Wagner's singers from the stage!

Los Angeles, May 27, 2011

"The Company Way" (on the 2011 revival of How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying)

2011-05-14T07:39:00.000-07:00

THE COMPANY WAY
by Douglas Messerli

Abe Burrows, Jack Weinstock, and Willie Gilbert (book, based on the book by Shepherd Mead), Frank Loesser (music and lyrics) How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying / New York, Al Hirschfeld Theater, 2011 / the performance I attended was a matinee on May 7, 2011

I will admit to a certain sentimental attachment to the American Musical Theater, although I feel, given the quality of the musicals for which I care, there is no reason for apology. Most of my friends who cannot comprehend my love of this genre have perhaps never seen a musical comedy before 1970, when the genre, as far as I'm concerned, almost died. The handful of good musicals since that time have been so few (most of them composed by Stephen Sondheim) that one might almost say that the form has died out. Today, except for revivals, musical comedy is for audiences who like songs consisting of three memorable notes, repeated through chorus upon chorus of driveling lyrics sung at very high decibels. But then, we do, from time to time, have wonderful revivals of the older works of this genre that remind us of what the musical theater was all about.

How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, the 1961 New York Drama Critics and Pulitzer Prize-winning gem by Frank Loesser, was not, I am afraid, one of the "wonderful revivals." I do not mean to suggest that it was not worth attending, for, at moments, this version was absolutely delightful, but overall it simply couldn't live up the standards of the original and the movie version.

I have never before sat in an audience with so many first-time theater-goers, mostly teenage girls and their slightly stunned families in tow. The girl next to me was celebrating her sixteenth birthday and "just had see" Daniel Radcliffe, this revival's star attraction, "in the flesh." In some senses the freshness of the fans was a treat. And Radcliffe, a trouper already at age 22, was not about to disappoint them.

Radcliffe, who I suspect has by this time quite settled into his performance, was better by far than the critics led audiences to believe. Although, as the New York Times suggested he is not a natural "song and dance man" (I am not quite sure what that means, and when I think of such figures I can only conjure up Robert Preston and Robert Morse, the original J. Pierrepont Finch, neither of them great singers or even able dancers!), he can now belt out a tuneful song and, with the help of the able chorus, jump, leap, and hoof it across the stage quite ably. Once and a while you can still see him grimace a bit, as if muttering deep within, "I'm gonna be great!" And, at moments, he is! If nothing else you have to recognize that Radcliffe is giving his all, which unfortunately, if you have seen Robert Morse in the role—I saw only the movie version, but listened to the original cast recording so many hundreds of times in my youth that the old wax stereo recording is all scratches and scapes—is just not enough.

Oddly, given the fact that he has now been nominated for a Tony for a supporting role (while Radcliffe was ignored), John Larroquette seemed far less engaged in the piece, speeding through his lines at times as if he were trying to catch a plane, and other times performing on cruise control. When Larroquette "woke up" once or twice in his role as J. B. Biggley, as he did in "Grand Old Ivy," he was quite charming, with both him and Radcliffe performing brilliantly. Unfortunately, director/choeographer Rob Ashford could not leave a good thing alone, bringing a whole chorus of football players to dance along, wiping away one the few enchanting character encounters.

Most of the other cast members are quite excellent, particularly Ellen Harvey as Biggley's executive secretary, Miss Jones, Mary Faber as Smitty, and, although a little young for the role, Rose Hemingway (at 27 she seems more a neophyte than Radcliffe). Christopher Hanke makes the nasty Bud Frump almost likeable. And, although her humor switched on and off at times, Tammy Blanchard is basically an hilarious Hedy LaRue.

Perhaps the most serious problem about this revival is that, despite its obvious satirical intentions, the work seems extraordinarily outdated and unnecessarily coy today. For those who have never seen the musical, I'll briefly relay the plot: window washer J. Pierrepont Finch, enters the executive suites of the World Wide Wicket Corporation in search of a job, armed with a little book that promises immediate success, How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. Within minutes he has literally bumped into the president of company, J. B. Biggley, encountered a woman, Rosemary Pilkington, who falls in love with him at first sight, and captures a job in the mailing room by transforming the unpleasant encounter with Biggley into what the employment head interprets as a friendship.

Finch is highly likeable, even charming, but he is without a single moral principle in his desire to rise up the corporate ladder, and within hours, so it seems, he shifts into the positions of a junior executive, advertising manager, and, even after a disastrous failure, is elected Chairman of the Board, all before you can say, ROSEMARY, the woman with whom, along the way, he has reluctantly fallen in love.

Biggley's nincompoop nephew, Budd Frump, tries his best throughout to trip up Finch, as the other executives, terrified by Ponty's swift rise in the company and fearing the discovery of their own ineptitudes, plot to destroy him; yet Finch (as he reminds everyone F-I-N-C-H) miraculously survives each battle, primarily because he is so self-centered that he fails to see the restless men on the prowl.

The most famous song of the musical is Finch's love song to himself, sung into a mirror of the men's room as he shaves:

FINCH: Now there you are;
Yes, there's that face,
That face that somehow I trust.
It may embarrass you to hear me say it,
But say it I must, say it I must:
You have the cool, clear
Eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth;
Yet there's that upturned chin
And that grin of impetuous youth.
Oh, I believe in you.
I believe in you

Women in this male-dominated world are all secretaries, whom the males are reminded, should are not be treated like toys—but nonetheless are. In today's world, it is clear that the efficient and trustworthy Miss Jones, the smart Smitty, and the quick-plotting Rosemary would be at the head of the World Wide Wicket Company instead of out bowling or wickedly spinning webs to find husbands. But in 1961...well, those gender lines were at the musical's satirical heart. Today the plot appears somewhat as a stale joke with little resonance.

For all that, I think the audience was willing to overlook the datedness of the piece if only the actors could come together and enjoy their own spoof. But time and again, it seemed, Radcliffe was not the only one grimacing. Everybody seemed to be playing it "the company way," refusing to get excited about anything. Two of the best dance numbers of Lambert and Fosse's original, "Coffee Break," (such a difficult number that the movie dropped it), and the sprightly "A Secretary Is Not a Toy," seemed lackluster in Ashford's staging, while at other times, as I mentioned, the director seemed to suck all the attention away from the actors through the introduction of gratuitous routines.

Finally, despite Radcliffe's pluck and elfin charm, I kept missing the puckish comedy of Robert Morse, the silly imperiousness of Rudy Vallee, and the jazz inflections of Michele Lee's voice.

One piece, alone, came to life and created for its few minutes the magic that might have stood as a beacon to these young performers. The last full number of the musical, "Brotherhood of Man," was so richly sung, punctuated by Ellen Harvey's coloratora soprano, and so thrillingly danced that it almost redeemed everything else. If only the cast might have realized that "brotherhood" earlier in the show, How to Succeed might have gone straight to the top!

In the end, however, it didn't matter. The young girls and their families stood up in celebration and absolutely roared (I've never heard as loud an applause) as Radcliffe bowed appreciatively to his fans.

Los Angeles, May 13, 2011

Sunday, Bloody Sunday (Mother's Day in New York, the Perfect Lunch)

2011-05-12T07:48:00.000-07:00

It was a Sunday, Mother’s Day 2011. I often end up on New York City on Mother’s Day, since it is the weekend my distributor, Consortium, generally chooses to host sales conferences.

I remember one such Mother’s Day, waiting for a play to begin in a bar on 45th or 46th, where I overheard a head usher from one of the nearby theaters discussing the horrors of the day, describing how numerous middle-aged couples celebrated the event by taking their elderly mothers and fathers to the theater, by simply dropping them off and picking them up later, sometimes long beyond the end of the production, presuming that the theater staff would take care of the parents until they arrived from wherever they have gone in the interim.

“They treat as if we were babysitters or schoolteachers,” the salty professional complained, leaving their poor parents to sit in their theater seats for hours sometimes after the play has ended, like it were a playground superintended by us.” “Several times,” she continued “we’ve had to call the police to report missing families for these dear old folk. I hate Mother’s Day!” she concluded.

I was startled to hear of such events. I never imagined that the theater might be used as a kind of dumping ground for the elderly, but I’ve seen it several times since. On Mother’s Day I try not to attend popular musicals or comedies that might attract these inconsiderate middle-agers as the perfect place for their mothers and fathers to spend the day, as if it were a Chucky-Cheese playground for the agéd.

I knew that the intensely serious play Jerusalem and, even more so, the off-Broadway production of the Belarus Group’s Being Harold Pinter, both of which I was attending that day, were unlikely venues for such abuse.

What I hadn’t prepared for is that both of the plays I chose for a Mother’s Day celebration were very much centered on violence and, more succinctly, blood. Hence, my title “Sunday, Bloody Sunday,” an echo of the terrible events of the Bogside massacre of 1972 in Derry, North Ireland, the song from the U2s 1983 album War, and the movie of 1971 about the Jewish family doctor, Daniel Hirsch (Peter Finch) and the divorced working woman, Alex Grenville (Glenda Jackson), who share the same lover.

My “Bloody Sunday,” was “bloody,” fortunately, without real bullets or actual deaths.

In preparation for the likelihood that I would not be able to eat dinner, given the fact that Jerusalem ran until 6:00 and Being Harold Pinter, way downtown on 4th Avenue’s Ellen Stewart Theater, began at 7:30.

I chose, quite by accident, but most felicitously, an Italian restaurant, Lattanzi, on 46th street in Hell’s Kitchen, one of several Italian restaurants on the block. But, for my taste, I couldn’t have chosen better, given that Lattanzi serves Jewish Italian, the kind of food I’d grown to love in Rome’s Trastevere, the old Jewish ghetto of the city.

Because I arrived early, the restaurant was nearly ghostly, but the hostess and waiters were most friendly, as I decided to sit at the bar at the other end of the restaurant from entry. I had a gin and tonic before ordering the primi, Coarciofialla Giudia, artichoke with garlic and olive oil cooked in the Jewish manner. What this means is a crispy brown outer series of edible artichoke leaves with the pointed, thorny stalks just to remind you of the mass of the vegetable that had to be cut away to get to the heart, that tender green, olive oil infused, center that literally melts in your mouth. The balance of the two, the braised outer, thorn-like leaves with its luscious green circle of the center is a perfect balance of the fruit of this nearly impenetrable fortress, which Americans generally serve by boiling or braising all the taste out of them, and smothering the slightly edible remainder with butter and salt. The artichokes at Lattanzi need little but the oil and a good appetite.

Before the artichokes the waiter had brought me a basket of breads far different from the usual Italian fare, although a more traditional chewy sliced bread lay under the treat of the matzo, incredibly thin, slightly grilled and topped with garlic oil! Unlike the packaged holiday Matzo, this was almost like an Indian Nann or even Puri, deliciously flavored and light as a feather, but recognizable as matzo nonetheless.

The waiter suggested a secondi, Trigliette all’Embrice, a Red Snapper sautéed in garlic and onions, with olive oil, pine nuts, white raisins, and vinegar. To compliment this, I chose their champagne, infused with orange and ginger, the perfect match for the sweet and bitter under flavors of the fish. I couldn’t imagine a tastier or more healthy dish. I felt it was the perfect food to fortify the five hours following of intense drama I was looking forward to.

I have to go back to taste their dozens of other of menu specialties which I might have ordered under slightly different circumstances.

Los Angeles, May 11, 2011

Sideshows and Carnival Barkers (on the Birther issue, Donald Trump and others)

2011-04-30T08:31:00.000-07:00

SIDESHOWS AND CARNIVAL BARKERS

by Douglas Messerli

The United States, in its history of political campaigns, has surely had its share of outrageous behavior, hypocrisy, and outright lies. There's something particularly about running for president that brings out the worst in some of the men and women who seek that elusive and, to my way of thinking, undesirable job. Thank heaven there are still megalomaniac men and women who want to run our country. And occasionally one argues persuasively that he or she has the best interest of the US citizens at heart—whether or not that turns out to be a fact.

I feel Obama, despite all of his failures (which, after all, are complicated by the failures of our legislative government) has convinced me that he is less interested in his own voice than in reforming government policies. However, his necessary commitment to the center has defeated his own best attempts at accomplishing anything. But I am not going to attempt here a deconstruction of how the President and the Congress together have failed an often uninformed and sometimes a near-idiot public. We are undergoing one of the most difficult times, with regard to the federal and even state governments, that we have ever faced as a country. Trust in public office seems to be at a new low, and those outside of government seem to be increasingly ignorant of what politics is about. The trouble with playing the center, as Obama has attempted to do, is that there may no longer be a center in American culture, which makes the President's position an extremely lonely one. If his approval ratings continue to decline as they have, I think we can chalk it up to the fact that there is no longer any way for a leader to appeal to both the left and the right, in part because both sides have too often let their extremist voices speak for them.

What concerns me most is that while we face dire issues of health care, global politics (particularly with regard to the new north African and Arab populist challenges), ongoing participation in warfare in Afghanistan, and financial debt which may collapse everything we have worked for, we are evidently unable to focus on these dilemmas, while we are transfixed by peripheral and quite meaningless issues. One of the most egregious of these, it seems to me is the "birther" issue, long-festering since Obama's election, in extreme right and religious groups, and more recently whipped up by potential presidential candidate Donald Trump. At the beginning of this week a USA Today and Gallup poll found that, among Republicans 43% felt that Obama was not born in the United States; and even among the general electorate, 15% say he was "probably" born abroad, with another 9% saying that he was definitely born on foreign soil. Perhaps one should not take these polls too seriously, since, as an article in the Los Angeles Times this morning mentioned, about 45% of those polled questioned the American birth of Donald Trump.

However, that this stubborn perception of Obama still persists after Hawaiian officials, both Democratic and Republican, have stated over and over that Obama was born in their state, along with biographical evidence that his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, an American citizen, lived, at the time of Obama's birth, August 4, 1961, in Hawaii, is shocking.

As Janny Scott, in a fascinating essay, "The Young Mother Abroad" (The New York Times Magazine, April 24, 2011) reports:

She dropped out of school (the University of Hawaii), married him (Barack
Hussein Obama) and give birth shortly before their union ended. In the
aftermath, she met Lolo Soetoro, an amiable, easy-going, tennis-player
from the Indonesian island of Java.

Dunham and her son moved to Seattle, where she enrolled at the University of Washington from September 1961 to June 1962, moving back to Hawaii, where she resumed her education at the University of Hawaii. Soetoro and Dunham married in 1964, and in 1967 Ann Dunham and her son, Barack, joined Soetoro in Indonesia, to where had been called home the previous year because of political events. The future president was 6 years of age. So what's the problem?

Of course there are numerous conspiracy theories, suggesting that Dunham somehow faked the Hawaiian birth, although why an unknown young mother would want to illegally register her son as a native-born American seems a rather odd supposition to me. How she might have accomplished this is even more perplexing. Could she have even imagined a young boy with a Black Nigerian father might someday be president?*

But then the very idea of the need to be born in the US in order to run for president, from my point of view, seems equally absurd. I suppose the early founders must have feared that a man born in another country might have conflicts of interest and influences from that other country which might stand in the way of US interests. Of course, many of us are very much influenced by the homeland of our forbearers, and, since we are a country of immigrants, one might suggest that anyone but a Native American would have no possible influences from abroad.

When I was 16, I lived for a year in Norway, and over the years, I have found some of the most pleasurable moments of my life in France. Might I not be, if I were to run for president, described as having special interests in these countries? It all seems rather tribal to me. I have always felt that just being citizen ought to be enough.

Accordingly, I basically ignored the "birthers'" concerns, seeing those who supported the question primarily as crackpots. When an aunt of mine, a fundamentalist, born-again Christian, e-mailed me bigoted texts that argued for Obama's illegality, I simply deleted them, until one day, after receiving several of these unwanted epistles, I wrote her, asking to be taken off her mailing list. Good Christian that she is, she replied that she would never talk to me again. And she was kept her word.

Despite my disdain for the whole issue, however, I realize that it is the current law that the President must have been born in the US, and the problem is that for some apparently illogical souls—a great number of them actually—Obama must be excised from his American heritage. Many intelligent observers have suggested, and I strongly agree, that this position is supported by strong racial animosity and outright xenophobia.

Why, accordingly, when Trump began talking about this issue—and others equally disturbing ("We need to seize Iraq's oil. " "The Chinese are our enemies!")—didn't some of the few sober Republicans speak out? Of course, some may have, their voices drowned out by an equally crass media, who allowed Trump to capture the stage, where he claimed, at first, that the President's birth may have happened in Africa, and later, on March 17th, "The reason I have a little doubt, just a little, is because he grew up and nobody knew him." I gather that Trump had never heard of or refused to believe in Hawaii Governor Neils Abercombrie's memories of Obama's mother and his celebration with them of Obama's birth.

A few days later Trump described hiring his own private investigators who, "at a certain point in time," will reveal some "interesting things."

Finally, Trump told CNN interviewer Ali Velshi, "When I started, two months ago, I thought he (Obama) was (born in Hawaii). Every day that goes by, I think less and less that he was born in the United States."

Whatever information Trump was privy to, we never discovered. It is clear to me that it was simply another "trump," a play of the cards to keep the public focused on his confused and obscure political positions. In any event, the tactic paid off as far as he was concerned, if only because it forced the President to finally lay the question to rest by producing his own birth certificate, which indeed states his birth to be on August 4, 1961 in Honolulu.

One might have imagined that finally this piece of dirty folklore could be laid to rest. But Trump, turning everything inside out, claimed that he was "honored" to have helped get the certificate's release. He was "proud of himself" for having had a role in settling this matter finally so that we can move on to other issues. Repeating himself, Trump declared and he was "really proud" and "really honored," before suggesting that the document had to be looked at carefully, as if to hint at new doubts.

In truth, Trump's major role was precisely what the President spoke of that morning, namely that of playing a part in the sideshow as a carnival barker with the pretense of saying something important about American politics. It was he, not the president, who had stirred up new doubts for an issue that might have been laid to rest years ago, given the statements from the State of Hawaii, released early on as Obama announced that he would run for president.

Obviously, the issue will not disappear. As Hendrig Hertzberg righteously suggested in The New Yorker of May 2, 2011.

The dismaying truth is that birtherism is part of a larger pattern
of rejection of reality that has taken hold of intimidating segments
of one of two political parties that alternate in power in our
governing institutions. It is akin to the view that global warming
is a hoax, or that the budget can be balanced through spending
cuts alone, or that contraception causes abortion, on a par with the
theory that the earth is six thousand years old...."

Hertzberg goes on to suggest that as Trump has proclaimed, "the world laughs at us."
What Trump doesn't comprehend, however, is that if the world is laughing it is at his own, and others like him, buffoonery. The sad commedia repeated by the thousands of so-called leaders and individuals in our country who cannot deal with the realities that Hertzberg suggests and other truths such as the fact that the US is one of the few civilized and wealthy countries that provides no health care for vast numbers of its citizens, and is apparently determined to take away even the insufficient benefits provided by Medicare and Medicaid; or the tragic-comic fact that public education in our country is in shambles, with states and cities less and less able to provide high quality teaching.

As if this recent circus had not been enough, a couple of days later Republican Committee Chairman, Reince Preibus, like a flying trapeze artist, turned everything on its head once more:

We're borrowing four and half billion dollars a day and this
president is more worried about birth certificates, Oprah Winfrey
and fundraisers at the Waldorf Astoria. It's maddening and I just
wish the president would engage in the real issues that are
affecting America.

When asked why, then, he hadn't suggested to Trump that he should alter his rhetoric, Preibus argued that his role was not to serve as censor. Yet Preibus would clearly censor the President for even responding. The most maddeningly thing of all is not the President's inability to engage in real issues, but the Republican inability to even comprehend what any "real" issues might possibly be or how to communicate them within the political forum, which would mean to do precisely what Preibus refuses to do, to sit down with his constituency to determine a sane beginning to a dialogue.

More recently, Trump has publically mused, why hasn't Obama released his grades from his Freshman year at Occidental College in Los Angeles—as if one of the best-educated and intelligent of Presidents in decades needed to prove something.

Before I could even revise this essay, that wonderful political spokesman, Donald Trump, again attacked the Chinese: "Listen you mother fuckers, we're going to tax you 25%!" Even a suicide bomber might be reminded that the Chinese own $755.4 billion of the US Treasury securities against American debt. Do the Republicans—so determined, as they insist, on balancing the budget—really want to risk this mad rhetoric on a complete and total financial collapse, all in the name of Trump's entertaining, family unfriendly, expletives? La Commedia è finita! And I haven't even mentioned Sarah Palin!

Los Angeles, April 29 and April 30, 2011

*Janny does report, amazingly, that Ann Dunham did think that her son, as he got older, could even become President of the United States. What a wonderfully determined mother she must have been.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Douglas Messerli

Ghent--Boating

2011-04-29T08:03:00.000-07:00

GHENT—BOATING

I had planned to spend my final day in Flanders in Antwerp, touring the city by myself, and finding a good restaurant for the evening. But when Tom van de Voorde invited me to his home, I really could not turn that offer down to see Ghent and, in particular, the Ghent altarpiece in the Cathedral there.

I left the city by train early in the morning, again walking, this time back to the train station. But at least I didn’t have my large “auntie” suitcase with me (I've joked elsewhere that traveling with my large suitcase was like taking a trip with a large maiden aunt), and I felt relatively lightweight and was prepared to enjoy the day.

Once in Ghent, I thought that I might be able to walk to Tom’s house, but after asking a couple of people for directions, I realized it was quite a distance, and took the streetcar instead. Fortunately, once I was told which car to take and at what stop to exit, the trip was an easy one, and I found Tom in his beautiful apartment which faced one of Ghent’s many canals.

Tom served coffee and showed me his quite extensive poetry collection before we set off, stopping by a pleasant restaurant near the main center of Ghent where I had a salad and wolfish, also known as Seawolf.

Tom suggested that we take a boat trip around the center-city canals, and I, loving all sorts of water travel, didn’t dare to tell him that such a trip in the hot sun would turn me bright red.

The tour, led by a friend of his and his wife’s, was a beautiful one, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, despite that my face, arms, and other exposed body parts were all in a blush. Sites along the way were the old castle, the only wooden house in a city of brick and stone buildings, and views of the absolutely beautiful guild halls. There’s something incomparable to slowly gliding along beside the streets, observing the city en route.

Next stop was the cathedral, where Tom told me a kind of horrifying story, funny nonetheless. Much of the beautiful white marble work, including the sculpture and tomb of Bishop Triest inside St. Bavo’s Cathedral (Sint-Baafskathedraal) was created by the then-renowned Flemish artist Jerome Duquesnoy, the younger. Throughout the period of installing his sculptures, he commanded that they be kept from public view by large hanging canvases and arras. One day, however, a guard dared peek into the area where the artist was working, only to discover Duquesnoy sodomizing a young boy, his model and assistant. The city elders where outranged, and he was soon after tried, set upon a pyre and burned to death in the large square outside the building.

The sculpture was lovely, as was the great P. P. Reubens painting “Saint Bavo Entering the Monastery.” But when we attempted to see the better known The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb by Hubert and Jan van Eyck, we found only one small section of it on view; it was evidently being treated for conservation. Outside the cathedral, in the square was a group singing English chanteys, attempting to stir up interest for the Ghent Opera’s new production of Benjamin Britten’s Billy Budd.

By this time I was quite exhausted, but Tom suggested we visit the nearby Flanders Poet’s House, a wonderful library containing every book of poetry published in Flanders in Dutch and in translations. Not even the well-run Poet’s House in New York can match the professionalism and complexity of this collection. I was enthralled and loved meeting the founder and the collection’s curator.

I was nearly crawling by this time, so painfully did my legs hurt. I cursed my my arthritic limbs, but I had enjoyed the entire day nonetheless. I took the train back to Antwerp, slowly transporting myself by foot, stopping along the way for a drink, to my hotel, collapsing into bed and a brief nap. I did venture out to De Markt, a nearby restaurant, later, where I inexplicably had a hankering for Italian food, and ordered up spaghetti.

Los Angeles, April 27, 2011

The Piper's Son (on Benjamin Britten's The Turn of the Screw and Noye's Fludd)

2011-04-21T08:34:00.000-07:00

THE PIPER'S SON

Myfanwy Piper (text, based on novella by Henry James), Benjamin Britten (composer) The Turn of the Screw / Los Angeles, Los Angeles Opera, the production I saw was a matinee performance on March 20, 2011

As I suggest in my piece about Jack Clayton's film The Innocents (see International Cinema Review), Britten's powerful opera, The Turn of the Screw, is quite different from both the film version and, even at times from James' original. In James' novella and Clayton's The Innocents, for example, the ghosts may or may not be manifestations of the governess' imagination; or, at least, we can never be certain. But, while in the Britten version the phantoms may still be in the mind of Miss Giddens (Patricia Racette, who is given no name in the opera), they are, on stage, very corporeal, singing and moaning, with the children appearing to see them or hear them and responding to their commands. The specters clearly, in the Britten work, have an influence of their charges even beyond death. And Britten strongly suggests that the greatest part of that influence has to do with sexuality, not only between the former valet Peter Quint (William Burden) and former governess, Miss Jessel, but with Quint and the young boy Miles (credibly sung and performed by 12-year old Michael Kepler Meo) and Miss Jessel and Flora (Ashley Emerson).

Consequently, Britten's carefully structured two acts of eight scenes each explores not just the psychology of its characters, but their metaphysical encounters with good and evil. The question of innocence, so central of the film version, is embraced, accordingly, within the larger question of the battle between these forces.

It is clear from the very first scene, when the Governess, charged with all responsibilities concerning the two children, expresses her anxieties, that she will never be up to the task. She is too young and untried to take on the battle with the unsavory forces of history represented by Miles and Flora's short past. In this society of the fin de siecle (which is, one must recall, the period in which this "ghost story" was written), forces are moving in two opposing directions; with Victorian conventions still in full force, the unspoken dominating over the open and honest presentation of sexuality, the era also saw a rise of unconventional behavior represented by and in literary figures created by Wilde, Huysmans, Schnitzler, Zola, Shaw, etc.

The children's seemingly perfect behavior creates a sense for the two women, Governess and Housekeeper, that everything is as it should be, while we witness, through Britten's cunning music and Myfanwy Piper's text, that something is terribly wrong. From the first moment of their obedient bows and curtseys, we suspect there is something amiss, our first real clue being the news of Miles' dismissal from school. In Britten's work the reasons for that dismissal are even vaguer than in James and the film, but the fact that he will never be allowed to return hints at the gravity of the situation, and Britten allows our imaginations to take us where we want.

Mrs. Grosse, who cannot quite say what she has seen except to suggest that it was terrible and not to her liking, also hints as something more evil, perhaps, that what the reality was. And, in that sense, like the busybody housekeeper in Wuthering Heights, she helps to create the hysterical atmosphere which defeats any logical solutions the Governess might have come to.
But then, there are those visitations, and Quint's banshee-like cries for Miles in Britten's Act I, Scene 8—cries to which Miles does respond—that seem to make it quite apparent that the relationship he had with Miles was more than a simple case of bad influence. His ululations come from a deeper place than a simple relationship between a young master and servant. And so too does Miss Jessel's sad soliloquy in Act II, Scene 3, in which she bemoans both her loss of love with Quint and Flora, indicating something far more serious than a Governess-pupil encounter.

Even greater revelations, however, come in the form of how the children play. While it may at first seem totally innocent, the children's haunting song of "Tom, Tom the Piper's son," with, in the Los Angeles production, Miles astride his sister with a whip, is more disturbing, I feel, than even the presence of the ghosts. We recognize almost immediately that there is something almost sadomasochistic about the game, and that it obviously is connected to something sexual of which children should have no knowledge. Moreover, the subject of that song, Tom, the son of the piper, has been naughty, is beaten, and "howls through the streets." There is also the suggestion in the word piper, moreover, that Miles must eventually "pay the piper," that he must eventually face the consequences of his acts, and, along with that, the underlying story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who, when the city refused to pay for his services of removing rats, turned the children into rats.

Similarly, Britten's hidden joke of Miles' Latin lessons, wherein Miles sings Latin words that all pun on sexual body parts,

amnis, axis, caulis, collis,
clunis, crinis, fascis, follis,
fustis, ignis, orbis, ensis,
panis, piscis, postis, mensis,
torris, unguis and canalis,
vectis, vermis, and natalis
sanguis, pelvis, cucumis,
lapis, cassis, manis, glis.

while the Governess, apparently not terribly knowledgeable in Latin, smilingly listens, points to a world far more evil than the one the Governess has ever imagined.

Miles' strange "Malo" song, with its references to "malo," a variation of bad or evil, "naughty boy," and an "apple tree" reveal that Miles, himself, recognizes the condition of his world, and expresses his fears for his own condition, that he is bad because he has eaten of the tree.

If James only hints at these possibilities, Britten projects them, plays with them, and through them makes a case for why the situation must come to the close as it does in all versions. In the battle between good and evil—even if we can describe the Governess as representing good—she is no match. Her absurd belief that by speaking something you can exorcise it (not entirely different, of course, from Freud's methods) does not deal with the possibility that evil can swallow up the truth and spit it out. Those so many unsaid things about life at Bly house may have silenced any truth forever.

Although Miles may recognize Peter Quint as the Devil with his last words, the Devil has stolen the boy from the living as surely as if he was an obscene lover. The Governess, in her battle to "win over" Miles, to transform him, did not know enough to love him as the boy he was.

Finally, it is evident that the composer may have been drawn to these concerns because of his own inclinations, particularly his love of young boys, sensitively revealed in John Bridcut's Britten's Children. Although Britten lived for years with his singer-partner Peter Pears, he also became close friends and a father-like figure for dozens of 12-14 year-old boys, showering them with gifts and letters. Many of these boys came from children's choruses, and for some of them he wrote roles in his operas. Only one boy, 13-year-old Harry Morris accused him of possible sexual molestation, claiming that Britten entered his bedroom in Cornwall where the composer had taken the boy on a sailing trip; charges were never filed.

Britten chose the young singer, David Hemmings (later a noted actor) for the role of Miles and, according to friends, was obviously obsessed with the boy, an adoration which Hemmings, strikingly handsome at 12, readily accepted. But Hemmings later insisted that Britten made no sexual advances. It is apparent, nonetheless, that Britten very well knew what Quint might have felt for Miles, and understood the ramifications of such involvements. And, to my way of thinking, it is why Britten was so focused on those aspects of James' tale.

Los Angeles, April 20, 2011

The day before we attended Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, Howard and I, along with our cleaning woman and friend Ana-María Abraham, saw a production by the Los Angeles Opera, with various young orchestras and choirs, of Benjamin Britten’s setting of the Chester Miracle Play, Noye’s Fludde. The groups included members of the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra, the Hamilton High School Academy of Music Orchestra, the Colburn School String Orchestra, the choir of St. John Etudes Church and School, members of the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels Choir, the Colburn School Children’s Choir, Pueri Cantores San Gabriel Valley Children’s Chori, the Padre Serra Parish Choir, the Jubilate Catholic Korean Choir, the St. Mel Parish Choir, and the Musical Youth of California Children’s Choir. Eli Villaneuva directed, with opera singers Richard Paul Fink, performing Noye, and Kate Lindsey, performing Mrs. Noye, along with Richard K. Price, singing the voice of God.

Like past productions at the Cathedral of our Lady of Angels, the production was a joyful one, which included the participation in three songs from the congregation, along with lovely costumes—particularly with the entry of dozens of pairs of animals performed by teens and young children—and with the joyful music of the entire work, conducted by the beloved LA Opera conductor James Conlon.

Perhaps the most fun of this piece involves the stubborn refusal of Mrs. Noye to join her husband, as she remains on land surrounded by her gossip friends until finally Noye and his sons drag her onto the ark and into salvation!

It was a perfect afternoon for all those who attended, which we followed with an excellent dinner at Los Angeles’ famed Pacific Dining Car with Ana.

Los Angeles, April 20, 2011

Embedded Trio (on Rossini's opera Le Comte Ory)

2011-04-19T08:03:00.000-07:00

EMBEDDED TRIO

Eugène Scribe and Charles Gaspared Delestre-Poirson (screenplay, based on their play), Gioachino Rossini (composer) Le Comte Ory / New York, Metropolitan Opera, live HD broadcast, April 9, 2011

Rossini’s 1828 opera, Le Comte Ory is one of his most memorable and truly humorous works. However it is seldom performed. The Metropolitan Opera of New York had never before mounted a production of it until April 2011, an excellent rendition directed by Bartlett Sher which was presented in a live-HD broadcast on April 9, which my companion Howard and I attended.

For one of the first times in my memory, the opera began without a curtain, attempting to recreate the theatrical conventions of the age, allowing the Prompter to be observed throughout, and using cast and chorus members to enter and exit openly with sets and props.
We are in Touraine around 1200, where most of the men of the community have gone off to fight in the Crusades. Outside the castle of Formoutiers the women, who have pledged a vow of chastity in the absence of their men, gather outside the castle where they have moved in with the Countess Adèle to protect themselves while serving her.

In love with the Countess, the irreparable Ory (Juan Diego Florez) has disguised himself as a hermit, sending his friend Raimbaud ahead to announce his arrival. The women, aware to the hermits’ legendary ability to grant all their wishes, bring him a bounty of food and gifts, each hoping to get a chance to speak with him, revealing their desies. Since the women have been so long in solitary, they are desperate for the return of their husbands—or, at least, the attentions of a man, all which Ory, when he appears, turns to his advantage. One of the great joys of this slower moving and somewhat less invigorating first act (the music of the act repeats many of Rossini’s songs in his earlier opera Il Viaggio a Reims) is Florez’s comic miming as, in his long beard and dingy clothing, he greets each of his supplicants with numerous promises and strokes of her body and hair.

Meanwhile, Ory’s tutor (Michele Pertusi) and his page, Isolier (Joyce DiDonato) have coincidentally arrived in the same area, hoping to find the missing Ory and bring him home before he does any damage. When the tutor hears of the presence of a noted hermit in the area, he is certain that it must be his student, proclaiming to Isolier in the long lament of his “honorable” role in life.

When Isolier encounters the hermit, he also asks the “holy” man for advice, admitting that he is love with the Countess and that he has a plan how to enter her retreat, dressed as a female pilgrim. Ory, as the hermit, encourages him, proclaiming that he will do everything in his power to help.

When the hermit meets up with the despondent Countess, his advice to her is that she must find love, embracing it immediately to rid herself of her depression. When the Countess sees Isolier nearby, she quickly falls in love, as Ory, tries to warn her to beware of his former page, in hopes that he himself may ultimately be the object of her love. Her paean to Isolier (“En proie à la tristesse”), turns into a wonderful tussle between the two wooers, Ory and Isolier, as they vie for the Countess’s favors.

The tutor arrives just in time to see through the hermit’s costume, revealing his student’s reprehensible acts, as the women, in horror and dismay retreat once again into the castle, vowing to remain in isolation.

If Act I is charming, Act II, although much simpler in terms of plot, is the heart of this opera and for which Rossini wrote new music. As villainous as always, Ory determines to employ Isolier’s plan to lay siege to the women of the town and to seduce, most particularly, the beautiful Countess. Dressing as nuns, he and his numerous followers, arrive at the castle in the middle of a stormy night, proclaiming that they too have been attached by Ory, pleading to be allowed protection within the castle walls for the night.

The Countess eagerly permits them into her company, finding rooms for the entire group, and speaking with Ory in nun’s habit as the representative of the group. Florez plays his role of Soeur Colette with great vigor, alternating between a shy and frightened pilgrim and a woman in need of love and its caresses, thoroughly confusing the Countess. But that is only a warm up for further mischievous acts.

Raimund, having found a cache of wine and liquor, passes out the bottles to Ory’s group, as they sing a drinking song (“Buvons, buvons”), between the entrances and exits of the Countess’s servant Ragonde, suspicious of the noises coming from the kitchen. The song is completely extraneous to the developments of the opera, but the very idea of a group of bewhiskered nuns drinking bottles of wine creates a sense of hilarity that is a perfect introduction for the next scene, in which Ory attempts to break into the Countess’ bedroom to rape her.

Fortunately, Isolier, come with the news that the women's husbands shall soon be home, realizes that the hairy pilgrims are Ory and his band, reporting the news to the Countess, who, together with him, plan their revenge on the Count.

In the Met production, the bed is lifted somewhat vertically so that he can witness the absurdity of the event, as in the dark, the Countess courts Ory, while Isolier lays silent between them, receiving most of the intentions of his bodily press, while Isolier plants kisses on the lips of his beloved. It is an absurdly funny scene, given the fact that Isolier is played by a female mezzo-soprano. Accordingly, if you perceive the situation as it is in the fiction, Ory is making love to Isolier, with two men and a woman upon the bed; but if you perceive the work in terms of their actual sexes, it is two women lying upon the bed with a man, all eventually becoming wound up and around each other as if in orgiastic joy that is either gay or lesbian. Scher has directed this so flawlessly that when the deception is finally revealed, Ory stands with a slight smile upon his face, as if he has not at all minded the confusion of sexual identities, singing out in praise of marriage which brings home the man. With the help of Isolier, he makes a final escape, presumably to seek out others to trick into love.

Just moments before the show began, Florez had sped away from his wife’s bedside, having just witnessed the birth of his new son. He reported between acts that he had not slept all night.

Los Angeles, April 18, 2011

Two Poets (on my visit to South Korea)

2011-04-09T07:56:00.000-07:00

TWO POETS

After my rescue from the city of Incheon in South Korea, the very first thing I did was to meet with members of the steering committee for the 2010 World Writer's Festival in the Hotel Seoul KyoYuk MunHwa Hoekwan. I don't believe the entire committee was there, but there were four or five individuals, Kim Hye-won, Park Duk-kyu, Lee Si-young, Kim Soo-bok, and Hae Yi-soo (my rescuer) among them.

I was asked to sign some documents, and paid, in the traditional way—in American dollars—the amount promised for the lecture I was asked to present.

My inability to remember names is quite notorious among my friends, with whom in conversation I sometimes must make two or three associations before anyone comprehends of whom I speaking. In Korea, because of the popularity of the names Kim, Lee, and Park, it was even more difficult to remember the names of those who were entertaining us. Moreover, other than Hae Yi-so, few of our hosts spoke English, and, accordingly, conversations were held through my wonderful translator. Fortunately, I would whisper to her, from time to time, to tell me to whom I was speaking, and by the third day, I finally was able to develop relationships that involved their individual identities.

The two poets of the committee, Kim Soo-bok and Lee Si-young, particularly interested me. I encountered Kim's poetry in the festival catalogue, where just a few lines fascinated me: The sea surging at the the tip of your toes, from the tip of your toes, to your knees, from the knees, to the thighs, to the stomach, to the heart, and as you breathe, hearing your, your, your free breathing, we cross your meandering stream, bearing our shadows on our heads. I asked my translator to check the original to see if the repetitions I so loved, and felt were so appropriate in this breathless action of the poem, were in the Korean as well, fearing it might have been only a typo in the English. Yes, she assured, they were there!

Upon a break in sessions, I asked my Ko Un translator, Brother Anthony, whether there had been any other English language translations of Kim's poetry. He had translated some others, he assured me, but not many. "However," he continued, "I have translated a substantial amount of Mr. Lee's poetry in my Cornell East Asian Series book, Variations: Three Korean Poems. The next morning he brought me a copy of that book, and I read several of Mr. Lee's poems, which also seemed excellent, although perhaps a bit more conventional or, at least, traditionally Korean in tone and subject matter. But there were wonderful narrative moments in the work, particularly in poems such as "Chong-im," about a young girl of his youth, now long vanished. I could see the possibility of publishing small books by both poets, particularly if I could get some aid from the Korean Translation Foundation. That afternoon I mentioned my idea to them. Both poets beamed with excitement.

It was about that time that the relationship between me and the poets began to alter, as they became more and more attentive to me. I had asked if I might be able to stay on after the Festival in Seoul for two days to better see the city. But they explained that I would have to pay for my expenses—which I had offered to do—and find my own hotel, since the one in which I was staying was only for special groups and events such as the Festival. Accordingly, I had asked my translator to help find a hotel, and she had done so, in the Cheonggyecheon district. The price seemed right, and the hotel, when I looked it up seemed pleasant. But at our last big dinner, both poets decided that I would be unhappy there, and arranged for me and a couple of others who were extending their visits to stay at a Artist's retreat, Seoul Art Space, at a much more isolated distance from the areas that I wanted to visit. Yet, since the offer meant that we would not be paying, I could hardly turn it down.

Soon after, Mr. Lee suggested that we go on a tour of the city the following day, and Mr. Kim invited me to a Southern island where he and his wife had a condominium in the woods. In Korea, as in many Asian countries, it is considered rude to leave guests alone for long periods of time, but I had to pass on their graciousness, explaining to Mr. Lee that I love walking around cities, discovering things for myself as I alternate between wandering and resting in cafes and bars. I told Mr. Kim that I truly appreciated his offer, but would never forgive myself if I returned home without seeing any of the city in which I had stayed.

Mr. Lee later introduced me to his girlfriend, who spoke English, and explained that she would love to be my guide the following morning. Again, I had to defer.

The Art Space location, although quite lovely, was quite distant from the shopping areas I had planned to visit, and far more rustic than would have been any hotel. I had to take a long taxi ride to the Itaweon district of Seoul, enjoying, as I mention elsewhere in these South Korean memories, the day, all to myself.

But on the last day, both poets again insisted on touring me through Jongno and elsewhere via auto, Kim's daughter serving as translator. There was no way I could possibly reject their offer. They took me to a wonderful Chinese lunch, and Mr. Kim drove me the long distance to the airport—kindnesses that, although truly heart-felt—seemed somewhat more forthcoming, so it appeared to me, because of my role as a potential publisher. In any event, I was truly appreciative. And my friendship with both poets will hopefully continue in the years to come.

In February 2011 I met with Mr. Kim in my own city of Los Angeles, and had a very enjoyable lunch with him, his wife, and a friend of theirs in Koreatown.

Los Angeles, March 9, 2011

Cleaning House (on Donizetti's Don Pasquale)

2011-03-30T07:53:00.000-07:00

CLEANING HOUSE

Giovanni Ruffini (libretto, based on a libretto by Angelo Anelli), Gaetano Donizetti (composer) Don Pasquale / The Metropolitan Opera, New York, November 13, 2010

A funny thing happened on my way to this opera. I had planned on my New York trip to attend the opera the day it was being broadcast live via high definition video so that Howard could see the same production back in Los Angeles as I sat in the theater. He might even spot me the audience as the camera scanned it. The irony is that he would have a much better view of the entire opera, plus backstage interviews that are often entertaining, while I sat in a high balcony seat squinting down at the small figures upon the stage. He would also hear it, sung into microphones at the edge of the stage, far better than I could from my vantage.

While I was in New York, I stayed with Sherry Bernstein, my poet friend Charles Bernstein's mother, whom I told of my plans. On Central Park West, her apartment is only a few blocks from the opera house. Oddly enough, Sherry also planned to attend, not at the Met but, just like Howard, at a live video showing in some movie theater.

Donizetti's comic opera is based very much on the stock figures of commedia dell'arte, so perhaps one need not be too serious about the ridiculous characters or the plot, which basically boils down to an attempt by two outsiders, Dr. Malesta (Mariusz Kwiecien) and his sister Norina (Anna Nerebko), to teach an old man, Don Pasquale (John Del Carlo), a lesson about life. Don Pasquale's young nephew Ernesto (Matthew Polenzani), in love with Norina, refuses to marry the woman his uncle feels is more appropriate. In reaction, Don Pasquale, on a suggestion from his doctor, Malesta, decides to marry Norina (pretending to be convent girl, Sofrina) instead, disinheriting Ernesto.

There is little else to the plot: the two are falsely married and Norina moves in, completely making over the house and her own wardrobe from top to bottom, as she prepares to head off to the theater without her new husband. Ultimately, the miserly Don Pasquale is so put-out—literally of his own life and house—that he is relieved upon discovering he has been duped, and is happy to hand over Norina to his nephew, while agreeing to restore his inheritance.

This silly story makes for many delightful moments, including Norina's truly comical "See, I am ready with love to surround him," and the servants' hilarious confusion in Act II and III, along with Norina's "Bring the jewels at once."

Yet I cannot help asking why this brother and sister team are so intent on teaching the old Don Pasquale a lesson, all for the sake of the rather meek and incompetent Ernesto? Norina is such a wicked flirt and liar that we can hardly understand her love for a boy so shocked by the announcement of Don Pasquale's marriage, he is ready to leave home and inheritance behind.Obviously, the two, brother and sister, do have something at stake. By pretending to marry Don Pasquale, the penniless Norina comes into great wealth, part of which most certainly will go, at the old man's death, to her lover.

But given her huge deceptions, even if they all turn out for the best, one has to wonder whether she will make such a poor boob a good wife. Certainly Ernesto is even more able to be hood-winked than his uncle.

By the time of the finale, "Heaven, what do you say?" there is actually little to be said. The heaven that has been invoked is one in which Norina has metaphorically cleaned the house of both men, who previously lived in a barren, cobweb-encrusted manor (at least in the Met production) existing, similarly, in lives basically empty and unused. I guess the question is, will Norina return the jewels or wear them to the theater each night?

New York, November 15, 2010

Brussels--Into the Congo (on my 2010 visit to Belgium)

2011-03-26T07:56:00.000-07:00

BRUSSELS—INTO THE CONGO

On the afternoon of June 3, 2010, the group of publishers with whom I was exploring Flemish literature were taken by bus to the small, but lovely town of Mechlin, where at the bookshop De Zondvloed we were fed wine, cheeses, sliced meats, and good bread. The bookstore was a large, two-storied place, with a reading occurring even as we dined, in another part of the building. One cannot imagine such a well-stocked busy bookstore in small town America, but Mechlin is midway between Antwerp and Brussels, and perhaps can depend on travelers scurrying between the two cities. It was certainly a perfect stop along our route.

After lunch, several authors, including Stefan Brjs, Rachida Lamrabet, Yves Petry, and Annelies Verbeke, spoke about their work, read short passages, and were interviewed (quite incapably, I felt) by the Flemish journalist Elke Vandersypen.
She sounded more like a provincial American journalist, without a clue of what a writer is and does.

We left Mechlin around 3:00 p.m. and continued to Brussels, where at the beautiful Grand Place we were given about an hour to simply tour alone or together. I chose the former, and quickly walked through the tourist-filled streets near the great square, indulging in some famed Belgium fries along the way, after clearly disappointing the chef by refusing any of the dozens of sauces provided in which to dip them. I've never like fries with sauces, but in Belgium it is almost a requirement, and clearly, etiquette demands it.

After finishing as many of the fries as I could, I sought out a bar, in this case a gay one, to get a drink and wash my hands. Although I personally liked all of the publishers, the fact that we had been compelled to be with each other for so many days, and that I was now completely surrounded by tourists who milled around the streets in large, laterally sliding gangs, made me seek out a place of silence where I might catch up on my daily diary and even, possibly, write. A gay bar at 3:30 in the afternoon would be as still as a tomb, I thought to myself. And, yes, it was quiet, perfectly delightful with only the bartender who might speak.

When I rejoined the group at a large restaurant nearby for coffee, Brussels waffles, and ice-cream, they asked me where I had been, and I told them. Some were confounded. How did you find a gay-bar? "Well," I paused, "it was called L'homo erectus! But I would have sniffed it out even if it had had a less ridiculous moniker. Gays know how to do that by habit." In truth, I hadn't been to a gay bar in decades and probably would never have discovered an appropriate place for such delicious silence in most cities, where gays and straights now drink together in what had formerly been exclusionary places.

Our guest at this high-caloric gala was the author David Van Reybrouck, whose Congo. Een geschiedenis (Congo: A History) some of us had perused at our publisher meetings a few days before. It was a hefty-looking, beautifully produced tome that had received raves in the Flemish press. David was a quite-charming and brilliant man, a philosopher and archeologist by training. He'd gone to the Congo to research this book, living there for a long period of time and befriending an ancient, but clearly entertaining man who had lived there as a child under Belgium rule. Van Reybrouck's history, beginning from a time before Stanley's arrival, brought his readers up-to-date with the country's current economic crises.

Van Reybrouck read a chapter, and discussed the book as a whole. But immediately after, I interrupted. "You know, David, this is clearly a marvelously brilliant work, but—and I say this with some hesitation—perhaps with the exception of Ascheoug and Luchterhand—you are trying to sell this book to the wrong people. I would love to publish such a book, but it would be a huge and very expensive undertaking, and we are all primarily literary publishers!"

Barbara Epler, from New Directions, agreed. "I was very honored, in fact, that the book was offered to us, but we are not your kind of publishers, and we could never do it properly. You need some university press, like Chicago or the University of California Press," she concluded.

"Or even a large commercial publisher," I added. "I don't see why a larger commercial publisher would not want to publish this book. It's looks to be wonderful!" Both of us and others suggested some publisher names and agents. And he seemed appreciative, if a little taken aback by our inabilities to take on such a title.

But the interchange made for a kind of momentarily intense relationship, and I couldn't help but to tell him about my childhood experiences at writing musicals in the basement. "When I was...I must of been 12 or 13...after I'd fallen in love with Broadway musicals, I attempted to write my own musicals in the basement of our house. We had a small piano there, and, although I couldn't really play it, I'd tap out tunes, and sing them and dance. Yes, it had to have been when I was 13 because it was 1960, the year of the Congo's independence from Belgium. I wrote a work entitled Rain on a Lonely Street, about a Midwestern family that had gone to the Congo as missionaries (I was big on missionaries as a child), and got caught up in the battles of February 1959. The father, a minister, was killed, and the mother and son had a difficult time in leaving Brazzaville, in part because they had no way to travel and also because they were committed to the people with whom they had so long lived. I still remember the major song, sung by the stranded son:

Rain on a lonely, lonely street
Will it never stop, this sleet.
The mud up to our knees, please
God, let it ease.

For me then, it was a great, romantic symphony. I now perceive it as a really ghastly piece. Why rain, and why was he so lonely? Perhaps because of the death of his father. But at the time, in my imagination, it represented a significant inter-cultural relationship.

Everybody laughed heartily. But Van Reybrouck was astounded. Had some young American Iowa boy really been so moved by the Congo and the events there that he had written of it way back then? "Yes, it seemed startlingly real to me, the news of the revolution and its aftermath. I must have read some place that missionaries had been stranded and murdered.

Soon after came the cakes and waffles and various ice creams and silence as we sat consuming them in delight.

I recently read that David's book has been accepted for publication by Ecco, a imprint of HarperCollins.

Again, we were given a bit of free time before we were to all meet up at the amazing Passa Porta bookshop. On the roof of the shop, we were served an excellent dinner, afterwards moving down into the large shop itself.

Passa Porta, much like its name, is a hub for international writing, serving not only as a seller of books but as a kind of literary center which provides grants, with the support of the Flemish government, to foreign artists to come and stay for periods of time near the bookstore, allowing them time to write and perform. Among the artists have been Richard Powers, Tod Wodicka, Phillippa Yaa de Villiers, and Alan Cherchesov. It is, in short, the kind of bookstore that I would have had for Sun & Moon and my nonprofit Contemporary Arts Educational Project, accomplishing a mix of publishing, bookselling, and direct literary support. However, in the context of US funding, we could never achieve that.

On the evening of our attendance there were readings by four prose writers, Gie Bogaert, Elvis Peeters, Peter Terrin, and the intensely handsome Dimitri Verhoulst, and, also, two poets who I planned to publish in a Flemish poetry anthology I was preparing with help from the Flemish Literature Fund and their poet-expert, Tom Van de Voorde. Both of the poets, Paul Bogaert and Peter Holvoet-Hanssen, were wonderful writers. While Holvoet-Hanssen was more involved with a kind a loony narrative work, performing with puppets and objects, Bogaert was a more abstract maker of language, with hilariously funny tropes that were presented with a straight-face.

After the readings we drank quite late into the night, and I talked with enormous pleasure, primarily to the poets. We reached Antwerp long after midnight, all seeking out the rather low-life bar across the street from our hotel. After only two beers it became apparent that my now dear friend Barbara Epler was getting quite tipsy, and I offered to accompany her back to the hotel, the two of us staggering across the street, through the lobby. The clock in my room read 2:30 a.m.!

Los Angeles, March 25, 2011

Antwerp--Walking (on my trip to the Netherlands and Belgium)

2011-03-23T07:45:00.000-07:00

the publishers invited in June 2010

the famed entry to the Antwerp railroad station

Letterenhuis (The House of Literature)

Boerentoren (the farmers' tower)

Antwerp City Hall and Guild Houses

ANTWERP—WALKING

In June 2010 I was invited, along with publishers from several countries*, to Antwerp to explore Flemish literature and meet with publishers of Flemish writers. I have long enjoyed Flemish writing, and had already published Stijn Streuvels, Maurice Gilliams (on both Sun & Moon and Green Integer), Paul Snoek, and Hugo Claus, and had made commitments to publish Ivo Michelis and Paul van Ostaijen. Yet I had never been to Belgium or even to the more popular Amsterdam!

What I hadn't prepared for was that in the past couple of years I had begun to suffer from serious arthritis, and although I could walk for long periods, after a few hours my knees gave way and both legs ached from the knees down. Yet the busy schedule the Flemish Literature Fund had prepared involved, primarily, city walks.

I love walking, and in my younger days I walked European cities for hours at a time. I think I have walked the length and width of Paris several times, and I just been to Paris to visit Joe Ross, Laura Wilber and their children (for whom I represent a kind of uncle) the few days before I arrived in Antwerp. In Paris I had also done a great deal of walking with the kids, including a long walk through Jardin du Luxembourg (where the children played happily in an enclosed playground), to the Marché Saint Quentin from their apartment on Boulevard de Magenta, and, by myself, a walk from Blvd. Magenta to the Left Bank for an appointment with publishers at P.O.L, which unintentionally included a walk back. So by the time I reached Antwerp with my huge suitcase I described as being akin to traveling with a fat aunt, my legs were already in pain.

Yet the moment one reaches Antwerp by train, the architecture overwhelms everything else. Barbara Epler, head editor of New Directions, saw the station so wonderfully described in W. B. Sebald's The Emigrants. Having not yet read that Sebald book, I, moving up the dark swath of the escalator, was hit in the eyes by the visage of a gold insigniaed and glass wall of stunning beauty as if I'd suddenly arrived in a great cathedral instead of a mere place of passage. And for a few minutes, the aches I had been feeling disappeared.

I quickly taxied to our lovely hotel, a former convent, called Elzenveld. There was the original chapel and sculptures in the courtyard below our windows, one of Gilliams. I visited a bar across the street where I had good soup and a drink. That evening we were invited to a festive party at the offices of the Flemish Literature Fund. A representative from the Fund arrived at 6:00 to take us, via tram, to the offices, but the affair was primarily a cocktail event, which meant hours of standing. I simply had to sit, taking me somewhat away from the center of the conversation. I would stand for a while and sit again. Stand and sit.

The group decided that it would be preferable to walk back to the hotel, so I trudged along, knowing that I would suffer again the next day. I think it was then that I realized I was the eldest of the group, maybe only 5-6 years older than Asbjørn, but several years older than most of them. My seemingly decrepit condition truly angered me, for a few years before I'd have joyously walked from sunrise to sunset!

The next morning, after an early breakfast with Czech publisher Marek Seckar, there was a walking tour of the city, as we passed by the Grand Place and the Cathedral before arriving at and touring (standing even while the docent lectured) the Heritage Library Hendrik Conscience. The visit lasted longer than expected, so we did not get to see the Carolus Borromeus church on the way to the House of Literature.

The House of Literature (Letterenhuis) is an amazing place, a museum of literature, impossible to imagine in the US. There were books, informative panels of dozens of writers, films, letters, and other matter of all the great Flemish authors from the beginning of the breakup of Belgium from the Netherlands in 1830. The tour occasioned a crash history in Flemish politics, literature, and the language, Dutch with some French-sounding words and other colloquial differences. The lecture helped me to better understand the prickly forces which are now threatening to split Belgium apart, and by pointing up the self-consciousness of Flemish writers, it helped to explain why I had been so taken with almost all the authors from Flanders I had read. In part, it is this sense of difference, so potent in an otherwise French-speaking country, that somewhat isolates the Flemish authors from even their Dutch neighbors. And, at the same time, the dense and dark history of Flanders including, to varying degrees, some Flemish citizens capitulating to or, at least, associating with the Nazis, makes for a darker vision, so apparent in Hugo Claus's work, for the contemporary Flemish writers.

Our next walk was to the WPG Publishers Group offices, where we had lunch and met with three presses, all of which I had previously dealt with: De Arbeiderspers, De Bezige Bij, and Querido. In my meetings, perhaps the only time we were permitted to sit, I updated them about my projects and discussed missing contractual items.

Following those meetings, we walked to a bar near the bay where Jewish immigrants had once arrived. From there, author Joseph Pearce, having written a book on his Jewish background, took us on a tour across the city to the Jewish quarter, where we entered a bookstore where he read from passages of the memoir-fiction.

Another short walk brought us to a brasserie near the railroad station, where I ordered steak "bleau," as did Asbjørn, with my pommes frittes. I found the steak so rare that was difficult to cut.

Finally, we walked the long way back again to Elzenveld, late in the night. I ached all over.
The next morning we walked again, this time at 8:30 in the morning, to the Antwerp Museum of contemporary art, where we were lectured to by the boek.be distributors—a truly uninspired event, during which, for the first time in my life, I kept nodding off—followed by a round table discussion by Flemish critics Tom Van Imschoot, Jos Borré, and Matthijs de Ridder. In the afternoon the Fund had scheduled more publisher meetings with Amstel, Contact, Wereldbibliotheek, De Geus, and Podium. In short spaces where we were allowed free time between meetings, I walked down to the galleries of the museum, which were displaying a vast array of Flemish contemporary art, some pieces of which appeared like imitations of other European work, other pieces of which were quite fascinating.

After some soup and quiche at Patine's, we were taken to a beautiful house, now rented out for just such events, where we heard readings and saw films by writers Rodaan Al Galidi, Paul Bogaert, Rachida Lamrabet, Jeroen Olyslaegers, Koen Peeters, and Paul Verhaeghen, all published by one of the largest Flemish-Dutch publishers, Meulenhoff/Manteau. A lovely dinner followed with, once more, a long trek back to Elenveld.

On June 3, we were slated to travel by bus in Brussels, the trip I describe elsewhere. But beforehand, we were slated again for a walking tour of Antwerp, this one with the gay author and charming raconteur, Tom Lanoye. He took us first to the famed Theo eyeglass shop, sporting some of the most charming and outrageous eye glasses available, popular with celebrities throughout the world. I dared to ask for the prices, whereupon our group got a small sampling of the range of the glasses available, from relatively low prices to eyewear that cost thousands of dollars.

We then visited, across the street, Boerentoren (the farmers' tower), the tallest building in Antwerp and first skyscraper on the European continent, from whose glass-walled top we could witness the entire landscape of the city. There Tom talked about his own writing and read us some of his work.

Tom later took us to a fashion designer several blocks away, in the fashion district, for a short visit before we caught our bus to the town of Meclin and the city of Brussels.

By the end of these three Antwerp days, I had almost loss all feeling in my legs, while my feet were swollen and red. It seemed sad that a walking trip of a city like Antwerp was no longer a possibility for me. I was pleased, however, by what I had witnessed.

It was interesting to me that in the Elsschot novel I read upon my return to the US, the plot consisted mostly of scenes where the characters walked the streets of Antwerp, lost and searching for a woman they had previously met. Still, the train and its glorious station is the image you take with you as you leave.

*The other publishers were Asbjørn Øverås (from Aschehoug in Norway), Giovanna de Angelis (from Fazi in Italy) Seid and Sibila Serdarvić (from Fraktura in Croatia), Marek Seckar (from Host in the Czech Republic), Christine Popp (from Luchterhand in Germany), Babara Epler (from New Directions in the US), and Beata Stasińska (from W.A.B. in Poland).

Amsterdam, June 5, 2010
Los Angeles, June 10, 1010

Between Who and What (on gay culture early in the 20th century and American gay artists in mid-century)

2011-03-20T11:08:00.000-07:00

Samuel Barber

Aaron Copeland

BETWEEN WHO AND WHAT

Willy The Third Sex (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007)
Michael S. Sherry Gay Artists in Modern American Culture: An Imagined Conspiracy (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2007)
Frances Stonor Saunders The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000)

Among the many books published under the name Willy—the pseudonym of Henry Gauthier-Villars—was Troisieme Sexe, published originally in 1927 and now translated for the first time into English as The Third Sex by Lawrence R. Schehr. It is unlikely that Willy himself penned the work; Gauthier-Villars, a man one might describe as a true rake and a virulent anti-Semite, hired ghostwriters to compose most of the over 50 titles published under his name, including books of the early Claudine novels, written by his wife, Colette.

Although this strange publication clearly reviles homosexuality—an interesting phenomenon given Colette’s later affairs with Nathalie Barney, the Marquise de Belbeuf, and other women—focusing on what the author and Willy clearly see as an “inversion” of human behavior and a threat to human morality, the book simultaneously is so utterly fascinated with its subject, with the perversities and titillating aberrations it describes, that what might have first seemed as a homophobic tract, by book’s end is perceived as an important document of homosexual behavior between the wars and a unintentional celebration of homosexuality, particularly given the sensationalist insistence of the extensiveness of the “vice” it documents.

An author with a clearly French bias, the Willy stand-in of this book can hardly resist proclaiming the entire German nation as “putting up with it,” embracing homosexuality not only in the clubs, “kabatretten,” and dance halls, but in bars such as the Adonis, “where, after two A.M., ephebes dance completely naked on the tables and show revealing tattoos; there is the Three Stars and especially the Como, a colossal bazaar of inversion, where you can see, at the back of pea-green velvet boxes, the honorable Business Counsel Siegfried Müller, the honorable Rechtsanwalt Siegmund Schmidt, the honorable bank director Kahn-Gugenheim arouse a pink ephebe, with curls like a little lamb, while the orchestra plays Isolde’s Liebestod or the mystical prelude to Parsifal.”

If those bacchanals, so temptingly laid out for a sympathetic reader, are not enough to titillate, the author of The Third Sex moves on to describe what he calls a “pederastophile movement” throughout the country, hidden behind organized clubs and societies such as the “Club of Noble Sociability,” the “Friendship League,” etc, seemingly upright organizations which gather on weekends for dramatic readings, theatrical performances, and “bad-boy” dances. Special gay casinos, trips for men only, and newspaper ads are catalogued as other German activities of the homosexual communities before the author moves on to briefly discuss such “perversions” in Italy, the US (Harvard and Yale and the American military are evidently particularly rich centers for the vice), and Asia.

After what he describes as “A Bit of Pyschology,” in which he uses Gide against himself and spends an inordinate amount of space on homosexuality in animals, the author moves boldly forward in outlining famous homosexuals of history (Alcibiades, Rousseau, Wilde, Lorrain, Proust, Rostand, Verlaine, Rimbaud) before moving on to a discussion of other locations common to “the third sex”: “Balls without Women Dancers,” “special” bars, art galleries, cocaine dens, and Turkish baths!

Before turning to the topic of homosexuality in literature, Willy briefly discusses “Varied Opinions,” including the theories of some doctors who claim to be able to “modify” the “disease” by grafting testicles and other strange non-scientific atrocities. But even here the author seems to satirize his book’s momentary “seriousness,” as he quips—after describing a possible cure of grafting a male with a monkey testicle—“It would seem, a priori, that a monkey graft should inspire us with the desires not for women, but for female monkeys.”

After brief and rather meaningless discussions of the “inverted theater” (which may remind us, once again, of the attacks against American gay playwrights of the 1960s described below) and the effects of the music hall, the author comes to rest with a brief, but fascinating discussion of whether the brazenness of the “inverted” being is a purposeful publicity of homosexuality, asking, in short, should the third sex remain “mum” or publicize itself. Thus Willy ends this strange and fascinating text with the old question: is it better to stay in the closet or openly celebrate one’s sexuality.

The questions of Willy’s book are those we seem to still be facing at the last quarter of the century as outlined in Michael S. Sherry’s intellectually engaged study of Gay Artists in American Culture, a book which centers on a perceived conspiracy of homosexuals in the early to mid-1960s: a conspiracy that resulted in questions of not only who is a gay or lesbian artist—what to make socially and morally of homosexual behavior—but what was he or she, what was the effect of sexuality upon one’s art?

Sherry explores US attitudes toward homosexuality through an extended and often brilliant discussion of gay musicians, dramatists, dancers, and writers from the late 1940s through the 1960s, determining that, although American culture was perhaps consistently homophobic, there was a significant change from the early post-war—a period in which, while there were occasional police raids and other publicized “outings” of gay figures, there was no “outright” denial of queer talent” nor an “outright assault”—to the mid-1960s, when, he argues, there was a near-unified belief that homosexuality was not only a corruption of American values but a real threat to American power.

Some of these changes had to do with the very success and openness of American gay figures: in music Virgil Thompson, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Gian-Carlo Menotti and others were increasingly seen as icons representing in their work not only American values, but the very substance of what it meant to be an American; similarly, in drama, playwrights such as Tennessee Williams, William Inge, Arthur Laurents and later, Edward Albee, seemed in their works to get to the very heart of the American experience; writers James Baldwin, Gore Vidal, and John Cheever equally seemed to signify Americanness. Accordingly, as the Cold War coalesced, and American political and military leaders—employing a wide range of American institutions and covert funding sources (see Frances Stonor Saunders’ revelatory book, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters)—sought out these same individuals and others to represent American cultural dominance to the world at large. The coming together of these two forces—the very popularity of these gay artists’ work and the felt need to represent their contributions as emblems for the American cause—brought them under heightened attention, often revealing the “open secret” of their sexuality to a wider range of critics and audiences alike.

Sherry’s insistence of these shifts in thought from 1960-1964 accord with my observations of what I described of the “conservativeness” of that period in “The Death of the Mother” in My Year 2004 and in essays in others of my volumes. Sherry, moreover, produces a plethora of commentary by figures from both the right and the left, from both positions of high and popular culture ranging from Jess Stearn’s popular best-seller The Sixth Man, to articles in Life (the one I mention also in “The Death of the Mother”), Time, and other popular magazines, and homophobic comments by feminist Betty Friedan to support his contentions. Some of these numerous citations seem to be caught up in the same “frenzy” that he describes as being at work against the queer artists. While the major figure of The Manchurian Candidate may certainly be a “mamma’s boy,” one might remind Sherry that he is most emphatically heterosexual in the movie—hardly what one might describe as a “Tea and Sympathy”-like figure the author makes him out to be [see My Year 2002]. While Susan Sontag certainly has mixed feelings about the notion of “camp,” associated with gay culture, one might have noted that Sontag has mixed feelings about most of the issues of which she writes, including the French noveau roman writers; and, in a book where Sherry decries his own study’s absence of lesbian artists (most of the issues raised in this period were directed exclusively at male gay artists), it seems strange that he does not even mention the “open secret” of Sontag’s own sexuality.

In general, however, Sherry’s copious research is revelatory and its examples of homophobic rage are quite terrifying. Yet his primary example of the effects of this American reaction to gays brings up as many questions as it attempts to explain the homophobic attacks of the period.

Clearly more at home in the world of music than in the other arts, Sherry delineates the career of Samuel Barber and its culmination in the disastrous opera premier of Antony and Cleopatra at the Met upon its move to Lincoln Center. Nearly all of the participants in this work—which was perceived as a grand failure by critics of the time—were gay artists: conductor Thomas Schippers, director Franco Zeffirelli, choreographer Alvin Ailey, and the work’s composer Samuel Barber. Sherry brilliantly outlines the critical climate of the time, when the more popular and musically lyrical writing of artists such as Copeland, Bernstein, Menotti and Barber where often set in opposition to the twelve-tone composers, most of whom were heterosexual. Accordingly, issues of melodiousness, prettiness, showiness, theatricality, preciosity, etc—all connected with the queer composers—were often pitted in homophobic discussions against the lean, spare, manly, difficult (and heterosexual) twelve-tone compositions. The lush, over-the-top dramatic endeavor of the Zeffirelli-Barber production, accordingly, was associated by many critics as failing precisely because it is was the product of gay men, men able only to express the surface of experience—a criticism often used as well against gay playwrights Williams, Inge, and Albee in their presentations of marriage and family life.

Sherry quite brilliantly untangles numerous other issues involved: the pretensions of cultural organizations such as the Met, the Cold-War boasting of cultural superiority, and Barber’s own misgivings with both subject and the time-frame in which he was to have composed a “masterpiece.” And the author traces various reactions to the opera over the years since its premiere, a period in which some critics have been much kinder to the work. But the fact remains that the attack on Barber—with all of its links to gay-bashing—along with Barber’s own decisions due to the break up of his relationship with Menotti and his own failing health meant an early end to the composer’s career. Along with Sherry’s sympathies with Barber’s fate, I have lamented a similar situation regarding Menotti’s career [see My Year 2007], and one can only wonder if Barber had lived as long a life as Albee, for example, (Albee is currently 80, having written two new plays in the past two years, Barber was age 71 at the time of his death) whether he might not have composed numerous other important works.

One must face the fact, however, that in the context of the early 1960s, before the embracement of a postmodern sensibility, Barber’s work was old-fashioned in its European-based melodiousness. And the focus on Barber’s musical career obscures the fact that in other forms of art the same homophobic forces were very much on different sides. Despite the attacks on gay playwrights in Stanley Kauffmann’s 1961 piece for the Times, “Homosexual Drama and Its Disguises” (an article I very much recall reading), the vast differences between the more expressionist Williams, the realist Inge, and the absurdist Albee did not really allow for one notion of what gay art looked like. In poetry, moreover—an area Sherry barely discusses—linguistic complexity and abstraction was more linked to the gay poets such as Frank O’Hara, James Schuyler, and John Ashbery than the narrative-based and certainly more “old-fashioned” heterosexual favorites of the time, Robert Lowell and John Berryman. Allen Ginsberg’s work, which linked him to the bardic traditions of Blake and Whitman, found support with numerous other heterosexual “Beat” authors; similarly many of the New York School writers who followed O’Hara, Schuyler, and Ashbery were quite obviously heterosexual. In short, the kind of formal issues Sherry sites that created opposition in the musical world between gay and straight men, were very different in the other arts.

Accordingly, while Sherry’s ability to point to a perceived gay conspiracy results in fascinating reading, I am uncertain what effect that hysteria had. Clearly it did not change lives in the same way as the McCarthy hearings of the previous decade. One might almost see this period, one in which I myself felt as a period of ineffectual restraints, as a kind of final swelling of prejudicial resentment by those hating homosexuality before their way of thinking collapsed.* It reminds me very much of the virulent attacks of many supposedly loving church-goers upon gays today who demand the same marital rights as heterosexuals. Their venom may be painful, but the changes they oppose are inevitable, country after country (even mythically macho-Spain) recognizing that homosexuality does not necessarily represent a who or a what, but simply another kind of love.

Los Angeles, March 13, 2008
Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XIII (Summer 2008).

*Obviously those kinds of hateful attacks have not entirely disappeared. Only the other day the media reported Oklahoma legislator Sally Kern’s remarks—echoing the statements by many 1960s homophobes—that homosexuality presages the fall of all cultures. Astonishingly, Stern proclaimed that she was without any prejudice against gays!

At the Edge of the Continent (a visit to LA by Ko Un and Lee Shang-Wha)

2011-03-12T10:40:00.000-08:00

Ko Un and Lee Shang-Wha

Ko Un and me at UCLA

Ko Un at the home of Hyon Chough

AT THE EDGE OF THE CONTINENT

In April of 2010 I had the opportunity to host the noted Korean poet Ko Un and his wife Lee Shang-Wha. After a reading at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, the couple flew to Los Angeles, where I picked them up on April 21st at the Los Angeles International Airport and drove them to the JJ Grand Hotel in the vast area of the city we call Koreatown. In part because Ko does not speak English, and the hotel contains a fine Korea restaurant, I thought it would be more comfortable for them to stay in that part of the city, which is also not terribly far from our house.

Clearly they were tired by the time we reached the hotel, so we didn't speak much that evening, and I quickly checked them in and departed. The next morning, however, would begin early and include great deal of speaking and socializing.

At 9:00 I met them at the hotel, where I had arranged a press reception in the hotel restaurant. Two different reporters from Korean newspapers were in attendance, and soon were interviewing Ko Un, snapping his photograph and sharing experiences. A woman from the Korean consulate also arrived and spoke to Ko Un and Lee Shang-Wha. My role consisted primarily of greeting the journalists and introducing them to the poet. Typical of their disinterest in international activities in their city, the Los Angeles Times sent no one, while even the event had beforehand been mentioned in the Korean papers. My cleaners told me they had read that Ko Un was in town for a reading when I mentioned his name the week before.

Meanwhile Lee Shang-Wha, always the manager of Ko's activities, selected the poems he would be reading later in the day, and handed me copies of them in English, I having previously told her that I would be reading the poems in translation.

Soon Howard joined me and, together, we drove them to the University of California, Los Angeles, where I had arranged a reading in the Korean Department. The faculty, in turn, had planned a pleasant lunch at the Faculty Club. The professors and staff, perhaps all in a little awe of Ko Un, were somewhat uncomfortably quiet, but Howard and I peppered Ko with questions, and finally the faculty began to speak up.

After a short tour of the Korean Department offices, they took us to a large classroom in Royce Hall where the reading was to be held. Seated at a table we faced a filled room, including my wonderful intern/now typesetter, Pablo Capra, who I'd hired for a couple of days to sell books and take photographs.

Ko is a wonderful reader, a true spellbinder, and I tried to keep up with his obvious sense of drama and humor. We had both been given glasses of wine, so when reading one poem about a drunk, he began with a sip, so too did I, reading it in English a few minutes after. The room burst into spontaneous laughter, and Ko beamed with approval.

The reading ended with a few questions and a gift from one woman of a Korean-style painting. We sold a substantial amount of books.

We then drove on the Mulholland Drive to the beautiful home of businesswoman Hyon Chough, whose stunning glass house overlooks both sides of the city, south to the Stone Canyon Reservoir and, in the distance, the ocean and north to the San Fernando Valley. Before entering the house we walked the grounds, Ko standing at the very summit to looking south, so close to the edge that I, who suffer some vertigo, grew frightened. "Come back, further back," I begged him, but he remained at the very edge of the cliff, almost as if he were some pioneer standing at the edge of the continent looking off into the distance. I was terrified: what if he fell? Would I be the indirect cause of his death? Fortunately, he eventually turned back, joining us in the gloriously lit house.

Hyon and I had invited a large number of the art community, Korean friends, and several poets (including Dennis Phillips and Martin Nakell), who all dined splendidly on the dozens of different dishes of Japanese and California cuisine. We also did a reading in the vast living room, but my voice was beginning to give out, as I began to develop what would become laryngitis, so we cut it short.

As we left the place I asked Ko and Lee what they had thought of the house. He, a Buddhist monk, quietly said, "I prefer my simple house." We all laughed.

Having kept them very busy the day before, On Friday, I allowed them the entire morning alone, during which time Ko Un, so Lee later reported, had taken a long walk, seeing much of the Korean part of the city, an area that used to be somewhat devastated, but is now almost entirely rebuilt and quite stylish, with new high-rises, apartments, and stores.

About 4:00 we picked up the pair again, and this time took them to an excellent Japanese restaurant at the edge of Beverly Hills. The head of the Japanese Department at the Los Angeles County Museum, Rob Singer, had given me a card of the restaurant's owner and handwritten, in Japanese, a message to him. Accordingly, we were served a number of special dishes, in course after course.

We then drove to the Korean Cultural Center near our home where the fairly large theater was packed, new chairs having been placed in front of the permanent seating. The crowd was almost entirely Korean, save a few friends of ours, again the Dennis, Martin, and also Rebecca Goodman, Deborah Meadows and Thérèse Bachand. By this time I had nearly lost my voice, and it crackled when I spoke. Yet I valiantly carried on, explaining my problem to the audience, but still getting across the spirit of the poems as much as I could in English. Pablo sold hundreds of copies of both of our Ko Un titles. Others drove Ko and his wife home, and we returned tired but pleased.

The next morning we picked up the couple and took them, sad to see them go, to the airport. Throughout it all Ko (then 78) appeared full of energy and not in the least bit tired. By Saturday I had completely lost my voice and was coming down with a terrible cold. But what fun it had been.

Los Angeles, March 12, 2010

Two Publishers (on a conversation between Polish publisher Jerzy Illg and me in Korea)

2011-02-23T08:21:00.000-08:00

TWO PUBLISHERS

Although many, if not most of the writers I publish think of me primarily as a publisher, I think of myself as a poet, fiction writer, critic, and memoirist who is also a publisher. I love publishing, to which the 400-some books I have published to date attest. But my heart is in the process of writing, not in the art of publishing; indeed if I had a great amount of money (or even any money to spend on publishing) I would pay someone else to do everything except making the initial selection.

These feelings were apparent when I was invited as an author to the 2010 World Writers' Festival in Seoul, Korea. Similarly, Polish publisher, Jerzy Illg, whose Znak press publishes much of the writing of Czesław Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, felt delighted to be there as a poet—even though he had published just one thin book.

We both recognized that we (and perhaps some of other writers as well) were there only because of Ko Un's suggestion. Both of us publish Ko Un. But that didn't diminish the joy of being featured so prominently in banners and placards throughout the city and on the campuses of Dankook University. And I think we both admired each other's essay more than the writings of some of the prominent international writers and critics included in the event.

Both of us also shared a sense of humor about the conference, whose seriousness was, in some small way, subverted by the "continually reincarnated" boy-genius, who we both agreed Ko Un is, a man with the force and energy of eternal youth, accompanied by the attendant freshness of thought. Despite their roots in traditional Korean writing and their relationships with Western narrative, Ko Un's poems are full of an energetic spirit that break out impulsively with dissociative images and sounds. He is, consequently, both a traditionalist and an experimenter, in the Modernist sense of that word.

Although Jerzy seemed to take himself less seriously than I as a poet, we both shared a kind of mad passion for literature, and, consequently, for much of our lives we felt driven to become publishers. Despite the fact that Jerzy worked for a much larger and financially sounder publishing house, I felt, in the fact that for many years he suffered under the Soviet repression (a much harsher environment than my penniless one) that as an independent publisher he was one the few people I had met in a long time who could truly comprehend just how lonely and difficult (logically impossible) it has been to publish all the books I have without money and hardly any staff. Talking with Jerzy I suddenly felt very old and tired, but perhaps it was just the beer we were drinking that made me feel that way. Both of us enjoyed drinking, and were delighted to find the small bar where we chatted for several hours.

There we discovered, through those shared "difficulties," that in some profound sense we understood each other—not that we felt sorry for ourselves; we had both chosen, even if by accident, our roles. And both of us expressed our love and pride in our endeavors. We agreed we still love what we do—at least most days! Each of us, in our own different way, has lived a remarkable life, he as a close friend and ally to Miłosz, Brodsky, and others (he is the Polish publisher, for example, of Mario Vargas Llosa, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature while we were visiting Seoul), I with a whole array of very different figures described in these pages. Accordingly, we felt a deep rapport.

Hearing Jerzy's descriptions of his youth when he joined an atelier in a Polish industrial town with no connections to culture, and where several evenings each week a woman sat reading the German texts of Hermann Hesse, studies of Eastern religion, and numerous other writings, translating them into Polish as she read—texts, totally unavailable in Polish, that revealed completely new worlds to him—brought tears to my eyes.

"When I first traveled to the West, to England," Jerzy continued, "I went into a bookstore and found, to my amazement, row upon row, in many editions, of my now beloved texts. I was astounded. There they were, in all their glory, waiting on the shelf for a people who no longer needed to care for them, while for me they stood upon those shelves as sacred artifacts. My wife was furious with me because I could not bring myself to leave that spot."

"How disappointed I was," continued Jerzy, "when I met Lawrence Ferlinghetti. I was attending an editors seminar at Stanford University—an excellent series of courses—and called Ferlinghetti, out of my love of Ginsberg and the Beats, to ask if could meet him. Finally, he agreed, and I went quite expectantly to the famous City Lights bookstore.

"After introducing myself, he growled out, 'What are you doing at a dreadful place like Stanford?' I tried to explain the wonderful things I was learning, but he waved it away.

"I switched topics, attempting to ask him about the important events surrounding Ginsberg's Howl, its censorship and the trial.

"'That's old business,' he grumped. 'Let's talk about something more contemporary and important!'

"'What do you think is more important?' I innocently asked.

"'I've just gotten back from San Salvador,' he pronounced, 'where the rebels are successfully overtaking the government....'

"'I'm sorry,' I responded, 'but I've lived years under Communist repression, and I do not sympathize with this.'

"He called me a Rightist.

"Tell me,' I came back, 'has there ever been a Communist or Marxist government that has lived up to its utopian claims? Look at Cuba or North Korea, etc. etc.'

"Needless to say, there was no more conversation between us. I feel saddened that one of my former heroes, who fought against government censorship, was now promoting governments that surely would not allow a Ginsberg, a Miłosz, a Brodsky, or any other poet I loved."

I have my own problems with Stanford, given what I know of the English Department and its abysmal treatment of Gilbert Sorrentino and Marjorie Perloff, and when Jerzy began to praise the Hoover Institute, I reminded him that it had once been the home of Condoleza Rice. But I comprehended Jerzy's outrage and his dismissals of "correct" thinking. His perspective was simply more profound than Ferlinghetti's, an outsider's interpretation of reality. All of which reminded me that when it comes to international issues, an ignorance in world affairs is shared by both the right and the left. In order to understand another culture, one had to begin with humility, accepting one's stupidity along with any supposed insights.

Perhaps that's why, despite our vast aesthetic differences, Jerzy and I got on so well. I don't know how he felt, but I found in him a new friend.

Seoul, South Korea, October 7, 2010

Six Degrees of Insanity (on Goodman's, Sellars' and Adams' Nixon in China)

2011-02-21T07:55:00.000-08:00

SIX DEGREES OF INSANITY

Alice Goodman (libretto), Peter Sellars (director), John Adams (composer) Nixon in China / The Metropolitan Opera, New York / the production I saw was a live in HD screening at the Rave Theater, Westchester, California

Although most of the critics who I read (Mark Swed in the Los Angeles Times, Anthony Tommasini in The New York Times, and Anne Midgette of The Washington Post) agreed that the Met's new production of Nixon in China was excellent and long overdue, there was a sense among the three that the plot of the work was static and that one character, in particular, Henry Kissinger (sung by Richard Paul Fink), was a figure of parody whereas the others were treated more seriously. In a piece by Max Frankel, published in The New York Times a couple of days before the live HD airing, the former editor of the Times—who was with Nixon in China and won a Pulitzer Prize for covering the trip—squarely asked the question which the other reviewers only intimated:

...Why bother, as in Nixon, to lure us to a fictional enterprise with
contemporary characters and scenes from an active memory bank?
Why use actualities, or the manufactured actualities of our television
screens and newspapers, to fuel the drama?

The answer, he feels, is "obvious but also treacherous," that the use of actual characters helps to "overcome the musty odor that inhabits many opera houses," drawing new audiences into the theater. But, Frankel continues, it brings other dangers with it:

The danger is that despite the verisimilitudes of text, setting and
costume, a viewer's grasp of events may not match the fabric
being woven onstage. What the creators intend to be profundity
may strike the knowing as parody.

Most of the reviewers agreed that the composer, writer, and director did give their figures a range of emotions, both serious and comic, and between acts, Winston Lord (of National Security) assured us backstage that much of the talk between Nixon and Chairman Mao in the First Act was close to what actually was said in their meeting; but all also felt that the opera did move to a kind of parody in the Second Act performance of The Red Detachment of Women, in which Fink, the singer-actor who played Kissinger, also plays a lecherous, Simon Legree-like landowner who has stolen away a young maiden. Fink sings:

She was so hot
I was hard-put
To be polite.
When the first cut
—Come on you slut!—
Scored her brown skin
I started in,
Man upon hen!

Some characterized this scene as surreal and the last act as psychological, as if they were somehow different in tone from the more historicized events in the First Act.

If nothing else, there was a sense that Nixon in China, without a narrative arc, was a bit of a rocky ride. Certainly, at times, while always enjoying the shimmering glory of the music, I too felt that way while watching it. Yet now that I've pondered it for while, I believe I was mistaken, that, in fact, the opera is highly structured and fairly coherent in its tone and presentation of characters.

First of all, John Adams and Peter Sellars are never going to present something that works as a Verdi opera might. Although all may work with a complex weaving of historical events, Verdi's sense of drama is highly embedded in narrative, while Adams and team, postmodern in their approach, eschew what we might call "story."

Nixon in China has "events," but there are presented in a series of tableaux, not unlike some medieval musical productions. Each character gets the chance to reveal his or her selves. But what Alice Goodman, Adams and Sellars are interested in is not so much the outer faces they present to the world, but what these figures are thinking and imagining within. And I think they would have to admit that every figure on their stage is, in one way or another, a bit unhinged; these are, after all—with the exception perhaps of Pat Nixon—people desperate for power. And all are on the edge of insanity.

Even before we meet any of the major characters, the people of China speak in a strange manner that we comprehend is not quite rational thought, as they sing from the text of "The Three Main Rules of Discipline and Eight Points of Attention":

Prompt delivery directly to authorities of all items
confiscated from landlords.
Do not damage crops.
Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses.
Pay for everything you damage.
etc.

As they chant, "The people are the heroes now," even if these "heroes" are highly manipulated and controlled.

Out of the sky drops the Nixons' Spirit of 76, and no sooner does the President descend the airstair, shaking the hand of Premier Chou En-lai, than he begins inwardly calculating the great results of this journey as the filming catches him just in time for the evening news broadcasts in the USA, he hilariously singing out his fascination with his own acts: "News! News! News!

News has a kind of mystery;
When I shook hands with Chou En-lai
On this bare field outside Peking
Just now, the whole world was listening

James Maddalena, who has now sung this role in hundreds of performances, is an amazing actor, who brings off those jowl-shaking absurdities quite brilliantly.

Nixon's and Kissinger's meeting with Premier Chou (Russell Braun) and Chairman Mao (Robert Brubaker) in the next scene is perhaps the most absurd of the entire opera, as the two powerful leaders speak in a series of alternating gnomic jokes, apothegms, and, in Nixon's case, simple American verbal blunders. As Mao becomes more and more incomprehensible ("Founders come first / Then profiteers") in sayings parroted by a wonderful trio of assistants, Nixon attempts his linguistic twists spun from what he believes the Chairman might be saying. It all reminds me, a bit, of the other Peter Seller's performance as the totally innocent and ignorant Chance in the film Being There, where he spouts meaningless sentences interpreted by others to be full of profound significance. Mao and Nixon, one a bit senile, the other a humorless and often depressed being , hit it off beautifully in their mindless chatter, while the more rational Kissinger proclaims to be unable to understand anything, and the Premier sits silently in sufferance.

What that meeting accomplished, an issue clearly of importance in this opera, is questionable. But surely we can feel, and, in Adams' delicious scoring, we can hear the growing friendliness of all figures as they swill down Mai-tai after Mai-tai with toast upon toast. Again, non-drinker Kissinger misses out on all the glorious insanity of the evening.

In Act II we get a chance to see Pat Nixon at the edge. She begins the morning, in fact, downing a couple of needed pills. Like Premier Chou she is in sufferance, and, although excited by the whole trip, she is also exhausted and, we feel, not at all comfortable. The most American of this opera's figures, she flaunts a bright red coat. Flawlessly played by Janis Kelly, Pat comes off as somewhat frail and slightly terrified being as she is rushed through a glass factory (where the workers award her a green elephant) and classrooms in which the students have clearly been told what to say and how to behave, before stopping by the Gate of Longevity and Goodwill, where she sings her touching and slightly pathetic paean to the world she loves:

This is prophetic! I foresee
A time will come when luxury
Dissolves into the atmosphere
Like a perfume, and everywhere
The simple virtues root and branch
And leaf and flower. And on that bench
There we’ll relax and taste the fruit
Of all our actions. Why regret
Life which is so much like a dream?

Yet the homespun images she spins out of her sense of momentary joy—lit-up farm porches, families sitting around the dinner table, church steeples, etc.—are right out of Norman Rockwell paintings and is just as absurd of a vision as are her husband's darker mumblings.

That evening's presentation of The Red Detachment of Women ballet, written by Chiang Ch'ing, Mao's wife—as she so shrilly reminds us later—is experienced by the now overwhelmed Nixons less as an objective performance—in reality the evening ended with enthusiastic praise by the President and First Lady—as from a psychological, inner viewpoint. It is clear that Nixon, as he suggests several times in the opera, admired Kissinger's mind, but he also mocked his ways and apparently disliked the man personally. Accordingly the Nixons both conjure up the evil landowner in their tired travelers' minds, to be, or, least, to look like Kissinger.* Like many an innocent theater-goer, the Nixons become so involved in the story of a poor girl who is saved and then destroyed by refusing to obey Communist doctrine that they confuse drama with reality, breaking into the action of the ballet itself to save and protect the young dancer.

Mark Morris, using some aspects of the original choreography, nicely stages his orderly squadrons of young military dancers against the chaos of events. This is perhaps the most difficult part of the opera, and I am still not sure whether or not it truly succeeds, but it is crucial to our witnessing the truly mad person behind Chiang Ch'ing (Kathleen Kim)—who in real life may have been responsible for hundreds of deaths and had, herself, erratic nerves and severe hypochondiasis—as she proclaims in the noted aria, "I am the wife of Mao Tse-tung," and angrily declares that all be determined by "the book." After Mao's death, we should recall, Chiang Ch'ing committed suicide.

After witnessing these six individuals'—Richard Nixon, Mao Tse-tung, Chou En-lai, Pat Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and Chiang Ch'ing—mental dramas, we can only breathlessly watch as they slip into sleep. Kissinger shacks up with one of Mao's translators before disappearing into the bathroom. The Nixons share their disappointments, the President for being misinterpreted by the newspapers, Pat silently suffering, with tearful eyes, from her husband's inattention and having herself to attend yet again to what may be his ritual recounting of an attack he endured in World War II. Mao also finds relief in the hands of one of his translators before threatening his wife for having made political mistakes, until he falls with her into a lustful embrace upon their bed. Chou En-lai, clearly already in pain from the bladder cancer which would kill him 4 years later, awakens early to return to his never-ending work, drawing a close to all the madness with the most profound question of the opera: "Was there any point to any of it?"

The "it" may refer, obviously, to the Nixons' visit, but it also suggests another possibility of meaning: "Was there any point to all their madness, to their desperate struggles to hold onto any power they might have over others?" All ended their lives in disgrace and shame, except for Pat; but even she almost disappeared from the public eye after the death of her husband, suffering a serious stroke the same year that Chou En-lai died.

In some respects, I now wonder, despite its occasional comic elements and always lush sonority of sound, if this isn't one of the darkest of operas. But then, aren't the young and the old—represented by the US and China—usually at the heart of the tragic, Romeo and Lear?

Los Angeles, February 19, 2011

_____
Coincidentally, in my 1990 "opera for spoken voices," The Walls Come True (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1995), I included Dr. Kissinger in my "Twelve Tyrants Between Acts: Mundane Moments and Insane Histories," based on the paranoia and ridiculous accusations he expressed in his Years of Upheaval (Boston: Little Brown, 1982) when, in 1973, he was in Hanoi attempting to negotiate the Paris Accords.

Invention Serves Remembrance (on the restoration of Agee's original text of A Death in the Family)

2011-02-18T09:04:00.000-08:00

James Agee

Editor Michael Lafaro

INVENTION SERVES REMEMBRANCE

James Agee A Death in the Family: A Restoration of the Author's Text, edited by Michael A. Lofaro (Knoxville: The University of Tennessee Press, 2007)

In a year (2008) in which I had determined, after writing about my father's death in 2002, to read James Agee's A Death in the Family, it seemed that I was fated to read the newly released "restored" edition of that book. I admit that I was not completely enthused by the idea, particularly after having read, in March, the review of the "restoration" in the Los Angeles Times Book Review which argued that David McDowell's editing of the original publication of the Agee work in 1957 was "superior" to the Lofaro text:

Lofaro conjectures that McDowell “changed the novel to suit the popular tastes of the 1950s and increase the book’s marketability”; he does not consider that McDowell might have made his decisions for a simpler reason: to create the best possible book. The new chapters, while interesting, don’t add much to our understanding of Jay or Mary or young Rufus. In fact, everything that needs to be established – the tenderness and conflict within the marriage, Jay’s drinking and tendency to drive too fast, Rufus’ deep sensitivity and his near-worshipful relationship with his father – is handled perfectly, and more economically, in the original version.
The critic goes on to argue that Lofaro's "most egregious" decision was to remove the "Knoxville: Summer 1915" section, replacing it with a nightmare sequence, which, "with its graphic violence and religious symbolism, is heavy-handed and not nearly as effective."
In short, he concludes, "Lofaro has made a mess of it."

My own intuition, moreover, was that what Lofaro argued was Agee's intention of a straight-forward, chronologically-ordered narrative seemed far less interesting than the flashbacks and other modernist narrative devices introduced by McDowell. The sheer size and heft of the "restored" edition, along with these reservations, led me to put off reading the Lofaro edition until late in the year.

Fortunately, the time in early December in which I came to the fiction also allowed me to slow down the pace of the reading and to more carefully consider Lofaro's voluminous series of notes and annotations—nearly as long as the work itself.

I have now come to feel that the restored version, contrary to the reviewer's insistence, is far superior: clearer, more emotionally engaging, and, most importantly, in concert with the author's desires.

Agee, it is apparent, never intended his beautiful set piece, "Knoxville: Summer, 1915," first published in Partisan Review in 1938, to be included in A Death in the Family. And the situation he describes in that prose poem, although it may remind one of the poetic tone and certain incidents in the fiction, makes it seem as if the young boy's uncle and aunt, "living at home," were residing within his own house. Emma, his sister, appears nowhere in that short piece. And the poem ends with a dilemma of self-identity that is not at all an issue in A Death in the Family.
Lofaro admits that there is no way of definitively knowing that Agee intended to begin his work with the horrifying dream sequence about a John the Baptist-like being, killed by the mobs of the city; but it is also clear that there is no other place for it in the work, despite it being contained in the original manuscripts.

The dream episode seems quite obviously that of an older man, still haunted by the death of his father; and Agee's own analysis at the end of that dream that the corpse was the father and his recognition that "He [the narrator]

should go back into those years. As far as he could remember; and
everything he could remember; nothing he had learned or done since;
nothing except (so well as he could remember) what his father had been
as far as he had known him, and what he had been as he had known
himself, and what he had seen with his own eyes, and supposed with
his own mind....

all seem to point to the very beginning of the imaginative voyage upon which the rest of the work will take the reader. As Agee wrote in 1948 to his dead father:

Let me explain what I am trying to do here [in this work].
I have lived, now, a year longer than you were given to live. I feel
very heavy in the sense of life and death, and very heavy in my
sense of uncertainty and of failure in my life so far.... My way of
trying to handle these things is to try to recall and understand
my life, as well as I can, and to try to write it down as clearly and
as well as I can.

As Agee wrote his mother:

I am trying to write a short book, a novel, beginning with the first things
I can remember, and ending with my father's burial. The whole closing
section is to be as clear an account as I can make of everything I can
remember, from the morning I woke up and learned that he had died
the night before, through to the end of the afternoon of the funeral.

He notes elsewhere that he is trying to write a narrative that is as chronologically correct and clear as he can make it. "In most novels, properly enough, remembrance serves invention. In this volume," Agee proclaims, "invention has served remembrance."

More importantly, Lofaro shows us that Agee saw this work less as "a novel"—even though he himself, as I have noted above, refers to the work as "a novel"—than as an autobiography, a work, had he lived longer, that might have been embedded within other writings about his ancestors, his mother and father's relationship, and his own later education and writing experiences.

The Lofaro edition adds ten chapters and restores versions of three other chapters, as well as bringing parts of the text together which were previously divided. The newly-found chapters that Lofaro includes slow down the work and draw the reader into the detail of Agee's world. Indeed, it is this series of details wherein this work has its deepest meaning. As I have written elsewhere, A Death in the Family virtually has no plot. We know from the outset what the major event of the work entails: the father's death. And anyone who has experienced the death of a family member can imagine the effects on a family. What is remarkable about his writing is how Agee makes his family members (Lofaro restores the actual family names, Agee and Tyler, to his text) so immediate and real: the way they cook, shop, worry for and about each other, and share and disagree with each other regarding viewpoints on various issues such as sexuality and religion. The familial details of life are at the heart of Agee's work, and Lofaro's version not only enhances these, but allows the reader to better understand the relationship of husband and wife, father and son, mother and son, and brother and sister.

Had the original editor, McDowell, more transparently admitted his radical editorial changes, I think no one might blame him for his decisions; I agree with Lofaro's analysis that "he changed the novel to suit the popular tastes of the 1950s and increase the book's marketability." The decision to produce a shorter work, the various flashbacks in time and space are quite understandable in a decade in which readers were assimilating Faulkner's great experiments and reading new works by Nabokov, Salinger, Bellow and others. Within this context, Agee's work, as he intended it, does seem somewhat "old-fashioned."

But McDowell felt it necessary to disavow any major changes, insisting in his "A Note on This Book":

There has been no re-writing, and nothing has been eliminated except
for a few cases of first-draft material which he later re-worked at
greater length, and one section of seven-odd pages which the editors
were unable satisfactorily to fit into the body of the novel [apparently
the prologue of Lofaro's edition].

If nothing else, however, Lofaro definitively shows just how extensive McDowell's changes were, revealing in many respects how different this book is from the original publication and, just as importantly I would argue, how different is a novel from an autobiography.

Admittedly, there are a few problems with this "restoration." Agee did not title any of his sections or chapters; Lofaro has chosen to title sections, some with words from the text that seem, within the context of Agee's poetical writing, rather awkward, such as "This little boy you live in," "Perceptions c. 1911-1912" and "Enter the Ford: Travel, 1913-1916." Lofaro also occasionally explains some of Agee's dialect word choices, placing them in brackets within the text, while I feel this might have been better handled through a discrete asterisk with a same-page note. But these are minor quibbles in what has clearly been a long labor of love.

Rather than "making a mess of it," I would argue, Lofaro has utterly clarified Agee's intentions and revealed an astounding contribution to American autobiographical writing.

Los Angeles, December 28, 2008
Reprinted from Rain Taxi, XIV (Spring 2009).

Peter Pan (on Jane Leavy's The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood)

2011-02-17T08:26:00.000-08:00

PETER PAN

Jane Leavy The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America's Childhood (New York: HarperCollins, 2010)

My friends and even those who know me only slightly would all be surprised, I think, to know that I read Jane Leavy’s fascinating biography of Mickey Mantle, The Last Boy. I am quite obviously disinterested in most sports, and when I do watch such events, it is usually the three s’s, swimming, skating, and skiing. The only group sport I can endure is another sport that begins with an “s”, soccer! In fact, much to the amusement and, perhaps the embarrassment of my three nephews, I do not even know the names of most American football, basketball, or baseball teams. I often visit sports bars to write, since I can completely tune out the several televisions broadcasting events, one of those bars being Mickey Mantle's Restaurant and Sports Bar on Central Park South in New York City, where I sat reading and writing before a meeting with author Richard Kalich one recent afternoon.

It is rather odd, therefore—or completely predictable—that I grew up in a family completely immersed in just to what I am oblivious of. My father began his career as a womens’ basketball coach, and early on coached football as well. My brother David, his second son, went on to become the football and golf coach for the school district for which my father served as superintendent and where I grew up. His three sons were all players of football and basketball there, and my youngest nephew has gone on to study sport’s therapy, after finishing a B.A. in business.

I was steeped in sports, made to participate in Little League baseball each summer—where I bleakly cowered in right field, terrified a ball might come my way. I was also strongly encouraged to, and obediently did play on the second string football team. I dreaded each practice session. During the games I sat on the bench, playing, to my recollection, only in one game.

By my Junior year of high school, I was freed from that indenturement, as I was taken on as the “mascot,” which meant I had to attend all sports events—basketball, baseball, football, wrestling, even field and track—cleaning up the locker room and, mostly, ogling the beautiful boy’s bodies. Herewith I reveal a long kept secret: at the end of the year, I, the most disinterested of sports enthusiasts in the city, received a letter sweater! The irony of it haunts me still today, and I saved that sweater for years after it ceased to fit my expanding body until my companion Howard insisted we remove it from our closet.

Growing up in the 1950s, accordingly, there was no way that I could not have heard of Mickey Mantle, and for one glorious summer, even I was in sync with my peers, collecting baseball cards, with the especial hope to open a pack of gum—a substance I did not enjoy and seldom chewed—to find a Mickey Mantle card—or, at least, to be able to trade one. My failure to acquire was thoroughly explained in Leavy's book. I believe my brother succeeded where I did not, but, then, he was the greatest sports lover I knew, and his sons continue in that tradition, announcing in Facebook message after message: “Go Hawks!”, “Go Pirates!”, “Go”—whatever their favorite team is of the week.

It must of have been as early as the summer of 1955 or 1956, the glorious years of the Mick’s pinnacle that I dropped the baseball cards for the Burns-Mantle Theater books, listing the names of plays, authors, dates, directors, and choreographers with the same intensity sports lovers did homeruns, runs batted in, and other such trivia. A year later I had added an addiction to film through seeing my second Hitchcock movie. I had no more time for sports, despite my father’s insistence that I persevere in playing them.

For all that, I found Jane Leavy’s personally sympathetic and yet substantially critical perspective of Mantle—no relationship to Burns—and his personal life a truly joyful read, for which I was happy to put away old grievances to regain a vision of what those golden days meant to the culture as a whole.

And as Leavy makes clear, they were days of cultural innocence. It was, as she puts it, the "cusp of a radical change":

Babe Ruth was three years dead; DiMaggio was taking his curtain call. His successor, Mickey Mantle, the first telegenic star of the new broadcast age, was installed in right field. Mantle's charismatic foil, Willie Mays, was playing center field for baseball's first all-black outfield.

Born the same year to fathers who rolled baseballs across the floor to baby boys who could not yet walk, they were in their major league infancy. What the 65,000 paying customers at Yankee Stadium saw that afternoon were two works in progress whose unlimited potential would fuel unending debate. They would improve each other and everyone who played with them and against them.

Added to Mantle's all-American grinning face, topped by blond locks, a personality that generally was friendly to his fans, and you had a hero in the making. And for many, as Leavy recounts, Mantle was like no other. No matter who you might think is the best all-time ballplayer, Mantle has always to be in the running, and Leavy, employing encyclopedic data, convinces that it has to be Mantle!

First of all there was his amazing ability not just to hit the ball out the park, but way out of the park, as if the ball had been launched into space rather than merely "hit" by some bat. Early in the book the author describes, in intense detail, the happenings of "One Big Day," April 17, 1953, when Mantle hit the ball out of Washington, D.C.'s Griffith Stadium, nicking the Bohemian Beer sign at the stadium's top:

The ball left his bat traveling at an estimated speed of 110 miles per hour. Clark Griffith, the namesake and grandson of the Senators' owner, was sitting in the family box behind the third base dugout, having cut class at Sidwell Friends School for an afternoon of baseball. "It went up and got caught in the jet stream," he said, "It took on a life of its own."

The thwack of contact resounded through the empty stands. The sound would stay in the memory of Roy Clark, the musical son of the Washington square dance bandleader, sitting with his father along the first base line. "It just echoed in that ballpark," Clark Said. "Even before it was halfway to its destination, you knew that it was gone. Looked like it was in the air for five minutes."

The Yankee's director of public relations, Arthur E. Patterson, immediately declared "That one's got to be measured," dashing from the stadium to discover the ball had been found by a young Black boy, Donald Dunaway. Leavy clearly reveals that much of the rest of the story of how far the ball had traveled was fiction. Yet, for years it stood in baseball history as Patterson had recounted it.

For months Leavy attempted, even with the help of a detective, to track down Dunaway, unable to find him in any source in Washington, D.C. until she went back to the neighborhood, querying people house by house. Miraculously, she found him, and sets the record straight: instead of falling to the backyard of 434 Oakdale Place, as Patterson reported Dunaway to have told him where he found it, Dunaway pointed to a window of a house twenty-five feet closer to the stadium.

Alan Nathan, a professor of physics at the University of Illinois-Champaign-Urbana reasonably estimates that the ball left the bat traveling at 113 miles per hour at an angle of 30 to 31 degrees. Given a wind of 20 miles per hour, less than the highest gusts, it fell from the roof of a nearby house about 512 to 540 feet from home plate, about where Dunaway reported to have found the ball.

But, of course, that was not the only Mantle home-run hit. Mickey Charles Mantle put 6,392 balls into play, according to Leavy, 536 of them home runs!

Secondly, there was his ability to hustle, even though for most of his baseball life Mantle was in almost unendurable pain. He could run, and raced round the bases throughout most of his career playable career. Leavy charts his numerous injuries which left him, for months and entire seasons, on the bench or bed.

Thirdly there was the simple likability of the man. His smile seemed to say it all. "It was a smile, Leavy quotes Tim McCarver, "quite unlike any other, almost a measure of man." In the club house he was looked up to by one and all, but while DiMaggio presumed he was God, Mantle was shy and affable about it. He was nearly everyone's best friend.

What Leavy also shows us, however, was Mantle's darker sides as well, particularly his dissociation with his own family, returning home only on occasions, while he lived most of his life in the locker room or boozing it up in bars, eateries and hotels with teammates like Whitey Ford and, almost always, women. Social diseases were a natural consequence.

Mantle was obsessed by death, and he presumed that he would never have a long life. And, apparently, he was often as broad-humored and coarsely-spoken as a small-town conventioneer. Hostile to the press, at times in his career he could equally tune out his fans. Generous to a fault, Mantle could also be so caught up in himself that he seemed to have no room for others.

The author of The Last Boy explains much of these "good boy/bad boy" extremes as having roots in his hardscrabble Oklahoma upbringing and through sexual abuse as a child by both women and men in his family.

But perhaps the best explanation is one based on a phenomenon that I have written about numerous times in the pages of these cultural memoirs: like so many young and middle-aged men I encounter in the sports bars, Mantle was never truly able to grow up—"He never grew up, and it ruined him," Leavy quotes Mantle's teammate Jerry Coleman.

Leavy's own enjoyable and painful encounter with the Mick at a time where he was forced to leave baseball for taking on the promotion of an Atlantic City casino, exemplifies nearly everything good and bad about the man, a story she tells in pieces throughout the book so that its revelations become even more powerful as we read. As she stood in the cold of a golf field waiting to interview him, Mantle screams out for someone to give her a coat, rewarding it to her almost as a gallant. Yet later he tries to grope her thigh before collapsing drunkenly into sleep, his head falling upon her lap. The next morning a question she asks about his son's cancer brings tears to Mantle's eyes.

By book's end we have little choice but to love while being being equally disgusted by this great baseball hero. I don't know if Mantle was "The Last Boy"—although we all know baseball changed again after his generation's passing, I fear many Americans' desires to return to childhood may never disappear—but he was a significantly lost boy in a long string of American Peter Pan's, and the terrible "hook" finally caught him. As an alcoholic whose body had been eaten up by both his vocation and personal behavior, Mantle's death serves as a awful testament to the heroic failure of men unable to face their adult lives. And yet, he was genius behind the bat, and how he could fly around those bases!

Los Angeles, February 13/16, 2011

Hold My Hand (on Verdi's Don Carlo)

2011-01-31T08:03:00.000-08:00

HOLD MY HAND

Joseph Méry and Camille du Locle (libretto, based on Friedrich Schiller's Don Carlos, Infant von Spanien), Giuseppe Verdi (music) Don Carlo / Metropolitan Opera HD broadcast, December 11, 2010

Giuseppe Verdi's great opera Don Carlo premiered in Paris in March 1867, the year Sigmund Freud turned eleven while attending Leopoldstädter Kommunal-Realgymnasium in Vienna. It would be years before Freud would propound his psychological theories, which refer often to classical literature; but Verdi's opera might as well be described as a template for many of Freud's ideas about human relationships, in particular those concerning various obstacles to love.
If there was ever an example of a competitive struggle between son and father for the love of a mother, other than Sophocles Oedipus Rex I can't imagine it being played out more dramatically than in Don Carlo. Promised in marriage to Elisabeth of Valois, daughter to King Henry II, Don Carlo (Roberto Alagna), son of the powerful Philip II of Spain (Ferruccio Furlanetto), has disobediently traveled to France to catch a glimpse of his intended. It is clear that he is somewhat nervous about the impending event, but when he finally sees Elisabeth (Marina Poplavskaya) frolicking in Fontainebleau on a winter hunt, he is overpowered by her beauty and immediately falls in love. When the two meet up, he pretends to be from one of the hunting parties, but as the two continue in conversation, he finally admits who he is. She, equally taken with him, is delighted and they sing of their joy and love.

Their marriage is to be announced as soon as their fathers sign the peace treaty between the Houses of Habsburg and Valois, but when the messengers arrive to tell her the news that the treaty has been signed, she is made to understand that she shall not be married to the infante, but the King, Philip, himself! Knowing that the marriage is necessary for her country, Elisabeth has no choice but to painfully accept the proposal; Don Carlo is devastated:

The fatal hour has sounded!
Cruel destiny
shatters this beautiful dream!
And my soul is filled with regrets;
we shall drag along our chains
until we rest in our tomb.

Seldom has a first scene in any opera transformed its characters' worlds so suddenly. Don Carlo is now in the painful position of being in love with the woman who is soon be become his mother.

Like anyone suffering from the Oedipal complex from here on he will come to hate his father. We recognize that the opera that follows will be centered, in part, on the struggle between the two.

Yet, in the very next scene Verdi introduces a further sexual wrinkle in Don Carlo's life. Having returned to Spain, he secretly visits the monastery of San Yuste, where, after his abdication in 1516, Carlo' grandfather, Charles V, came to live out the rest of his life before dying of malaria.

There he encounters his dear friend Rodrigo, who has obviously come to meet him. Carlo reveals his love of Elisabeth, a fact that shocks Rodrigo, who immediately demands that Carlo join him in saving Protestant Flanders—the birthplace of Charles V—by freeing it from the Spanish rule.

Rodrigo is a pure idealist, a believer in justice and evidently a fine soldier. As he pleads with Philip a short while later for the Flanders cause, he reveals what he sees as the people's condition there:

RODRIGO
O King! I have come from Flanders,
that country which was once so lovely!
It is now but an ashen desert,
a place of horror, a tomb!
There the orphan, begging
and weeping on the streets,
falls, as he flees the flames,
on human remains!
Blood reddens the water in the rivers,
they roll on, full of dead bodies …
The air is filled with the cries of widows
over their butchered husbands! …
Ah! Blessed be the hand of God,
which through me brings
the passing-bell of this agony
to the notice of the righteous King!

Philip, the king of a country where at the very moment the trials of the Inquisition are taking place, cannot possibly support the reformers, nor intervene in the French domination of that region, and rejects Rodrigo's and Don Carlo's pleas to travel to Flanders out of hand.

It is clear that Rodrigo, in even daring to speak of the subject with his King, is committed to his cause. Yet we soon suspect another reason why he is so eager to have Don Carlo join him. Verdi may have thought of their relationship as being nothing more than a deep brotherly affection, but the bonds they express, their continual embracement of each other, and the vows of love they repeat over and over again in phrases such as "hold my hand" reveal their relationship is perhaps far deeper than simple friendship. They would be "united in love and death" and sing of their fealty as an oath before God. As in a marriage ceremony they cry out for a "brotherly love" that obviously is also a sexual bond. Taking Carlo with him to Flanders may be the only way to protect the young prince from the wiles of Philip's wife and his own undoing. Although Rodrigo is somewhat single-minded in his idealism, jealousy, it is apparent, may have a role in his actions as well.

Their relationship, despite Don Carlo's inability to join him in Flanders, remains one of committed love up until Rodrigo's last act death. Not only in life do they pledge to remain together, but even in death, at least from Rodrigo's point of view:

RODRIGO
We must take our leave!

Don Carlos freezes, looking aghast at Rodrigo.

Yes, Carlos! This is for me the supreme day,
let us say a solemn farewell;
God permits us still to love one another
near him, when we are in heaven.

We can only wonder what Elisabeth, had she been able to consummate her love with Don Carlo, might say to Rodrigro's dying desire.

Like Hamlet, we perceive, Don Carlo is a confused psychological being, not a man of action like his friend. As Paul Robinson has written in an excellent essay on Don Carlo (in Opera & Ideas: From Mozart to Strauss):

In all of opera there can be no more improbable friendship
than that between Rodrigo and Don Carlo. Just as Rodrigo
is the quintessentially political animal, Carlo is one of those
people who seem incapable of a coherent political thought.
In the course of the opera, admittedly, he gets deeply involved
in affairs of state, beginning with the friendship duet... But
we are never in doubt that it is all pretend politics, and that
he understands nothing of the Flemish cause or the ideological
principles that all but define Rodrigo's existence.

It is also clear that Philip would have wished a son more like Rodrigo than the one he has. For that reason alone, one suspects, the King confides in Rodrigo and takes him on almost as an advisor. In a world where his rule is threatened by the church, and in which he feels he can trust no one, not even his beloved wife, Philip has no choice but to turn to the handsome man of action, his weakling's son dear friend.

The tension between Rodrigo's commitment to the political and his love for Don Carlo comes to a head when the Inquisition prepares to torture Flemish rebels. When Philip rejects the pleas of Flemish representatives to free them, Don Carlo rushes in, a ridiculous hero, sword in hand insisting that he will be their savior. Philip demands that his son be disarmed, and Rodrigo has no choice but to disarm him. Don Carlo, appalled by his actions, sees it as a betrayal of their love, but Rodrigo clearly recognizes it is the only way to save his friend from death.

So too is Philip made to choose between his role as a ruler and his love of his surrogate son. In the horrifying verbal battle between the bassos, Philip and the Grand Inquisitor, the blind man of the church insists that the King hand over Rodrigo. Once again, the choice is a terrible one, but as a conciliator he knows he must give in to the demand.

Finally, even the pure and suffering Elisabeth, who has already been forced into the awful choice of marrying Philip or his son, is tortured by the oppositions between the personal and the political. Betrayed by Princess Eboli, jealous of Don Carlo's love for the Queen, Elisabeth is asked to proclaim her innocence before her King/husband, who is convinced that she has been carrying on an affair with his son. The overbearing tension between these two forces, the domestic and the State, results in her collapse.

Throughout Don Carlo, accordingly, the characters' attempts at love are perverted, torn as they are between their psychological states of being and the State, the political and religious machinations that work against their love for one another. At opera's end all have fallen from any possibility of grace, as Don Carlo, who finally seems to recognize Rodrigo's righteous view of the world whereupon he renounces his heterosexual lover/mother, is quite literally dragged into the past—and, of course, death—by the ghost of his own Grandfather, Charles V, in what is perhaps also a metaphor of where his political actions would surely have taken him had he attempted to save Flanders.

Los Angeles, January 30, 2011

Two Beckett Films" Mouth on Fire and Be Again" (on Beckett's Not I and Krapp's Last Time)

2011-01-30T07:56:00.000-08:00

TWO BECKETT FILMS

Beginning in 2000, Michael Colgan of Dublin's Gate Theatre and the Irish Film Board determined to film 19 of Beckett's plays and monologues, each directed by a different individual. Directors included Karel Reisz, Anthony Minghella, Damien Hirst, David Mamet, and the two I've chosen below as representative, Neil Jordan and Atom Egoyan. Actors included John Gielgud, Jeremy Irons, Milo O'Shea, Timothy Spall, and Julienne Moore and John Hurt, described below. These films were never put into theaters in general release, but several of them were shown in the 2000 Toronto Film Festival.

MOUTH ON FIRE

Samuel Beckett (author), Neil Jordon (director) Not I (part of the project Beckett on Film, presenting 19 Beckett texts on film, conceived my Michael Colgan) / 2000, DVD release 2002

Neil Jordan begins his short film Not I, based on the 1972 dramatic text by Samuel Beckett, with a view of a young woman (Julienne Moore) entering to sit upon a chair. Perhaps he just couldn’t resist showing off his actor, but this clearly works against Beckett’s instructions, wherein he writes:

Stage in darkness but for MOUTH, upstage audience right, about 8 feet
above stage level, faintly lit from close-up and below, rest of face
in shadow. Invisible microphone.

The auditor, covered head to foot in a loose black djellaba, is missing from Jordan's film.
From here on, however, Jordan follows the author’s suggestions, turning the rest of the work into a film of the mouth.

The mouth—or the voice—is, in fact, the subject of this work, which concerns an older woman (seventy years of age, we later discover) whose parents, having died or disappeared shortly after her birth, was brought up without love and basic human communication. Throughout much of her life she has seldom spoke, grocery-shopping, for example, by bringing a black bag and a shopping list to the store, and quietly waiting until the clerk puts the articles into the bag.

Suddenly, one April morning, upon hearing the larks, she falls face-first into the grass and, accompanied by an interminable buzz she hears all about her, she begins to talk without stop. The speech she releases into the world seems to be often incomprehensible to her friends, but, despite the constant interruptions between words, the tumble of language she uses to describe herself in the third person, we do gradually come to comprehend her “story.” It is as if all the silence she has previously lived has been let loose as a roar of suffering, a suffering she has not previously felt. In fact, she has felt little, apparently, throughout her life, unable even by the end of her scree to identify herself as single entity. Like a character in a fiction, she describes herself as a figure “out there,” a “not I” with no inward being.

One might read Beckett’s short work as a kind of statement of the writer’s art, the writer being a silent entity until he is forced, “once or twice a year,” to express himself, often without being properly comprehended. And when those words pour out, or the mouth opens to speak, it cannot stop, swallowing up everything, including the self, in the buzz of a created reality.

Moore credibly plays the interruptive mouth, but it is somewhat difficult to watch this mouth in action—despite the three different views the director presents—in such extreme proximity of the camera. In some ways, the busy lips almost become abstract, so focused is the camera upon them. In the theater, where an unspeaking Auditor also stands in the shadows, there is more to distract the audience, even if it is hidden in the shadows. While I was watching this DVD, the movie was appropriately accompanied by a buzzing, a saw in my neighbor’s apartment from their attempts at renovation.

Although I like the theatricality of the moving lips, the gasps, pursings, and poutings of them against the actor’s white teeth, I often felt the need to turn away briefly to relieve myself of the apparent pain they express.

Los Angeles, January 26, 2011

BE AGAIN

Samuel Beckett (writer), Atom Egoyan (director) Krapp's Last Tape (part of the project Beckett on Film, presenting 19 Beckett texts on film, conceived my Michael Colgan) / 2000, DVD release 2002

Actor John Hurt's portrayal of Krapp in Beckett's 1958 play put to film is absolutely brilliant, despite he and director's Egoyan's small changes to Beckett's text. The realist setting of the play, with the spots of bright white light, gives a grand theatricality to Krapp's world, a world in which, under the light, he feels safe while being surrounded by darkness wherein, as Beckett himself described it, "Old Nick" or death awaits. On his sixty-ninth birthday Krapp, yet again, forces himself to interact with a younger incarnation.

It is clear that Krapp has a fixation with his former selves. For years he has recorded tapes describing his life's events, most of them quite meaningless, but some of them of great poetry and sensibility. The tape Krapp chooses on this particular, rainy night, is "Box 3, Spool 5," the day Krapp turned 39.

Yet Egoyan reveals that what leads up to his playing the tape is as important in some senses as what is actually on the tape itself. The ritualistic acts, Krapp's continual checking of the time, his strange way of eating a banana—he puts the entire banana into his mouth holding it there for a while before biting it off, clearly a bow to the fruit's sexual suggestions—and several of his other actions, including his nearly falling on the banana peel he has tossed into the dark, reveal him as a kind of eccentric fool—in short, the typical Beckett figure. As his name suggests, he is "full of shit."

Hurt presents Krapp with a kind of valor despite his obvious distancing of himself from the human race. Clearly Krapp's mother has been a monster, living for years in a world of "vidiuity"—the condition of being or remaining a widow. The small things he describes are both comical and life-affirming: playing ball with a dog as his mother dies, awarding the ball to the dog as he hears of his mother's death; attending a vesper service as a child, falling off the pew.
Krapp is an everyday man with romantic aspirations, or at least he was, it is apparent, at age 39, the time when we are all have arrived in the prime of life. Krapp at 39 is both a smug bore,

Spiritually a year of profound gloom and indulgence until that
memorable night in March at the end of the jetty, in the
howling wind, never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the
whole thing. The vision, at last. This fancy is what I have chiefly
to record this evening, against the day when my work will be done
and perhaps no place left in my memory, warm or cold, for the
miracle that . . . (hesitates) . . . for the fire that set it alight.
What I suddenly saw then was this, that the belief I had been going
on all my life, namely—(Krapp switches off impatiently, winds tape
forward, switches on again)—

a man who will not regret any decision of his life, and is a man amazingly come alive through the love of a woman whom he describes lovingly in a scene where the two lay in a small punt as it floats into shore through the reeds.

The older Krapp, who realizes that his younger self could not imagine the loneliness and emptiness of the life ahead, has no patience at times with his past. His new tape, which he begins after impatiently winding the older tape ahead to escape his previous self's blindness, is filled with bitterness and anger for a failed life:

Nothing to say, not a squeak. What's a year now? The sour cud and
the iron stool. (Pause.) Reveled in the word spool. (With relish.)
Spooool! Happiest moment of the past half million. (Pause.) Seventeen
copies sold, of which eleven at trade price to free circulating libraries
beyond the seas. Getting known. (Pause.)

He has failed, obviously, even in his writing career. Unlike his younger self, so unregretful of his past, the old Krapp is filled with the detritus of his life, all those materials left over from his disintegration. If the younger Krapp declares himself as only moving forward, the elder would "Be again!"

Be again in the dingle on a Christmas Eve, gathering holly, the
red-berried. (Pause.) Be again on Croghan on a Sunday morning,
in the haze, with the bitch, stop and listen to the bells. (Pause.)
And so on. (Pause.) Be again, be again. (Pause.) All that old
misery. (Pause.) Once wasn't enough for you. (Pause.)
Lie down across her.

He gives up this, his last tape (or perhaps simply his latest) to listen again to his former self describing his sexual moment with the woman in the punt.

Director Egoyan represents these last scenes, nearly twenty minutes in length, with a full shot, where the viewer cannot escape the shaft of reality penetrating the darkness around Krapp. Hurt so painfully suffers and loves his former self that one can almost hear his heart crack.

Los Angeles, January 29, 2011

If you enjoy reading about film, please visit my International Cinema Review (http://internationalcinemareview.blogspot.com/)

Trying to Leave (the final piece on my 1989 Russian adventure)

2011-01-26T09:07:00.000-08:00

DAY TWELVE - TRYING TO LEAVE

Yesterday's bombing at Moscow's Domodedovo airport could not help but remind me of our group's experiences at that same spot in 1989.

We gathered first in the large space where the bombing took place yesterday, checking our suitcases and other bags. Since I had brought a rather large sum of money which I spent in the Soviet Union on trinkets, etc., a couple of the Rova saxophonists asked if I might carry their cash, since they had been paid in dollars, and could take out of the country only the amount with which they'd come in. I readily agreed, and we all moved forward to the large eating facility on the second floor. It was still early, and thought we might get a bite to eat. It was just after noon, and our plane was not scheduled until 4:00.

Sitting at tables, however, produced no results. No waitress or waiter appeared. I finally stood and went over to a man who seemed to be dressed like a server. He joined me as we walked back to the group, telling our guide in Russian and he could not serve us without permission from the main office.

Where was the main office? I asked. He pointed, and a friend and I marched over to get the permission. There were two women behind the counter, but neither would come forward. As I had seen so many times in Russia, one of them turned away, hiding behind a small curtain and the other just looked down as if we were invisible.

"Excuse me, I have a question," I pleaded.

I was invisible—and evidently mute.

"We can see you," said my friend, "even if you can't see us."

"We've been told we need to get permission here."

Neither of them moved.

"Permission to eat. We're hungry."

They had turned to stone.

My friend turned back to the group, while I went forward in the other direction just to explore. A few feet away, I found a small Japanese cafe, open, apparently, and serving. But, unlike the larger food court, wherein our group sat waiting, it was terribly expensive. Soups cost $20.00, some meals went for $50. I was hungry and sat down to eat a small bowl of noodles.

When I returned to the ROVA group, I told them about the Japanese spot, but none of them wanted to pay that much. Suddenly, as if a miracle had just occurred, the larger pavilion opened their windows and servers came out to take the group's orders.

While they waited, a message came over the loudspeakers—in English—that our plane was slightly delayed. Yet as suddenly as the food began to arrive, another message—this in Russian only—reported that our plane would soon be ready to board.

Our guide, relaying this information to us, suggested we leave the food to face the interrogation of the passport inspectors.

Just as I have described in my 2006 volume about my visit to East Germany, the inspectors spent an inordinate amount of time stamping things and starring into our faces. The questions they posed were generally simple if somewhat inexplicable—"Why do you visit our country?" "Why are you leaving?" "What are you taking with you?" "What cities have you visited?" etc. etc. The problem was that, no matter how you answered it appeared to be "incorrect." I felt as if they were attempting to keep me there until I confessed some criminal act and intention. It would have been comical except that it was so foreboding, and no smiles were encouraged.

Eventually, I was released along with Clark Coolidge and several others. Yet we noticed one of our friends, my roommate Peter Vilms, was still being questioned, and Clark and I determined—unlike the others who had passed through the screening into another waiting room—to check on him. We stood aside for a long while, but he seemed to be making no progress, so I joined him at the window where he was held.

"They're evidently upset with me," he explained," because I came into the Soviet Union on the ferry to Estonia." Peter, of Estonian ancestry had arrived earlier than the rest of us so that he could visit relatives in his parents' home country.

Strangely, the inspector was speaking only in Russian, a language Peter could neither understand nor speak. The interrogation also included the requisite stares and stamping, but this was far more intimidating, and nothing Peter said seemed to help his situation. The man clearly was determined that something was "wrong" here, that Peter had obviously "up to something," and there was apparently no way to change his mind.

For a few minutes, I tried to intervene, explaining he was with our group and visited Estonia only as a tourist. But that seemed to have an even more negative effect, so I ceased, and moved off to the sidelines where Clark and I continued our wait.

By now all the others had gone through screening and were gathered on the other side of glass wall for entry onto the plane. Peter was completely stalled, and there seemed no way to free him until suddenly he was waved on. The moment the three of us begin to go through screening, however, three soldiers blockaded the route, pulling down a small wooden bar.

"We have to join our party over there," we explained.

Their answer was "Nyet!"

We tried to get the attention of our friends, but everyone seemed oblivious.

Turning again to the guards, I tried to enter, but was barred yet again.

We all had our breaking points in this Soviet trip, and Clark's came at that moment as he beat head in frustration, again and again, against the glass. Finally someone from our group came up to the screening place.

"They won't let us in," Clark nearly shouted.

"It's okay," spoke the man, "The flight has evidently been cancelled."

A while later, we were encouraged to join the others, and we passed through without event.

Eventually, the plane was loaded. Evidently, there had been a threat of a strike in Finland, and the Russians were determined not to cross the strike line. We were just relieved that we had made it on board, and before long were rumbling down the snow-covered runway to some place else.

We had, however, missed our connecting flight to the US, and the Russians were forced to put us up for the night in a hotel, a very nice hotel indeed, the Helsinki InterContinental. Sitting down for dinner in the hotel's restaurant, we behaved like wide-eyed Russians visiting the West for the very first time. I think nearly all of us ordered up big steaks, with piles of potatoes and other sides. After dinner, we all took walks, amazed at the gleaming store-windows filled with stylish shoes, jewels, gowns, coats. Helsinki looked like a gem against the night sky. It was as if we had never seen such wealth. Indeed, in that year Helsinki was the most expensive city in Europe. In 2010, the most expensive European city was Moscow! In recent renovations, Domodedovo airport has added 20 new restaurants and several jewelry boutiques.

Los Angeles, January 25, 2011

Breaking the Rules (my Russian trip in 1989)

2011-01-21T07:53:00.000-08:00

DAY ELEVEN - BREAKING THE RULES

From the very beginning of our travels in we were told by our USA tour guide that there were two important rules when traveling in the Soviet Union. One must never buy anything—as tempting as it may be—from the thriving Black Markets. "It is, first of all, against Soviet law, and, secondly, is extraordinarly dangerous given the individuals who sell the outlawed stuff.

Two: "Do not attempt to eat outside of the hotel restaurants. It's nearly impossible to get a reservation, and, you never know what you might be fed or where it comes from."

Lyn Hejinian had added a third rule: "Don't ever get sick in the Soviet Union!"

The Russian tour guide suggested a fourth: "If you take a taxi, do not pay in American dollars. It was for that very reason that he had to hijack ordinary drivers to take us to our out-of-the-way resort spot in Latvia."

I am generally quite obedient, although I do have a stubborn independent streak when it comes to being told not to do something while traveling, as I think I've revealed in these Russian memoirs so far. But these four rules all seemed to represent good advice. Why endanger yourself by buying off the street or in dark corners of a hotel? And when I observed the seedy and surely sinister figures loitering in the dark stairwells of our Leningrad hotel, I had no desire to approach, being more than a little bit frightened they may try to approach me.

It was far easier to eat at the hotel dining rooms than to find an open or available restaurant, and after my "soku" incident in the same city, I had a great fear of unknown food stuffs.

It seemed ludicrous that taxi drivers waited to serve only "rich" Americans, leaving their compatriots to freeze on the streets.

And I had no intention of getting ill.

Yet, one by one, I broke all but one of these sacred stipulations. It began in Latvia, when Susan Hopkins Coolidge, Clark Coolidge's wife, and I both speculated on the quality of Soviet restaurants. One of our group had gone to a restaurant before joining up with us, claiming it was an excellent experience. We were both curious and, more to the point, bored our by current repetitive fare. Consequently, we sought out a restaurant, and boldly entered. The place was utterly desserted, appearing as if it had never seen a customer. Approching the man we thought to be the host, we were told we could not eat there.

Displaying my stubborness, I asked, "Why not?"

"Because you do not have a reservation," snapped the host.

"How do we get a reservation?" Susan shyly asked.

"See the coat check," answered the uncoperative comrade.

We had experienced the coat check maneuver previously, when, at one hotel, we had found that we could get vodka at the coat check. At another inn, the coat check quietly arranged for cans of Beluga cavier to be sold at our table. Accordingly, we followed the host's instructions, and found a friendly face behind the empty coat racks.

"What time can we come for lunch?" we inquired.

He looked at his watch. "Two hours. You pay in advance."

"How much?"

He quoted a price in rubles that was something close to $10.00.

We readily paid, and returned precisely at the hour he'd suggested. We were quickly taken up to a pleasant table, but the room was still barren. Evidently, we were their only customers that day. But what a wonderful treat! The food was plentiful and excellent, exactly the kind of break in diet we had been seeking. And it was, so it seems twenty-two years later, extraordinarily tasty. Out tip made everyone happy. I felt it was worth, this one time, breaking one of the rules.

By the time we reached Moscow, I had discerned that perhaps we had been somehow misinformed, that good things happened only when one didn't quite follow the rules. I had intended to bring back a Russian Babushka doll for my grandmother, a doll within which sits a series of nesting dolls. She had asked if I might get her one, but, clearly, none was to be found. As I have written elsewhere, most of the stores I visited were nearly empty, and when they contained products they were not what any tourist might desire. So one afternoon, met in the stairwell by two young Russian boys, I asked if they might be able to find the item for me. I was told to meet them in their room (Room 305) in about an hour.

Fearfully, I attended the appointment, knowing that anything might happen. I might be robbed, beaten, even killed. But no, there was the doll, and the transaction, for a few American dollars, went off without a hitch. My second such breaking of rules was rewarded just as nicely as my first. Obviously, I might have purchased the dolls more easily in Los Angeles.

While I was in Moscow, I was determined to visit the major English-language bookstore, The House of Foreign Books. Yet, when I asked where it was located, I was told that it was quite a distance, and that I would be unable to walk. Taxi's were just as hard to grab in Moscow as they had been in Riga. When I found a cab-driver willing to roll his windows down while remaining tentative about a stop, I quickly offered to pay in American dollars if he would wait for me, and, after I had visited the store, return me to where he had picked me up.

The cab door opened, and I was wisked away to Kuznetsky Most Ulitsa, where I spent more than an hour studying the shelves. Although I purchased only one book, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. And when I exited the place, there was the taxi, patiently waiting to carry me back!

I told no one about these transgressions, and Susan apparently did not mention our secret rendezvous except to her husband. As we gathered in the lobby to leave Moscow, however, the two young boys who had sold me the Russian dolls, ran up to us, explaining to our US tour guide that I had forgotten my proof of purchase (obviously a fake document), necessary to take the dolls out of the country. The guide handed it over to me, tsking, "Douglas, shame on you, shame!" I bowed my head like the bad boy I was.

As I mention above, I obeyed only one of the rules. I had no intention of visiting a Soviet hospital.

Los Angeles, January 20, 2011

Shadow of a Process: A Personal Appreciation of Steve Roden

2010-12-31T07:57:00.000-08:00

we the darkness with a fire between us, 2009

SHADOW OF A PROCESS: A PERSONAL APPRECIATION OF STEVE RODEN

Steve Roden in between: a 20 year survey, curated and with a catalogue essay by Howard N. Fox / Armory Center for the Arts, Pasadena, California, September 12, 2010-January 9, 2011

The wonderful new show of the works of California artist Steve Roden was organized and the catalogue written by my companion, Howard Fox. Accordingly, I have not attempted a “review” of this show, but have tried to write a piece that might accompany the viewer in his or her appreciation of the art.

Indeed, I am not sure that I would have easily “penetrated” Roden’s art without the help of Howard’s involvement with the artist and his work. Surely, I might have recognized—as critics have noted—that there is something, despite the wide range of various forms Roden’s art takes, that hints at an orderly world, or, at least, a series of systems underlying it—that in his works involving numbers, words, patterns, and planes of light and dark there are visible clues to systems behind the art—but I would have had no comprehension of what kind of systems those are.

Fox illustrates some of the many devices that Roden has used in creating his works in his discussion in the catalogue. In Roden’s The Ridddle for example, in which the work is bisected into black and red zones, across which the artist places the words “a riddle which is intended not to be solved but to exist,” Roden began with a quote from Swedish novelist and poet Pär Lagerkvist in his novel The Sibyl. The art, however, does not attempt to tell the story of Lagerkvist’s fiction, but rather employs its “aesthetics of the unresolved.” As Fox writes:

Resolution, determinacy, transparency, reasonable certitude…are supplanted
in Roden’s art by the poetics of incertitude and indeterminacy.

In another work, fallen/spoken, again Roden started with a text of Lagerkvist's, this time a poem, and, with no knowledge of Swedish, translated the words into English-language homonyms, words sounding more or less like the Swedish words might. "Hon knäpper sina händer hop," for example, became in Roden's transformation, "hovering sine waves hop from clapping hands."

His 1996 painting, i am sitting in a room, moreover, was based on a sound composition by American composer Alvin Lucier, who spoke a text into a tape record, retapeing the words onto another recorder, and another, and so on until the tones and sounds became "completely abstracted"; "...the skeleton was still intact but the surface totally unrecognizable," notes Roden.

Nearly all of Roden's art, indeed, parallels, in one way or another, this approach to art. Like John Cage, Alfred Jensen and others Roden generally begins with complex systems that he uses not so much as a frame, but a starting point, an impetus that allows for the creation of the final work.

Some of these systems are so complex that even Roden has forgotten them. And in that fact, as Fox reiterates, these systems and methodologies represent what might be called the shadows of the complete pieces. Even if we sense that ghostly system in the "completed"—or, perhaps, since Roden often returns to pieces years later, working on them anew, we should describe them as "temporarily complete"—it does not serve, however, as a tabla rosa or even a lens through which we can read or see the art. Most of Roden's paintings, sculptures, musical performances, and other artifacts remain, in the end, something close to the abstractions which at the start he appeared to eschew.

Roden is himself somewhat shy and sincerely self-effacing, and that comes across strongly in that his approach sheds most of the evidence of the artist's processes in the final artifacts. While the viewer might certainly discern the work to be a Steve Roden "product," most of us would be hard put to say precisely what that means or even what the work itself means.

But that it means is without question. And in saying that, any viewer recognizes the necessity to dig deep into his or herself to question and perceive the art's significance. It is that "shadow" of process that seems to demand a search. And it becomes nearly impossible, as a serious witness to such art, to simply walk away from most of Roden's pieces with merely a shrug. They demand engagement, encourage us to see them as objects in our world with which he must at least seek to comprehend. For that very reason, Roden has gained a respectful position among fellow artists, collections, and critics—both local and international.

For Roden all his hidden systems—what one might describe the building blocks of his art—emanate from his intellectual and spiritual interests and his attempts to translate them—in a way that most good literary translators comprehend—into a language in which he can better comprehend them or reveal them to a different audience.

And, in this respect, Roden reminds me—more than any other contemporary artist I know—of the great American and European figures of the early 20th century, represented by the editors of magazines such as The Seven Arts, The Dial, The Little Review, Transition and others, who believed in an intense synthesis of the arts, combining literature with visual art and essays on dance, music, theater, and sometimes film. While one recognizes, at times, a kind of a simplistic idealism in some of these attempts to bring together all the arts, it has grown ever more evident within the context of postmodern hybridities influenced by Cage, the Fluxus Group, and other individuals that that aspiration was and remains an important perspective of the democratization of American art in general.

It is little wonder, accordingly, that I feel so at home in Roden's exhibition, as radically different as are the pieces he has created. For it is precisely this embracement of various genres representing cultural and social complexities which I have urged in my own poetry, fiction, publishing, and in the pages of these cultural memoirs. It can be no accident that Roden's show, titled in between, is precisely the way I have described my own work, including my collaborative poetry collection Between.

New York, November 11, 2010

The Ocean's Voice (on Jules Michelet's The Sea)

2010-11-24T07:34:00.000-08:00

THE OCEANS' VOICE

by Douglas Messerli

Jules Michelet The Sea, translated from the French by Katia Sainson (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2011)

Upon reflection, it seems a little odd that I, born in the land-locked state of Iowa in the US—a state which has but a few small lakes—should be standing here in Korea speaking of "The Poetic Spirit of the Sea." For a while as a child, I lived with my parents on one of those tiny lakes, Clear Lake (which today, I am told, is overgrown with algae, being anything but "clear"); and one day my mother gasped and rushed from the house to save me as I was led to the end of the pier by a slightly older child. I am sure I would not have jumped in, for I was afraid of water through most of my childhood, and only learned to swim in college.

For all that, I have spent most of my life since age 16 near the seas, living my senior year of high school in a small Norwegian town on the Oslo fjord, and shifting a few years later to New York, Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia before settling—now for some 25 years—in Los Angeles, which is the largest seaport, incidentally, in the US.

Perhaps it was in restitution for my long dry childhood that I drifted to the Atlantic and Pacific shores. What is also clear is that I discovered during my adult years how very much I enjoy traveling by any water-going vessel, being attracted to everything from large ships, to sizeable ferries (by which I traveled a few years ago from Oslo to Copenhagen and commuted several times from Naples to Ischia and back) and even small rowing boats by which I traveled by night from Praiano to Positano on the Amalfi coast one dark midnight and recently floated for an afternoon along the canals of Ghent. I have never been sea-sick despite the obvious sufferings of some of those around me.

Despite all of this love of water, however, I must admit that I am not the beach-going type. My doctor has long ago warned me of sitting in the sun for more than five minutes, and I have never enjoyed the grate of sand and rock upon the surface of my body. The light, moreover, is usually far too intense, so that even my favorite activity, reading, becomes difficult. If I were to live directly on the ocean I suspect I would prefer the coast of Brittany in France or Maine in the USA on a winter day, when large storms toss about the ocean's tumultuous waves. I would love to be inside a well-protected sea-side cottage on those days!

This is, of course, a Romantic conception of the sea. Today we need only to look to the oil-slicked tides in the once pristine Gulf of Mexico and remind ourselves of Hurricane Kathrina's 2005 devastation of New Orleans to perceive that the sea is quickly being transformed by man into something that is dangerous to live near or even transverse. In a few decades from now the lovely and fascinating cities and beaches of Venice, Santa Monica, and Malibu near my home may no longer exist, having been flooded over by the rising oceans.

I've not come here, however, to lecture on the obvious: the fears we all share for those waters that sustain and connect our shores. Instead of abandoning that "Romantic" concept of the sea, I thought I might return to it in the guise of the great French naturalist and historian of the 19th century, Jules Michelet, who wrote on everything from women, birds, and insects to religion, education, and the history of the French Revolution. One of his most important books, moreover, was titled The Sea (1861)—a book which, coincidentally my publishing house, Green Integer, has just published—which I thought might be appropriate to share with you in this conference dedicated to that very subject. Although Michelet may treat the great oceans less like a scientist than a devoted lover, perhaps the latter is what we most need today, a wise admirer, who will help us all realize the beauty and importance of the matter that covers most of the earth and, as the ice caps melt, may roll over even more of our planet's surface.

Michelet begins his book, surprisingly, by relating stories from the shore, beaches, and cliffs the powerful forces and fearful behavior of the ocean waters. Like me at the edge of that childhood pier, he seems, a first, so terrified of even looking at the great roll of waves, that it appears he will never jump in.

Throughout his highly poetic recounting Michelet gives the sea voices, but the first of these voices presents "her" (and for Michelet the sea is not just linguistically but psychologically a feminine force) as having a most "formidable character:

"...we feel or we believe that we feel the vibrant intonations of life. In fact, at high tide when one wave—immense and electric—rises above another, the sound of shells and of thousands of diverse creatures brought in with the tide mixes with the stormy rumble of the waters.... And the sea has still other voices! When she is emotional, the sea's moan and deep sighs contrast with the silence of the mournful shore. In fact, the shore seems to be quietly meditating, in order to better hear the threats coming from the one who just yesterday was flattering it with a caressing wave. What will the sea be telling to the shore next? I don't want to predict. I do not to speak here of the frightful concerts that the sea may give, of her duets with the rocks, of the basses and the muffled thunder that she produces deep inside the caves, nor the astonishing cries in which one thinks one hears: "Rescue me!"

Even witnessing the sea from atop a cliff or other promontory can be a dangerous act:

At the highest point of the Mont-Saint-Michel, one can see a platform called
the Madman's Terrace. I know of no place more apt to drive someone
crazy than this vertiginous structure. Imagine being surrounded by a vast
secluded plain of what looks like white ash—dubious sand whose mis-
leading smoothness is its most dangerous trap. It is land and yet it's not.
It is the sea and yet again, not. It's not fresh water either although beneath
the sands rivers constantly burrow through the ground. Rarely, and only
for a few short amounts of time, a boat will venture forth. And, if passing
by when the water is receding, you are likely to be swallowed up. I speak
from experience. I myself was almost engulfed.

By the time he gets to the great storms, quoting seafaring explorers such as James Cook, François Péron, and Jules Dumont d'Urville, we are nearly overwhelmed by the power of this dreadful force:

"...At the shore of the Aiguilles Banks also known as the D'Urville Banks" quotes
Michelet, "the waves reached heights of eighty to one hundred feet. I had never
seen such a monstrous sea. ...At times the sailors on deck were submerged. There
was awful chaos that lasted no less than four hours that evening...a century that
was enough to turn your hair white!... -This is what southern storms are like,
so horrible that even on land the natives that can sense their arrival are horrified
by them in advance and hide in their caves."

One particular storm of 1859 on the Western coast of France was witnessed by Michelet himself, and his recounting of that event, with its "shifting and bizarre winds," is perhaps one of the best written descriptions of the fierceness of ocean storms.

It is no wonder that in a later chapter, the author writes what seems almost like an ode to lighthouses, beacons that call out to the frightened sailor: "Persist! One more try!...if the wind and the sea are against you, you are not alone. Mankind is there watching out for you." The naturalist is understandably proud of the France's "ring of these powerful flares," each armed with the Fresnel lens (invented by the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel, and first used at the Cordouan lighthouse in 1823).

If the drama of the sea is what the reader seeks, Michelet does not disappoint either in his sections on storms nor in his recountings of various sea-lives, particularly of the giant octopus (which, he admits, no longer exists) and his tales of whales and sharks. Jules Verne used the former as a major figure in his Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and Lautréamont parodied the author in his Chant de Maldoror. In short, Michelet is determined to engage his reader with numerous exciting adventures regarding his subject.

However, the author warns us, early on, that despite all this seeming fury, the sea itself "is quite innocent."

Moreover, one cannot be fooled by the tremendous illusions she
creates, by the immensity of her wonders or by what on the surface
appears to be moments of fury that are often in fact acts of kindness.

And it is already here, in the second chapter of the book, that Michelet takes up one of his major themes, which elevates this text to stand as a significant work even today. After describing the terrible landscape around Mont-Saint-Michel, the naturalist ponders:

Is it the sea's fault if this beach is so treacherous? Not at all. The sea
arrives thee, as she does elsewhere, noisy and strong but loyal. The
true fault lies with the land whose cunning immobility always seems
so innocent, and who, below the beach, is filtering stream water—a
sugary and whitish mixture that undermines solidity. It is especially man's
fault, because of his ignorance and neglect [italics mine]. During

the long barbarian ages, while he thought only of legends and

establishing this great place of pilgrimage dedicated to the archangel,

who had vanquished the devil, the devil took possession of

that neglected plain. ...Far from doing harm, this madwoman carries

in her menacing waves a treasure of fertile salt. Superior to the Nile's

silt, it enriches the area's cultivated fields and is the source of the

charming beauty of Dol's former marshlands, which today have

been transformed into gardens.

This culpability of man is at the heart of Michelet's plea for the survival of things relating to the oceans. First, he establishes the oceans as the source of life itself by noting the great fecundity of the sea, which he describes as "the sea of milk," a kind of gelatinized water. A single drop of water, he insists, carry thousands of infusorium, "moving about and vibrating," coming together to create links of maidenhair. "This is not fable," he argues, "it is natural history. This hair with its dual nature—plant and animal—is life's eldest child."

Importantly, Michelet goes on to establish the international patterns of the sea's movements, and the shifts in the oceans' currents, from hot to cold, around the globe. It is, accordingly, only by seeing the sea globally that we can truly comprehend its importance. Describing different sealife throughout the planet, Michelet gracefully takes, as his favorite explorer, Vasco da Gama (he dismisses Columbus' journey as a mere repetition of what the Normans and Icelanders had done long before), in their travels. And in doing so we gradually come also to be fascinated with the abundance in our oceans.

By the time Michelet comes round to talking about the whales, he quite clearly anthropomorphizes his subject:

Because such a life form is inherently shaped like a ship, the mother's
waist is narrow and this means that she cannot have the profuse waist of
a woman—that adorable miracle of life on land, that stable and harmonic
life, where everything disappears into tenderness. No matter how tender
the whale—that great woman of the sea—is, she still must make everything
dependent on her battle against the waves. Moreover, her organism is the
same under this strange mask—the shape, the same sensitivity. Fish
on the surface, woman beneath it. [This analogy continues for a few more
paragraphs]

By doing this, however, Michelet has created a true link between the nursing whale and his readers that can only shock when, a few pages later, he decries what have become of these wonderful leviathans:

The strongest of the strong, the ingenious one, the active one, the cruel king
the world has finally arrived. My book is flooded with light. But what will it
show? And how many sad things do I now have to bring into this light?
This creator, this tyrannical God was able to produce a second nature
within nature. But what did he do to the other one, the original one, his
wet-nurse and his mother? With the teeth that she gave him, he bit her
breast....

The freest of beings, who formerly brought joy to the sea, those good-
hearted seals, the gentle whales, the peace-loving pride and joy of the Ocean,
all have fled to the polar seas and to the awful world of the ice floe. But they
cannot bear such a difficult life, and soon, they will completely disappear.

Soon after, the author introduces a chapter on The Harpoon, and moves forward to the discovery of the three oceans. And it is now, in the newly discovered world that he truly cries out against the barbaric acts of mankind. After describing the conquerors treatment of the native populations, Michelet continues:

It is obvious that if Man has treated Man in this way, he was no more merciful,
no kinder to the animals. He carried out a horrific slaughter of the gentlest
species. He made them savage and barbaric forever more...
In the New South Shetland Islands, Dumont d'Urville says, the English and
the Americans exterminated all the seals in four years. In a blind rage, they
would slit the throats of the newborns, and would kill the pregnant females.
Often they killed for the skins alone and wasted enormous amounts of oil
that could have been use.

"The water gushes forth with the red droplets..." the naturalist ends his description of the "drunken butchery" of tuna by men and women alike on a European shore.

As a solution to some of this mad abuse, Michelet proposes, along with other writers, a new bill, a "Declaration of the Rights of the Sea" to change regulations on the periods of coastal fishing, to create more humane ways of killing, and to ban fishing entirely during the season when each species reproduces. "As for the precious species that are on the verge of disappearing, especially the whale, the world's largest and creation's richest life form, we need absolute peace for a half-century," concluded Michelet in 1861.

Not only does Michelet argue for these prescient measures of conservation, what he describes as a Truce of God, but, more important, he recognizes in the ocean's many voices, a kind of international (perhaps even universal) community that will bring world harmony. I quote this powerful passage at length:

There is one extremely big difference between these two elements—land is
silent and the Ocean speaks. The Ocean is a voice that speaks to distant stars
and responds to their movement in its deep and solemn language. It speaks
to the land and the shore, conversing with their echoes in poignant tones.
In turn plaintive and threatening it rumbles or sighs. Above all, it speaks to
man. Since the Ocean is the fertile crucible in which creating began and
within whose strength it continues, it possesses creation's animated eloquence.
This is life speaking to life. The beings, which are born from the Ocean in
the millions and billions, are its words. It speaks, even before the white and
foaming sea of milk—from which they emerge—with its fertile marine jelly,
is organized. All this, combined together is the great voice of the Ocean.
What does it say? It speaks of life, the eternal metamorphosis. It speaks of
a fluctuating existence. It puts the petrified ambitions of terrestrial life to shame.
What does it say? Immortality. An indomitable force of life can be found
in the lowest rungs of nature. And yet, theirs are so much more superior!
What does it say? Solidarity. Let's accept the rapid exchange, which
occurs between the different parts of an individual. Let's accept the superior
law that unites the living members of a single entity: humanity. And beyond
that, let's accept the supreme law that means that we cooperate and create,
with the great South, that we are associated (to the best of our ability) with this
world's loving Harmony and that we show solidarity with the life God has
created.

Romantic? Yes. A few of Michelet's topics may even appear, in retrospect, a bit silly (his discussion of the restorative powers of the ocean are outdated and somewhat quaint, to say the least). But when it comes to describing that vast and troubled lake that surrounds all our continents, I can best hear his voice—the voice he has given to our Oceans.

Los Angeles, July 10, 2010
This essay was first read to a Korean audience on the occasion of the 2010 World Writers' Festival, "The Poetic Spirit of the Sea," hosted by Dankook University in Seoul, Jukjeon, and Cheonan, Korea on October 5, 2010. It was published in both Korean and English in the programme for that event, From the Sea of Discovery to the Sea of Communication (Seoul/Jukjeon: Dankook University, 2010).

Moscow Thanksgiving (travel to Moscow in 1989)

2010-11-05T07:54:00.000-07:00

Rossiya Hotel

GUM Department store

Dining room at the Rossiya

MOSCOW THANKSGIVING
by Douglas Messerli

After a relatively pleasant time in the moderne world of Tallinn, it was quite a shock to return to the Soviet Union, where the 19th century seemed still to exist. The dust of the Moscow streets blurred our eyes, and the buildings, about which we had been forewarned, were notably Stalinist in look. Our hotel was the vast Rossiya Hotel, consisting of 3,200 rooms. Even the nearby Kremlin seemed lost in its hovering shadow. If one found ones way back to the room, it was comfortable enough, but almost unbearably overheated. In 2006 it was torn down to make way for a new, grander hostelry.

Although I continued the pointless activity of shopping in Moscow, it meant little. Hardly anything existed in the shops. Even in the famous GUM Department store across from Red Square there was not even a coat to be found. Numerous shops stood empty. The trinkets left in the few open stores seemed valueless.

ROVA continued their concerts, thank heaven, which provided wonderful entertainment each evening, but in my daily walks I had grown tired of Moscow's ugly streets. I felt after more than a week in this cold country, we all wanted to go home.

One evening we were bused to a large theater on the edge of the city to hear Soviet poets read, our friend Ivan Zhdanov being one of the readers. But of course, the reading was in Russian and most of us could not comprehend what was being said.

Lyn Hejinian met up with a young Russian writer there, whose name I cannot remember. He must have been still in his teens, a handsome and very gentle young man whom she invited for a walk the next day as well.

That day, November 23, 1989, was Thanksgiving back in the USA, and as a surprise our tour guide had ordered a special Thanksgiving dinner so that we might celebrate and be free, at least for one meal, of the standard Russian fare. After our walk, we encouraged our young poet friend to join us.

Russian citizens, despite Arkadii's rejection of the law, were not allowed in the international hotels; and the boy, accordingly, demurred. "Oh, I can't do that!" he insisted.

"Oh yes, you have to join us," Lyn insisted.

"Do come share dinner with us," I added.

"But I can't," he pleaded. "What if they find me out?"

"You're with us," Lyn added.

"But I don't speak English well enough."

"Yes, you do," I insisted. "Besides we'll do all the talking. Just pretend to listen."

And we quickly moved him through the lobby and into our dining room, as we chattered away, placing him at the center of the long table the staff arranged for us.

The dinner was edible, if I remember, although many complained loudly throughout. I believe chicken was served instead of turkey, stringy and without taste. But the potates were fine; even gravy. Did they add any of the other "trimmings?" I can't recall, but just having a change was good for the soul.

And despite regulations, black market dealers approached the tables with bottles of vodka and cans of cavier. I bought both, sharing the vodka.

Several of our group, however, grumpily continued in their commentary on the quality of the cuisine.

I turned to our the young guest. "How did you like the food?"

He turned his fresh face in my direction, a smile creating a crater in its path. "It was the best meal I have ever had in my life."

He was serious! Tears welled up in my eyes.

Los Angeles, November 4, 2010

Incheon City (on my Korean travels, October 1-8, 2010)

2010-10-28T09:23:00.000-07:00

INCHEON CITY
by Douglas Messerli

After the long 13-hour air trip from Los Angeles to Korea, over oceans I watched every time the clouds briefly opened up a view, I arrived at the Incheon Airport.

I had been told that I would be met by my translator, who would whisk me off to my Seoul hotel.

Although it took me a while to move through passport control and to receive my small bag, I rolled out of the entry doors with a feeling of being on time, ready to greet the person holding a sign bearing my name. No such sign appeared. No signs appeared save discreet hotel announcements: "Meet your Hilton Hotel representative at gate 15, meet your Marriott Hotel guide at gate 21."

I stood still in bewilderment, then turned back to look upon the billboard over my head regarding the flight announcements. So many were listed that I couldn't quickly find my flight number. But I knew I had exited from the door closest to our baggage caravel. What could I do? I had been given, despite several queries, no name of a hotel, no name of a contact. It had been repeated and repeated in emails that someone would be there to meet me.

But after a half-an-hour, I had to admit to myself that there was no one. Perhaps he/she was late; was I early? No, I was on time. She/he was late. I walked back and forth across the waiting area, attempting to strongly convey to those waiting for others that was seeking someone. No one responded in the least. I was not for whom they were waiting.

I even dared to walk out of the waiting area for a few moments, perceiving that there were several such entry gates; but I quickly determined that they were inappropriate spots, containing mostly domestic flights, and returned to my original location. No one even looked in my direction.

So here I am, I thought to myself, at Incheon International Airport without a clue what to do, even if I were to reach Seoul.

I was tired; I had not slept during the flight, and it was now 2:00 a.m. in California time, hours after I usually retired to bed. Well, I sighed to myself, I am a seasoned traveler. I'll take a taxi into Seoul to a major hotel; certainly I can find a single room!

Still—in all meanings of that world—I remained, feeling somehow guilty, that I was at fault. My translator had simply missed me; she/he had gone to the wrong gate or failed to recognize my face, had been delayed in heavy traffic. Fortunately, I'd never witnessed the Seoul traffic jams, for I would have perhaps never strayed.

I walked away. I came back. Walked on. Clearly, no one was going to come for me.
Out of nowhere appeared a kindly Korean man. "You are clearly lost," he began in English.

"Yes," I quickly responded, "I was to have been met by a man or woman to take me to a hotel in Seoul."

"Do you have the number of the hotel or the number of the person who was to have met you?" he inquired.

"No, that's just the problem. I have no telephone numbers whatsoever except for those who planned the event I'm to attend.

"You know," is slowly offered up the facts, "there are four or five major gates. Are you sure this is the one at which you were expected?"

"Yes, it has to be this gate," I insisted, looking again at the overhead listings of flights. My flight was no longer on the board.

"Do you have anyone's telephone number?" he continued, as if speaking to a very small child, which I felt I had become.

"Well, I do," I admitted, but these are only university numbers and, surely, on a Saturday evening, they would not be there!"

"Let us try," he attempted to reassure me, taking out his cell phone and dialing up the numbers I displayed. He rang each number three times without result.

"Thank you so very much for your kindness," I finally cut off his good Samaritan attempts. "No one can be in their offices tonight. I'll just get a taxi into Seoul."

But where in Seoul? I pondered to myself.

At the information desk I described my situation and had my own name paged, hoping that if somewhere were waiting for me they would come to the desk. No one arrived at the desk, and I was not even sure that I heard the announcement.

"Across the way," she blithely pointed, "is a woman who can help you get a hotel." I looked across the way, but no one was there. "She will be back soon."

When her colleague finally returned, I encountered a friendly, good looking woman, seemingly happy to serve me.

I told her my story, hoping she might help me find a hotel in Seoul.

I suddenly remembered my father's absurd way of obtaining hotels during our family travels across Europe in 1965. At each airport in which we arrived—Copenhagen, Paris, Zürich—my father simply approached just such a woman as she who stood before me, and fearlessly obtained quite pleasant accommodations.

In Copenhagen, for example, we stayed at one of the major hotels (I could not identify the hotel in today's listings on the internet). I believe it had to be, however, a four-star hotel, since the series of events that occurred there would not have taken place at a hotel of lesser quality.

My brother David and I shared one room, while my Father and Mother slept in another. My brother quickly drifted off to sleep, but all night long I was kept awake by rumbling and roaring noises, as if a crowd of angry protesters were stationed just a few blocks away.

My parents, so they reported the next morning, had also been kept awake. Dave had heard nothing.

While we spoke at the breakfast table near the lobby, loud screams of young women suddenly silenced our conversation. Across the lobby, in full view of our table, marched a group of musicians, led by two men I immediately recognized as Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. It was June 26, 1965, the day in which The Rolling Stones first performed on their famed first Scandinavian tour.

I had heard their new record, "Satisfaction," just a month before in my Norway dorm room on the English off-shore Radio Caroline. No one else in my family knew who they were or why people might be screaming at them.

"Rockers!" the head waiter contemptuously declared.

In Paris my father found us, again at the information desk, a wonderful hotel just across from the offices of Paris Match, with high-ceilinged rooms and a small elevator that reminds me to this day of the one in the movie Charade. I loved the hotel, although my mother complained vociferously, as she did about any hotel or motel in which we stayed. It was in that hotel room that my father broke into tears as he entreated me to return home from my year in Norway, the purpose, I suddenly perceived, of our little Grand Tour. I had just turned 17, an age when a father's tears still had an enormous impact, and, accordingly, I acquiesced, despite my desire to stay on for the rest of the summer.

In Zürich, once again, through the airport information booth, my father procured a lovely pension, in which my brother and I were perfectly happy, despite my mother's distress on account of heat and noise.

Now, here in Incheon, 45 years later, I knew things had changed. Before this trip I had always planned everything out, arranging for rooms long in advance. I would never have trusted to luck. Yet, in memory of those halcyon days I felt that certainly I could find a single room available in a city with a population of over 12 million inhabitants.

"Do you have a reservation?" she innocently asked.

"No, as I told you, I don't know the name of the hotel in which I was to have stayed tonight."

She smiled sympathetically at my predicament, while reporting, nonetheless, with a complete sense of authority, that there was not a single hotel room to be found in the entire city of Seoul!
I was dumbfounded. "How could that be in a city with hundreds of hotels. There clearly has to be something available."

"It is," she paused, "Saturday, the beginning of the weekend!" as if that explained everything—or anything.

I laughed. "You're not telling me, surely, that not a single room can be found in the city. There must be some place to sleep."

"Nothing," she politely and emphatically declared.

"Perhaps if I catch a taxi to the Hilton, they might have a room for me?"

"Not without reservations," she proclaimed. "There might be something near the airport."

"But I don't want to stay out here," I declared. "My business is in the city." Little did I know that Seoul was situated more than a hour away.

"I'll call the Airport Hilton."

After only a few words, she hung up. "Nothing available there."

"I have to have some place to sleep tonight."

"You don't remember the name of the hotel in which they booked you?" she scolded.

"I enquired, but they never told me. Someone was to meet me here and take me there."

A slightly disgusted look crossed her face, the kind of expression one might save for an iterant gypsy. I was perspiring out of simple fear and frustration.

"There may be one room left in a nearby tourist hotel, the Eulwang Hotel, not far from here. Here's a brochure," she suddenly waved before me as if she had produced it out of thin air. I'll check."

The brochure displayed a white painted, concrete structure in the Korean palace style. The rooms looked somewhat pleasant, in a rustic manner of polished redwood.

She came back to me with an open smile. "They have one room left."

Although I inwardly rolled my eyes in disbelief, I outwardly responded enthusiastically. "Then let us book it," I caved in, like a rube just off the bus. Clearly she was taking in a healthy under-the-table income as that hotel's agent. But what choice did I have? "And what's the price?"

"It's reasonable. Only 85,000 Won." I gasped, trying to convert that into dollars.

"That seems like a lot."

"About $75.00," she responded.

Now I was afraid: at that price it might be a dump.

"A driver will be here to pick you up in 10 minutes. Gate 33," she summarily dismissed me, handing me a slip of paper announcing my reservation. I looked up to discover that I was at Gate 3.

Somewhat relieved, if nothing else, I walked to that far gate and went out onto the sidewalk. There were several large city buses, and others arriving at regular intervals, dozens of them, each sweeping away huge crowds. I waited for a long while, but no hotel shuttle bus arrived.

One large bus, so its sign announced, was headed to Dankook University, the host of the conference I was attending. For a second I fancied riding out to the University, except that I knew no one would be there to greet me, and perhaps, I questioned whether events would even be scheduled there. I waited for a longer while. No hotel bus showed up.

In the very next lane I could see a lineup of taxis. Perhaps I was waiting in the wrong lane? My luggage cart and I rolled out into the next circle of hell, where I attempted to ask a taxi driver if the bus to the hotel—presenting him with my small slip of passage—might be arriving at this location.

After much scrutiny of my paper, he brought out a pair of reading glasses and studied it anew. He pointed back to where I had come. And I retreated, waiting for a longer period.

I was tired, had had no sleep now for over 17 hours. I was anxious to reach the hotel, email my hosts, and crawl into bed. No bus arrived.

With grim determination, I returned to Gate 3 in order to complain. My friendly guide was waiting upon other suckers, and I had no patience left. I grabbed the brochure which she had previously offered, and marched out to the waiting taxi line: "Can you take me here?" I asked.
He too brought out his glasses to study the brochure. Fortunately, the flier contained a small map of the area. And after a brief survey of the thing, he walked me forward to his cab. Finally, I was on the move, I thought to myself.

"All right," I attempted to calm myself. "When I get to the hotel, I'll take a shower. I'll email Hae Yisoo, the General Secretary of the International Creative Writing Center." He had been my line of communication throughout the months before my arrival. "Perhaps they will meet me tomorrow morning at the airport. Or I'll take a taxi into Seoul, after they tell me where to go. I've traveled a great deal. This is no big thing. It's important to get a good night's sleep."

Looking out the window of the taxi, I noted that we had just passed the Airport Hilton. Many rooms looked empty, but I knew there was no turning back.

We drove down a road on which nothing else seemed to exist, but I realized that much of this land, so close to ocean, must be marshland that I couldn't make out in the dark.

We took another turn and drove down an equally empty road, and then another, and another. Where was this driver taking me? At another turn there were a few of what appeared to be roadside stands, selling fireworks, all lit up by colored firefly lights. A few larger buildings were also lit up by strings of out-door light bulbs, some with red-neon depictions of women in prone positions, which I presumed represented the existence of sex-bars or hotels.

"Where are we going?" I quietly asked.

"This is where," the taxi cab driver mumbled in Beckettese.

"Where what?" I wondered to myself.

Long stretches of empty highways followed, replaced with a few more brightly-lit roadside stands and bars or hotels with sometimes unidentifiable symbols.

"This seems to be awfully far from the airport," I spoke up. "The agent who arranged for my room told me that it was 'airport adjacent.'" I mumbled to myself.

"This is the way. Very popular," spoke the sibyl in the front seat.

We drove on and on into the night.

"Where are you taking me?" I registered some alarm.

"This is where." he repeated.

I wanted to laugh, but couldn't quite get up the energy.

There was another stretch of sexual institutions, another series of what appeared to be fruit stands surrounded by what looked like Christmas lights.

It reminded be, a bit, of the Thai countryside and small villages depicted in Apichatpong's films, which I'd recently been viewing.

Finally, a few higher structures appeared and the driver took a turn into a narrow side-street, what seemed to a dirt alley. He drove half-way up the alley, before backing down and turning at a fork into an equally dark lane. A few yards off lay what looked somewhat like Eulwang Hotel of my brochure.

"Here, arrival!" proudly announced the driver.

I looked around in some small distress, but felt happy to have arrived at any destination.

"Thank you. I'm sorry I doubted you," I apologized, paying him something like 20,000 Won, which seemed like a ransom instead of fee.

He helped me carry my bags to the lobby, filled, it appeared with about 100 people lined up to the front desk. But I soldiered on, suddenly perceiving that these tourists had already checked in and were awaiting their room assignments from the tour guide. Accordingly, I walked straight to the desk.

The young clerk quickly checked me in and, after a shower (in mid-bathroom with a hose), I returned to the lobby to use my computer, since there was no access in the guest rooms.

I sent messages to both Hae Yisoo (who uses the nicknane, Heysoo) and to Ko Un's translator, Brother Anthony—fortunately, because the next day I discovered that Heysoo, exhausted by all the festival preparations, had not checked in on his email; at 11:00 p.m. Brother Anthony called him, and at midnight, Heysoo called the hotel with a message for me: he would be there to pick me up the next morning.

Despite the shouting voices one could discern in the nearby streets along with the occasional explosion of fireworks, I was fast asleep at the time Heysoo called, and slept comfortably all night.

The morning light sent me downstairs for a 5:00 a.m. breakfast, which an even younger clerk described as an "American brunch," consisting of fried eggs, bacon, and French fries. I laughed at the combination as a I bit into a slice of toast, as did the Korean-American couple from Atlanta seated at the next table. There is something surreal about beginning one's day with fries.

As I began to explore the underdone yolk of my egg, the clerk announced that I had received a telephone message, reporting that someone would be here to drive me into Seoul at 10:00.
I finished as much of my "American brunch" as I dared to consume, and determined to take a short walk. Who made up these noisy night crowds? I wondered. And what were they doing in this outpost?

A block away was a huge arch, a marquee, apparently, to mark off one's entrance into what at evening must be an array of small shops selling trinkets, food, and other unidentifiable objects, along with small motels, which, when I looked into their long halls, appeared to be made up of rooms the size of the windowed booths of the red light district in Amsterdam. This, clearly a city of quick and sudden thrills, I perceived, nestled against a nearby beach was what one might describe as a kind of boardwalk, just as run-down and ragtag as the so-called boardwalk of Venice in Los Angeles.

No one was here this early in the morning, although it was already partially lit, as if primping itself for its nightly show. I walked to the end of the street and stared across a small park abutting it. There, spread out in front, was the subject of the conference—the sea, in all its splendor! This was the Yellow Sea, beyond which lay China.

I returned to my "tourist hotel," to observe several buses gathered upon the small street, which the tourists from the night before had gathered around, as if waiting for someone to tell them to climb aboard. It was a desolate spot where Heysoo would find me, a few hours later. I was equally embarrassed that he had felt the necessity to "save face" by coming out to rescue me himself. He might have easily sent the translator or just the driver, I counseled.

"Please don't worry about me. I was fine. I slept well. The sea, even though I didn't know it was close by, must have comforted me, as it always does, by its rhythms."

When we had finished apologizing and thanking one another, I concluded. "There's no problem; here I am!"

"Here you are," he laughed.

We quickly became friends. The fact that, despite his unbelievably hectic schedule for the day ahead, he had come so far to retrieve me, would inure him forever in my heart. And I was secretly delighted in having witnessed another view of the Korean landscape.

Seoul, October 8, 2010

Noticed and Overhead in Korea (on my Korean trip October 1-8, 2010)

2010-10-19T08:20:00.000-07:00

Tiny roofs upon a roof

Selected dishes

Ripper slippers

Heedfall, sign at left

Signing a ceramic vase

A large photograph, bottom row, center

The comfortable lobby in my hotel

The comments in the pages below are based on just a week's stay on my visit to Seoul, Korea in 2010. Accordingly, my observations are meant neither as representations nor criticisms of Korean culture, but rather are written out of humorous observations of quickly perceived differences in a near virginal euphoria as I encountered this complex society. One might as easily have noted similar differences—perceived oddities in a newly encountered culture—by any Korean first visiting the USA. At no point do I intend my comments as applying to the society at large, which I highly admire and have just begun to explore as a culture. These jottings represent just what they suggest by their collective title: things briefly noted and observed—and, I should add, for the most part joyfully experienced.

Noticed and Overheard in Korea
by Douglas Messerli

FOR FINGERS ONLY

It appears to me that Koreans are stingy with towels, cloth or paper. Although Western-sized towels are likely available in the larger hotels (they were available at the Hotel Seoul KyoYuk MunHwa Hoekwan where we writers' invited to the 2010 World Writers' Festival stayed.) But in smaller hotels, certainly in the tourist hotel where I stayed the first evening, the towels provided were the size of very small American hand-towels, insufficient to properly dry Western sized bodies (or, for that matter, Korean bodies of today). The more rustic Seoul Art Space, where I stayed the final few nights, expected their guests to bring their own towels, and we had each to insist that we be provided with one; somehow I received two very small towels, but gave one up to my neighbor, Antonio Colinas, who had not so insisted. To be fair, the Art Space may tell its regular guests beforehand what to expect; we were sudden and unexpected visitors.

This lack of towels, however, extended also to many public facilities. In a number of public bathrooms I found a sink and even soap, but nothing with which to dry one's hands. Even in Dankook university there were no towels to be found, which does tend make one a bit shy about washing one's hands in the first place, and certainly makes for an unsanitary experience. A few of these public bathrooms did offer hand-driers (which I also abhor, but will use if necessary), but the majority offered nothing.

Table napkins are even smaller, more for the fingers than mouths or hands, and are as thin as facial tissues.

Seoul, October 7, 2010

THE DECLARATION OF THE ROOF

It was fascinating to me that most of the high-rise apartments in Seoul, of which there are hundreds, are all aligned horizontally to the streets and highways, their vase rectangles of concrete, each marked with a number, possibly determined by their position in a sequence from left to right or vice-versa: 102, 103, 104, etc., facing the traveler.

Whereas most Western apartment buildings, influenced obviously by the Bauhaus architecture and modernism in general, are topped off by a flat surface as if to emphasize their sleekness, almost all such buildings in Seoul, when they are not built as spectacular architectural statements, bear mansard-like roofs or, even more often, are topped by a small model of a house (presumably containing the equipment that runs the elevator), themselves crowned by a traditional roof in the manner of the American Red Roof Inn motels. Accordingly, it is as if each architect has placed atop his or her construction a little cap or a tri-cornered hat, influenced, quite obviously, by the roofs of the great Korean palaces. Indeed, sometimes the arcs of the palace roof is itself imitated.

These decorative elements atop what are otherwise simply rectangular boxes have the effect of rendering these buildings, at least to Western eyes, as slightly kitsch, as if there has been some attempt to prettify a form that so shouts out its utilitarian function: a number of stacked floors containing variously sized cubicles in which humans are housed. This may be your home, but it is definitely not a palace—despite the declaration of the roof.

Seoul, October 7, 2010

ALL AT ONCE

Although there are different "waves" or "phases" of Korean meals, there is no sense of different "courses" as there is in the West. Except for rice and the Korean version of udon, all dishes, consisting of small plates of various cabbages (kimchi), meats, fish, fried foods, salad, etc, are placed upon the tables in restaurants all at once and are shared by one's table mates. Each of the low tables, requiring sitting upon the floor, have from four to six settings, around which these small patters are placed. There is no order in the selection; one simply takes up the small, pointed metal chopsticks and selects a bit of what one desires, placing it upon the diminutive plate or bowl before one. If a platter is out of reach, another diner will help with the serving. One never pours one's own drinks; one must pour for others and, they, in turn, will pour for you. My 21-year old translator and her friends reported, however, that that tradition—since it had been essentially the task of the woman, a role Korean Feminism now frowns upon—is beginning to disappear, yet at every lunch and dinner I shared with others the tradition was maintained.

This communality of eating, accordingly, helps to involve everyone, and contributes to the sustenance of conversation, while still allowing for individual tastes. As the different dishes begin to be eaten up and are quickly cleared away, the next "phase" is served, and often a third, sweeter "wave," at which time the waitresses also serve tea.

Although I had eaten several times in Los Angeles' Korean restaurants before my travels, I discovered several new Korean dishes, some of which I preferred to others, and by the end of my visit, I had begun to make determined choices in what I ate. With the abundance of different choices, however, I certainly never went hungry. And the Koreans seem to be hearty eaters.

Seoul, October 7, 2010

A SLIPPER FETISH

Koreans, like those of other Asian cultures, have what might be described as a shoe-fetish, or more correctly, a "slipper-fetish." It is one thing to take off one's shoes before entering a house—Howard and I do that in our own home, although we do not require it of others; and a recent invitation to a party at the home of Michael Ovitz, the founder of Creative Artists Agency and former president of the Walt Disney Company, announced that guests would be asked to remove their shoes and put on slippers before entering their home. But it is quite another thing to require, as they did at the Art Space, that one differentiate between a slipper to wear in the rooms and hall, a slipper to wear in the out-of-doors, and a slipper to wear in the bath.

The latter is necessary since many homes and hotels do not have a shower stall in their toilets, and one bathes, accordingly, by holding a shower hose over one's head in the middle of the room, the water eventually running to a floor drain, usually located under the sink. Depending upon how often one showers, the bathroom floor remains wet throughout the day and into the night, and returning to it is a bit like entering a wading pool. The floors of many Korea homes and hotels, consisting of highly polished wood, moreover, does not wed well with the tracks of wet feet. Plastic slippers, kept just inside the toilet, facing the direction of one's feet, is the perfect solution!

Leaving a restaurant, particularly with a large group, involves the discovery and reckoning of one's foot wear, usually stowed upon entering in large cabinets or stacked upon shelves. The deep bend of each guest to fit and tie up his shoes has a feel almost of a ritualistic act. Fortunately, I wear loafers.

I should add, the so called "Ripper Slippers" found in Korean hair salons, patronized by ghetto women, have become popular with both Black gang members and gays in Los Angeles.

Seoul, October 8, 2010

THE TENTH SAINT

In the Itaweon neighborhood of Seoul I lunched at a French bistro titled Le Saint-Ex, one of the first of the higher-class restaurants opened when the area was still a red light district and off-limits to most Koreans not working in the sex industry. The restaurant is run by Benjimin Joinau, who has since become a noted figure in the Itaweon community.

Their Steak Poirve is truly excellent, and, along with a good bottle of Merlot, and an hour long nursing of a gin and tonic beforehand, produced much of the writing in this piece.

I puzzled, however, over the name of the place. Did it mean to suggest just any saint, a saint without a name, the tenth saint—whoever that might be—or was it suggesting that we should just cross the saintly off our list?

Seoul, October 7, 2010

AT THE EDGE OF THE CLIFF

At the Cheonan Campus of Dankook University, I met In-Ho Cho, Vice President, in charge of the Chenon Campus. He spoke English and had studied dentistry at UCLA in Los Angeles. As we moved from his offices to the theater for our readings and lectures, we were stopped by a photographer to have our pictures taken.

There, to the left of where we stood, was a sign that Ko Un's translator, Brother Anthony pointed out, warning that a cliff began just beyond the barrier which stood behind us. DANGER, it shouted out in both Korean and Korenglish: HEEDFALL. We laughed, explaining to Mr. In-Ho that there was no such word in English, but that it such a wonderful creation it should perhaps be introduced into the language. Certainly there was no way to translate it properly!

Seoul, October 7, 2010

THE IMPORTANCE OF LANGUAGE

At the Three Alley Pub in the same small street where I had lunch, the bartender spoke endlessly with the American military personnel from the nearby Yongsan Garrison who gather there. "Even when I lived clear out in the country," he proclaimed, "I made the long journey into Seoul and Itaweon to come here. It's important in Korea to have a place where the bartender speaks English!"

Seoul, October7, 2010

MISS PAK AND MR. FRITZ

I had come to this pub precisely for what it offered, a chance to write while overhearing the local news and gossip. What I most like about any city is trying to comprehend how people live in it, what they do, etc. Since I did not understand Korean, however, I could not "overhear" things the way I do in some other cities. I needed, as the bartender had demanded, a place where the bartender and customers spoke English.

Accordingly, my comprehension of Korean life is a bit far-fetched, since it is based mostly on hearsay from Americans living in the midst of the most international and sexually open section of Seoul. Yet no tour guide could have offered me up a more delightful mix of conversations than the ones I assimilated at Three Alley Pub.

Somehow the conversation turned to the neighborhood characters. The bartender described how one night he was visited by the very famous Miss Pak. Miss Pak, evidently, is quite ancient, without teeth, and with cheeks that have gradually caved in over the years—yet she is a legend in Seoul. Her name is Dakju Pak, but she is known only as Miss Pak, a whore who haunts the streets of Itaweon. She has been at her job for nearly sixty or even seventy years, they all agree. Although greatly loved, just for the absurdity of her situation, she is also quite dangerous to some. Apparently, she has crushes on some soldier boys, even if they have had nothing to do with her, and shouts at them in the streets, sometimes at inopportune moments such as when they might be out walking with a military superior: "I love you best, Ralphie" Miss Pak screams. Ralph blushes of course, but even if innocent, he is forever suspect.

They attempted to calculate—forgive me dear reader for the coarseness of these soldiers' imagination—how much cock she must have had, given her age and averaging two medium-sized customers six days a week (they gave her a day off, even if she didn't take it), and summarized that it might reach—if you took it south—clear to Busan!

The denizens of this bar followed up with a brief mention of Mr. Fritz, another neighborhood figure, who goes about dressed only in his pajamas, pointing his umbrella at desired individuals, as if to say, "Take this!"

Seoul, October 7, 2010

MOTHER KOREA

Oh, that reassuring, yet commandeering voice of the Korean mother! In Seoul she exists everywhere: at street lights she tells you when to cross and when to stop; in elevators she announces what floor you have reached, "please exit now." Taxis could never reach their destinations without her navigational skills. She seems to be everywhere, that wise, bossy, scolding, slightly sexy, and utterly terrifying woman, informing everyone—particularly the Korean male—of when, what, and why he should act. Often she sneaks up on you. On the escalator down she commanded me in Korean to "step off immediately." Yet to my knowledge she said nothing on the way up!

Even as we sped to the Incheon airport, Mother Korea took time to tell us, as we drove through the toll booth on the freeway that "You need to buy a new ticket" or "Your ticket remains in good stead," I couldn't determine which. For her ever vigilant helpfulness she makes very large demands.

Seoul, October 7, 2010

TAXIS TO SOMEWHERE ELSE

Most of the taxicab drivers I encountered in Seoul were in their late 40s and 50s, few of them comprehending more than a dozen words of English, unless it has to do with a financial transaction.

Whenever I handed the driver a card with the address to which I wanted to be taken, he had first to put on his glasses before squinting at the business card as if he had never seen such a thing or was attempting to interpret the strange characters displayed upon it (although it was written in Korean). Five out of six times, the driver seemed utterly perplexed until I suggested he check out his navigational system.

The drivers' mastery of this system, however, was another problem. In four trips to the "lost paradise" hilltop Seoul Art Space, three of them ended in a place I could not recognize, one very late at night, where the drivers' were ready to "dump" me, despite my complaints. At one point, I tried to tell the driver to take me back to where he had picked me up—I would pay for the whole trip in order to be in a place where I would know where I was. Fortunately, he asked a passerby who was able to explain the Art Space's nearby location.

The other two times that I arrived at the wrong destination ended in something like a shouting match as I proclaimed my lack of recognition while the drivers' pointed with assurance at their navigational system's map. After all, Mother Korea had told them they had arrived at their destination. My refusal to leave the cab, accordingly, resulted in something like a standoff, until I handed the card to them again, beseeching them to call the Art Space's office. The helpful staff explained each time to the drivers their errors and how to reach their goal.

Although all of these trips ended on a friendly note, accordingly, I entered each vehicle with a sense of trepidation, never knowing where I might end up. And there was always the chance that Mother Korea would win out over me, leaving me high in the hills at an unknown doorway.
When I expressed these fears—without adding any of the details above—on a visit to Brother Anthony, he reassured me in his delightful Cornwallish accent: "Not to worry. The taxicab driver will take out his glasses, study your little card, and take you straight to gate."

I could only wonder that all taxicab drivers in Seoul must suffer the same affliction of far-sightedness. Perhaps it was merely a trick of the trade, a way of assuring the customer that he was seriously attending to his destination.

Seoul, October 8, 2010

SIGNATURES AND PHOTOGRAPHS

I have never signed more programmes, documents, and objects than here in Korea. It was very sweet for 15 high school girls, dressed all in red, to want our autographs. I signed each one, dedicated with the name of she who requested it. It was also very nice to sign the large banners bearing my intensely smiling face on the opening night. I also was asked to sign a large placard, which is difficult to do with a permanent marking pen, given my small handwriting.

At Dankook University we were all asked to put some words and our signatures upon a large ceramic vessel waiting to be kilned. Later, we were asked to affix our signatures to a plate.
At the Seoul Art space we again signed placards. Everywhere people begged for signatures above our photographs.

My hand hurts. It is the mentality of "Kilroy was Here," the sign as symbol of being and event.

Another Korean (and pan-Asian) infatuation is the photograph. I have never been shy with the camera, myself, and for years have stubbornly documented my friends and acquaintances in the US, Europe, and South America, so I am quite in sympathy with this activity. Yet, I admit it, I cannot match the obsession with photo-documentation of this trip.

There has hardly been a moment during our tour in which we and are audiences were not being filmed or photographed. At every venue, both before and after, we have been gathered together for group photo shots, most of them exposing my fat belly along with my over friendly smile (my translator, Soomin, overheard children at the Changdekyung Palace describing me as Santa Claus).

I have never in my life felt so exposed, so overexplosed. Posters of our faces hang on street lamps, across the sides of buildings, in every theater in which we have performed, are pasted even on the sides of the buses which carry us about.

Beyond all this, each of the writers and translators gleefully snap the others' pictures, and filmmaker's following us take pictures of our taking pictures. News photographers even get into the act, snapping up pictures of our documenters taking pictures of us taking pictures of ourselves!

Surely among these hundreds and hundreds of images there must be one photograph worth retrieving—the one that makes look like someone else or, at least, a better me! I invite all of you who captured my image to return them to me before my image of myself is forever lost!

Seoul, October 8, 2010

WHERE IT IS

Although one can easily find beer in the Incheon Seoul Airport, in the concourse from which my plane left there was only one tiny bar which one could easily miss, with the unlikely name of Fizz & Jazz, which serves vodka (no tonic), Jack Daniels, Chevas, Hennessey, and Bicardi—nothing else. Four beers: Heineken, Asai, Corona, and Budweiser. There was also no music while I was there, so, in short, they had neither jazz nor fizz!

Indeed, even in the major hotel in which I stayed, they had balked at serving me a vodka and tonic and claimed to have no gin. What was this absence of certain popular spirits all about?
I spoke to the young woman who bartended this small space. She reported that, although her girlfriends loved gin and tonics, her boss wouldn't stock the place with either. "Why?" I queried.
"No one in the older generation would drink them. They drink beer. They drink soju [a slightly sweeter drink like vodka, but with a low liquor content, that is drunk "straight"]. They don't drink vodka, never tonic."

"But don't tourists want gin and vodka? At home we drink it all the time."

I knew, in part, the answer to the question. Brother Anthony had explained that when the American soldiers gathered in Seoul after the war, the Koreans discovered them to all be whiskey drinkers. No "effeminate" mixed drinks for them. They wanted the real "stuff."

Consequently, the contemporary American tourist must suffer this sixty-year old misconception. And now I comprehend why Fizz and Jazz is where it is! May I suggest Sprite?

Seoul, October 8, 2010

THE KOREAN WAY

Representing a cultural of consensus, Korean restaurateurs, shopkeepers, waiters, and other service people can be very strict when it comes to rules and regulations.

At the Hotel Seoul KyoYuk MunHwa Hoekwan one morning, I awoke quite early at 5:00 AM. After answering my emails, shaving, showering, and brushing my teeth, I determined to write for a while. My room, however, was poorly lit and the sun had yet to fully shine. So, I determined to go down to sit in the lobby waiting room, a commodious, inviting place with numerous tables and chairs next to the restaurant, which opened at 7:30. When I arrived, however, the room was dark. The restaurant, preparing for service, on the other hand, was brightly lit, and I looked around seeing only a few young servers laying out the foods for the buffet.

Quite carefully, I moved back the table setting and sat, writing peacefully for several hours—including the sketch you are now reading. No one bothered with me in the least. As time moved on, however, and it got closer to 7:30, the maitre'd suddenly appeared, his eyes growing large with horror as he moved toward me. Half in Korean and half in English he informed me that I was not allowed to sit there, that the restaurant would not be open until another half-hour. I attempted to explain to him that I would put everything back, and that I had chosen this place only because the lobby was dark, pointing to the room beside us. To my surprise, the lobby was now fully lit, and I readily agreed to move.

"7:30! 7:30," he adamantly repeated.

"Yes, I know. It opens at 7:30," I spoke as I rose, carefully placing the mat and silverwear as I had found them.

"Go!" he exhorted.

I stubbornly remained in place until I had returned everything to perfect order before retreating to the lobby where I continued to write.

At precisely 7:30 he came to me in the lobby, inviting me back into the restaurant. I thanked him but continued where I was for at least another hour. No one arrived in the restaurant until 8:00.

I did understand that I had intruded upon the perfect order of his world, that I had been "out of place." Yet, he could not comprehend that a slight exception of that order might not represent a disaster.

An even funnier event like this occurred one afternoon as we paused for lunch at a restaurant near Deoksugung Royal Palace. Here we sat as usual on the floor, awaiting service, which was brought to us over a period of some time, the waitresses bringing out dishes one by one, and placing them in various spots around the tables. Each time something was put near my publisher and poet-friend Jerzy Illg, however, we would compulsively move it. A rebel from Poland, a man who grew up under the Communist rule, he could not, I surmised, resist putting the dish in a place of his own chosing.

After he had done this several times, the waitress scolded him, explaining (through his translator) that he should not move the dishes since she was working hard to find room for which the numerous platters she would serve us.

Yet the next time she set down a platter within his reach, without thinking he pulled it again in his direction. This time she had no patience, and quickly bending down, gently slapped the back of his hand. We all laughed, and Jerzy resisted touching anything until all was set into position.

Visiting the Manila Bar in Itaweon, in which I was the first and lone customer, I sat on the balcony, only to be told by a Korean waitress quickly scurrying to my side that I must not sit without first ordering. "I'd like to order a San Miguel then," I responded.

"No, you must order and pay," she replied.

"Don't you trust your customers?" I laughed in mild defiance.

"Over there," she pointed, "over there."

"But I intend to order several beers," I pushed back. "Must I get up and pay over there every single time?"

She looked at me disconcertedly, as if I were a simple child unable to comprehend: "It is our way," she insisted.

Despite my aching legs, due to my arthritis, I stood, walked down the few stairs, and went to the counter to order through another Korean woman what I already had requested. I paid and returned to my balcony seat.

With a satisfied flourish of recognition of my obedience, the first waitress served it up with a bowl of peanuts. I did not desire another round. And besides, it was now the time when most the restaurants opened up for lunch.

I am certain such behavior occurs thousands of times each day in the USA, but my guess is that it would not occur so readily in Japan or Malaysia, this slightly surly insistence of the right way of doing things. It emanates, surely, from a culture that has too often been dominated by outsiders; perhaps even American soldiers during the Korean War influenced this insistence upon the Korean way of doing things.

Seoul, October 6, 2010

Day Nine-The Resort Hotel (My trip to the Soviet Union)

2010-09-15T08:29:00.000-07:00

Riga

The House of the Benjimins

The Resort Hotel

by Douglas Messerli

As I mentioned in an earlier piece, we took a bus from Vilnius to Riga, traveling along, at some points the Black Sea in ice-cold weather. At one point we stopped by the sea just to watch the winter waves pounding the beach.

Arriving at one of the grandest and oldest hotels in the city, we were told only the jazz performers and their families could stay there. Although reservations had been made, there weren't enough empty rooms. What would the rest of us do?

We were shifted, via the bus, to what was described as a "resort hotel" in Jūrmala, a town between the Gulf of Riga and the Leilupe River about 20 minutes out of town. Certainly there some grumbles about this new development, but we had, apparently, no choice.

The hotel was more like college dorm, clearly built in the Soviet style. The bathrooms had only a drain instead of a contained shower stall, which troubled those of our group who had done little traveling previously. Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this isolated spot (although the on-line promotional sites describe it as the fifth largest Latvian city) was its darkness and desolation. A heavy snowfall had just descended upon the region, and as several of us set out to explore the neighborhood, the entire area was so quiet and seemingly bleak that it felt somewhat foreboding, as if we had ended up in a town of the dead. Perhaps in the summer, it was beautiful and bustling, but its small dachas and wooden houses, lovely as they were, did not entice us. We couldn't know that this had been a particularly beloved spot for Communist Party officials such as Brezhnev and Khruschev, and that over 400 wooden houses in the Art Nouveau style had been designated national treasures.

I recall seeing the so-called "House of the Benjamins," one of the favorite of the area structures, built in 1939, set darkly against the night.

When we returned to our concrete bunker of a hotel, however, we not allowed to enter without our room keys and a passport. Like so many buildings in the Soviet Union, one door was closed, while in the other stood a guard. Access even to our beds was controlled.

When one of our group explained that his wife had the key, our friend was refused entry, despite the rest of our proclamations that he was "one of us."

"No. Nyet." repeated the guard.

I was angry. "He has to get in," I argued, "to dress of the evening performance. Can't you comprehend that he is one of us?"

"No," the guard insisted.

"We'd like to speak with your superior," another demanded.

"Nyet."

Finally our friend's wife arrived to save the day, and he, with some resentment, was allowed to pass.

The jazz concert at a large hall, the name of which I can't remember, was excellent that evening. And we were all fascinated by the formal stroll of the Latvian audience, arms around each other's waists as they slowly circle the halls. It was like something out of another era, as if it were a formal dance.

But we were frustrated once again when, after the concert, we had no way to return to Jūrmala, since the bus had evidently abandoned us. Our Intourist male guide quickly flagged down several personal cars, asking if, for a few American dollars, they would drive us to the resort. All but one agreed, and we finally reached our destination late that evening. Evidently, that mode of transportation was a fairly common one, for Leslie Scalapino reported to me that on a later trip to Latvia, during which she had also been forced to stay at Jūrmala, they too had had to flag down passenger cars. In 2008 bus service from the airport to the resort town was begun for the first time, and presumably, there is now bus service between Riga and Jūrmala.

By the next morning several inexperienced tourists among are group were boisterously angry, threatening to demand their money back and to cancel the rest of the trip. Those of us who had been in many countries or were simply more able to deal with small inconveniencies, attempted to explain that a shower outside a stall was quite common in many parts of the world, that the guard's stubbornness was based on his attempt to protect us from black market dealers, and the seemingly unusual method of conveyance was not a serious problem; after all we had been returned safely—and at only a cost of five dollars. One had to expect some difficulties when traveling thoughout the Soviet Union. After a long conversation, they admitted that they had not been truly harmed.

The next leg of our trip was a fascinating journey to Estonia, of which I have already written in My Year 2005.

Los Angeles, September 14, 2010

A Glimpse into the Future (Marianne Hauser's Me & My Mom and a visit to my Mother)

2010-09-06T08:45:00.000-07:00

My mother and her friend Ann

The twins, Savannah and Maggie, perform

Great-uncle Douglas and Eva

A Glimpse into the Future

by Douglas Messerli

Marianne Hauser Me & My Mom (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993)
My trip to Iowa took place from September 1, 2010 (when I flew from Los Angeles through Dallas-Fort Worth to Cedar Rapids) to September 4th (flying home through Chicago)

On my way to visit my mother—just turned 85 and residing in an assisted living home, Bickford Cottage, in my hometown of Marion, Iowa—I subliminally grabbed a copy of Marianne Hauser’s gentle satire of an aging mother and a mother-daughter relationship, Me & My Mom, published by my Sun & Moon Press in 1993. I should add that I planned to teach this book the following Tuesday in my Otis College M.F.A. course on American Satire.

The big issue of this book is the daughter’s own social and psychological problems, created in part by her mother’s obsessive focus on a dead son (a child, who, evidently, because of numerous birth defects, died in the womb), and the result, more importantly, of her own lack of sensibility and intelligence. The two must now switch roles, the daughter becoming the mother, her mom the overlooked child.

Tucked away at the Bide-a-Wee nursing home, the mother—whom one might describe as an intelligent and sensitive romantic—is bitter to have lost her home, her cats, and, most of all, her personal freedom. She spends much of her time apart from the other nursing home inmates, having learned from her first few months of internment not to cause a ruckus. Indeed, as the daughter describes it, she has slipped off into a private world except for occasional linguistic outbursts that betray her simmering anger.

The daughter, the source of income for her out-of-work, alcoholic husband and her young child, must continue to confront her mother in short visits it is clear she resents having to make. The two confront and console one another with their memories, alternating between anger and simple love.

What is immediately apparent in Hauser’s version of a painful relationship, played out in a hundred ways in millions of lives, is the lack of sensibility in the daughter—and by extension, in the younger generation. The world may have become more “realistic” in the daughter's often course and unimaginative perceptions, but it has lost the wonderment and beauty inherent in the older woman’s memories, one of the richest of which is a breakfast of Eggs Benedict, perfectly cooked, at the beautiful Majestic Grand with a handsome architect, of whom the mother remembers little else. The Majestic Grand has long since become a building inhabited by homeless people, and shortly after its mention in the fiction, it collapses, killing several of its inhabitants. Yet it stands for something that can never be replaced. If the mother cannot remember the name of the man, the meal becomes a motif throughout the book of a world that has disappeared. Throughout Hauser’s short fiction, New York and the remnants of past life are being destroyed, fading and forgotten. A new, less glorious landscape is built up in its absence.

The daughter is without a clue how to rediscover the beauty of that world, and finally, with husband and son, and a new child in her womb, she retreats to an equally run-down country life, which promises an even more dilapidated vision of reality. At least the daughter has no longer to confront her mother, and gradually becomes unable even to write her a note. The old woman has been abandoned, like most of her generation, to their own disappearing memories. And since even the names of presidents as recent as Jimmy Carter are unknown (in what I would argue is a slightly unbelievable premise), evidently, to the daughter and, by extension, to her generation, we can only image a world that is being eaten away from both ends so that by work’s completion, we have only those momentary encounters between the two. When even those confrontations disappear perhaps history ends. A new birth is about to occur, but for what purpose? What meaning might that child discover in a world that no longer holds any significance?

My own mother, Lorna, I reassured myself, was happy in her assisted–living residence, consisting of a two rooms and bathroom. We had attempted to return her to her large suburban house a couple of years after an accident that sent her hurling down the basement stairs, with her right hand permanently damaged. And she seemed eager to return, to give her former life another chance. I particularly had fought hard for that, insisting that we could hire a nurse to stop in for a few hours in order to help her bathe, and that we could provide her with food through deliveries from “Meal-on-Wheels.” On Thanksgiving in 2006, I returned to fix the big meal in her empty house, inviting the whole family to gather round that table once more, partially in the attempt to draw my mother home.

Soon after she returned to the house on Concord Drive, but after one night in the place she had loved so deeply, she called my brother to return her to the Bickford Cottage. “I'm lonely,” she wailed. There was no one there to talk to. She hated her meals-on-wheels, and feared most of all, I presume, the endless silence of the place. Most of her neighbors, although friendly, were younger couples with families. Many of her friends had died or were themselves now in assisted-living homes. My brother helped her move back into Bickford Cottage, and, soon after, sold her home.

Visiting Lorna the day after her 85th birthday, I met her so-called friends. What I wasn’t completely prepared for was the rudeness with which they often treated one another. Like Hauser’s central character, my mother, has remained slightly aloof, a “lady” as the nurses call her, who most of the resident’s love because of her slightly magisterial behavior. Yet as we shuffled down the hall to lunch, a three-pronged, decorative cane at her side, my mother pointed to the woman ahead, and spoke in a voice she might once have used only at a football game, “You see the woman with the scraggly hair? That’s our nurse.”

Another woman was “The one I told you about! Rose, meet my son.” A few feet away my mother continued, “She comes to the table and reads the newspaper every day. Doesn’t say a word!”

I presume the nurses have all grown accustomed to this elderly "honesty," and that many of her friends are so deaf they may not hear what she says “just out of speaking distance,” but the behavior, nonetheless, took me aback.

My mother, however, was not the only seemingly insensitive being in the place. The woman who usually sat next to my mother, Ann, spent the whole lunch telling me that both her former husbands had been secretly—unknown to her at least—gay, that she herself had had a nervous breakdown and “gone in for shock therapy” and that her daughter was in AA, confessions, I presume, brought on by my casually mentioning my “companion.” Perhaps my mother had previously told her I was gay, and she had regaled my mother with these same tales many times; for my somewhat proper mother, didn’t blink an eye, and Lorna later reported that before her shock therapy, Ann had attempted to come to dinner "dressed in her birthday suit."

Rose, the woman who my mother told me read the newspaper throughout the meal, sat at this lunch at another table, but soon came forward to tell Ann to shut up so that my mother and I might talk to one another. Ann didn’t miss a beat, moving on to tell me about all of her “artist friends.” “That’s why I never suspected my husbands,” she declared. “I had so many artist friends.”

Back in my mother’s room I observed that Ann certainly did have a lot to say. “But at least she talks,” my mother snapped back.

What I was also not entirely prepared for was the number of times my mother repeated each piece of information. During our weekly telephone conversations she often repeated news up to three times in each conversation. What I hadn’t imagined is that, if one spent more time with her, that repetition would increase to six, seven times…, occurring endlessly, depending upon how long one had time to speak with her. Reminding her that she had said it before helped not a bit; for she stubbornly repeated every last sentence, refusing to even acknowledge my attempted interruption. At first I simply chalked it up to the fact that she didn’t have a great deal of information to impart, and that she repeated things simply to fill up the conversational space. But I soon realized that it was simply a kind of dementia; she could not help but to repeat herself.

The future was equally open to reiteration. When I mentioned that my brother David and sister-in-law Jill would be visiting just before dinner, she asked me numerous times if I knew whether they might stop by. My sister Pat, who I told her was visiting for lunch the following day, brought forward my mother’s continued resentment, since she never visited. “Why won’t she come by?”

“She plans to tomorrow, Mom.”

“She never visits.”

After spending breakfast and lunch with her and touring her around town to visit the various houses in which we had lived (there are five, she imagines others), I took a short two hours off, returning to the hotel before I stopped back to Bickford Cottage to see David and Jill. They laughingly reported that upon calling her, they asked if I had been there all day. “No, he wasn’t,” she snorted. Jill corrected, “Has he visited today?” “Oh yes, he was here all morning.” Logistically, she was correct: I was not there all day.

“Is Pat going to visit?” my mother plaintively asked.

“Tomorrow,” I laughed.

“Time for dinner!” by mother spoke up.

“All right,” you go ahead, I answered.

“You see that woman with the scraggly hair over there? She’s the nurse,” she proudly pointed.
“Did you meet my son?” she accosted the kindly, “scraggly” haired girl.

Later David, Jill, and I met near the cars to briefly confer about the future. “How many years can we afford to keep her here?” I finally asked.

“About four years,” Jill confided.

“Oh dear, it would be quite devastating if she had to move,” I sighed. “But perhaps, like Howard’s father, when the time comes, she won’t even know it’s happening.” I cringed at the thought.

“That’s, sadly to say, what we’re hoping for,” my brother said.

Yes, we too were now plotting for the past to be gone. Now in our sixties, the three of us realized that we might soon be sitting in similar situations. Dave and Jill, at least, had their children, three loving boys, to turn to. To whom would Howard and I entrust our forgetfulness, to share a past that no longer mattered to anyone?

The next day my sister arrived, the charming two-year old twins, her grandchildren, in tow. They were delighted to see their great-grandmother and to meet a new relative. One of them, Savannah, insisted that I return home with them, crawling into my arms and refusing to let go. Soon after, my nephew Matt’s wife arrived with their new baby, Eva. I held Eva for a long while, the child falling to sleep on my lap. My mother held her for a half hour. The young girls where urged into the front room, where they entertained many of the residents by reciting their numbers and alphabet, dancing across the hearth as they spoke. At once it again became apparent to me, my mother was not all like the poor woman in Hauser’s book.

That evening, at dinner with my mother at Bickford, Ann, the woman who had told me her life story the day before, spoke more quietly, reporting that my mother didn’t truly have a great many people to talk to at the Cottage. “She’s—well how can I say this?—so much better educated and more intelligent than many of our residents. She’s a true lady amidst these rustic folk.”

Cap (whose real name was Casper, oddly enough my mother's maiden name), a former farmer to whom I spoke, couldn't remember where he had farmed or what crops to which he had devoted his life* When I tried to speak to some of the other "ladies," most complacently smiled, one of them giggled. Another woman intermittently hovered over our table to tell me that I reminded her of someone she knew from Grand Rapids who worked at The Journey (presumably a religious publication) "I've never been in Grand Rapids," I apologized.

Finally, I came to realize that, despite these occasional family visits, my mother was not very different at all from the mother in Hauser’s poignant book. She too, although seemingly most open and friendly, was somehow aloof, sitting apart from the other Cottage residents.

Would I too, when the time came, be an old man, reading in the corner in an attempt to escape the fellow lunatics wandering the halls? Yes. I was sure of that. But what if my eyes were no longer strong enough to see the words upon the page, my hands unable to type out the sentences of my personal commentaries? And who would be coming to see me? And when? My mother had generations of family. I would have none.

When I said goodbye that evening, she cried. But the tears where those of joy, not loneliness or fear. She was not being “abandoned” as was the romantic survivor of Hauser’s satire—and, as my glimpse of the future revealed, I might someday be. “I’ll call when I get home. And I’ll be back to visit as soon as I can,” I softly spoke as I bent down to hug her. “I know,” she answered, wiping away the tears. Yet her knowledge sounded somehow distant, inurned to some other reality she might have imagined. Like Hauser’s agèd mother she was preparing herself for disappointment.

Did my mother ever have Eggs Benedict? I order them rather often, but at breakfast with my brother the next morning I confused the poached eggs I wanted—not on the menu—with an omelet. "Do you want cheese with 'em?" asked the waiter. "Oh, no," I blithely complained.

Cedar Rapids, Iowa, September 2, 2010 ;revised September 4, 2010

*Cap did, however, tell me a story with startling detail. One day his wife came home, he reported, and suggested that there was a nearby farmhouse for sale that she'd love to see. So that evening he took her out to see the house. She was delighted with everything about it. "It's perfect," she proclaimed. And before he knew it, they had bought the new farm and were moving in. "Only later did she tell me that she'd long had her eye on that place, and she'd seen the inside dozens of times throughout the years." "She knew what she wanted, and how to get it," I joked. "She sure did!" was his response. "We lived in that house the rest of lives."

Consummation (on the LAOpera production of The Ring Cycle)

2010-08-23T08:12:00.000-07:00

Consummation

by Douglas Messerli

Richard Wagner Das Rheingold / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 18, 2010)

Richard Wagner Die Walküre / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 20, 2010)

Richard Wagner Siegfried / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 23, 2010)

Richard Wagner Götterdämmerung / LAOpera, performed at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Los Angeles (the production we saw was on June 26, 2010)

Over several afternoons and nights from June 18th to June 26, 2010, Howard and I attended the entire 16 hours of Der Ring des Nibelungen at the Los Angeles Opera.

Much has been written about Wagner's overwhelmingly brilliant, often mocked, and sometimes hated achievement, and I do not care here to wade into the complex stories, myths, and psychological sloughs surrounding the work. The Ring, no matter what is thrown at it, is quite simply a marvelous human accomplishment, never quite matched in the all the years since its creation. Its mess of a plot, sometimes ridiculous characters, and forests of inexplicable riddles does not, somehow, diminish this work, and I think anyone—saintly or evil—who loves theater, music, and spectacle cannot help but admit to admiring it.

What I would like briefly to focus on, instead, involves another kind of quagmire of sorts regarding the extravagant costumes and sets by the notable designer-directors, Archim and Amanda Freyer and the musical direction by the much beloved Los Angeles Opera conductor, James Conlon.

Nothing I might write in connection with these issues is easy. For I highly admire the decision, which was strongly argued for, I have heard, by Conlon and General Director Plácido Domingo, to attempt this production. I also applaud their goal of bringing a completely new look and feeling to the great opera. That the company was almost destroyed in the process of bringing Wagner's four operas to the stage brings more blame, perhaps, on today's audiences and the high cost of such an undertaking than any misjudgment by the producers. It was and remains a noble act to present this work in a city always hungry for art, theater, and music, but not always appreciative of the particular manifestations of such.

Yet all that said, there are some important questions to be brought up regarding this version.I swore to myself not use my variation of Dickens' tired antithesis to describe my feelings about the LA Opera's Ring, but it continues to summarize my feelings: "It was the best of operas, it was the worst of operas."

The first evening began swimmingly enough with the Rhine Maidens dressed in the billowing robes of water which is their home. The Freyer's highly raked stage worked nicely to create a sense of the swelling water, undulating in time to their joyful teasing of the ridiculous Alberich, dressed in this production, as a masked troll. The combination of the grotesque and whimsy in Alberich and the Niebelungs later nicely fit a world where they are entrapped in the process of refining gold.

But already in the scene in Valhalla, we begin to become somewhat distracted by the costumes. Fricka's constantly outreaching hands may indicate her major activity of pleading with her husband Wotan, but to keep her character locked away in this position seems to allow no subtlety. She is, after all, not always pleading, but righteously correct her assessment of Wotan's own laws. The powerful giant brothers, Fasolt and Fafner, seem inexplicably to be alternating between dwarves and the incredibly tall construction workers by which the work defines them.

Wotan's head, locked in a square-boxed helmet, with his facial image reflected upon it, seemed to diminish the power with which the character is defined. Of course, he is a conflicted image, a God who is tempted, again and again, away from obeying the laws he has himself established. And there is no question that Freyer's costume implies this tension between his mind and apparition. At certain times, particularly when he stood at the top of the stage, however, the audience could hardly hear Wotan's (Vitalij Kowaljow) declarations, let alone tremble at the vocal power of his angry proclamations. At other times, Fricka (Michelle DeYoung) seemed somewhat distraught in her permanently outstretched position. Only Alberich (Richard Paul Fink) and Mime (Graham Clark) seemed comfortable in their dress.

By the time of Die Walküre—easily the most brilliant of the LA Opera productions—the problems of direction, costume, and set became more obvious. In some ways, Freyer's attempts to create his own series of private leitmotifs, helped the audience—particularly those who had never before encountered the complex series of characters Wagner presents—recognize and define them. But by so thoroughly defining them, he also took away most of their "humanity," stripping them of any empathy we might feel for their human-like achievements and failures and leaving them afloat in a mythological world that separated them from us. A student of Brecht, it is clear that that was, in part, what Freyer was seeking. But in a work such as The Ring, which has already built into it a sense of separation from our daily experiences, the actors and director must work even harder to, in some ways, to make us feel that these figures resemble ourselves.

James Conlon is a dedicated and highly committed director. And his lectures before each the four operas were filled with beautiful descriptions of how Wagner's music brought us into the action both emotionally and intellectually. In my encounters with this director, however, it appears that he prefers sublimity over the barbarous. He is not the kind of director, I feel, to do justice to Stravinsky or Berg. And here, although he described the dreadful power of certain of Wagner's refrains, we seldom heard them. The music (perhaps in part because of the near-burial of the orchestra beneath the stage) was often beautiful, but seldom intense, let alone earth-shattering.
Linda Watson sang and performed marvelously as Brünnhilde, but the constant dressing and undressing of her, as Siegfried later rips her gown away patch by patch, was more a distraction that an amplification of any substantive meaning, visual or otherwise.

By the time we had reached Siegfried we had lost touch with this world, strangely at the very moment when we encounter the most human character of the entire masterpiece. Like LA Times music critic Charles McNulty I suddenly felt I had entered a California amusement park instead of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Admittedly Siegfried is a kind of bumbling idiot, a true innocent whose only major attribute lies in his powerful muscles. But to portray him simply as a kind of blond-headed Michelin Man is to destroy any possibility of human redemption. And that is ironically, why Wagner vested so much power in this figure. In his innocence, he even seeks fear, without comprehending what might lie behind it. In the course of the work, Siegfried discovers love, treachery, hate, and even death. He is of a new race, and as such, to close him off as a laughable stereotype does a terrible injustice to the entire work.

For all that, the costumes and sets, even the ridiculous tilt of the stage, did create some memorable moments: among them the nightmarish underground world of the Niebelungs and the great battles (achieved through dozens of colored light sticks) of Götterämmerung. Perhaps I had simply grown more use to Freyer's methods by the last long work, but it seemed to me that the positioned costumes into and out which Gunther and Gutrune stepped well-fitted the mould of these opportunists. The orchestra itself, moreover, seemed to come alive and, still without the shattering thrill of sound one hopes for in Siegfried's death—a death which, as our opera-loving friend Bob Orr, in his deep Alabama accent, described it, signifies the end of the whole Teutonic universe—performed ably and even memorably. The audience, many of whom had never before seen a Wagner opera, was clearly thrilled. Despite my stated doubts, I too applauded joyfully with tearful eyes.

This is clearly a production that should be seen again.

Los Angeles, August 19, 2010