Growth in Mainline Protestant Churches: Thinking Out of the Big Box

(reflections on Laurene Beth Bowers, DESIGNING CONTEMPORARY CONGREGATIONS: STRATEGIES TO ATTRACT THOSE UNDER 50. Cleveland, OH: Pilgrim Press, 2008.)

Laurene Beth Bowers, a pastor for twenty – six years in a congregational church, often asks questions about church to “post – modern” people, defined as those who are technologically and culturally up to date probably under age fifty. They say that God is everywhere, but that churches “think they have a monopoly on God” (46), that churches “only want my money” (15), and that church is a place for “everybody’s grandmother” (46). Yet she also hears that they’re interested in going to some church if they can find one, and, yes, they admit sadly, they do “need a grandmother – like person.”

The core question of Bowers’ book is how to reach that kind of post – modern believer. More broadly, she wants to replace the perception of church as “one more thing to do in an already busy week” with the notion of church as “the grounding base that energizes us to be involved in everything else we do during the week” ( 47).

Her solutions do not include modernizing the service to make it “glitzy" like the big box churches that measure "growth" in numbers. She would look for other ways to measure growth.

For Bowers, a church that does not generate energy for service both inside and outside of the church is “depressed”. Chronic symptoms of depressed congregations include “constant anxiety about money, fear of losing long-term members by taking a stance” on controversial issues, and what she calls “multiple hat syndrome” where the same people head all the committees. When efforts to “contemporize” the services fail to draw “the crowds,” a depressed church blames the pastor or the denomination (19).

She sees one “window of opportunity” in the postmodern believers’ interests in “spirituality.” While postmoderns think of “religion” as something preached by authorities, they like “spirituality,” which encompasses for them Eastern traditions and social causes. Far from being non – religious, she says, they are extremely interested in what the church can offer, but put off by the church they see on TV and in town. They like ritual, and come to have a child baptized, by which they mean “blessed.” They’ll come for a wedding or a funeral. Bowers disapproves of how, burned by couples who showed up for a baptism and then disappeared, some churches deny rites to non-members. She thinks a better approach is to group such people with each other in a seminar or cell, so that they come to the rite already part of a group with whom they have much in common ( a child, a new marriage ).[Read about another take on "spirituality" by Richard Rolheiser.]

Perhaps the central idea of her book is her understanding of “church.” Church should be more than a school where the pastor teaches, more than a country club where the pastor is a sort of activity director, and more than a service organization such as the Kiwanis club (46). She writes:

We embrace a relational theology through which being a disciple of Jesus means that we have signed up for service to be an instrument of God’s blessing through each other: We believe that God’s intervention can only happen through a human agent. (48)

This service to each other can take place, she says, in “designer cell groups” of kinds based on a common interest or common stage of life (56). She makes a side note about youth groups that function as mere social “fun” groups. “An indicator of a church’s emotional health is the functioning of its youth groups. …An effective youth minister is one who does social activities in order to … provide a place where the youth can openly share their faith and practice doing so in order to evangelize other youth.”

By “Evangelism,” she does not mean “selling” the church but simply sharing our defining moments of faith. She cautions against merely “being warm and friendly (like every other church)” to those who step through our doors on their own, because such people are already a “certain personality type.” A sign that says, “The Episcopal Church Welcomes You” is outdated. She recommends charging the congregation with inviting a diversity of people in, and she recommends service to the community. Building a Habitat House, for example, she found many curious about what had motivated her church members to come out and to do the work (62).

She recommends improving the church’s “curb appeal” (65-67). Where a “modern” member sees “beautiful and traditional,” a post-modern person sees “old fashioned.” Have members list the church’s artworks, furniture, relics in categories for “keepers” and “discardables.” The middle category was for any physical object that excited debate, and the agreement was, “We’ll put it away for a year, and if anyone misses it, we’ll restore it.” In the places of these objects, she suggests bright colors, artwork produced by members of the congregation (maybe in rotation through art workshops).

She cautions against letting visitors observe how things are done before getting involved, and she also cautions against involving them in committees where there are “a few positions open.” Instead, she says, ask, “What do you believe you have to offer us?” and put them onto it, or offer a way for newcomers to discern their particular gifts. A survey is one way to start, but may reveal a person’s interest more than a person’s gifts (81). A striking example of “gifts” is a talent for “visitation.” She recommends training for visitors who may end up dealing with people who are depressed or dependent or abused (81).

In every case, Bowers recommends that the pastor distribute “power” and “energy” away from herself to cells and the talents of the congregation – precisely what we at St. James discussed in our Vestry retreat.

She also means for the church to be reaching out even when members, scared of shrinking resources, say, “Shouldn’t we take care of our own?”

She says that postmoderns expect a diverse congregation, and will be put off by a homogeneous one. She explicitly recommends taking a stand for inclusion of gays and lesbians. In a digression about critics who charge that this is to deny Scripture and core beliefs, she argues the opposite, that the critics are citing authorities who themselves have misunderstood poor translations of Scripture (39).

She writes that, if a church is to attract anyone, its worship should be a source of energy to “handle life’s challenges,” to “heal traumas,” and to “work for social justice” (29). Her emphasis here is on liberation more than theology. “Social justice” for her means assisting the “have – nots” in assailing the “power structures” that keep the “haves” in dominance over the “marginalized” (88). Later, she denies all “dualism” dividing the world between “us” and “them” (116). I guess dualism is okay for her if it’s from the point of view of “have nots.” Leaving aside liberation theology, she makes the point, “While we may not all agree on what causes those social issues, we are likely to agree on a method of intervention”(86).

CABARET by Atlanta's Lyric Theatre: Still Fresh

(a reflection on the production of CABARET, book by Joe Masteroff, music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, original production directed by Harold Prince.)

Seeing CABARET for the first time in thirty years, I was struck as I had not been before by the power of the "book" songs.

The show is famous for its creators' new approach to musical theatre, using the songs of performers in the "Kit Kat Club" to comment on developments in the story. The creepiest example is the song that follows a heart - breaking scene in which a German woman rejects her beloved Jewish suitor because of the Nazis' growing influence. That's the cue for the Emcee to dance with a gorilla (it's in a tutu) while singing, "When we go walking together, I hear society moan / But if they could see her through my eyes, / Maybe they'd leave us alone." The title number is ironic, sung by a woman deluded in thinking that she has a future as a singer in Berlin, singing "No sense permitting some prophet of doom / to wipe happy smiles away! / Come to the Cabaret!"

But there are songs for other characters that express the same attitude. The aged landlady sings a good - natured song about why she'll take in an impecunious young American for half the usual rent, "The sun will rise, and the moon will set / And you learn how to settle for what you get... " This song, like many of the others, employs a dissonant interval (here, a rising major 7th) that alerts the audience to danger in a conventional attitude.

Another example is the young man's haunting song to the cabaret girl Sally: "Why should I wake up? This dream is going so well!" But the storyline is telling him to wake up. He and the other characters dismiss the rise of the Nazis as "politics," irrelevant to their daily concerns.

Near the end, the elderly woman confronts the young man. He has told her that she "can't" let other peoples' prejudice stop the marriage. She tells him that she's near the end of her life, and all she wants is to live peacefully, and she stands to lose everything if she associates with a Jew in the new political climate. "Go on tell me," she sings, "I will listen, what would you do if you were me?" The tune drops by the interval of a major 7th, the same distinctive interval by which her first song rose. That's got to be a musical metaphor to mirror the way that she has now progressed from insouciant apathy in her first song to bitter resignation in her last.

Bob Fosse's movie of CABARET escapes the back - and -forth, real life v. cabaret pattern that grows tiresome in the Broadway show. But Fosse jettisoned most of the "book" songs to do it, and they are underrated treasures.

Stretch the Sketch: TRADIN' PAINT

(reflection on TRADIN' PAINT by Catherine Bush. Produced by Theatre in the Square, Marietta, Georgia. Directed by Jessica West)

Photo: Kate Donadio as Lucky, Chad Martin as Skeeter, Eric Mendenhall as Coty, and Veronika Duerr as Darla.
Source: MJ Conboy

"I just hope my past history ends real soon," says the character Darla Frye near midpoint of TRADIN' PAINT, a play by Catherine Bush.
Truly, by midpoint, I felt the same way as Darla: I was getting a bit tired of character's "past histories" exposed in stand up comedy routines.
By then, she has already made the first step out of thirty years of passivity and self - deprecation by enrolling in an adult GED program, and the play is about to stretch the bounds of comedy sketch territory.

If her story weren't packaged as an extended comedy sketch about NASCAR culture, it's doubtful that Theatre in the Square would have been packed with laughing adults. A flag man lectures us on NASCAR for any "Yankees or atheists" in the crowd; Darla's dimwit boyfriend Coty relives his gridiron agonies with the Polka, NC "Dots"; and we get a lot of jokes about the play's fish out of water, a black gay English professor and NASCAR afficionado whose name is a joke straight out of the index of the playwright's American History textbook: Halley Smoot (one letter off from the infamous tarriff).

Just when I was afraid that I was in for a couple of unpleasant hours a la the predictably snide GREATER TUNA the characters begin to interact in dialogue, bumping up against each other. That's what "tradin' paint" means in NASCAR lingo, we're told.

The sketch format gives Playwright Bush a lot of flexibility. In Act One, we meet Lucky Tibbs, self - confident, competent, and tough -- everything Darla is not -- and she treats us to "the condensed version" of her courtship of racecar driver Skeeter Jett. In Act Two, Darla confronts all her demons, as well as God and Dale Earnhart. Darla confronts Coty, Coty confronts Lucky, and the coming together of all these characters touches us as much as stand - up cartoon cut - outs of act one can.

It's a great pleasure to watch, and the sketch format is a good one to emulate, though I don't think I need to see something like it again any time soon.

Poet Todd Boss: Story and Rhyme

(reflections on YELLOWROCKET, first collection of poems by Todd Boss. See http://www.toddbosspoet.com/Home.html)

While Todd Boss’s rhymes jump out at unexpected places, his persona lays back to appreciate or figure out what’s up. It’s a pleasing juxtaposition, like finding mint chips in your vanilla shake. I know from reading the sometimes snarky commentary in the journal POETRY that rhyme and narration are both scorned by a large segment of the “poetry community,” and the pleasures of this book make those self-righteous critics look as foolish as vegans at a barbecue.

Boss organizes this collection almost in the shape of a novel. Part one is memory of parents, grandparents, farmland. Part two focuses on a pivotal event, a storm of July 15, 1980 “Still the single worst natural disaster in Wisconsin state history” his note tells us in the appendix. Part three gives us turbulence of another sort, between husband and wife, with some ups and some violent downs, characterized by “Don’t Come Home” words more damning than I hate you, he says. Part four seems to be about waiting and a need for reconciliation. Five brings us home, with tributes to “Things, like dogs” that are glad to see us in the morning, and a poem about a sleeping son, leading to part six, which brings us to appreciation of nature, his “joy doubled” by perceiving that his young daughter perceives it.

That middle section of conflict is certainly the sharp center of the book, but not its best part. She throws clothes down at the poet, “Tangled Hangers and All,” and she floods the kitchen to make a point, and it’s all effective in the way that staged confrontations in movies are. I’ll remember these poems about conflict, and the ones about the aftermath – such as “Six Nights in a Hotel” that seem to chronicle the man’s exile after being told not to come home, beginning with the very simple and effective lines…

My wife and I


a mile apart

All of these poems take off from narrative events, such as a waitress’s mistaking the poet for someone else. He uses the occasion to think that he has become someone else, and, by placing the poem at the end of this section, Boss strongly suggests a transition from conflict to renewal of relationship.

But other parts of the book feel less stagey and more substantial. I never had two grandfathers, I never lived on a farm, but Boss’s memory of sitting with his grandfathers as they played cards is so vivid and rich that I’ve appropriated it.

they often held me on their laps,
their arms about me, so I could see
their hoards. Their buckles poked
and I fiddled with their braces.
I studied their hewn and stubbled
faces…

He puns on the suits of the cards a few lines later as he reflects, “I had no words / for how it felt to sit so intimate with kings, their hearts, their diamonds / fairly dripping through their knuckles / when they dealt.” As usual, he slips in some rhyme, here “felt” and “dealt,” and earlier, “braces” and “faces,” an effect rather like the pleasure of turning up a card that fits the hand.

I wonder what would be lost if Boss put rhymes at the ends of lines? End rhyme has that satisfying feeling of word and idea clicking into place, giving any couplet a feeling of inevitability and unassailability. He does it occasionally, as in a witty epigram called “Wish” from that turbulent middle section of the book:

You’ve never not been negative,
I wouldn’t know you if
you weren’t. You never wish
but in the subjunctive,
candles to the frosting burnt.

He could have written out the lines in a quatrain to emphasize the rhyme, but it’s strong enough. He certainly seems to have stayed up all night to find sound – related words, and a couple of the poems here seem to be more about sounds than sense (such as “Ere We Are Aware”). I suppose that Boss prefers to follow the internal logic of each poem’s content, using rhymes for incidental emphasis, rather than to let rhyme shape the piece.

A couple of poems stand out for opposite reasons. “She Rings Me Up” strikes me as a stand up comedy routine, as the comedian plays the innocent guy who believes that he’s picking up on flirtatious vibes from a grocery store clerk. He pretends not to get what’s happening, while we can all figure it out. This same persona is Boss’s throughout the book, but here’s the egregious exaggeration of it.

“The Day is Gray and the Lake” develops a conceit with impersonal but alert interest: the day is the work of “the maker” who “can’t make up his mind, always fussing.” The lake “shifts, mercurial, / like modeling clay, / the million thumbs / of wind at work upon it.”

I heard Todd Boss read a new poem on the NPR program “The Splendid Table,” concerning the taste of freshly harvested apple pieces, enjoyed all the more because he shared them with his father, sitting silently during a break in their work, on the back of a pick up truck. He admitted that he moved to the city as soon as he could, and spent a decade denying his rural past. Now he embraces it.

The poems are richer for the background story.

Swedish Detective Wallander: One Step Behind

(reflection on ONE STEP BEHIND by Henning Mankell, translated from Swedish by Ebba Segerberg)

Reading for the first time from this highly - acclaimed series, I'm struck by the extent to which the detective novelist's job is simply stringing the reader along. I could be irritated by that, or I could enjoy the experience: I haven't decided which reaction I'm feeling.

There is some admiration of how he does tease us. We know in the first chapter everything we'll ever know about the personality and motivation of the murderer; only his name is withheld. He shoots three young adults while they indulge in a midsummer night's dress - up fantasy. While Detective Kurt Wallander and his team look into the disappearance of those three young adults, we wonder, when will Wallander figure out what we already know? Later, when we know where the murderer is lurking, and what he is planning, then there's page - turning suspense. That's a good thing, and it kept me up reading past midnight.

Meanwhile, however, we do have irritating iterations of the phrase, "something was not right," as Wallander can never seem to put his finger on the source of his intuitions. If he did, gosh, the novel would be over in two chapters. Even the detective's mid - life health crisis is drawn out so long that it wears thin: okay, Wallander, you have diabetes. So?

The Martin Cruz Smith books set in Russia, and Walter Mosley's books set in the same streets as Raymond Chandler's LA give us a strong sense of alien, beautiful, intriguing settings. Sweden seems to be a place where everything is within an hour's drive, and where two murders in a summer is enough to get the national news media up in arms about lawlessness. I'm willing to revisit Mankell's Sweden, but it made a bland first impression.

REVERSE MENTORING by Earl Creps: It's Not Just About Technology

(Reflection on a book by Earl Creps, REVERSE MENTORING: HOW YOUNG LEADERS CAN TRANSFORM THE CHURCH AND WHY WE SHOULD LET THEM. Leadership Network Publications, 2008)

"Words don't stick" for our younger church members, not the way they did for those of us who are Boomers or older.

For Creps, information came in words, and these were mined with great effort and skill in hard - to - reach sources, to be mulled over in essays, with all these words to be kept in files and notebooks as treasures, and their possession gave a person authority. That's certainly the way I've always thought of words and information. And the subject that I teach in middle school, History, is based on that model.

But for those raised on the internet, information is no treasure, but a utility as easy to turn on and off as water. It's there to download anytime; no need to treasure it or to keep it.

Then there's the issue of "playlists." Boomers were raised on radio, while younger members take for granted that they can instantly choose their music, tv shows, and anything else. The typical church experience for them is "too homogenized," one size fits all, like radio. They want their own playlist.

So what are People of the Book supposed to do, especially in our liturgical church that proudly preserves its texts and rehearses them every time we meet? How can we draw younger members into an experience when they balk at lectures and three - point sermons?

The first step, according to Creps, is simply to ask for their help. First admit, "I'm not cool," and ask, "What is that? Who is that music group? What matters to you?" He suggests a number of models for doing this formally, and strongly suggests that church leadership should approach this informally, over a long period of time, meeting at coffee houses, getting help with technical things, meeting two (young) on one (older).

Creps admits that this generational conflict has been around "since the Tower of Babel," and he describes the show-down brewing between current "Gen - Xers" and the even younger "Millennials" (i.e., those who grew up watching 90210 on TV or Dawson's Creek). His Gen - X youth leaders complain that "Millennials" can't do anything, and that they are "immune to instruction" unless it's a humorous video or else "about me" (119).

Creps also seems to have forgotten earlier manifestations of the hunger for "authenticity" for which he admires his younger colleagues. When Boomers were in High School, it was the hunger for "relevance" and it re-shaped the curriculum. A generation earlier, folk music was "authentic" (and Peter, Paul and Mary were "too commercial"). In years before that, the badge of authenticity was whether one appreciated be - bop. So I'm not too impressed with a huge chunk of this book.

But he does put his finger on some issues to be aware of:

- Boomers, like every generation before them, are afraid that they will be "ignored to death" (81).

- Relationship is more important than information; leaders should begin with the idea that they won't just present and guide, but will learn from those they lead (124) and very few churches have a coherent strategy for doing this (152).

- God conveyed his lessons by sending a human being -- texts came after. A young audience wants to know what the Kingdom of God means to the ones presenting the lessons and sermons; Greek roots and quotes from authority don't carry weight with them (137)

- "engagement" of the younger audience isn't about information, even if it has pictures, but about asking questions and telling personal stories... as Jesus must have done when he told parables that had no easy interpretation.

- Our younger members are also largely ignorant of the overarching story of God's purpose in the world. Creps likens the typical young person's experience of a sermon to his own uncomfortable lack of comprehension when he watched the second movie in the LORD OF THE RINGS cycle without being familiar with the books or with the first movie.

Ideas for St. James: "iPod byGod?" Some kind of mentoring by young members re: technology they take for granted... Wiis and iPods etc.

Borrow Creps' idea of sending text messages to the preacher during the sermon for review later... just to get fleeting impressions of how the message is getting across, and to keep young ones engaged.

Some kind of shadow Vestry -- commitment by Church leaders to meet with pairs of younger members regularly.

Georgia Festival Chorus presents "Total Praise"

(reflections on a concert May 31 at First Baptist Church, Marietta, Georgia by The Georgia Festival Chorus, Frank Boggs, founding director, David Scott Associate Director, Ken Terrell, Assistant Director, Cathy Adams, Pianist, John Innes, Organist)

The theme of Sunday night’s concert by the Georgia Festival Chorus was set at the start by an intense, brief segment of John Ness Beck’s anthem “Total Praise.” The rest of the piece was held in reserve until the end of the evening, when founding director Frank Boggs rose, still recuperating from emergency heart surgery just three weeks ago. At that point, it was an emphatic statement of thanks and praise. But at the start, the piece was a wake – up call, and Associate Director David Scott tied each piece to that theme.

Another theme emerged as the three directors put the Georgia Festival through their paces: contrast. That opening statement by Beck showed contrast in texture and contrast in dynamics, beginning with a soprano’s earnest solo line, joined by full chorus, and suddenly swelling as the choir sang “You are the source of my strength / You are the strength of my life.”

Immediately, that contemporary piece was contrasted to Haydn’s classical balance. Sopranos were especially noteworthy, floating their high notes without vibrato above the roiling counterpoint of the lower voices in the “Kyrie” from the Lord Nelson Mass. For “The Heavens are Telling,” the chorus sang grandly over Haydn’s playful keyboard ornamentation, executed presto by pianist Cathy Adams and organist John Innes. The chorus exuded joy – classically contained -- bringing each iteration of the word “firmament” to a perfect unison “tee.”

A setting of the Lord’s Prayer by a composer named Cain (any first names, program writer?) set up a different kind of contrast. After Haydn, we were treated to unaccompanied voices piling up in a chord that expressed anguish and need as the words addressed “Our Father who art in Heaven.” The chorus slid through the contemporary harmonies accurately and emotionally, bringing the piece to reassuring consonance only at the very end.

The next piece, Beck's setting of Psalm 90 ( “Canticle of Praise” ) began deceptively as one of those generically heartfelt ballads of the 70s identified with Barry Manilow, but it cut loose from its pop moorings around the line about our lives being as the grass that is cut down and “gone.” There was a special effect here as each voice part alternated the syllable “gone” on a different pitch, descending into gloom. From then on, all stylistic bets were off: sunny harmonies broke through, but kept evolving until we were into strong choral writing with keyboard antics that sounded more like Bartok than Barry Manilow.

Assistant director Ken Terrell introduced a set of hymns arranged by someone named Wilberg, where there were fewer compositional pyrotechnics and therefore greater exposure of the Chorus’s technique. Women sounded lovely above bubbling flute accompaniment in “All things Bright and Beautiful.” For “The King of Love my Shepherd Is” the men sustained convincing unison, basses and tenors together, on some high pitches – very difficult to do right.

Again, for contrast, a select ensemble of voices came forward to sing a cappella “E’en So Lord Jesus Quickly Come” by Paul Manz. It’s an especially moving piece, expressing yearning with open harmonies and surprising melodic turns.

We also heard fine arrangements of Broadway tunes, including “Somewhere,” credited to Bernstein. (Attention program writer: The lyrics were enunciated so well. Who wrote them?) “Georgia on My Mind” was warmly harmonized, punctuated by Cathy Adams’ piano stylings, and notable especially for the bridge, sung by the women with warm tone quality and jazzy phrasing. These people know what they’re doing when they switch genres!

Throughout the evening, the choir showed off amazing control with long crescendos, sudden decrescendos, and every combination of the two.

Rising to thank his choir for their support of him during his illness, and then to conduct the full rendition of “Total Praise,” Frank Boggs showed off the choir’s chops by dramatically elongating a fermata. Conducting the final phrases of the song for an encore, Mr. Boggs again varied the sound.

As always, the evening ended with the lovely Lutkin Benediction, sung by the choir spread throughout the hall.

Teaching Tips from Animal Psychologist Temple Grandin

(reflections on the book ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION by Temple Grandin with Catherine Johnson.)

Subtitled “Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior,” Dr. Grandin’s own story of growing up autistic is part of every chapter of this book. She “thinks in pictures,” and her experience and research lead her to believe that animals think similarly.

She also reports on results of brain imaging experiments.

The book ends with recommendations of what works and what doesn’t with pets, but, to my surprise, I picked up information more useful to teaching middle schoolers. I suppose that should not be so surprising. I can laugh at my students’ behavior (except when it’s malicious or dishonest) by remembering “they’re puppies.” And I don’t get angry at my dogs anymore, just firm.

Above all, we get this message, stated more succinctly in a review of the book that followed this one, printed in NYTimes: “Don’t stimulate rage, fear and panic if you can help it, and do stimulate seeking and also play.” (Garner, Dwight. "The Joys and Pains of Being an Animal." Review of ANIMALS MAKE US HUMAN. NYT 20 Jan. 2009)

Here are tidbits from ANIMALS IN TRANSLATION that have applications in class as much as to life with Bo my Lab and Luis my Lab experiment:

Adolescent males of species with complex brains engage in violence for its own sake, without any obvious evolutionary purpose. Example: chimp battles, dolphins destroying porpoises, pp. 150-152.

Breeding for one trait leads to unexpected behavioral results. She gives examples of rapist roosters, “neoteny” (perpetual adolescence) in dogs, increased skittishness of dalmations, decreased intelligence in border collies over just the past thirty years.

The neocortex is the part of the brain that automatically seeks connections, that makes mixed emotions and generalizations possible. Dogs generally don’t experience mixed emotions, but Grandin gives exceptions – such as curiosity mixed with fear in cows (p.91). Ritalin and other stimulants increase neocortical activity and inhibit playfulness (119).

My favorite bit concerns a piece of research that has been updated since I first heard about it in the 80s.

When electrodes are implanted into the curiosity / interest / anticipation system, animals turn them on and keep them on until they’re totally exhausted from all their frenzied racing around and sniffing…. Researchers used to think that this circuit was the brain’s pleasure center…

But now researchers see things differently. We have a lot of evidence that the reason a drug like cocaine feels good is that it’s intensely stimulating to the SEEKING system in the brain, not to any pleasure. What the self-stimulating rats were stimulating was their curiosity / interest / anticipation circuits. That’s what feels good: being excited about things and intensely interested in what’s going on – being what people used to call “high on life”!

Evidence? The animals act curious, searching, sniffing. Humans report feeling interested. But, for Grandin, the “clincher” is that “the SEEKING circuit fires during the search for food,” and stops when the object is found (p.95).

I’ve said this for years to students: The only real pleasure in life is learning new things. It’s better if it’s meaningful; it’s better if it involves cooperation with others.

She answers a qualified “yes” to the question. “Do animals talk to each other the way people do?” For example, prairie dogs’ communications varied according to their perception of dangers, including new “transformational” uses of patterns to describe unfamiliar stimuli that the experimenters presented(p. 274). Apes discussed objects that were not present in the room (275). A parrot, impatient for the nut that was to be its reward for identifying letters, repeated the usual formula, “I want a nut” but then added “nnn, uuu, tuh.” Spelling (282)!

Along the same line, Grandin sees music as a communicative element in animals and humans. Typically, she relates this to her own autistic behavior: She could hum tunes with her mother at the piano long before she could speak, and another autistic child confused the words of a song with its tune: he thought the tune was the message.

About animals, Grandin stresses the need to establish dominance. “Make the dog sit quietly before he is fed. The dog should learn that he eats on his owner’s terms.” Also, precede the puppy into rooms, touch food while the puppy is eating, and playfully turn that puppy over and rub that puppy’s tummy to establish dominance (p.169). To avoid dangerous dominance issues and “pack mentality,” she advises dog owners to own two dogs, but no more (p. 169).

Finally, for those of us who sometimes shudder to think how many chickens have died for our pleasure, she writes clear-headedly about vegetarianism (179-180). She wishes we had evolved to be plant eaters, but we haven't. She herself was unable to operate without animal protein. Besides, it's not death but suffering that animal lovers should decry. On a related issue, here's another excerpt from that NY Times review:

She worries about the “totally adversarial” relationship between animal advocacy groups and the livestock industry. She has kind words for companies like McDonald’s and Wendy’s (she has consulted for both), which are forcing their suppliers to treat animals more humanely. But she also praises activists. “The big companies are like steel, and activists are like heat. Activists soften the steel, and then I can bend it into pretty grillwork and make reforms.”

Memoir by Singer Cleo Laine: Footnotes

(Reflection on CLEO, the autobiography of singer Cleo Laine, published 1995, and on her music and career).

I met singer Cleo Laine one time, a meeting that didn't make it into her autobiography, even as a footnote. But she is more than a footnote in my life. Since she modestly omits from her life story all discussion of the artistry that makes her important to mine, I'm adding some footnotes to her book.

1973 - "The New York Carnegie Hall concert was the first of all the other highlights I was to encounter in America. ...It was a one-of-a-kind peak...." (p.256) On the recommendation of my teacher Frank Boggs, I risked six dollars on the live LP recording of that concert. I started with side two, to hear "Send in the Clowns" by my hero Stephen Sondheim. I was disappointed. Her voice seemed breathy, sometimes raspy. The accompaniment wasn't faithful to Sondheim's original. I sighed, and turned the LP over to see if there was anything to like. Then, each track was a revelation: folk song "I Know Where I'm Going" sung a cappella, a swinging waltz version of Carole King's bland "Music" that -- unlike the original -- built in excitement. For the first time I heard and appreciated scat singing, as Cleo spanned four octaves in a single line. Then there was a forgettable pop ballad made beautiful by Cleo's smokey vocal timbre and dynamics. This was followed by rude blues in a rough - hewn voice, and a spectacular novelty number "Control Yourself." By the time I got back to "Send in the Clowns," I had converted. Now I appreciated the understated singing, especially now that I knew how much vocal power she was keeping under the hood. Now I appreciated the arrangement for opening up the song to less restrained emotion. From that time on, I sought out jazz interpretations of songs I knew well. Oh, yes: the next track was "Riding High" by Cole Porter, and I'd found a new composer to love.

1974 - recording of Pierrot Lunaire and Songs by Charles Ives (p. 332) - Cleo mentions this in her discography without comment. I was ready for some good old modernist dissonance and drama, but this shocked me. Schoenberg's twelve-tone song cycle in "sprechstimme" (sp? "speak song") made me radically uncomfortable. I waited for the eerie introduction and morbid poetry to end and the music to begin, in vain: the din just continued thirty minutes and stopped. Ives's songs, on the other hand, opened me up to the ideas of disjointed rhythm and disconnected tonality. I determined to understand this stuff, and I've pursued it through books and recordings, learning to love some of it. Also began to appreciate eclecticism in an artist.

1976 - "Ray [Charles] and I got on with each other right away. The atmosphere in the studio was one of joy bordering on love, for the music and for the artistry of all concerned" (p. 261). The two - LP recording of songs from PORGY AND BESS alternated between big band arrangements with strings and pieces that Ray Charles accompanied on keyboard with a small ensemble. In one fell swoop, I learned to love Ray, Gershwin, and the opera. That same year, Cleo recorded her "return to Carnegie," which included a Sondheim medley, but also a lovely piece by Noel Coward, "London Pride," introducing me to another composer and personality to love.

1977 - "But two productions have gone from the Stables [a summer camp for the arts run by Cleo and her husband John Dankworth] to the West End: Colette... and Side by Side by Sondheim." (p.318) Thanks again to Frank Boggs, I saw the original cast of SxSxS in NY (1977) and met Sondheim after the show. Two years later, I missed seeing Cleo in Colette, which opened the week that I left England during a wonderful summer as a literature student at New College, Oxford. While shopping in London that summer, I found Cleo and JD's recording "Wordsongs," a collection of art songs from poetry by Shakespeare, Eliot, and others. I also had the piano music from which I learned something about jazz riffs and arranging. (I've since reviewed the recording of Colette.)

1985 - "That Old Feeling." Cleo's recording, evidently made to fill up time while husband JD was on tour with the London Pops Orchestra, is extremely beautiful: with a friend at the piano, Cleo recorded songs in her own living room. I had prized her four octaves and thrilling scat singing. But here were standards, performed without ornament or improv, made intimate and credible. A new ideal!

1988 - Cleo Sings Sondheim - a dream come true. 'Nuff said.

1989 - A stray dog entered my home when I opened the door to my carport. She took over the house from the two males who lived there, my Yellow Lab Churchill and me. This puppy howled and whined with a four octave range. Her voice and her regal bearing led me to name her Cleo. (My lovely dog Cleo died painfully but with merciful suddenness of some undetermined internal problem, after a long and happy life, in 2003.)

ca. 1990 - Cleo doesn't mention a tour that brought her close to Washington DC at a time when I was chaperoning eighth graders there. Thanks to my friend Leesha Faulkner, her eighth grader son Buck Cooper and I were able to arrange to leave the school group to hear Cleo. (I forget if I drove a rented car, or if we rode in a taxi.) Leesha also had roses delivered to Cleo's dressing room, which was our "in" to go back to meet the lady herself. Here's what I saw in that brief encounter:

The dressing room was drab and crowded with other well - wishers. Cleo and husband John Dankworth were both tiny people, around 5'2". They were both obviously exhausted but up to giving each visitor some personal time. I got to say "thank you" for all the above, and to mention my puppy Cleo. Most interesting to me was an envelope I saw, on which the list of songs for the evening had been penciled in. I got the sense that Cleo and JD were keeping themselves fresh by changing up their repertoire, and that they saw themselves as teachers and sponsors for the young band members. During the concert, these two had made a point of introducing the members of their small combo, and of including numbers written and / or arranged by these young musicians. One arrangement was a premier, I recall.

I've seen Cleo and Dankworth two times since then at Spivey Hall south of Atlanta. One concert was memorable for Cleo's medley of songs that her father sang, including "Tea for Two" in a very slow tempo that made it deliciously sensuous. I'm afraid the other concert displayed Cleo's age. She nearly lost her footing on her high heels, she had some trouble adjusting her eyes to the spotlight, and her voice gave out on the encore -- as she quickly gestured to her husband to hit the note on his sax.

Arkadya: Place in WOLVES EAT DOGS

(reflection on WOLVES EAT DOGS, a novel in a series featuring detective Arkady Renko by Martin Cruz Smith. See my reflection on STALIN’S GHOST elsewhere in this blog.)

Place, not plot, makes this novel. The basic story is uncomplicated: the victim and his associate did something that angered someone else enough to wreak revenge, and the detective travels to the site of the second murder looking for that something and that someone. But the author enriches this novel through places that are both credible and surreal.

Series detective Arkady Renko explores these places. He questions the people he meets, he sometimes sympathizes, but he remains untouched. Oh, sure, in this novel, he’s beaten with hockey sticks, shot at, besotted with peasant alcohol called samogon, bedded by a radioactive beauty, and glared at by an intensely taciturn eleven – year old boy who needs a father. But Renko holds all of these people at arm’s length, either mistrusting or afraid that he himself can only bring unhappiness to the ones who want to be close to him.

WOLVES EAT DOGS begins in one memorable place, a penthouse that epitomizes “the New Russia.” Its owner, the founder of a security corporation called, fittingly, NovoRus, is the novel’s first victim. His home is trendy, all white and glass and spaciousness, high above the gritty Moscow street. It bristles with electronic security devices because the new Russian oligarchs can’t rise high enough to escape the underworld foundations of their wealth.

The scene shifts when another NovoRus executive is found far from Moscow in the Ukraine, throat slit, in the radioactive “Zone” surrounding Chernobyl nuclear reactor number four that spewed radioactive iodine dust into the world’s atmosphere around 1986. In Smith’s telling, it’s “a funhouse mirror world” (106) of monumental Soviet-era structures lining vast uninhabited town squares, huts where aged peasants raise livestock on radioactive feed, “hot zones” where looters can evade police to emerge who – knows – where, and a lake by the power plant where giant mutated catfish swim. The woods, encroaching on abandoned towns, are full of hedgehogs that have lost their fear of humans, and wolves that eat the guard dogs. “And where will we be when all the dogs are gone?” asks one resident of the Zone. “It will be the end of civilization” (168).

Smith mythologizes his Zone. One character provides historical context: “It’s a nice place. Full of murdered Poles, Jews, Reds and Whites, not to mention the victims starved to death by Stalin or hung by the Germans, but still nice” (269). The physicist named Alex tells the story of Chernobyl as “Russian stand – up comedy” (179), emblematic of the entire Soviet era, a story about self-interested bureaucrats, state secrecy that kept technicians from knowing the dangerous limits of the reactor, the government’s determination to go forward with a May Day parade in the open fallout, and the cover – up that spread radioactive death to dozens, thousands, or millions – depending on whether you accept official numbers or not. “When does this start to become funny?” his wife asks.

Smith uses a Russian folk tale as an allegory for the whole novel and all of Russian history. Early in the book, that eleven – year – old boy becomes animated (for once) as he reads aloud fairy tales about the witch Baba Yaga, who had “steel teeth” to eat her prisoners and a fence around her hut “festooned with skulls.” Listening as he drives the boy through Moscow, Renko sees

Moscow University, one of Stalin’s skyscrapers, built by convict labor in such a fever for higher learning and at such a wholesale cost of life that bodies were said to have been left entombed. That was a fairy tale he could keep to himself, Arkady thought. (17)

Later, talking to the boy via cell phone outside the derelict nuclear plant, Renko says,

I met Baba Yaga. In fact, I’m outside her house right now. I can’t say whether her fence is made of bones, but she definitely has steel teeth. …In her pond she has a sea serpent as big as a whale, with long whiskers…. I didn’t see her magic comb… but I did see an orchard of poisonous fruit. All the houses around are burned and full of ghosts. (177)

Through another character, dying of radiation sickness, Smith draws parallels between this strange land and the modern world:

History moves in funny ways, right? We’ve gone through evolution, now we’re going through de-evolution. Everything is breaking down. No borders, no boundaries. No limits, no treaties. Suicide bombers, kids with guns. AIDS, Ebola, mad cow. It’s all breaking down, and I’m breaking down with it. I’m bleeding internally. No platelets. No stomach lining. Infected. (265)

Smith populates his world with some memorable characters. There are the Woropay brothers who roam the zone on in-line skates and Hockey gear brandishing sticks and guns. There’s Eva, doctor and cancer-scarred “Mother Theresa” of the Zone who once had a “radiant future” (237), before the Chernobyl accident. Her sudden and intense affair with Arkady complicates his relationship to his guide Alex, who also happens to be Eva's husband. He's the one who points out that Arkady is like those insouciant hedgehogs in a dark world of wolves – neatly tying every motif of this novel together.

But it’s place that makes the novel.

Crazy as Smith’s imagined world of the Zone is, rife as it is with Smith’s ironic black humor, it is authentic.

I know, because I’ve met an eyewitness, also named Arkady. Arkady Shvetsky was a nuclear engineer at the time of Chernobyl’s disaster. He told me how there was a sudden cloudburst in town, of the sort that brings people to their windows to marvel at the deluge. Strangely, this one didn’t abate in a few minutes, but continued for a weekend, and Arkady suspected that iodine in the clouds was the cause. Then he was summoned to Moscow for an urgent meeting of nuclear experts, only to be told at the meeting, “Never mind,” and to be sent home without explanation. Arkady told how he later learned of a friend of his who was approaching the entrance to the Chernobyl reactor number four for routine maintenance, unaware of what was transpiring. When radioactive air blew out the entrance, the friend and his co-workers were knocked down and instantly charred. Arkady removed his family to Israel, then to the US, where I taught his son Eugene. Arkady told how looters raided the abandoned towns in the Zone, selling contaminated furniture and electronics throughout the former Soviet Union.

We Need More Shaw in our Lives

(reflection after seeing ARMS AND THE MAN by Polk Street Players Theatre Company in the basement of St. James, Marietta.)

For twenty years, I spent some of each summer at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, seeing lots of Shakespeare, and, once in awhile, Shaw. I always left feeling that the Shaw was the best of the plays. I remember especially seeing MISALLIANCE with student Josh Cox, who turned to me at intermission and said, "This is amazing. I want to write down every single line!"

I feel the same way. I laugh, and I follow the logic of each person's arguments, and I'm inclined to agree with every speaker -- even when they argue outrageous things.

We should have more of that. Maybe we could have a Shavian talk radio program?

Shaw had admired Ibsen for addressing social problems in plays. But Shaw's early efforts failed to make much impression. The only one I know by name is MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION, about a madame.

Shaw decided, with ARMS AND THE MAN, that he could more effectively break down audience conservatism by writing comedy.

Seeing ARMS AND THE MAN again, I'm reminded how refreshing Shaw is. There's a plot, its elements all taken from popular theatre of his day. An enemy soldier on the run hides briefly in a girl's bedroom. She saves him from the soldiers pursuing him, and she feeds him chocolate. Months later, when her father the General and her fiance the Captain return, her help for this enemy soldier comes back to embarrass her. That's the plot.

The fun is how Shaw sets up every character one way, and then lets them be undercut. The heroic captain? Actually, he was terrified when his horse ran ahead into danger. The virtuous daughter? Actually, just about everything she says that she believes is a lie, and she gradually recognizes this. The war itself? A farce.

The audience was a bit timid about laughing. But Shaw got laughs with sure - fire Bulgarian jokes. The social - climbing mother brags how she now washes her hands once a day. The General speaks in hushed tones about something their house has that no other Bulgarian house has -- a library. Later, the mother boasts how their family's wealth is nearly historical, going back twenty years.

These are lovable, laughable characters who -- as is commonplace to say -- all talk like Shaw.

Contrast to an opera I walked out of, LA CENARENTULA (sp?) or Cinderella, by Rossini. The prince meets the girl of the cinders about ten minutes into the opera and they fall in love. So far, I was charmed. But the librettist kept inserting unfunny, unnecessary, and tedious complications to keep the thing going. It's the first time that I haven't enjoyed a Met Opera HD broadcast, and the fault was mostly Rossini's. He was just killing time with that one.

Einstein: Not What's Taught, but the Teacher

(reflections on a quotation from Einstein in an article by Thomas Martin, "Einstein on Independent Thought" in the St. Croix Review, April 2009, p. 38 ff.)

Philosophy teacher Thomas Martin writes of picking up an old volume of Einstein's Ideas and Opinions, and running across the following text:

It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. ...He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and the morally good. ...He must learn to understand the motives of human beings, their illusions, and their sufferings, in order to acquire a proper relationship to individual fellow men and to community. . .

All of this seemed unexceptionable. However, the next part was a surprise:

These precious things are conveyed to the younger generation through personal contact with those who teach, not -- or at least not in the main -- through textbooks.

My first mentors in school teaching said essentially the same thing. "More is caught than taught," said Dr. Berkley Latimer, the principal who hired me. "Let the children know your story," advised Dorothy Kitchings, the woman who created the middle school where I was assigned my first classes. Einstein continues:

It is this [contact of teacher to student] that primarily constitutes and preserves culture. This is what I have in mind when I recommend the "humanities" as important, not just dry specialized knowledge in the fields of history and philosophy.

How reassuring, especially at a time of year when I'm afraid that I'm not going to finish the textbook, and when I sometimes indulge myself in side stories about things I've read or seen that may be only tangents to what's in our text.

Updike's ENDPOINT: Light at Sunset

(Reflections upon John Updike's final poem sequence ENDPOINT. He died in January of this year.)

Calling himself "a literary Mr. Sunshine" in a poem collected in AMERICANA (2001) (39), John Updike turned clarifying light on any subject of his essays, stories, poems and reviews. The week that he died, NPR's Terry Gross spoke at unprecedented length about her appreciation for his art as a writer, and for this quality of intelligent appreciation that animated his interviews with her. Then we heard it, how he started each response to her questions with insights that buttressed whatever she had said, before he gently turned away to disagree.

In his writing, Updike never shied from the darkest and foulest parts (however often I wished he had), but he always highlighted "whatever is good, whatever is true, whatever is just" in the subject at hand.

Nine years after AMERICANA, he turns that same light on his own aging and death in ENDPOINT AND OTHER POEMS. The title piece is a set of poems aligned with verses that he composed on his last birthdays. Naturally, these touch on themes of self-evaluation of his own legacy.

He repeats the image of his past lying under water, "at bottom." Pained by neuralgia, mind "vacant" from birthday chatter, he thinks "The boy I was no longer smiles / a greeting from the bottom of the well, / blue sky behind him from a story book" (3). For Updike, "Roosevelt's sunk Depression world" had become "Atlantis at the bottom of a life, / descried through sliding thicknesses of time" (17). He returns once again to scenes familiar to his readers from his non-fiction and from appearances (slightly altered) in numerous short stories -- the hapless school - teacher father, the bitterly disappointed mother, the afternoons with the silent grandparents and refuge in radio and comics. He admits, "I've written these before, these modest facts, / but their meaning has no bottom in my mind" (27). [PHOTO: On my virtual bike tour of the USA, I stopped by Updike's childhood home, now a museum, to pose with most of his books.]

His own career as a writer seems to bring him modest satisfaction. He remembers pride, "to see my halt words strut in type," and more, "to have my spines / line up upon the shelf, one more each year, / however out of kilter ran my life!" (10). The wives he wronged and the children for whom he wrote, provided material for that writing: "I drank up women's tears and spat them out / as 10-point Janson, Roman and ital." He writes an ode of appreciation to his own right hand, that old "five - fingered beast of burden, dappled with / some psoriatic spots I used to hate." But ugly as it is, it served to "carve from language beauty, that beauty which / lifts free of flesh to find itself in print" (12). He thanks words themselves that "formed, of those I loved, more solid ghosts" (19).

Yet, in some of the more striking passages, Updike seems resigned to a future without him and without his work, "For who, in that unthinkable future / when I am dead, will read?" (8) He asserts, "The printed page / was just a half-millennium's brief wonder" to awaken the Medieval "world long dulled by plagues and plainsong." Updike explains how "the Bible freed" for anyone to read "spelled trouble," as readers smashed stained glass, leaving "clear windows" to see "that self which tribal ways suppressed, and whose articulation asked a world of books." In these witty few lines, Updike has sketched out everything from the Reformation to 20th century ideologies.
Then he is nonplussed by an eerie scene in an electronics store: he comes upon a little girl, separated from mother, staring at images on a hi-def plasma screen, "her face as close and rapt as at an udder / motionlessly drinking something in" (17) from what he elsewhere scorns as the "infotainment web" (59). He has glimpsed the future, and the belles - lettres aren't in it.

Then, after a career of writing about characters who try to avoid death - the adolescent boy's horror at the beauty of feathers from a pigeon he shot, the ex-basketball star's running away from responsibility, the couples who enmesh themselves in a cocoon of sexual relations to escape meaninglessness - Updike faces the real thing. The sequence of poems gathers emotional heft in the manner of a novel. In "Hospital 11/23 - 27 / 08" he tells himself "The world is blanketed by foregone deaths, / small beads of ego, bright with appetite," who comprise "a jagged coral shelf / unseen beneath the black unheeding waves." But when his grandchildren visit, and he is "politely quizzing them / on their events and prospects," he asks himself if he must "uphold the social lie / that binds us all together in blind faith / that nothing ends, not youth nor age nor strength." His answer: "My tongue / says yes; within, I lamely drown" (23).

When the death sentence comes, he sets it simply, at the end of a sonnet: "The gland, biopsied, showed metastasis." He rhymes it with "peace" (29).

Finally, Updike performs for the last time a trick that has made him a marvel to me during these past twenty-three years of enjoying him (I started when ROGER'S VERSION was published). That is, he rounds his work out with a framing reference. How often he has done that before, in amazing ways, as if he'd planned it all along. In chapters written thirty years apart, Rabbit plays basketball with teenaged boys. Though the flustered young Mr. Maples forgot to kiss his bride in a short story published in the early 1950s, in middle age, he finds an appropriate way to take leave of her after their divorce, in a story written decades later. So, nearly forty years after publishing MIDPOINT, Updike now publishes ENDPOINT. And this sequence of annual poems, started in health and concluded in a hospital bed, begins and ends with verses that finish with the same thought:

Nature is never bored, and we whose lives
are linearly pinned to these aloof
self-fascinated cycles [of seasons] can't complain,
though aches and pains and even dreams a - crawl
with wood lice of decay give pause to praise . . . (5)

...The timbrel creed of praise
gives spirit to the daily; blood tinges lips.
The tongue reposes in papyrus pleas,
saying, Surely -- magnificent, that "surely" --
goodness and mercy shall follow me all
the days of my life, my life, forever. (29)

It's the Saturday before Easter, recalling Updike's much earlier poem, "Seven Stanzas at Easter," and it seems apropos.

Let us not mock God with metaphor,
analogy, sidestepping, transcendence,
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded
credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.

[See an index of my other reflections on Updike's work at my Updike page..]

Black, White, and Noir: Walter Mosley and Ross MacDonald

(Reflections after reading THE IVORY GRIN (1952) by Ross MacDonald and BLONDE FAITH (Grand Central, 2008) by Walter Mosley)

In one of the throw-away lines that make Walter Mosley's novels so rich, detective Easy Rawlins reflects that he is "no more a private eye than . . . any soul sitting in that [black dive, ca. 1966]. Each and every one of us was examining and evaluating clues all the time, day and night" (98).

Once the novel gets started, say, around the second page when Easy is commissioned to find a missing girl, Easy follows one lead after another to a variety of places: a low-rent duplex (behind a promotional tire two stories high), the public library, and a car dealership. Each place pits him against a challenge: How to get past the white goons who won't let him in? How to get info from the dull-eyed woman? How to get the beautiful woman to help him before the guards in the parking lot spot him on the fifth floor through the building's glass facade?

Mosley's series has progressed in real time since the first one set in the late 1940s. Now that it's 1966 in LA, and white people slam doors in Easy's face, he gets some help, as when he takes a date to the top floor of a restaurant and the hostess won't seat him, and in a wonderful scene replete with fatal possibilities as a gang of white toughs follows Easy up stairs to where he might or might not be facing another white enemy (p.119.)

Tomas Hight was the quintessential white man, the white man that all other white men wanted to be. He was tall and good - looking, strong and restrained but willing to act.... I felt gratitude toward him while at the same time feeling that he was everything that stood in the way of my freedom, my manhood, and my ultimate deliverance....

Added to my already ambivalent feelings was the deep desire in me to respect and admire this man, not because of who Tomas Hight was or what he had done but because he was the hero of all the movies, books, TV shows, newspapers, classes and elections I had witnessed in my forty-seven years. (p.121)

We don't meet the title character until midway, and it's well-done: Easy observes Faith Morel behind glass in her office at the bank where she deals with a difficult customer. Around the same time, there's a "deus ex machina" where all the answers fall into Easy's lap, and the rest of the novel isn't about finding out where or what, but about keeping the worst from happening, as things get worse and worse.

Through it all, Mosley is keeping up a steady commentary with literary roots, about black experience with American culture. Easy and the librarian discuss CATCHER IN THE RYE and how this kid Caulfield's "got it good." Easy comments "So much we know that they never even think about, and so much they think about without a thought about us," then reflects on how he doesn't have to say who "they" and "we" are:"We lived in a they - and - us world while they lived, to all appearances, alone" (p.55). Later, a character mentions Richard Wright and Mosley's predecessor, black "noire" writer Chester Himes.

Seeking another noire writer, I tried Himes and couldn't get into his novel. This time, I tried THE IVORY GRIN by Ross MacDonald, and I was impressed on every page by the author's piquant observations and witty words. His detective Lew Archer, is of course a ringer for that Tomas Hight. In his story, too, he encounters a nineteen-year old "black boy tangled in white law" (48) and, no differently from Mosley, he observes how the white cop shoots at the black man first, to ask questions later (51). The list of phrases that caught my eye is long:

an Indian woman shoots Archer a gaze "from the other end of history" (65)

the bonework beneath the matriarch's face is "like concealed artillery" (83)

driving fast along an avenue, the ocean is a "silver stream" running behind the palms that whiz by (40)

Like Mosley's scene of the blond behind thick glass, some scenes derive their fun in this book from limitations of the senses. Archer hears an encounter through the thin walls of a hotel, missing just enough muffled words to tease us. Another scene, Archer observes through a window from below, so that he can describe only shadows on the room's ceiling and the tops of heads.

As much as Mosley reflects on race, MacDonald reflects on manhood and its opposites. A group of soldiers are "babies" (12); a dandy "might inspire a Debussy tone poem" (56), which must be a slam on delicacy; there's a "womanish man" (113) and the humiliation of a weak husband (174). There's a sportsman who never took a real chance (97). Connected with this is the theme of "play - acting," a staple of noire, where no one can be trusted. A character tries on attitudes (71); a woman affects girlishness and false mother love (87).

I may not try another MacDonald, though, since this novel dissolved into ridiculousness around p. 120. Hard boiled reality turned into Gothic fantasy, and, worse, descended into some fake Freudian explanations. Mental disturbance became an easy motive, and I lost interest. Reading about MacDonald on line, I find that this was something he did a lot.

So long as there's more by Mosley, I'm spared the prospect of Freud noire.

Physics, History, Poetry, Jazz and Faith: It's All in the Midrash

(reflection after hearing Hebrew scholar Evita Zornberg speaking with Krista Tippett on the NPR program SPEAKING OF FAITH this morning)
Before I was old enough to go to school, my mother used to make me nap in the middle of the afternoon, whether I felt tired or not. She was the one who rested, while I lay in bed looking at pictures in books that I couldn't read. I remember a two-page spread in one book, over a text that was probably just "ring around the rosie," but what I saw was a group of boys and girls celebrating while one boy stood aside, hands in his pockets, smiling directly out at the reader. Two girls flanked him. Why was he apart? What were kids celebrating? Why were those two girls paying such close attention to him? I constructed elaborate back stories for the picture, with dialogue: Bad guys had threatened the group, the boy had super powers and had fought them off, etc. etc.

Speaking of Exodus, Hebrew scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg told how rabbis have been doing the same thing with scripture from the centuries before Jesus. They call it "midrash," a story interpolated in the margins of scripture to explain why things happened the way they do. She read verse seven of Exodus, "But the descendants of Israel were fruitful and increased greatly; they multiplied and grew exceedingly strong; so that the land was filled with them." How did this happen? A midrash predating the 5th century C.E. tells a story of how Hebrew women fished in the stream, sold the fish at market, and purchased mirrors. These, they took to the Hebrew men in the fields. "See? I am more comely than you," they would say. "No, I am more comely than you," the man would respond. "And in this way," the midrash continues, "they became accustomed to desire." Zornberg inserted her own midrash, here, speculating that this story speaks to how slaves in despair need to be taught a desire for a different future. The ancient midrash adds that these women bore children always in sets - twins, quads, or even thousands at a time... thanks to mirrors.

What the ancient scholars did with their Scripture is what I did with that picture, and it occurs to me that it's one of the two essential things that our brains do all the time. One of these essential things is to look for the back story, to look between the lines, to "open up" a puzzle box, or "speculate" beyond the apparent. The other of these essential things is to find connections between unlike things, and that's what I'm going to do now, relating the midrash idea to just about everything going on in my world today:

• Physics has opened up our understanding of the universe by looing inward to see atoms as planetary systems, molecules as galaxies; and to find, looking ever farther outward, galaxies themselves as part of vast galaxy - like systems.

• Historians' whole job is to fret each decision, each remark in a newfound letter, to speculate why. I've been reading A.Lincoln: A Biography recently, and the author speculates how Lincoln's grandfather was affected by seeing his own father slain in a field by Indian raiders, and how Lincoln was thinking when he summoned Black leaders to propose a "back to Africa" solution; something every page. A scornful reviewer in WEEKLY STANDARD belittled it as a liberal Democrat's remaking of Lincoln in the image of, say, Mario Cuomo or Barack Obama. I don't see that; but I do see an effort to analyze Lincoln's decisions and fragmentarily expressed beliefs.

• I went to sleep last night listening to jazz, and what is that, except inspired interpolations of new melody, new harmony, between the lines of established songs? Ditto, Bach's riffs on hymn tunes of his day.

• Last I heard, dreams themselves are "midrashes" on glancing thoughts and prevalent concerns in our days. I awoke several times last night with dreams concerning people I haven't seen in years, and students I teach now, and crime movies, and a tornado. Couldn't get back to sleep, unable to stop myself from speculating where those images all came from in my recent daily life.

• Actors search for motivations behind every line, every pause, every move. Hamlet speaks to ths ghost of his father in act one, then claims that no one knows if there's an existence after death ("an undiscovered country") in his most famous soliloquy. How? Why? Actors think of it as "finding the truth" in the line... a truth that they can relate to in their own experiences.

• The news is full of speculation: Obama calls "provocative" the North Koreans' launch of a rocket this morning. What exactly does that mean? What response does that rocket "provoke?" And what reaction do the North Koreans' hope to get? We have federal offices devoted to questions like that.

• I'm reading ENDPOINT, John Updike's final book, a collection of poems written since 2001. Every single poem is, of course, a midrash on some moment, some image. For example, he tells of seeing a very small girl alone in an electronics "big box" store. He remembers being a tiny child lost and crying in a store; but this girl is pacified by the motions of pixellated fish on a big screen. From that, he jumps off into a meditation on "infotainment." This whole package takes off from the thought that Updike's lifetime of generating words may turn out to have been wasted, as book literacy seems to be diminishing in importance.

• The Hindu scripture BAGAVAD GITA is one long "midrash," an interpolation into the legend of a prince who led one half of his family into battle against the other half. JOB is clearly a poetic midrash inserted between paragraphs of a prosaic story of a rich man's being tested by God and Lucifer.

New York's Episcopal Bishop Spong, much despised by religious and social conservatives, tells in one of his books how the concept of midrash changed the way he reads Scripture. One doesn't have to follow him to all his conclusions to acknowledge that what he says is obviously true: the midrash tradition was at its height when Paul et. al. were composing our New Testament. Clearly the Gospel writers are working with a mixture of Hebrew testament stories, stories passed on by word of mouth about Jesus, speculation to explain some of Jesus's hard sayings and acts, and imagination to give the "back story" to Jesus's life. (One obvious such interpolation: Jesus's prayer at Gethsemane, to which we are told there were no witnesses.)

Scholar Zornberg points to the "upside - down" nature of the Exodus narrative, which often tells us that these things happened so that later generations could tell the story. The Seder liturgy, according to her, includes the question, "How is this celebration of the Passover in this family different from all the others?" The answer is, "We're relating it to us."

Can it be wrong to take something like the feeding of 5000 and to speculate how that worked, or to speculate that the whole story is a metaphor expanding on the remark "I am the bread of life" with a pun on "fish" (an early symbol of Jesus, thanks to a Greek anagram of Christ)? I think not. Rather, it's what a thinking person does, to ask, "Why? How? And how does this relate to my experience?" Here's the Scripture, here's the script, here's the event: What's the truth in it, for us?

Early Frost

(Reflection upon the first few dozen pages of ROBERT FROST: COLLECTED POEMS, PROSE, & PLAYS in The Library of America.)

Before my voice changed, I could recite all of "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," and key phrases in "The Road Less Travelled" and "Mending Wall." My teachers treated Frost as a voice apart, wonderful and unmatchable as Shakespeare.  (The AP exam my senior year presented both writers in one: Frost making allusion to Shakespeare in the poem "Out, out--:). To this day, Robert Frost’s words and wisdom are tucked away in the same mental file as The Lord's Prayer, Psalm 23, and The Gettysburg Address. All the contemporary poetry I've read and enjoyed in adulthood has seemed to be written by mere mortals, while Frost remains on his pedestal.

This year, I've resolved to make my way page by page through his Collected Poems, Prose, & Plays, to re-evaluate him. Here's what I've discovered, so far:

His life, summarized in a chronology at the back, was much more complex than I'd heard. In his youth, through his twenties, I notice a theme of having to prove himself to be more than his mother's boy. His father died early; he grew up in San Francisco long before returning to become the quintessential New England writer. Several items tell us how he got in fights, fought two boys at once, beat 8th grade boys when he took over his mother's unruly class, and how he was beaten up by those same students in an ambush later that year. Besides work in the classroom, he was a drama teacher, and a mill worker, before he settled down on a farm. We also read that he “heard voices” when he was nine; and close relatives were institutionalized with debilitating mental illness, including his sister and his daughter.

In his earliest collection, Frost was imitating poetry that must have been pretty corny even in the early 1900s. Take, for instance, the first lines of the penultimate poem in that first collection, “My Butterfly”:

Thine emulous fond flowers are dead, too,
And the daft sun - assaulter, he
That frighted thee so oft, is fled or dead. . .

But the last verse in that collection achieves a gracefulness that sounds natural despite the triple rhyme, and that rhyme clicks the thought into place:

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

The next collection, NORTH TO BOSTON, published in 1914, begins with “Mending Wall,” and we sense a quantum leap for Frost. It’s no longer a young man alone with his old man’s thoughts. In that first poem, and in all of the others, it’s one mind wrestling with another’s. A taciturn neighbor mutters, “Good fences make good neighbors.” Our poet says, “I wonder / If I could put a notion in his head: ‘Why do they make good neighbors?’” Many of the other poems are like short - short - films in verse: setting the scene with sensual detail, then a dialogue. Often there are spaces and indentations that have the effect of Pinter’s pauses. There are soliloquies (Frost emulating Browning), including this, from “A Servant to Servants”:

It’s got so I don’t even know for sure
Whether I am glad, sorry, or anything.
There’s nothing but a voice - like left inside
That seems to tell me how I ought to feel,
And would feel if I was all gone wrong.
You take the lake. I look and look at it.
I see it's a fair, pretty sheet of water...

... but the character, a woman, doesn’t feel the beauty that draws others to the lake. She is a fictional character dealing with mental illness in the family as Frost did.

We can see Frost developing a different technique in some of these, where our poet is an intermediary between characters of strong opposing feelings. In “The Death of a Hired Man,” it’s the wife attempting to shield the sleeping, good-for-nothing hired hand in the next room from her husband’s ire. In “The Black Cottage,” our spokesperson is a parson describing how he bridges the gap between old and young in his church. In “The Code,” an employer and two hired hands have been working on a farm, and one of the laborers has just left in a huff. Our spokesperson is the remaining worker, trying to explain the quitter’s state of mind to the employer.

Rhythm, sometimes rhyme, enter in, but always so naturally that they don’t intrude, but lend a sheen, and a sense that everything is just right.

All that said, these are still the work of a young man in a context. The popular culture of his day was filled with melodrama, the populism of Progressive “muckrakers” and a fascination with deaths of innocents. So we get a young couple still mourning the death of their infant child (“Home Burial”), and the shyster company lawyer trying to bilk the stoical mill worker maimed on the job, and a sort of ghost story. His poems concern the cook, the housekeeper, the farm hand, the decayed home of the forgotten old woman, and the honorable farm life compared to the decadent urban life.

I checked the blogosphere to see whether I’m thinking along the same lines as others, and stumbled happily across the blog of Dana Gioia (DanaGioia.net), recent head of the NEH, a poet around my age whom I’ve had the pleasure of hearing in a small room at Emory University. I’ve read his book CAN POETRY MATTER? in which Gioia describes the insularity of many contemporary poets, English Departments, and poetry publishers.

According to Gioia, the purposeful accessibility and public persona of Frost made him a target for a hostile biographer and academic disdain.

Gioia quotes Frost about that dramatic angle in his poems: “I make it a rule not to take any character's side in anything I write." Gioia comments, “Like Shakespeare, Frost's imagination was capacious enough to encompass contradiction. He used the friction of irreconcilable opposites rubbing against each other—sometimes humorously, more often tragically—to spark the dramatic energy of his narratives.”

Gioia continues:

In Frost's lyric poems, however, his gift for opposition took a more complicated turn. On the surface he would create an engaging poem that memorably argued some sensible point of view. Meanwhile underneath he would set loose another line of argument that subversively qualified or rejected the surface message....In "Mending Wall," for instance, the speaker does not agree with the farmer's pronouncement that "Good fences make good neighbors." Nor does "The Road Not Taken" unambiguously assert that the choice of paths "made all the difference." While the Modernists made the surfaces of their poems complex and forbidding, Frost made his surfaces deceptively simple. On close examination, however, his seemingly lucid poems often unfold into imaginative enigmas.

About Frost’s capsule biography, Gioia makes a point about a “central paradox in Frost's career—the great poet of New England was born and raised through childhood in San Francisco.” So, coming from temperate urban San Francisco to rugged, snowy, rural northeast, Frost “took nothing in this new landscape for granted. ...The newcomer has to make conscious sense of a place in ways a native never bothers. Frost was an elective New Englander, and a convert is always more passionate about the new faith than someone born to a religion.”

Thanks to Gioia for introducing me to this quote, which I am evidently the last English major to learn: Poetry "is a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget."

A Butterfly That Draws Us In

(Reflection on MADAME BUTTERFLY. Composer: Giacomo Puccini. Librettists: Luigi Illica and Giuseppe Giacosa. Based on play by David Belasco. Patricia Racette stars. Directed by Anthony Minghella. With Marcello Giordani as Pinkerton, Maria Zifchak as Suzuki, and Dwayne Croft as Sharpless.) Photo above from Metopera.org and, at left, from Playbill.com

I had seen pictures of Anthony Minghella's stripped-down production of Madame Butterfly, and its eerie little life sized puppet of "Trouble," the boy borne of Buttefly's short honeymoon with Pinkerton. I wondered if there weren't a whiff of condescension in the Oscar-winning director's comment that, for the stage, you had to direct it "theatrically." I'd read about his use of Japanese theatrical techniques. Ho - hum, I'd thought. Been there, done that. Had I written my review before seeing it, I would have written this:

Yes, the Japanese element of Butterfly is important and skillfully woven into the score, but the piece is still an Italian opera, not the ritualized Japanese drama that Minghella wants to force out of it. The director’s treatment of stage action and character is all style and surface, epitomized by the astonishing idea of presenting Trouble, the 2-year-old son of Butterfly and Pinkerton, as a Bunraku puppet. The puppet is cute as a button, and it’s ingeniously manipulated by three onstage hooded figures, but the device succeeds only in further diverting our attention from the dramatic situation and italicizing the mechanical artifice of the staging. The stiff interactions among the real-life characters are not much more convincing, and we lose touch with them and their problems almost the moment they appear.

These are the words of Peter G. Davis, reviewing the production for NEW YORK magazine. But having seen it myself now, I wonder if Davis perhaps had made up his mind before he saw it.

There is another possibility, that Davis simply didn't have a good enough seat. With the cinematic advantage of closeups, we watched the tears form and drop from Maria Zifchak's eyes in her role as Suzuki as the little family kneels and waits for Pinkerton's imminent return that never comes. We saw the momentary looks of terror in Patricia Racette's eyes as she sang most forcefully Butterfly's faith in the man who married her. We saw the warmth, pride, and sadness in the Japanese suitor who would take Butterfly and son away from their lonely hilltop house... a character who made no impression on me in the other production I've seen of this. Sharpless, the American consul, likewise projects smoldering indignation at the way his countryman has abused the delicate Japanese girl, and tender concern for her, for her son, and for her servant Suzuki.

Backstage, Zifchak told interviewer Renee Fleming that Minghella purposefully tightened the focus of the stage to a little box of light. He told the actors to fill that box, and to do no more. "He told us, 'We must draw the audience into us.'" She also commented that Minghella wanted the part of Suzuki to rise in importance, and it's hard for me to imagine the show now any other way, than to have Suzuki on stage for most of the show, a mostly mute witness whose face shows judgement, regret, hope, despair, fury. She and Butterfly communicate with small gestures -- a meeting of hands or a slight shaking of the head.

Even with warning and photos, I was surprised by that puppet. He runs on stage, arms outstretched. Butterfly picks him up in her arms, and his little legs kick in pleasure. His expression is always inquisitive, always on the line between wonder, delight, and trepidation... fitting all the situations he experiences. Unlike Davis, I felt the presence of the character and projected all the appropriate feelings onto him, and even felt protective of him as Butterfly does . . . all the while also being intrigued at another level of consciousness by the mechanics of the operation, and the awareness that three dedicated artists were manipulating him. Stagehands in black also animate the scenes with paper lanterns and origami birds.

MInghella forecasts the action of each act beginning with mute action or dance. Act One is preceded by a stylized dance with fans the presages the final image of the opera. (Unfortunately, the HD visual transmission blacked out for a couple of minutes in the middle of that opening sequence). Act Two shows the advancement of three lonely years with the simple shifting of a screen. Minghella uses another human puppet for a kind of ballet "dumb show" version of Act Three performed during the prelude to the act, and it is again very affecting and strange at the same time -- I think more affecting because more strange, as if the theatricalism distills the feeling.

My mentor Frank Boggs, who has seen many Butterflies in his 80+ years, marvelled that he had often admired operas before, but he had never been moved. (Mr. Boggs, a world-renowned bass baritone, also commented about the self-satisfied and undependable Pinkerton, "How appropriate that he's a tenor.")

Of course, the central figure of Cio - Cio San must hold the center of the piece, or it's all for nothing. I remember seeing the show the first time, and being uninterested because, while Pinkerton was a cad, Cio - Cio San was a ready-made victim. Not here, thanks to Manghella's direction. Writing of the soprano who opened in Manghella's production back in 2006, critic Patrick Stearns wrote of her "potentially controversial characterization of Butterfly as someone who had emotionally outgrown repressive Japanese culture before the opera started. That opened the door to full-blooded displays of temper and tragedy, plus a compelling loss of poise inconceivable in traditional productions."

Before it started, I commented to a neighbor who knew nothing of the opera that she should have her handkerchief ready. I meant it ironically, implying that it's effective at manipulating the emotions and it's also a bit comical for being such a tear-jerker. Then tears came in many unexpected moments, and always mixed with the element of appreciation for what the artists were achieving to clarify Puccini's vision. Unforgettable.

Sue Grafton's P, Q, R, and T: Best for Last

(More reflections on Sue Grafton's alphabetical mystery series. Her novels I through O and especially S are discussed in another article on this blog, July 14, 2008.)

In Sue Grafton's series of alphabetical novels, her best two may be the most recent two, S is for Silence and T is for Trespass.

About P is for Peril, I had mixed feelings. There's an interesting detective plot digging into events several months old to find a missing person. For thrills and that surge of violence at the climax, however, Grafton introduced an unrelated subplot involving a handsome stranger, and it was less than satisfying to have one plot wind up before the other.

Q was unique in being based on an actual unsolved mystery. The story takes Kinsey out of her usual haunts, and it involves her with two retired detectives, one nearing the end of his life. That one wants to tie up loose ends in his career by finding the identity of a badly decomposed teenaged girl found in a stone quarry in the summer of 1969 -- a year when runaway teens and Charles Manson made headlines. Ms. Grafton paid to have a forensic expert make a reconstruction of the face of a real teenaged girl whose body was found that year in a stone quarry.

I'm afraid that R is for Ricochet was a hard slog for me, because the main line of the plot seemed to be sidelined by the love lives of Kinsey Millhone and of her 89 year old landlord Henry. "R" might stand for rambling. To be honest, I'm thirty pages from the end and not interested enough to finish it.

I've discussed the wonderful S elsewhere (see July 14th, 2008), along with the novels before P.

Now T is for Trespass shows Grafton in control. Again, a musical analogy is apt. Grafton opens the novel with a short meditation on predatory people, and she reprises that at the end. In between, every plot and subplot -- even the landlord Henry's dating of a real estate agent -- relates strongly to that theme of predatory people who don't see anything wrong with how they manipulate others for gain.

Reading T, I was reminded of the novels by Charlotte Armstrong. In Armstrong's novels written in the 50s and 60s, she lets the reader know step by step everything that the bad guys are doing. The suspense grows as the reader wonders how far the bad guys will get before the good guys figure out what's going on.

The plot involves a caregiver (pseudonym Solana Rojas) hired to take care of Kinsey's elderly neighbor. Kinsey grows uneasy right away, in a scene that recalls our first glance of Roger Chillingworth in The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne describes a look that twists across Chillingworth's face like a snake, then disappears like a snake in its hole, through the man's immense effort at self-control. In Kinsey's first conversation with Solana, the dialogue quickly goes awry:

It was like being in the presence of a snake, first hissing its presence and then coiled in readiness. I didn't dare turn my back or take my eyes off her.... In that flicker of a moment, I could see her catch herself. Some kind of barrier had come down and I'd seen an aspect of her I wasn't meant to see, a flash of fury that she'd covered up again. It was like watching someone in the throes of a seizure -- for three seconds she was gone and then back again. (p. 137, paperback edition).

But it's a problem for the novelist built-in to the plot, that Kinsey can get only rare glimpses of the caregiver's tricks, over a period of weeks. Grafton faces a sort of stage management problem. How can she keep our interest with Kinsey in front of the curtain while she shifts the scenery backstage for the next act? Here, Grafton involves Kinsey in a handful of errands serving deadbeats with legal papers. These less - than - life- threatening subplots are still interesting, and with great skill, Grafton ties some of them in to the main plot (as when a deadbeat renter lives on the same seedy block of apartments where the deadbeat villainess lives -- a plausible coincidence), and all of them are tied by that theme of predators -- with a real estate hawk, a bogus civil suit, and a pedophile.

Grafton is learning her craft as she goes. Of course, we are, too. Can she still surprise us with U? I'm rooting for her.

Oh, Mr. Glass?

(Reflection, written yesterday, on a performance of AKHNATEN, music by Philip Glass, production by the Atlanta Opera.)

Guess who I ran into this evening? I was at Emory University's Shwartz Center to see the Atlanta Opera's "staged concert" version of Philip Glass's 1984 opera Akhnaten, and I ended up in a seat across the aisle from the composer. During intermission, as everyone milled about, I touched his arm to get his attention, and he smiled but kept moving on to meet an acquaintance.

If he had stopped, I would have said something like this: "I caught your show up at the Met last spring. Loved it.

"Your music has brought me great joy these past 23 years since I first heard 'Glassworks.'

"I'm enjoying this one, too. The very first CD I bought was the recording of Akhnaten, so I've known the music a long time. It's great to see that it works as a drama, too, not just as a piece of music. For the story of the Pharaoh who topples the old regime and devotes his life, and his kingdom's vast resources, to worship one true God, you courageously took time to unfold it with the stately pace of religious ritual.

"I'll admit that I'm still not sure what you intend for us to see in the figure of Akhnaten. Are we to see him as a visionary leader perhaps too wise and too good for the brutal and entrenched Egyptian elite, or as the self-indulgent playboy so wrapped up with Nefertiti and his sensuous sun-worship that he thoughtlessly puts his kingdom at risk?

"But what I really mean to tell you applies to this show, and Satyagraha, and to many of your other scores for concert halls and movies.

"You helped me to see music in a new way -- clear as glass, ahem.

"Until I heard your music, I was daunted by the complexity of composers I loved. You show us how the music works, and that's a great pleasure. When your melody is only four notes ascending a scale, the shifting of harmony by a downward step in the bass line stands out, and we understand how harmony works. When your beat is steady, we appreciate how you use counterpoint to fill gaps in the pattern. You add elements to the texture one at a time.

"More, it made me feel that this was something I could do, and something I wanted to do, and that has been a joy.

"Hope you enjoy your stay in Atlanta! Oh, and have you heard the latest?"

Knock, knock. Who's there?
Knock, knock. Who's there?
Knock, knock. Who's there?
Knock, knock. Who's there?
Knock, knock. Who's there?
Philip Glass.

The History Boys: Why Teach?

(reflection on the film THE HISTORY BOYS and the play script of the same name by playwright Alan Bennett)

The beauty of THE HISTORY BOYS isn't what the critics think it is. I read a lot of hoopla about Alan Bennett's script when the show opened on Broadway with the London cast, and again when the movie version appeared, with the same cast. Everyone I read focused on the threat posed to meaningful education by Irwin, the supercilious new breed of teacher who advises the boys to lie, or at least to disregard what they know is true, to impress their examiners.

The thing is, I know that Irwin's "new" approach is nothing new at all. In Shakespeare's day, it was called "disputation," and even then it was a game to argue the opposite of what one believes, to show off resourcefulness in citing and twisting authorities. Shakespeare shows off his school boy education when he has Iago argue both for and against the importance of "honor." It's nothing more than "playing devil's advocate." I humbly admit that, at the age of ten, I planned to write a book How to Write a Report That Won't Be Blah Blah by advising my fellow fifth graders to find an angle on the topic opposite to readers' expectations. No big deal. If that's the focus of Bennett's script, it's not so interesting.

Bennett explores the question, "What does it all mean, anyway?" "It" is history itself -- "Just one f***ing thing after another," says one boy (and the plot, what little there is, seems constructed to support that view). "It" is also an education that, twenty years on, seems to have done little to shape the lives of the boys we see. In his introduction, Bennett relates the scene from his real life that he puts at the core of this play, in which a long-time teacher lays his head on his desk and asks why he has frittered away his life for these kids.

Bennett's play does focus on the vitality of these eight lower-middle class boys in a low-status village in an adequate "public" (read "private") academy with pretensions. "Vitality" could be a euphemism for "sexuality," and that is subtext or more to every scene, but I really do mean "vitality." The boys are probing, not just for advantage in their upcoming exams, but also for the truth, and for a clue to what their whole lives will be.

In their quest, they're confused by opposites. Bennett structures his play in dialectic pairs: rumpled old Hector v. smart young Irwin, knowledge for its own sake v. knowledge to dazzle, words that express the truth in your heart v. plausible sounding lies.

A couple of scenes don't fit the pattern, and they stand out as the core. Shy boy Posner recites a Hardy poem for Hector in tutorial and Hector says something from the heart:

The best moments in reading are when you come across something -- a thought, a feeling, a way of looking at things -- which you had thought special and particular to you. Now here it is, set down by someone else, a person you have never met, someone even who is long dead. And it is as if a hand has come out and takes yours.

He puts out his hand, and it seems for a moment as if Posner will take it ... but the moment passes.

In another scene, student Dakin confronts teacher Irwin and confidently becomes teacher to his teacher, propositioning him and asking, "Why are you so bold in argument, but when it comes to the point, you're so careful?"

Framed by scenes in which the actors speak from the perspective of twenty years on -- when they're largely ordinary guys in humdrum careers, except for a phony historian and a shyster tax lawyer -- the play begs the question, "What did any of this education matter?"

The answer is in the fabric of the play itself. The vitality of the argument, and the inspired silliness of the boys' learning scenes and songs from trashy "classic" movies and shows, say something in themselves. Old teacher Hector gets the last word in the play. He has already said that the "tosh" of his unplanned curriculum was to be an "antidote" to reverence for literature, something of "middle age" that would replace a vital love of learning for its own sake.

At the very end, in a sort of benediction, he tells the boys, "Pass it on." Since meaning depends on what comes before, and what comes after, I suppose what he's saying is, "Nothing has meaning, unless we all pass it on -- so pass it on, and give us all meaning."