Vienna after Midnight: Virtual Bike Tour Continues

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Scott Smoot at Vienna's State Opera House, virtually, with the ghost of its former director.

Sometime after midnight, my friend Mark Millkey put Mahler's Titan Symphony on his record player and asked me to be patient: "This composer's a little long-winded." I had time, although it was a week night, because Mom had lifted my curfew for the last quarter of high school.

Mark and I had passed the hours after class talking literature, faith, and music. Now he let me discover for myself that Mahler's solemn funeral march was a nursery tune, Frère Jacques, dormez-vous? ("are you sleeping, Brother John?"). I got the gallows humor.

That's what makes Vienna one of "the places I've lived or loved," enough so that I've covered 184 miles on bike trails around Atlanta just to make the side trip from Salzburg. Mahler conducted there, Mark visited there, and, driving home that night around 2:30 am, I felt that I, at 17, had reached the pinnacle of maturity and spiritual depth.

To the extent that I really had grown up, Mark had a lot to do with it.  Being so modest, he probably didn't know it. Freshman year, he'd been just a regular guy. After straining his voice in his job at a summer camp, Mark couldn't speak during our sophomore year. Abstaining from gossip and chatter, he learned to listen. He became a model of empathy and tact. When Mark could speak again, he asked about things that mattered; he was everyone's best friend and confidant.

Many of us were evangelicals; he was our only Roman Catholic. When he expressed mild amusement about a prayer he'd heard, "Lord, just tell me, can I run a stop sign at a deserted intersection?" (something I, too, was torn up about), I took a new look at my belief system. We joined Mark for Christmas at the church designed by Mark's late father, architect Herbert Millkey, where the priest fed us in the rectory after midnight Mass. Another Christmas, as Mark and I exchanged wrapped gifts, we knew by heft we'd both received the collected letters of Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor. I ended up much closer in outlook to Mark and Flannery than to the Moral Majority.

I was honored when Mark invited me with Joe A. and Matt H. to hike the north Georgia mountains for three days in the week after AP exams. Because of heavy rain, we pushed hard to finish in half that time; when tempers flared, Mark made peace. As Flannery wrote in a story, "I'm glad I've went once; I ain't never goin' again."

I used Mark's story to teach generations of middle schoolers about asking questions and really listening to the answers. At my best, I'm still emulating him. And I still love Mahler.

Miles YTD 458 || 2nd World Tour Total 13,993 beginning June 2020 || Next Stop: Warsaw

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"Lightning Strike" and "Fox Creek": W. K. Krueger's Series 18 and 19

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Fox River

A man hires part-time detective Cork O'Connor to find his beautiful wife Dolores who ran off with a lover. So far, so noir, author William Kent Krueger channeling Chandler. It's so classic, it's a stereotype. Then we learn the identity of The Other Man. I laughed out loud.

Still, Fox Creek is full of suspense, ordeals, and moral dilemmas. As Krueger himself notes in an interview at the back of my signed hardback edition, beloved characters of the series have suffered and died. Because we can't assume they'll be okay, he can generate some genuine suspense.

But among the great joys of this series is the building up of community around Cork. His friends and family are all involved in the search for Dolores, even after Cork's wife Rainy and mentor Henry Meloux become targets. His son Stephen, whom longtime fans remember as a vulnerable little boy, now shares with his father the responsibility of being an action hero. It's a delight to see Stephen fall in love with a suitably courageous and smart woman named Belle who seems to feel the same about him.

We find another joy on the border between standard detective novel and wilderness adventure, as the action crosses from Cork's small Minnesota town into Canada.

As always, Krueger also explores the boundary between the material world and spirituality, whether that's Ojibwe or Christian. Stephen's vision and the wisdom of Henry figure in the story.

While Henry leads Dolores and Rainy through woods he's known 100 years, he misleads a tribal hunter working for the bad guys. Through the hunt, Henry and the hunter known as LeLoux ("the Wolf") come to respect each other. Their relationship becomes the heart of the novel long before they ever meet.

Lightning Strike

The book before that is Lightning Strike, set in the summer of Cork's 12th year. With two buddies, he discovers the body of a revered Indian man hanging in a secluded spot where the friends like to camp and canoe. Cork's father Liam, the town's sheriff, investigates. The death at first seems to be a suicide, then a murder staged to look like suicide. The victim's Indian half-brother is implicated, but so is the town's white millionaire. No matter which way the evidence takes Liam, he's making enemies.

To see the father-son relationship with Cork in the child's place is instantly rich with resonances to the other books and rewarding. Many of my favorite moments happen when Cork slips out of his bedroom onto the roof of the porch where he can think -- and sometimes hear his parents' low voices when they discuss the crime and their parenting of him.

While the setting is 1963, the novel resonates with the upheaval and uncertainty of the year of its copyright, 2020. Liam is a white cop, married to an Ojibwe woman, hearing anger and mistrust from both the reservation and the white townspeople. Young Cork feels afraid: "The world seemed to be changing in front of his eyes, and he couldn't figure out if it was him -- that he'd simply been blind before -- or if the world was, indeed, shifting, becoming unstable under his feet" (207). Later, he confesses to his mom, "Everthing's different. It all feels broken. Here and on the rez" (271). I know that feeling. His mother has no answers.

Henry Meloux does. 50 years before he's the elder we know, he's already wise. "Nothing is broken," he tells young Cork. "It is just that we see only in part" (272). Again, "Fear is not a bad thing in itself....It is what we do with our fear that matters."

Cork does some investigation on his own, and takes his buddies out to the wilderness to snoop around. The action ramps up fast.

There's a theme of empathy, here. Cork imagines the last minutes in the life of a tribal girl who drowned and understands in a flash of insight what really happened. He feels it deeply: "She'd been just a victim before. Now, she was a person and Cork felt a genuine sorrow, one he wanted to talk about but could not" (350). Liam is chagrined to see himself as his son must see him. "Even to himself he looked like a stranger, a man who could frighten children" (256). He goes to talk to his son, but Cork's asleep, and the father keeps his feelings to himself.

No spoiler alert, needed, here: Longtime fans know from the 10th book Vermilion Drift that Liam O'Connor will die estranged from his son later that summer. That subtext adds emotional substance to the entire novel.

[Find a list of links to my appreciations of other Krueger novels on my Crime Fiction page]

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New Poems at "First Verse"

At my blog First Verse, I've posted six new poems since Christmas, with images by Susan Rouse.

• On Track| Literally, the first thing I remember; allegorically, the rest of my life.
• Expiration Date| The apocalypse, at a Publix.
• We Thank You for the Gift of Water| Puppies are involved.
• Conspiracy Theory| The great balloon panic of 2023.
• Day after Valentine's| Happy Singles Awareness Day.
• Bike, Snake| Spoiler alert: he wasn't hurt.

I hope you'll check these, and more, at First Verse. If you do, leave a comment. Feedback keeps me scratching away at my legal pad each morning.

The NEW New Music at the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra

The composer of a piece premiered by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra Saturday night hadn't been born when minimalism was an audacious new music that inspired me to want to compose. [See my page The Minimalist Zone.] Curiosity about the new new music drew me to Woodruff Arts Center for the first time since the pandemic.

Jerry Hou conducted with joy and shared evident rapport with his players. During bows, he ran among them to draw attention to soloists and sections.

Hou, center; from top left: Tower, Montgomery, Bartok, Pratt

This was the premiere for Rounds, a piece for piano and strings by young composer Jamie Montgomery. Her program note alerted us that the form was a rondo, and that the first movement was a rondo within a rondo -- hence the title, a translation of "Rondos." But we also heard material played by the pianist echoed by the strings in the manner of what in English we call a round.

Piano soloist Awadagin Pratt and I are 20 years older than when I saw him play a recital at Georgia Tech. Back then he was a young lion with a thick mane of dredlocks. While he played, he snarled "Don't do that!" at a reporter snapping his picture and glared at the house when people applauded at inappropriate moments. He was a big guy who sat on a teeny little bench and raised his hands above his chest to reach the keyboard. Aside from the theatrics, he also made clear the middle voices of a Bach piece -- a revelation for me, and a miracle of technique, I thought.

He has mellowed. Saturday, he was professorial, with thinned hair, a gray beard, and smiles. The bench was only marginally lower than we're used to seeing. But he was sensitive as ever playing a cascade of notes tenderly one moment, beating block chords another.

The concert opened with 1920/2019 by eminent composer Joan Tower, commemorating women's right to vote and the #MeToo movement.

The new music, different as the pieces were, shared a few characteristics.

There was a great variety of textures and colors, from full ensemble sound to just a soloist or a duet, sections playing in tandem or going up against each other. Pratt startled us when he stood up to reach inside the piano to pluck and strum the strings.

Then, the composers played more with modules or gestures than with anything we could call a melody. Ascending scales in Tower's piece (not quite do-re-mi -- a couple of tones were augmented) weren't a tune but a suggestion of upward movement -- and a ceiling to break through. Montgomery gave the piano a spray of delicately arpeggiated notes (think "Rustles of Spring"), a lovely and quiet gesture that she slid up and down the keyboard and contrasted with harsh explosive chords.

Taking a long view, I think that the minimalists I loved had some influence on what I heard Saturday. Before them, the concert composer's pride was in their ingenuity developing and varying themes. Even 12-tone music was rigorously focused on what you do with a given sequence of notes. But the minimalists thinned out melody to just a module of two or three notes repeated over a pulse, drawing our attention instead to the processes of imitative counterpoint, gradually shifting harmony, and instrumental colors.

In Tower's piece, I heard the wood block's tok-tok-tok that John Adams patented in his big hit "Short Ride on a Fast Machine" ca. 1986; the repetition of a single bass note was a feature throughout the movements of her piece, sometimes slow and regular, sometimes fast, whether puffed, plucked, or pounded. Whatever the composers might say about minimalism, they would surely agree that their pieces are not about melody.

After their pieces, I picked up some of the same qualities in Bartok. In the five movements of his concerto, I recognize several gestures that make a strong impression every time we hear them. They're repeated, imitated, varied a little, but none is a tune you could hum for more than a couple of bars -- except the annoying one by Shostakovitch (or maybe Lehar) that Bartok ends with a fart from the low brass. The colors and the contrasts take me by surprise even now, more than 40 years after I first fell in love with it through an LP.

It was a joyous welcome back. The hall was nearly full, with an audience diverse in age, ethnicity, and dress. I saw a lot of young couples. All appeared to be enthusiastic. Keep the tradition alive, people, and keep the new music coming.

My Role in "The Sound of Music"

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Scott Smoot with bike in the Austrian Alps, virtually

In 1966, Aunt Blanche and Uncle Jack took me and my cousins to an ornate movie theatre in downtown Cincinnati for the gala premiere of The Sound of Music: a dress-up affair, with a glossy souvenir program. I didn't know nuns from Nazis, but I saw my family on the screen, and I was pretty sure that Julie Andrews was my mom.

I bring this up now because my virtual bike tour of "places I've lived or loved" has taken me to the site where the film was made. Since January 5, I've covered 277 miles, riding bike trails around Atlanta when the weather was good, and swimming indoors when it was not. On a map of the world, that distance takes me from Venice to Salzburg.

My relationship to Julie Andrews had begun with Mary Poppins the year before. That movie about children whose father is distracted by work resonated with me, as our dad was away on business so often. Their magic nanny, being close to Mom in age, hairstyle, build, and bearing, was practically my mother in every way.

The Von Trapp manor in Salzburg was the same as the palatial home of my aunt and uncle in all things that mattered to me. Curved staircase sweeping up from marble tile? Check. French doors opening to a terrace that looks out to rolling green hills? Check. A gazebo in a sculpted garden? Gazebo, no, but sculpted garden, check.

"A captain with seven children?" Eight, and more: Aunt Blanche and her sister Shirley raised their large families in homes side-by-side on a vast campus. During the summers, I was one of them. My siblings and I stayed with our grandmother, but when she had work selling real estate, she left us with Blanche. 

My awe-inspiring Uncle Jack would arrive home for dinner dressed in boots and jodhpurs, riding crop in hand, having worked out his horse -- just like Captain Von Trapp.

My family's relationship to Julie Andrews' movies was all very clear to me, except for the fact that Aunt Blanche was both the tomboy governess and the magic nanny. Blanche took us and my younger cousins to ride horses, to canoe, and to bicycle to the next town for ice cream. Often with Aunt Shirley, Blanche took us to magical places: movie theatres, live theatre, the Queen City Tour, the planetarium, fireworks, horse shows, amusement parks, and the first game played at Riverfront Stadium. Though I saw Blanche usually in company with little kids, teenagers, adult friends, and old people, she always made me feel special. She treated me as an adult.

I learned to ride a bike in Blanche's driveway and to swim in Shirley's pool.

I am grateful for these grown ups I grew up with, and for Julie Andrews.

[See memorial tributes to Uncle Jack, Aunt Blanche, and Dad. I remember my Cincinnati grandmother in an article Thelma Craig Maier and a poem Wingtips. My mother's story continues; see the latest portrait Mom's World and more at Dementia Diary. For photos and stories of other grown ups I grew up with, see the curated list of links at my page Family Corner. ]

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1000th Blog Post: Mom's World

Among my first blogposts in April 2006 was Shrink Age in regard to poets who wrote about the diminished worlds of their aging loved ones. I didn't know then how much their words would inform my experience for the next 16 years.

At that time, Mom's world was The World. She and Dad crossed oceans on jets and ships; they trained for 5K competitions; they got involved in the church and politics.

During a recent walk in the park outside of the memory care facility with Mom and her caregiver Laura, I took a photo that my phone app transformed into the painting below. I call it Mom's World after Christina's World, Andrew Wyeth's portrait of a disabled neighbor looking towards home. (I've known that painting 50 years and never had noticed the wheelchair in the distance.)

In the image, I see how Mom still wants to appear at her best. Laura helps her with lipstick, earrings, and painted nails. The waves in Mom's hair and the white stripes of that cute top go with the white waves laid in strips over the blue sky.

Mom's reserved smile shows amusement and judgment withheld. She laughs to hear that the staff refer to her as "the Queen." She walks when a physical therapist helps her to remember how, but she's ok now with her wheelchair.

The impressionistic scenery matches Mom's vague impression that her childhood home is in those hills. She doesn't remember what that place was (Cincinnati), but she likes to look through photos of places and people she used to know and to listen as we tell her about them.

We've made it past the years of frustration when her world was too big for her to manage -- when she placed calendars and clocks in every room and stuck memos on every surface to tell her what she thought she needed to remember.

For now, we're in a sweet spot, when the past is far off and she doesn't look beyond the frame of her present moment. What we see in this image is her world, just the right size.

[See more of Mom's story at my page Dementia Diary.]

Boomers for Bacharach

Nostalgia is the first reason for me and my fellow Boomers to like the music of Burt Bacharach, who died this month at 94.

With lyricist Hal David, Bacharach wrote songs that we learned from our parents' radios and 8-track tape decks, including Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head, Close to You, What Do You Get When You Fall in Love? and my dad's favorite, What the World Needs Now (is Love Sweet Love). Like lava lamps and floral prints on plastic cushions, those songs are part of a Boomer's mental furniture. Like those fashions, Bacharach's blend of soft rock percussion with brass and strings gave our parents a way to stay "with it," to be "cool." It didn't work, but, B+ for effort. When I hear any of his songs, I think fondly of Mom and Dad in their prime.

Then, in my teens and early adulthood, Bacharach's advanced musical vocabulary was what I liked. I displayed my musical knowledge by commenting on Bacharach's complex harmony, mixed meters, and odd song structures. When I played Bacharach's song Promises, Promises on the piano, I pounded its dissonant chords in shifting time signatures of 3/4, 4/4, 3/8, and 4/8 to show off my musical machismo -- which, I admit, was the only machismo I had.

But I learned how to appreciate Bacharach's expressiveness over impressiveness. Bacharach told interviewer Terri Gross that he set phrases the way they made sense to him; he never realized he was changing meters in a song until he notated it. So the character in the Broadway show Promises, Promises spits out the title phrase in 6/8, disgusted by the sleazy promises he's made; when he imagines life free of moral compromises, the meter shifts for expansive declarations: I can live with myself and be proud - I laugh out loud!.

In another song for that show, Hal David wrote, Go while the going is good. / Knowing when to leave may be the smartest thing that anyone can learn. / Go! On the second phrase, Bacharach spikes the melody up an octave on the -ing of knowing and sets all the following syllables on fast notes, all one pitch, like the hammering of an alarm bell: ding-ding-ding-ding-ding! Then that single syllable Go! swells like a siren for a full measure. The music conveys the urgency that the lyrics express.

The song "This Guy's in Love with You," without hook or bridge, consists of just two verses and a tag line, a structure both unusual and very effective. Read the opening phrases aloud and you've got the basic rhythm for the whole song, a slow shuffle: You see this guy? This guy's in love with you. We hear the tune played on a muted trumpet before we hear the words, with just a piano for accompaniment. The singer asks the person he loves, Who looks at you the way I do? By the end of the second verse, evidently not getting a straight answer, "this guy" is breaking down: My hands are shaking; don't let my heart be breaking.

Up to this point, Bacharach has kept a full orchestra in reserve. The strings and winds come in forte when the singer opens up, I need your love, I want your love. Same pitches as the opening phrase, same rhythm, but so different now. Bacharach expands the phrase in two more lines: Say you're in love / in love with this guy. At peak volume, the orchestra plays chords in triplet and stops. After a pause, the singer finishes softly, If not, I'll just die. The trumpet and piano repeat the intro, the musical equivalent of shuffling sadly away.

I don't remember caring about that song before Vic Bolton, a tenor in our high school chorus, sang it for our concert. I wanted to cry.

Bacharach once said his own favorite was his title song for the 1966 movie Alfie, because he liked the message. You don't have to see the movie to gather from Hal David's lyric that Alfie is a cynic who believes it's just for the moment, we [should] take more than we give, and life is for the strong. The song is an intervention, as the singer challenges Alfie's worldview and then offers an alternative. The song tickles my nostalgia for the 1960s when philosophers, poets, and theologians were part of our popular culture, along with their discussions of existentialism, "Is God Dead?" and the absurdity of life. I like the message too.

But I also like the way Bacharach's music expresses that message. Bacharach sets the syllables of the name "Alfie" on a rising fifth, like a fanfare (e.g. the Star Wars theme), perfect for the name of a cocky character. But Bacharach undercuts that confident sound with dissonant intervals (m6, M7, m2) in lines intended to discomfort Alfie, such as, if only fools are kind, Alfie / then I guess it is wise to be cruel. Two verses follow that pattern before Hal David's words shift towards the singer's creed, one that even unbelievers can believe in. The vocal lines for that part climb up and down wide intervals over shifting chords. When the singer settles back into the notes of the opening line, it's a sunny declaration emerging from clouds:

I believe in love, Alfie
Without true love, we just exist, Alfie
Until you find the love you've missed, you're nothing, Alfie..

A recording of Alfie by Cleo Laine made this my favorite of all Bacharach's songs. It's on her 1983 album That Old Feeling. She's a virtuoso musician and an actress, and she brings out every nuance in the words as she navigates the twists and jumps in Bacharach's music. The song was recorded in her living room with simple piano accompaniment, making her quiet rendition almost uncomfortably intimate. (See my reflections on Cleo.)

About Bacharach's later work, I'm agnostic. I liked his theme from the 1981 movie Arthur, and I enjoy an album of Bacharach songs played by jazz pianist McCoy Tyner with trio and full orchestra. I bought that because I'd heard Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach talk on the radio about new songs they had written together. I've downloaded those, but they're hard for me to appreciate because -- well, I prefer Costello's talking.

[I first admired Stephen Sondheim for the difficulty of his music. Read about how his music is hard to sing, and why that's a good thing, in my blogpost from 06/2015.]

Sermon on the Sermon on the Mount: Providing Context

Our associate rector Fr. Daron Vroon [see photo, from blessing of the animals] has preached on parts of the Sermon on the Mount during the last month, bringing new light from Jewish tradition on familiar sayings of Jesus.

When Fr. Daron shows how Matthew draws parallels between the life of Jesus and the history of the tribes of Israel, the sermon on the mount becomes more than just a moral teaching. The pharaoh's slaughter of infant boys, the flight of young Moses out of Egypt, 40 years in the wilderness, and the crossing of the Jordan parallel the birth of Jesus, the sojourn in Egypt, the 40 days in the wilderness, and the baptism by John. So when Matthew writes that Jesus went up on the mountain, we should be thinking of Moses; and the sermon on the mount parallels the giving of the Law.

Fr. Daron explained a puzzling little phrase in Matthew: "Jesus opened his mouth and spoke." Why not "Jesus spoke?" How else could Jesus speak except by opening his mouth? But when Moses met God at Sinai face to face, the Hebrew expression for that is "mouth to mouth." Ah HA!

Like the first four commandments, the first beatitudes concern our spiritual relationship to God. The latter commandments and beatitudes guide our relationships to others. Fr. Daron stresses that the word translated as "righteousness" connotes "justice," so it's not about our own obedience to the law, but about seeking social justice. Fr. Daron challenged us to think on one beatitude a week.

Today, Fr. Daron took up the part of the sermon where Jesus couples what you have heard it said with but I say to you. You have heard it said, do not kill; but I say to you that you have committed murder if you bear hatred in your heart. Ditto fornication and lust, divorce and adultery, oaths and dishonesty -- a person's honesty should be known from his way of living, not dependent on an oath. The Pharisees' strict compliance with the law wasn't strict enough because it falls far short of fulfilling God's purpose, which was to change our hearts (cf. Isaiah and Amos).

The Pharisees had a question, Fr. Daron said. When the original temple was built in the time of Solomon, we read that the Lord's presence descended and filled the temple. Nothing like that happened when the temple was rebuilt after the Jews' exile in Babylon, in the time of Ezra and Nehemia, about 500 years before Jesus. Why had the glory of the Lord not descended on the temple again?

The Pharisees concluded from numerous scriptures that God would come down only when His people were obedient. So the Pharisees enforced obedience, and hedged the law with even more laws so that no one came even close to breaking a commandment. This would bring God down to expel the Romans and restore the Davidic line of kings. Jesus undercut their authority and their whole mission: no wonder they wanted him to die.

When Jesus says he came to fulfill the law, he meant literally, fill it to the brim. It's not about what we don't do. Every day that you don't kill someone or don't commit adultery, you have NOT necessarily fulfilled God's will. We are to move beyond anger, respect women, and live with integrity. It was never about getting to heaven when you die, but about how we live now.

[See an appreciation of Fr. Daron and a decade of his sermons at More than Skin Deep: The First Ten Years (10/2022)]

Living a Life that Matters: Rabbi Kushner on Jacob

Harold S. Kushner

Some days ago, I uncovered two unread books in my basement, Listening to Midlife and Living a Life that Matters. Too late for those, I guess. I wasn't yet 50 when I bought them at a long-gone local bookstore almost 15 years ago.

Yet Living a Life that Matters by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner still resonates. I'm especially drawn to what Kushner sees in the story of Jacob in Genesis.

Kushner compares Jacob's story to a play in three acts: boy, suitor, and patriarch. The arc of the play is implied by the character's name change. Jacob, his name in youth, relates to Hebrew akav "crookedness," while the name he later earns, Israel ("he wrestles with God") relates to yashar "straight."

In the story, Jacob masquerades as his brother Esau to trick their father into passing his legacy on to him instead of Esau, his firstborn son. Kushner speculates that it's deeper than that: Jacob wants the strength and boldness of Esau; he feels incomplete. (22)

Kushner observes that, lacking curtains or chapter headings, the ancient text marks transitions from one act to the next with dream-like epiphanies in the night, a ladder to heaven and an all-night wrestling match with an unnamed being. The first of these happens at the end of the day when Jacob fled his home where Esau has sworn to kill him. Ashamed and afraid, Jacob envisions a bridge between earth and heaven. Kushner says this image gives Jacob hope that he can reach higher (21). That night Jacob bargains with God: for divine help, he will give God a tithe of his earnings.

In the second act, he is the first (the only?) character in the Bible who falls in love. Others take wives, are given wives, coming to appreciate them later, but for Jacob and Rebekah, it's love at first sight. Rebekah's father tricks Jacob as badly as Jacob tricked Isaac, fooling Jacob into marrying the less lively older sister Leah. We're told that Jacob hated Leah. Kushner speculates that she was always a living reminder of Jacob's own malfeasance. Jacob has to wait 14 years to consummate his love for Rebekah. He builds a family and wealth, and readies himself for a return to Esau.

[My poem Angels Never Know grows from Jacob's story.]

In the second transition between acts, Jacob has sent his family ahead. We're told that Jacob was alone. But then he's wrestling with someone who doesn't give a name. Who is it? I've heard it's God, it's an angel, it's a devil, it's a spirit of the place. Kushner thinks it's Jacob's own self, equally strong, equally adept. Jacob's fighting his own fear; Kushner says he's fighting his own impulse to use some underhanded way to avoid meeting Esau face to face. Jacob's injured, but survives, a lesson to take away, that he doesn't have to be afraid. Again, Jacob prays, but this time he does not bargain with God but requests strength to do the right thing (31).

Across the three acts, Kushner sees Jacob moving from amorality and selfish ambition, shame being the only sin, to a morality of integrity, in which the primary sin is to fail to live up to your ideals (21). Kushner tells us the scripture calls him "shalem, whole, united within himself" (107). He lives the rest of his life raising the brothers who will constitute the nation of Israel, and he carries his love for Rebekah to the end.

What does Jacob's story have to do with Kushner's readers leading lives that matter? Kushner's chapter following his analysis of the Jacob story is titled "Family and Friends: We are Who We Love." Essentially, it's what I've known for years, said simply in a lyric by Comden and Green, Make someone happy / make just one someone happy / and you will be happy, too (see blogpost of 11/2006). Kushner tugs at my heart when he refers to adolescents, himself included, who were "redeemed from self-doubt" by a parent or teacher who let them know what Jacob's first dream told him: you are someone who will matter. Kushner steps out from behind his screen of authority to tell of his son killed in middle school by a rare genetic disorder, whose classmates years later cited him again and again as their inspiration and a shaping influence on their lives.

Kushner's message resonates with what I believe as a Christian: We cannot bring the Messiah down to solve the world's problems, but we can bring the Messiah down for someone else.

[Harold S. Kushner. Living a Life that Matters. (New York: Knopf, 2001.)]

Finding Allies at "Desolation Mountain" : Cork O'Connor Series #17

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A plane carrying a Senator crashes at Desolation Mountain in William Kent Krueger's novel of that name, 17th of his series featuring detective Cork O'Connor. The crash is a partial fulfillment of a vision that has kept the young man Stephen O'Connor awake, in which he sees an eagle with red-white-and-blue tail shot out of the sky by an arrow. But, then, why does he continue to have the vision after the incident? And what is the presence Stephen senses behind him in the vision, so monstrous that he's afraid to turn and see it?

From that beginning, this story has a strong downward tug into chaos and malevolence. The little Minnesota town of Aurora is overwhelmed with investigators from a half-dozen federal agencies. Good people disappear, and (sad to say) dogs die. There are white nationalist vigilantes and also a para-military group commanded by Gerard, whose allegiance we don't know. Even Cork's adopted grandson Waaboo (Ojibwe "little rabbit") is troubled by a vision of a many-headed monster.

But there's an equally strong tug upwards towards light, even lightness. Cork's grown children are inured to threats and know how to fight back. From the families of everyone who disappears, Cork picks up an array of allies who grow into their roles as ad hoc crimefighters. Cork's old friend Bo Sorenson joins the team. As always in this series, there's also Henry Meloux, a mide or "healer" now over 100 years old, whose hermitage swells with visitors as de facto HQ for the good guys.

The most thrilling part of the story is also slapstick funny. Cork assigns his son to take their least-favorite Ojibwe relative to a safe place. Beulah, a product of the Federal government's efforts to expunge Indian culture out of Ojibwe children, is a Christian of the sour judgmental kind, innocent of both wilderness and physical exertion. It's already funny to see her in a canary-yellow helmet bundled into Stephen's ATV clutching the safety bar; when the bad guys force them off-road, it's fun to see that Stephen -- formerly a frail and needy little boy -- is now an Ojibwe action hero saddled with this prim and panicked sidekick. (Think African Queen.)

Stephen also reaches out to Winston Harmon, a "willowy" young teen of Ojibwe descent, an artist in whom Stephen sees some of his own sensitive nature.

I laughed and, yes, I cried. Great addition to a great series. I'm half way through Lightning Strike; the one after that is still in hardback. Don't look behind, Mr. Krueger: I'm catching up.

[Links to my reflections on other Krueger novels are listed at my Crime Fiction page ]

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Never Get Used to Derek Walcott's Poetry

Never get used to this begins Derek Walcott in a poem from The Bounty (1997). That could mean, "Wow, I never do get used to this" or, "Note to Self: never allow yourself to get used to this!" Walcott always means both/and not either/or.

This in context means both sunrise over the ocean viewed from the Caribbean island St. Lucia, where he was born, and the craft by which he explored that ocean -- craft meaning both a boat such as the one he sees on the horizon and the craft of writing poetry. Though he feels his gift fading out of this page and gently mocks the poetry of his younger self -- what did it know of death? Only what you had read of it -- he is grateful. He plays with phrases from Roman Catholic practice, the Ave Maria when he replaces ocean "waves" with Aves, the rosary in regard to the surf fingering its beads, and "Hail Mary full of grace" with hail heron and gull full of grace. Joking aside, he tells himself that he has come to his end praising and giving thanks. By the end of the poem, he's thinking of the same seascape at night, and the yachts studying their reflections in the water like black glass -- which suggests both literal boats and a peripatetic Nobel-prize-winner pondering his life.

This poem set off fireworks in the margins of my copy from Selected Poems (Edward Baugh, ed., 2007), where my pen made arcs, stars, and circles to mark all those both/ands and other features: the stately iambic pace; rhymes and other wordplay; his painter's eye for visual details; healthy self-deprecation; the horizon where, in numerous poems, he sees both his home when he's away and the world beyond when he's home; and gratitude that toes the edge of faith but never wades in. I wrote a note on the back flap that this one poem encapsulates what I've learned to enjoy in all of Walcott's work.

I wrote the same note about a dozen more of his poems, at least. In all my notes, I've been telling myself Never get used to -- and never forget:

• His visit to Arkansas, ca. 1986. Walking before sunrise from his hotel past a Confederate memorial, he is suddenly aware that police nearby would likely take interest in a large black man out at that hour. In the silence that falls when he enters the diner, A fork clicks / on its plate; a cough's rifle shot / shivers the chandeliered room. The allusions to a rifle and trigger bring an overtone of violence into a mundane scene, typical of how Walcott regularly layers metaphorical meaning over literal details. ("Arkansas Testament" 203)
• A belfry like the exclamation point at the end of a Swiss village (from The Prodigal 289)
• A hotel worker in Rome who also embodies Rome in herself:

  She stacks up the popes like towels in cathedral drawers;
  now in her stone kitchen, under the domes of onions,
  she slices a light, as thick as cheese, into epochs. (from Midsummer, II, 174)

• Coming home from the beach with his twin brother used to be such a thing! he remembers in The Prodigal (295): The body would be singing / with salt, the sunlight hummed through the skin and iced water was a gasping benediction
• A walk up a hill to a baptism at an Episcopal church in Laventile, Trinidad in a 1965 poem is also a journey through class and time. To go downhill from here, he writes, is to ascend in socio-economic class. Thinking of the Middle Passage through which all their ancestors arrived here, Walcott sees that the poor there are still clamped below their hatch, / breeding like felonies / whose lives revolve around prison, graveyard, church. Walcott mocks the pretensions of the Episcopalians who have given themselves whole-heartedly to the rites and ways of their old colonial overlords.
• The comedy of a middle-aged poet, world traveller, jostled on public transport by working-class people from the neighborhood where he grew up. He admires the beautiful young woman across the aisle as if he were painting her, calling her the light of the world. After a basket-laden old woman on the street yells at the driver, Pas quittez moi a terre, literally, don't leave me on this earth, Walcott rings changes on her phrase to the point of feeling guilty for having abandoned his people on this earth. Ready to weep, he exits the bus at his luxury hotel, only to be given another light in an act of kindness by the driver. ("The Light of the World" 184)
• Gentle assurance from beyond the grave to a family grieving for a child

  I am not young now, nor old, not a child, nor a bud

  snipped before it flowered, I am part of the muscle
  of a galloping lion, or a bird keeping low over

  dark canes; and what, in your sorrow, in our faces
  howling like statues, you call a goodbye

  is--I wish you would listen to me--a different welcome... ("For Adrian" 196).

Allegations of sexual harassment surfaced after Walcott's death in 2017. I'm not surprised: I don't sense that he took women seriously. Except for Walcott's mother, women do not have a voice in the poems I've read. They are described by their attractive parts. In contrast, Walcott writes long poems dedicated to his male friends, including Joseph Brodsky and Seamus Heaney, in which he focuses on their writing, their ideas, their conversations, their virtues. Even Walcott's numerous wives are mentioned only with passing regret for his not caring enough for them.

So, like many poets, he may not have lived up to his best work. I know little about Walcott beyond what's in the verses. Some of those got too specialized for me -- I couldn't make headway through Omeros, his Nobel-prize winning transposition of the Odyssey to the Caribbean of his childhood. Tiepelo's Hound, which is both a biography of a Renaissance painter and a memoir of his own artistic development, has great moments, but reading it was like solving a puzzle.

Even so, his precise language and rich layering of metaphor on reality serve largely to express praise and gratitude. As Robert Frost said about poetry in general, reading the poetry of Derek Walcott "is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget."

Trust No One in "Sulfur Springs," Cork O'Connor Series #16

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To keep his crime series fresh, author William Kent Krueger takes his detective Cork O'Connor somewhere new around every five novels. In other books, we've come to know Cork, his growing family, and his hometown of Aurora on the edge of the Ojibwe reservation. He's spent some time in Chicago, mountains out west, and north of the Canada border. But Krueger sometimes takes us deep into communities far from Aurora in Copper River (#6 in the series), in Northwest Angle (#11) and in one I've read most recently, Sulfur Springs (#16).

The precipitating action is a phone message to Rainy Bisonette, longtime lover of Cork, now his wife. Her son Peter out in Arizona leaves a garbled message through heavy static about someone named "Rodriguez," that he has "killed him," and "they'll be looking for me." He doesn't return urgent calls from his mother and Cork, so they board a plane for Arizona.

The town of Sulfur Springs is Aurora's opposite: oppressively hot and arid, on edge because of drug trade and illegal migration from the southern border. Nearly everyone who speaks to Cork tells him to "trust no one but family" in Sulfur Springs. Trust and doubt color the entire novel, leaving no one untouched, not even Rainy, whose previous marriage to a drug lord named Mondragon is news to Cork. Still, Krueger gives us rich description to show the beauty and danger of nature in this unfamiliar setting.

In this novel, Krueger develops further the theme of the ogichidaa, an Ojibwe word for the kind of person Cork is, a "guardian" for his people. Rainy's son Peter turns out to be one of these, a leader who is safeguarding migrants from both a rapacious drug gang and a racist vigilante group. Watching the relationship develop between Cork and Peter is a highlight of the novel, especially when Peter is involved in a confrontation between his natural father and his adopted one. When Cork tells him he's a part of Cork's life, now, Peter asks, "Like family?" "No, not like. Family." (276)

I come away from the novel with impressions of two strong scenes that parallel each other. In both scenes, Cork, Rainy, and her ex face a young man involved in the drug trade. In the second instance, it's the son of drug lord Rodriguez, a privileged young man shielded from consequences until the moment that Cork gets the drop on him. At the earlier instance, the young man is younger than 20, shares the name Pedro with Rainy's son, and sobs when Mondragon orders him shot. Rainy intervenes, and Cork tells us

I saw what Rainy saw, a kid way over his head in something that he regretted now because of the present consequences but that, if he survived and grew wise, he might regret later for all the right reasons. (171)

Later, Cork reflects on how he has often tried not to think of his opponents as human beings, to shield himself emotionally when having to use deadly force.

But Pedro had had a profound impact on me. He wasn't much younger than my own son, Stephen. He'd come from a small village, and God knows how he'd gotten himself mixed up with people like the Rodriguezes. Maybe those [other gang members killed in a shootout] were no different.... Every child is born a clean sheet of possibility, and no mother dreams of her beautiful baby ending up dead in an alley or rotting in the black of a forgotten mine. (175)

Krueger has always orchestrated his stories to reach suspenseful high-impact showdowns. This is no exception.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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Theology for Breakfast: "Forward Day by Day" Nov-Dec 2022 | Jan 2023

Every morning I read the day's meditation on scripture in the quarterly Forward Day by Day, and every quarter I've culled highlights, going back to 2013.

November 2022
English teacher Todd Hague of Tyler, TX began his meditations on All Saints Day with the confession that he experienced a lot of suffering in the preceding 12 months. With that in mind, I was drawn to comfort he finds in harsh sayings:

• The raging seas that cover the earth symbolize chaos in Sirach 43.23, but "the Lord places islands in it." Hague says friends and church can be "islands" in our lives.
• "Sometimes guilt is like a physical malady," Hague writes, and the nightmares in Revelation can help us stay awake (Rev 16.15) to "keep watch over our thoughts, intentions, and actions."
• Anyone unwilling to work should not eat is tough love from Paul (2 Thess 3.10-11) also proclaimed to the upper-class idlers at Jamestown. (For middle schoolers, I called it "the thesis sentence for America.") Hague finds its spiritual application:"when fulfillment comes too easily, it sours...Empty pleasures that require nothing of us fail to feed us."
• When Paul seems harsh, Hague remembers that "much of Paul's ministry involved breaking through old centers of tribalism and traditions." Hague admits, "I have very little in common with many people in my congregation... But we kneel at the same communion rail and confess our sins to the same Christ."
• Zebedee was probably dismayed when his sons James and John left him in his fishing boat literally holding the bag: there went all of his expectations for the future. Hague asks, "What expectations can you let die so that you might live more fully in Christ?"
• Psalm 102.2-4 expresses misery, My days drift by like smoke, but Hague offers an image from cowboy author Louis L'amour's book of poetry Smoke from this Altar. A lone figure sits at a campfire under the stars, smoke rising. For L'amour, it's an image of prayer.

December 2022After a career in marketing and communications, Sallie Schisler was called to ministry in southern Ohio. What stands out for me in her meditations are practical ways to tame demons in our personal lives.

Schisler remembers "The Devil made me do it," a catch phrase for comedian Flip Wilson. But "no one's laughing" when Satan enters Judas, who then betrays Jesus. Rage is one reaction to betrayal, but Psalm 37.9, appointed for that same day, reminds us, "rage... leads only to evil." Schisler recommends we get help with our feelings of anger and "set small goals" for dealing with our sense of powerlessness. (I'd just had a financial setback; a small goal to save just $60 a week helped me to regain a sense of security.)

The small blossoms on a fig tree are signs of the coming of spring, Jesus observes. Schisler reminds us how our "smallest actions" can be signs of God's love for others.

In a couple of scriptures, Schisler simply warns us that these aren't just stories of the past.

• 2 Peter 2.19 people are slaves to whatever masters them goes with the scientific conclusion that we're "wired" for addiction. Schisler cites addictions to work, shopping, and various substances, and I recognize myself and people close to me in that list.
• We can't take comfort in the fact that Herod's slaughter of the Holy Innocents was long ago: "There are many ways to kill our children," Schisler cautions.

January 2023 Elis Lui is the youth minister at Christ Church in Bronxville NY. She finds messages that appeal to youth and retirees alike.

New things I now declare (Is 42.9) puts Lui in mind of the "quirks and different perspectives" her church members "bring to the shared table." We're not to pretend we don't see those differences, but are to allow love to supersede them. Likewise, Eph 4.9 gives us Paul imprisoned telling us that "captivity is captive." We can't pretend not to suffer, she says, but pain and loss do not have to "define our lives."

Rabbis gave Lui some insights. When God asks Cain what's happened to Abel, Cain answers sarcastically, "Am I my brother's keeper?" One Rabbi said that all of scripture and the rabbinic tradition can be summed up in God's unspoken response: Yes, you are your brother's keeper. Another Rabbi told her that we should carry two slips of paper with us at all times, a different message on each: the world was created for me and I am but ashes and dust. "Wisdom," he told her, "is learning when to read which slip of paper."

Lui tells how she suddenly heard familiar scriptures in new ways. God shall give you your heart's desires (Ps 37.4) sounded to her like a promise to give her stuff; with a shift in emphasis, it means that God will let her know what her heart truly desires. That saying by Jesus that only those who do God's will are his brother and sister and mother sounded like he's disowning his family; Lui takes it as an opening to imagine God the Father as also God the Mother, the Sister, the Brother -- and she challenges us to begin our prayers to God from those different angles.

Lui recounts times when disciples do not recognize Jesus until he makes a small word or gesture: walking on water unrecognized, he tells them not to be afraid; mistaken for the gardener, he simply says Mary's name; at Emmaus, he breaks the bread to share it. Lui concludes,

Where might you be overlooking Jesus in your life? Saint Benedict reminds us to welcome every stranger as Christ himself. At every turn, it is a small intimate action that only Jesus would know that reveals God to us: the breaking of bread with our community, the quiet reassurance to take heart even in times of trouble, the quiet whisper of our own name.

A line from Gal 4.9 about coming to know God [and] to be known by God recognizes that we are works in process. By coincidence, I read that just after I'd run across an analogy by crime novelist Dorothy L. Sayers (friend of C.S.Lewis and J.R.R.Tolkien), who sees similarity between God's relationship to us and her relationship to the characters in her novels: they exist solely by and through her, yet her intentions for them change as they develop through their stories. Lui writes a reassurance that must be especially welcome to adolescents, "God delights when we grow and change into more of who we were created to be."

"Assassins" on Target

When a production of Assassins hits its target, it sometimes kills the applause. How do you clap when you're cringing?

In the 1990 musical by book writer John Weidman and composer-lyricist Stephen Sondheim, the characters are drawn from history, all the misfits who've aimed guns at U.S.Presidents from John Wilkes Booth to John Hinckley. Their delusions make us laugh, but their earnest self-justifications can make us profoundly uncomfortable.

After a pause to show that the assassins' methods and views are not necessarily those of the audience, we cheered this past weekend at the Jennie Anderson Theatre in Marietta GA to tell the actors and musicians how we appreciated the expressive pitch-perfect voices, flawless performance of music that demanded precision, and commitment to playing characters who could easily have been presented as caricatures.

L-R: Byck, Guiteau, Fromme, Zangara, Booth, Oswald, Czolgosz, Moore, Hinckley

The cast made strong impressions:

• Michael Joshua Williams in a grimy Santa suit as unemployed tire salesman Samuel Byck in tears because he can't tell from the media what is true anymore;
• Lukas Chaviano as Charles Guiteau, with a warm smile and tireless optimism right up to the moment he faces the noose -- and then summons the will to accept that, too;
• Cameron Scofield as hippie Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme and Jessica Miesel as scatterbrained suburban housewife Sarah Jane Moore, abandoned by everyone else, bonding with each other over Charles Manson;
• Chase Sumner as college dropout John Hinckley, Jr., taunted by Fromme for never having a girl friend and joining her in a soft-rock duet addressed to their idols (Jodie Foster and Manson);
• Claudio Pestana as immigrant ditch-digger Giuseppi Zangara who "never had no chance" and doesn't care about his target "so long as it's king";
• Marcus Hopkins-Turner as factory worker Leon Czolgosz, dignified, lonely, brooding on the injustice of his position;
• Jordan Patrick as hapless Lee Harvey Oswald, with his soft admission, "yes," all he wants is for someone to care about him (even if it's hatred they feel); and
• Craig Smith as John Wilkes Booth, lamenting in the score's most beautiful musical passage "the country is not what it was / when there's blood in the clover" a few measures before he sings the score's ugliest lyric.

As quasi-emcees, Ithica Tell gave her rich low voice to the "Proprietor" in the opening song, and cheerful "Balladeer" Skyler Brown looked genuinely stricken when his optimistic paean to the American Dream is overwhelmed by "Another National Anthem" for "the ones who can't get in to the ballpark."

This was a "concert version" that didn't have, and didn't need, a set. Director Clifton Guterman made a striking and meaningful backdrop from a vast American flag on which images of the assassins' targets were projected. Under the flag, the orchestra sat in full view upstage of most of the action. Around a central platform just large enough to bear 11 actors, a semicircle of chairs gave the assassins a place to watch each others' scenes. In a nice touch, director Clifton Guterman suited each chair to the character and their time: an ornate white rattan chair for Booth, a 70s easy chair from the Hinckley family basement, and even an airplane seat for Byck, who planned to hijack a jet to drop on Richard Nixon's White House.

The effect of the assassins rising from their chairs to join Oswald on that platform was creepy enough to make me catch my breath, and yet it felt like what the whole show was heading to: the misfits who couldn't connect to anyone in their lives connect to each other through Oswald's assassination of Kennedy. Booth calls it "the real conspiracy."

The orchestra, conducted by Holt McCarley, sounded bigger than they were and better than I've heard outside of New York. As Sondheim often interweaves different musics for different characters to tell their stories (e.g., a Sousa march for American tourists plays parallel to a tarantella for the Italian assassin Zangara), it was fun to watch McCarley corral all the moving pieces through tempo changes to reach climactic points together -- gunshots, an electrocution, a hanging. Being able to see the orchestra was a plus.

Because this production didn't include supporting actors, assassins variously doubled as a soldier, a reporter, and bystanders. Without an actress to play Emma Goldman, this production cut the scene at a train station where Czolgosz offers to carry luggage for the socialist orator. Perceiving how the man is lonely and ashamed of his scars from his work in a furnace, she touches his face and tells him that his scars make him beautiful. It's the only tender moment in the script, and I missed it.

The cast shortage did give the actors the opportunity to play sympathetic characters for a song late in the show, "Something Just Broke." Sondheim interweaves stories from everyday Americans across the decades who recall where they were when they learned "the President's been shot." They didn't have to like the President to agree that "Something just spoke, / something I wish I hadn't heard."

The line acquired new resonance with the January 6 insurrection. I wish it hadn't.

Earlier Posts about Assassins
[See my Sondheim page for curated links to my articles about the composer, his craft, his colleagues, and his shows. I wrote about Joe Mantello's production of Assassins in 2004 with Neil Patrick Harris as both "Balladeer" and "Oswald." After seeing several productions around Atlanta, I wrote in 2012 how low budgets and even vocal weakness don't diminish the show's emotional impact. See Sondheim Mini-Festival in Atlanta.]

Books 14 and 15 in the Cork O'Connor Series: Deep "Canyon"

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For books 14 and 15 of the series featuring detective Cork O'Connor, author William Kent Krueger dreamed up two of his most memorable openings. These two books also give us two halves of one arc in a crisis for the hero Cork, whose loved ones observe to each other that he has lost something essential. The friends and family who support him through his trouble grow both in number and in depth.

Windigo Island Readers of the series know from Ojibwe tradition that the cannibal spirit called a "windigo" will call the name of its next victim in the wind, and that the only way to defeat a windigo is to become one.

This novel opens with Native boys in their early teens who canoe to Windigo Island for a daring stunt. As a long-time middle school teacher, I can attest to Krueger's accuracy and sympathy depicting this age: we're fully on the boys' side when the weather turns suddenly and the wind calls out one name. Then they see the creature.

Chapter two involves the detective and his grown daughter Jenny in the search for two missing Native girls in their teens. As the trail leads quickly into the business of child trafficking led by a brute named Windigo, Cork's anger grows until, some chapters later, he is becoming what he opposes. Cork gave up firearms earlier in the series, but here he aims a gun at a man's old dog. A new character, Daniel English, tells Jenny, "Something [in Cork] died there." It's a relief that Krueger shifts away from Cork to tell the story through Jenny's perceptions.

Krueger alludes many times to a tribal adage, that two wolves battle inside all of us, Love and Fear: the one we feed will win. In Windigo Island, there's a lot to fear -- powerful men with guns, flame, explosions -- but the fear of disappointing a loved one is strongest.

Manitou Canyon Krueger frontloads this story with foreboding. A band of Natives, including a woman, a tall man, and a teenaged boy with a rifle encamp above a secluded lake. The boy learns that the name of his target is Cork O'Connor. He sights the shoreline, and the woman behind him whispers "Bang."

In the pages that follow, Krueger sets Cork on a hunt for a millionaire engineer, once Cork's friend in childhood, missing from a fishing trip on that same lake.

Visions, important to the Ojibwe traditions of Cork's family, deepen the dread. Cork's memories of failures and fatalities in Novembers of other years make this November "cruelest" month. His loved ones sense that he has changed. His son Stephen comes home early from a vision quest because he has such a strong sense of danger enveloping his father. And a new character, Leah, still angry after five decades that the Ojibwe healer Henry Meloux rejected her, now comes to him for help, terrified from her waking dream: hundreds of fish with human faces, gasping, drowning. 

Stephen and Cork come to recognitions about their roles in life as healer and guardian, respectively.

While this novel goes to dark places, there are buds of hope along the way that open as in time-lapse photography to make this novel a bouquet of reconciliation and gratitude. How many detective novels have ever left me feeling that way? I can't think of one.

[See my responses to other Krueger books]

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Tom Wayman Works: Poems 1973-1993

In "What Good Poems are For," a man in his 50s reads one of Tom Wayman's works to strangers in a bar because the poem was about work he did, what he knew about, / written by somebody like himself ("What Good Poems are For," Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993). The poem could've been any number of Wayman's works that come at industry from different angles.

In "The Factory Hour" (68), the poet depicts the work day as a voyage on the blue tide of the early morning sun. The workers share experiences of car pools, the grey plastic lunch bucket and safety boots. Walking in through the asphalt yard / we enter the hull of the vessel for a voyage marked by the sounds of machines, the drone of the PA system, and short breaks. We're immersed in the sounds and feeling of the journey.

One of the co-workers named by the PA gets his own poem on the next page of Wayman's collection, a paean to the experience of the iron itself, dormant for eons before it's pulled into the light and transformed miraculously to bolts with purpose ("Neil Watt's Poem" 70). Playful in its personification and language (the iron proclaims We are ore), the poem conveys awe, admiration, and pride. In another poem, one worker's steady beat draws all the men into a joyful jam/dance. The foreman goes away shaking his head ("Industrial Music" 100).

The foreman is a bad guy, or at least incompetent, in many of Wayman's poems. The foreman harangues his workers to go faster, but when they team up to finish ahead of schedule -- showing how superfluous he is -- he obstructs them ("Asphalt Hours, Asphalt Air" 155). The foreman at the sugar silo who's supposed to monitor safety from uptop is MIA while men deep in the silo risk their lives ("One Lump or Two" 201). When Wayman, just hired, asks to be trained for his dangerous new job, the foreman says only, "Nothing to worry about... Can you start tomorrow?" ("Wayman in the Workforce: Actively Seeking Employment" 66). The foreman in "Factory Time" is so polite on Friday afternoon, long cheques dripping out of his hands (102).

Why should the foreman earn more than the ones who exhaust their bodies all day? "Socialism" in Canada wasn't such a dirty word in the 1970s the way it has been in the US, but Wayman still doesn't hammer us with Marx. Some of these poems did wear me down, ones that seem like documentaries, in which Wayman gives distinctive voices to many men and women on the workforce. I prefer the playfulness in "Paper, Scissors, Stone" (192), which makes a children's game of figuring the worth of work:

An executive's salary for working with paper
beats the wage in a metal shop operating shears
which beats what a gardener earns arranging stone.

But the pay for a surgeon's use of scissors
is larger than that of a heavy equipment driver removing stone
which in turn beats a secretary's cheque for handling paper.

Wayman figures everyone should be paid the same for their time. Sixteen years earlier, figuring how hourly expenses squeeze hourly wages every hour of the day, Wayman gives us this delightful vision of harmony and justice:

...every bright season, chemical workers
in the factory of the leaf
effortlessly, without wages, and with everything they want
change sunshine and water into a living thing ("It is Seven O'clock" 41).

So Wayman's poems give us trees and sunshine, too, with friendship, love, and whimsy.

He has a dialogue with his poor tired body: "You go to work if you're so keen," / it says. "Me, I'm going back to sleep." ("Routines" 72). He empathizes with "The Feet," so important during the day, but made to lie down naked / in a part of the bed no one visits... with nothing to do, crossed like a blind horse putting his head over the neck of another blind horse (145).

He plays with personification: Some unfamiliar people who call to him from a bar say they're his needs, including talkative Friendship, a guy with hard hat and hammer named Shelter, and the unnamed woman who smiles every time he looks her way. Wayman asks, Shouldn't there be someone here named, uh, New Stereo? ("Meeting Needs" 178). Things get uncomfortable when he asks about "the Major," as in, Major Social Change. His "Kitchen Poem" is both a cooking lesson and an allegory for global inequities (106). [This inspired my poem On Track.]

Wayman comes up to the edge of scorn when he's dealing with consumer culture, but he doesn't forget the humanity of the misguided. Each object in a suburban home "whispers" its four numbers all day long -- purchase date, price, savings, and present worth -- until the woman of the house goes berserk ("Saturday Afternoon in Suburban Richmond" 109). After he tells us that a particular family's TV is like a grandmother, he carries that idea through the day so vividly that it's not a screen I picture in the corner of the family room, but a little old lady talking to herself ("Grandmother" 114). The chatter of radios and the whining of tourists intrude on the reverence of trees gathered at a mountain like worshipers at a cathedral ("The Banffiad: The Silence That is Like a Song" 49).

The title poem of the collection, "Have I Missed Anything?" is Wayman's greatest hit. He gives a special page to it on his website. It was a meme before there were memes, circulated by FAX, posted to professors' office doors, passed around teachers' lounges, often attributed to "Anonymous." It's all the snarky things that come to a teacher's mind when a student returning from absence asks that question.

My gateway to Wayman was "What Good Poems Are For" (1986) from Christian Wiman's anthology Home. Wayman imagines that a poem is like a potted plant on a sunlit windowsill in a lake by a cabin, a decoration you might not notice -- but you'd notice its absence. As I've been writing poems all year, I can identify with Wayman's experience:

Only those who work on the plant
know how slowly it grows
and changes, almost dies from its own causes
or neglect, or how other plants
can be started from this one... (131).

Catching up with 30 more years of Wayman's work, I have work to do.

The Bike in the Piazza: Venice

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Scott Smoot on a bike in Venice, virtually

Since November 8, I've biked 130 miles on trails around Atlanta. On the map of my virtual tour of the world, that distance takes me from Milano to 38 miles west of Venice. With inclement biking weather, I've completed the remaining 38 miles swimming at the West Cobb County Aquatic Center. Let's pretend that I swam the canals.

In the photo, I'm in St. Mark's Square, known to locals as Piazza San Marco. Glass barriers have kept out most of the flood waters. At the far end of the square stands the basilica of San Marco, the white building topped by crosses and cupolas.

When Mom and Dad took me along for a visit to Italy in January 1991, demonstrators protested in the piazza. Bombing had just begun in the first Gulf War. Something else that had just begun was CNN, which we could view each night in our hotel.

My strongest emotional connection to this place, however, is music for worship in the basilica composed in 1610 by Claudio Monteverdi, a local musician. Because choirs of singers and instruments at San Marco faced each other in balconies across the nave, Monteverdi often wrote antiphonal pieces for one side to echo the other.

I was still new to the Episcopal Church when a wonderful 2-LP recording of his Vespro della Beata Vergine (Vespers of the Blessed Virgin) came out around 1984. Director Andrew Parrott restored the chanting of the worship service with Monteverdi's music. The Episcopal liturgy helped me to appreciate this Catholic liturgy. I played the album during Saturday afternoons, which I had made my Sabbath (Sundays I was always busy with choir and preparations for class Monday).

Something else I love about the Vespers is Monteverdi's eclectic mix of styles. Plainchant calls us to worship; then comes a grand brass fanfare (from THE first opera, his Orfeo) with chorus singing homophonically -- a first, when composers thought in terms of counterpoint, not chords. Some of it is dance music; "Surge Amica" from the Song of Solomon is a love song by soloist with lute. The mix of styles appealed to me, much the same way that Leonard Bernstein's Mass (11/2013) had done. I emulated both when I studied composition with Dr. James Sclater (11/2015) beginning in 1987.

My title for this blogpost alludes to a wonderful musical by Adam Guettel which I write about in A Little "Light" Music (01/2008).

←← | ← || → Use the arrows to follow the entire bike tour from the start.

Sasha Sagan on the Richness of Ritual

"I was taught to be skeptical, not cynical," Sasha Sagan told an interviewer on NPR this past week. 

She comes from parents famous for their writing and video presentations of a secular, scientific, and humane world view. Her mother Ann Druyan produced Cosmos, the documentary series that made the late Carl Sagan's voice and image familiar nationwide. Sasha Sagan's book For Small Creatures Such as We was the subject of the interview. In her book, she offers the insight that rituals enrich our lives, whether or not we believe in God. 

 Here are a few notes I made after I heard the interview:

• "Every ritual is a portal to another way of being." I can see that, as I experience both the scripted rituals of the Prayer Book and the habitual rituals involved in dog care, friendship, and daily routines -- actions that bond me to another, re-center my thinking, or prepare me to make an effort.
• Knowing that the universe is so huge and we are of so little matter to it makes us more significant, more of a miracle just by our chance existence.
• Her mother's favorite toast at Thanksgiving is, "You don't need to know whom to thank for you to feel thankful."
• Her interviewer mentioned how seeing the moon is a "special event" for her little daughter; Sasha jumped on that as a perfect example of an attitude that she would cultivate.
• Mathematicians have proven that we all breathe in atoms that were breathed out by everyone who ever lived. Simply deep breathing, then, becomes a ritual of connection to all those in history whom we honor, and to all whom we have loved and see no longer.
• The kinds of rituals she has in mind needn't be contrived or solemn. During the early days of COVID, she (or the interviewer?) made a ritual of wiping little hands with the "potion" that sanitized her fingers that had shared the playground with runny-nosed friends. A family she knows will howl at the moon before bedtime. A cab driver eavesdropping on a young couple anxious about their future, told them to lighten up and just sing their ABCs, which they've done every week ever since.

Ritual, I know, can be a control valve that lessens anxiety, a reminder of past joys, a re-adjustment of perspective. My faith is sustained by ritual. Part of that faith is the assurance that God's spirit is working in each of us, whether we know it or not, and the urge to pray or praise is the work of the Spirit in us.

"Empire of Light" Blesses the New Year

My friend Suzanne and I went to Empire of Light on the recommendation of NPR and the reputation of writer/director Sam Mendes. Very glad we did. Also very surprised that a poem by Philip Larkin seems to have had a part in shaping the movie.

Olivia Colman plays Hilary, a white middle-aged middle manager of the Empire Cinema in Margate, England, 1981, who trains Stephen, a new employee played by Micheal Ward. They find common interest in the design of the old theatre and in caring for an injured bird. There are problems: a daily dose of lithium is all that keeps demons of her mental illness at bay, while he feels more vulnerable every week during a surge of racist nationalism in the U.K.

We want these people to make each other happy, and so do their co-workers (except her abusive boss, played by Colin Firth). The projectionist Norman, played by Toby Jones, teaches Stephen how a thin stream of light passing through still pictures at 24 frames per second registers to the human eye as life, and the darkness between frames doesn't show.

So movies are themselves a metaphor for the hope that both of these people need.

A key moment in their relationship occurs at midnight on New Year's Eve. Another key moment is an admission that "last year is dead," conveyed by the "fullgrown thickness" of trees in spring. We hear that message from Hilary's reading aloud of Philip Larkin's poem "The Trees." Larkin's trees are also telling us, "Begin afresh, afresh, afresh."

From a movie that has its share of darkness, it's a sweet message.