Perfect Ragtime by Atlanta Lyric Theatre

image from ALT's Facebook page

RAGTIME, the musical.
Book by Terrence McNally
Music and Lyrics by Stephen Flaherty and Lynn Ahrens.
Production by Atlantic Lyric Theatre at the Strand Theatre, Marietta, GA
Production directed by Alan Kilpatrick.
Performance of April 18, 2013.)

Colorful, warm, ingenious, and crammed full of energetic and soulful songs, the musical RAGTIME unfolds the interrelated stories of three families and numerous celebrities of the early 1900s with clarity and efficiency. Aside from narrowness of stage and muddy acoustics at Marietta’s restored Strand Theatre, nothing lacked in the production by the Atlanta Lyric Theatre.Voices, staging, band, and design all sold the material to us with clarity and vigor.

The songs are beautifully crafted and fitting to the historical era and to the characters. Taken together, they move the story along, signaling by style when we move from the parlor songs of genteel Anglos to a honky-tonk or church with Black characters, to the Eastern European immigrants in town. Ragtime is itself important to the story and a metaphor for a “ragged time” of transition when whites, blacks, and immigrants were all drawn to the sound. Lyrics sound natural as speech, while neat rhymes point up meaningful thoughts; the songs build to climaxes sometimes loud, sometimes pensive.

The only problem is that every second or third song seems to be teaching us something about America in the 1900s, until we feel that we’re watching a great story wrapped in an essay. We're taught by the remarkable opening number how everything certain in the lives of complacent wealthy Anglos is soon to be shaken by encounters with Blacks and Immigrants. This is acted out in song and dance, in which these groups cakewalk around each other and back away from confrontations.  It's very effective. But the next song tells us the same thing, from the point of view of the complacent Anglo “Mother.” As her world does crumble, she tells us about it in three more songs, two shared with others who are having similar experiences.By the end of show, when “Mother” reflected  a fourth time how life can’t go “Back to Before,” actress Christy Baggett's beautiful and earnest singing  could not keep us from feeling that she'd been used to reiterate a thesis statement. 

With two anthems, “Wheels of a Dream” and “Make Them Hear You,” the songwriters use the character Coalhouse (played by Kevin Harry) as a spokesman for all people of color in America early in the 20^th century. Mr. Harry sang with conviction, his powerful voice sustaining long notes over the climaxes, and he earned thunderous applause -- as a spokesman.  Then he went back to being Coalhouse.

One number, "He Wanted to Say," is led by socialist activist Emma Goldman (Ingrid Cole) with a big voice and big heart.  Eventually, the entire ensemble is singing a rousing anthem consisting of all the things that "Younger Brother" (Matthew Kacergis) feels about the injustices of life in the USA.  Yet this lecture on social ills and White man's guilt is made funny and personal because it's all the stuff that the character cannot put in coherent form. 

Social commentary is acted out for laughs with "What a Game,"  depicting the Father's misguided effort to connect to his young son by taking him to a baseball game.  Father learns to his discomfort, and to his son's delight, that the "gentleman's game" has been appropriated by the working class, and it isn't as genteel as it used to be in his days at Harvard. 

"The Courtship" alternates music and dialogue, covering months during which Coalhouse tries to atone for the way he wronged Sarah (played by Jeanette Illidge), mother of his child. There's a gentle duet between immigrant father Tateh (Stanley Allyn Owen) and "Mother," discovering kinship as parents across a wide social divide ("Nothing Like the City").  Deep in the second act, when Coalhouse seeks vengeance for the killing of his beloved Sarah, he remembers meeting her at the club where he played piano, and he re-enacts his love song to her, “Sarah Brown Eyes.” Sarah appears upstage of him, and each mimes dancing with the other, several steps apart. We know it’s a memory, and we can guess what’s ahead, but this bittersweet interlude was a highpoint of the show.

Poet Richard Blanco: Not Grievance, but Gratitude

(Reflections on LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL by Richard Blanco. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.)

Blanco at inauguration, Jan. 2013

President Obama may have appointed Richard Blanco his inaugural poet because a gay son of Cuban immigrants unites two categories that divide our parties. Publicity suggested as much, focused on his Cuban grandmother’s scorn for her grandson's "effeminacy."  Interviewers were interested in his causes for grievance.  But, while poems of his latest collection frequently relate to his growing up “a boy afraid of being a boy” (“Afternoons as Endora” 33), who “had to sing with [his father] like a real Cuban” (“Cousin Consuelo, On Piano” 12), his main impulse is to preserve memories of those people he has loved. 

The first poem, from which LOOKING FOR THE GULF MOTEL takes its title, gives a keynote.  ”There should be nothing here I don’t remember,” the epigraph tells us, and we can hear a driver muttering that the motel he remembers from childhood “should still be / rising out of the sand like a cake decoration” (1), but then, “My brother and I should still be pretending / we don’t know our parents,” embarrassed by their “scruffy” appearance and “reek” of garlic; and his father “should still be” poolside watching the two sons “he’ll never see / grow into men who will be proud of him.”  The ambivalence is thick, but the conclusion is clear, that the poet, now ashamed of the shame he felt, wants to redeem that time.

That idea of memories “still” living comes up often in this collection.  When he visits on his mother’s patio, “It’s always summer” and “Everything I am is here still” with a banyan tree nearby “dropping roots / as thick as my legs from its branches,” a fine image of how self is rooted in memory of a place (27).  The home of his Americanized aunt is both “the house we never went to again, [and] the house I never left” (Tia Margarita Johnson’s House in Hollywood” 11).  His own wide fingers, the veins on his knuckles, and ten little mirrors that are his fingernails reflect his father (“My Father, My Hands” 45). 

Photographs would seem to preserve memory, but Blanco invests some photos with meanings that are at least double.  He was posed to look perfect for a photo at Sears, except that he wouldn’t smile (“Birthday Portrait” 57). He poses a cousin at the Statue of Liberty with some irony (13), praying “may this be her country more than / it is mine when she lifts her Diet Coke like a torch… and hold still when I say, Smile.”  In childhood, Blanco is alarmed and mystified by a cheesy staged photo (“Mama with Indians: 1973, 2007” 59).  No irony, only gratitude, colors a memory of his father at the kitchen table planning how he’d provide for his son, “though there’s no black-and-white to prove it” (“Papa at the Kitchen Table” 43). 

The theme of memory takes a new direction in his apostrophe to a cousin (whose photo, he thinks, must be “somewhere”):  “Tell me / it’s true, we’re everything we remember, / tell me memories never fail us…” (68).  But what happens when the memory’s gone?  He remembers for his aged aunt what she cannot (69), and he reminisces with another aunt to avoid discussing the prognosis that brought him for the visit (72).  With his mother, he visits the grave where there’s surely nothing left of Blanco’s father but cuff links, the wedding ring, and “Bones, Teeth” (73).  Watching his mother step into the water at the beach, worrying the way she used to worry about him, Blanco sees her as Boticelli’s Venus in reverse, stepping back into the sea, “her eyes fixed on the horizon / at nothing I can see” (61).

Blanco gives us a lot of laughs for a “sad” boy who wouldn't smile for his portrait, who fit nowhere.  His family makes bets about who’ll be Miss America.  But, when Miss Ohio is crowned, “Gloves up to her elbows, velvet down / to her feet, crying diamonds into her bouquet / the queen of our country,” no one in the family knows where Ohio is (“Betting on America” 9). Considering celebrities with his name, he affects the pinky ring of Richard Dawson on Family Feud and knows he’s “as wholesome as Richie Cunningham” on Happy Days (7), and eventually arrives at an Anglicization of his name that encapsulates all of his adolescent pretensions.  “Killing Mark” tells about ways that an active imagination can kill a loved one who hasn’t arrived home at the expected time.  As the more sedentary of two middle-aged brothers, I especially appreciate “My Brother on Mt. Barker” (41) in which the less athletic one envies the one who skis with apparent ease:

…Funny, that’s the way

It’s always been: me looking up at him

conquering mountains, secretly wishing

I could be as daring as he, less like me. 

The poet wonders how “blood is not enough / to explain this handful of memories” that relate them.  But all’s well when the brother “tumbles down” and complains, “Damn, my bones are killing me.”  Been there, felt that!

Blanco often uses balanced phrases that reflect his in-the-middle, neither – one – nor – the – other identity.  So, his Tia Margarita Johnson’s home was “the house with a flower garden, not chickens” (11), a formula ("house with... not...") repeated many more times.  Blanco frames his ambivalent thoughts about America and Cuba in a sort of prayer for his cousin, that she “may always” do some things, and “may never” do the others (13). Other poems are built on repetition of single phrases:  “some days" and  “sometimes” (“Some Days The Sea” 77);  and “Maybe” (48).  A striking poem closes the collection asserting “I’ve been writing this since” a certain summer, since a certain class, since a certain night, and “since my eyes started seeing less, my knees aching more” (“Since Unfinished” 79-81).  He has arrived at another great "middle" condition, middle age.

Even in this cursory survey of the poems, a reader may pick up on an image that repeats in this collection: the sea.  Of course, writing of Florida, Cuba, and of his present home in Maine, he often pictures the sea.   “Today," he writes, "the waves open their lions’ mouths hungry / for the shore” (“Some Days the Sea” 77). But the previous poem in the collection asks, “Why am I always imagining the sea?” (“Place of Mind” 76), and it suggests that, like drops of rain that gather into streams and flow to the ocean, our individual lives and memories flow back into the larger sea of family history.  Imagining his great-grandparents’ love and life in Cuba, and what he might have been had they settled elsewhere, he concludes, “I’m a consequence, a drop / of rain,” “in the middle of a story I don’t know” (15).  An aunt at the end of her life is “like a wave drunk by the sand” or “a raindrop returned to the sea” (70).  The image is comforting in one way, though disturbing for a childless gay man when he watches his mother tend his father’s grave:  “Who’ll visit with flowers, speak to what’s left of me?” (74). 

Of course, if Blanco keeps producing works like this, he can find his answer in Shakespeare:  “So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.” It also gives life to your father, the aunts, and those other places and times you want to honor.

More on Richard Blanco

• In mid-winter and mid-life, I was feeling pretty badly, and found Solace in Blanco Verse.
  
• It Takes a Pueblo is my reflection on Blanco's loving memoir.

Parable of the Ski Instructor

You know the parable of the Prodigal Son, and the one about the Good Samaritan, but here’s the newly-discovered parable of the ski instructor.  Our Education for Ministry (EfM) class didn’t so much write it as uncover the implications of a single metaphor that we found to describe common experiences in our own lives -- a process EfM calls "theological reflection."  Once we saw the metaphor, we agreed that we'd been in this situation many times --  "every day of my life," said one participant -- and we saw how God works in all of the different outcomes.  

I've taken it upon myself to turn our metaphor (see picture) into a full-blown parable. So, here goes:

There once was a ski instructor who led three novice skiers to the pinnacle of a high hill.  The instructor put his arm around the shoulders of the first skier and said, “You have the training you need to try this hill.  Won’t you go ahead?”    Down the skier went, avoiding the trees and rocks, arriving at the resort below, where she yelled, “This was the greatest experience of my life!”

The instructor put his arm around the shoulders of the second skier and said, “You have the training you need to try this hill.  Won’t you go ahead?”  The second skier asked, “If I discover that it’s too scary, can I return?”  The instructor explained that, once launched, the skier would have no good way to stop. The second skier said, “Here goes!” and launched, but struck a tree.  Alerted by the ski instructor, EMTs from the resort rushed to save him, and airlifted him to the hospital.

Seeing this, the third skier said to the instructor, “I know that you have given me the training I need to try this hill.  But I’ve decided that this is not the time for me, just yet.  I will remove my skis and take the ski-lift down to the resort.  Perhaps I will take up canoeing instead.”

The ski instructor put his arms around her and said, “I’ll see you down at the resort.”

Robert Spano and the ASO: Bringing New Composers into the Family

(reflections on a concert April 5 by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, music director Robert Spano conducting.)

Robert Spano’s long-range plans for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra are coming to fruition.  He has

ASO's Kurth with young composer Primous

intentionally developed an “Atlanta School” of composers over the past decade, so that we’ve grown used to hearing new or nearly-new works by Higdon, Gandolfi, Golijov, and Theofanidas, among others.Though four of five works on Friday night’s program date from the 2000s, the audience responded as if this were nothing unusual, and they welcomed even the most unfamiliar pieces into the family.

The youngest composer was fifteen-year-old Commodore Primous III.  Brought to the ASO through its “Next Generation” program and mentored by ASO bass player Michael Kurth, Primous endeared himself to the audience during a recorded interview with Mr. Spano, who asked him to play his piece on piano.  The gangly young man played octaves with his left hand while the thumb and forefinger of his right ran a rapid descent from the high end of the keyboard, and it was very pleasant in a George-Winstony kind of way.  With Kurth’s help, Primous added layers of harmony and countermelody to those parts for left and right hands, and built his “Lullaby” into something very different that he now calls The Triumph of Day. After the piece was over, Primous bounded up on stage for his standing ovation – pretty common response by our affectionate audience. 

Kurth’s own composition Everything Lasts Forever takes inspiration for its three movements from graffiti in the neighborhood not far from where we were seated.  He, too, got the video interview with Spano, and he admitted that, as a player with the ASO, he knows what’s frustrating and he knows what kind of challenges the players want.  It sounded to me as though he exposed each section of the orchestra enough to justify caling this a concerto for orchestra. 

Kurth’s interview included photos of the graffiti that he used for his “program.”  Images of feet by a tagger with moniker “Toes” suggested a foot-stomp motif that kicked off the piece.  Dancing around different sections of the orchestra, these stomps developed through different colors and moods.  A black-and-white image of a bird to which some tagger later added a red heart, inspired “Bird Song Love.”  It’s a simple song played first on celesta, repeated with new colors added on top, until it developed into something much bigger for full orchestra.  The foot stomps returned in the sweet third movement, gently this time, to tie the piece together in a way that satisfied and charmed.

Yet a third video interview (the most I’ve seen in one concert) re-introduced us to Marcus Roberts, whom I last saw when he improvised fresh cadenzas for Gershwin (was it Rhapsody or his Concerto?) some years ago.  Roberts composed Spirit of the Blues: Piano Concerto in C minor at an electronic keyboard, layering different parts on top of each other to build the orchestral score.  He admitted to Spano in the interview that he’d had trouble with structure, and my own impression on first hearing is that he never did escape the box of the classical formula of  orchestral passage – solo cadenza – orchestra passage, etc.   Even playing his own solos, Roberts seemed constrained.  While every bit of the piece was fine in itself, I didn’t feel that it took us anywhere.

The other two pieces on the program were textbook examples of how to take a listener on a journey, and they are both “in the family,” too. 

Bernstein’s West Side Story dance suite had been in the repertoire only ten years, when I and my sixth grade classmates sat in the balcony of this very hall to hear the ASO play it in 1971.  As often as I hear this familiar piece, Lenny catches me by surprise with the ways that he prepares the transitions from one melody to the next.  Admittedly, he made that easy for himself when he’d built many of the songs in his musical on the interval of the augmented fourth that the “Jets” gang uses for its signature whistle.  It plays at the start of the suite, emerges again from the busy texture of the Prologue to mark its transition to “Somewhere,” and reappears in tunes we know as “Maria” and “Cool.”  Bernstein reuses certain textures to mark our progress from one movement to another, as when we hear fragmentary flights of melody by flutes chasing little bursts of percussion while the orchestra sits in tense silence; and when the bass section plucks a funeral march under stretched out song-lines in the high strings. 

Rainbow Body by Christopher Theofanidas premiered in Atlanta in 2000, so it’s already older now than Bernstein’s piece was when I first heard it.  Spano and the ASO schedule Rainbow Body every fiew years, and their recording of it is played often on our local NPR station, so it’s an old friend in the repertoire.   Based on a line from 12^th century composer Hildegard van Bingen, the piece builds like a dance from some characteristic gestures:  a stately statement of the melody in the brass, a sparkling fountain of sound that rises suddenly as punctuation at junctures of the piece, and a dark rumbling fragment of Hildegard’s melody.  By the end, when these sounds reinforce each other, they all contribute to a glorious finale for the piece, and for the concert.  

MAD Sanity

A cover I loved at age 8, blending my two favorite icons

(Reflection on MAD magazine, after hearing an interview with John Ficarra on Bob Edwards' Weekend radio show.)

"Everyone thinks that MAD was at its best the year they first read it," says John Ficarra, editor of MAD today.  MAD's mission, he says, is "subverting minds."

Truly, MAD was a sane balance for the craziness of the time.  My introduction to MAD was 1968, one of the single most tumultuous years in American history, when national self-confidence was shaken by "generation gap," political assassinations, riots and the exposure in Vietnam of our leaders' dishonesty and incompetence.

My window on all that was Alfred E. Neuman's "What - me worry?" face.  Hippies v. Hardhats, Spy v. Spy, Hawks v. Doves, KKK v. Black Panthers-- MAD's creators found a laughable angle on just about everything but assassinations, and that helped when the world was too scary or depressing.  (Note: NPR's "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me!" serves this way for me today.)

I recall a feature "If Comics Adopt Nudity like the Movies," and take-offs on "Midnight Cowboy" and "Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice," making fun of promiscuity, hypocrisy, and Timothy Leary's drug culture.  My introduction to the Ten Commandments was through a feature that juxtaposed images of Elizabeth Taylor, Eddie Fisher, et. al. with "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife," and an actress kissing Oscar beside the ban on graven idols.  In a mock advertisement, Adolf Hitler endorses cigarette companies for their success killing more people than he ever dreamed.

Something else that MAD always showed was consistent craftsmanship.  Mort Drucker's caricatures were dead-on target; Sergio Aragones' marginal cartoons were admirably compact, of necessity;  Al Jaffee's fold-ins were ingenious and skillful;  I loved the cover art.  I learned irony from Dave Berg, as in his "lighter side of fitness" cartoon feature, when an older man at a gym asks a younger one why he spends his time on machines that row nowhere, run nowhere, and bike nowhere.  "They get me somewhere," the young man says, "Away from my wife!"  MAD's parodies of poems and songs, meticulously matching original rhyme-schemes and meter, got me started on a life-long hobby, as in this song from MAD's sequel to "The Sound of Music":

You are forty,
Going on forty-one,
Already past your prime.
No man has wed you,
Each man has fled you,
Except for Father Time....

I find online many MAD tribute sites where covers and articles are available for viewing. 

The Coup, Chapter One: Updike's Playground

(reflections on The Coup by John Updike. New York: Fawcett Crest Paperback edition, 1979).

John Updike overlays so many strands of story, cultural commentary, and jokes in the first chapter of The Coup  (1978) that  I want to underline every paragraph.  So I’m reflecting on it right away. More may follow. 

For The Coup’s first chapter, we’re in the land of Kush,  a constitutional monarchy “with the constitution suspended and the monarch deposed” (17).  The first incident of the book occurs in 1973, “at the end of the wet season, which had been dry”(21).  Being an artificial political state imposed by European colonialists on a kingdom called Wajiji, Kush doesn’t even have a history.  Its borders bracketing clashing tribes with different languages and traditions, Kush is only “an idea” (21), but in that way, it is no more imaginary than most post-colonial African nations  in the 1970s.  Kush’s political system uneasily combines populist Islam and atheist Marxism.  Its economy is perpetual disaster, its Saharan north starving in drought and its south subsisting on peanuts.  (Doh! Another joke!)   The land is rich only in diseases (16).

Our guide to the nation is narrator Colonel Hakim Felix Ellelou, whose narrative voice is Updike’s playground.   Writing in exile or prison (we’re not told which, yet), Ellelou writes in decorous third person, except when the mask slips, which is often.   “There are two selves,” he explains, “the one who acts and the ‘I’ who experiences” (17).  He admits that the “historical performer bearing the name of Ellelou was no less mysterious to me than to the American press wherein he was never presented save snidely… in the same spirit the beer-crazed mob of American boobs cheers on… the crunched leg of the unhome team left tackle.”  Mixing “wherein” with “boobs” and “the unhome team,” Ellelou’s English is that of a foreigner who has absorbed some American slang into his outdated formal training – a formal trainwreck.

When dialogue begins, between President Ellelou and the old king whom he has imprisoned,  it is rich in polite hostility, rhetorical arabesques, and drole commentary on the World.    Here are the very first lines:

 “Splendor of Splendors,” Ellelou began, “thy unworthy servant greets thee.”

“A beggar salutes a rich man,” the king responded.  “Why have you honored me, Ellelou, and when will I be free?”

“When Allah the Compassionate deems thy people strong enough to endure the glory of thy reign.”  (23)

Because “all their languages were second languages,” the French and Arabic (and English) that replace their tribal tongues are “clumsy masks their thoughts must put on” (23). 

I read the book thirty years ago, and I retain vague memories.  In flashback, Updike will give us Ellelou as a foreign student in a small Midwestern college, attracted to a blonde coed who’ll end up as one of his four wives.  Near the end, there’ll be a scene of a hapless, well-intentioned American official atop crates of breakfast cereal when Ellelou sets the whole supply on fire.  The wives and the fire are both mentioned in this first chapter. 

A year after The Coup was published was celebrated by Van Morrison in his song “Dead or Alive” as 1979, “the rule of the tyrants’ decline…/ From Uganda to Nicaragua, / it’s bombs and bullets all the time.”    Updike was paying closer attention than I and my pals at Duke to the rise of Islam as a strong political force that was about to burst into American headlines. 

There’s a lot to look forward to.

 Blog Note: I’ve read all of Updike’s novels, stories, and poems.  I’ve written about him many times on this blog.  Use the search bar at the top of this page especially for observations about his last books of poems and stories, his hits COUPLES and WITCHES OF EASTWICK (with sequel WIDOWS…), and his problematic novels TERRORIST and SEEK MY FACE.

Jung Over, Part Two: Geography of the Self

Last month, I took instruction from a dream concocted by my unconscious mind, and wrote about it on this blog. It was confirmation of Karl Jung's theories of dreams.

This time, I've re-read something in John Updike that I experienced in a dream, and once again I find confirmation for Karl Jung's teachings.  Jung thought that dreams of homes are dreams of our own bodies;  the human inhabitant is the soul. 

Updike begins his memoir Self-Consciousness with a long essay about his childhood home.  When he was around 50, he left his Mother and second wife watching the movie Being There in the old cinema of Shillington, PA, while he took the chance to wander up and down the street where he'd lived as a young boy, and where he'd strutted as a teenager.  "You had to be there" never was more appropos, as he detailed ordinary places to the point that I was just about exasperated. That the whole town was merely the furniture of his consciousness, and he, center of this universe, was almost embarrassing.  But then he reached his conclusion:

Billions of consciousnesses silt history full, and every one of them is the center of the universe.  What can we do in the face of this unthinkable truth but scream or take refuge in God? ... [Reviewing the town] I had expected to be told who I was, and why, and had not been entirely disappointed. (40-41).

Elsewhere in this blog, I review Updike's final book of poetry, in which he writes one more time of his Shillington childhood, admitting that he has written of these many times, because "for me, they have no bottom." (See my Updike page.)

My Shillington is Cincinnati.  My grandmother lived in a modest but immaculate home in Madeira, north of the city.  It was a home purchased by her son, my Uncle Jack, in the late 1940s.  She moved in when Jack and his wife Blanche moved to the swanky Indian Hills neighborhood. 

Not long after my grandmother died, I had a vivid dream from which I awoke with tears streaming down my face.  That was unprecedented, and I took notice!  In the dream, not so different from my actual final visit to her home following her funeral, I searched every room of her home for "the secret to me."  Something there, I didn't know what, was the key to my personality and my future.  I cried because I could not find it.

A moment's reflection, after I awoke, revealed that the "key" was nothing in the house, but the house itself:  a sense of myself as loved, worthy, special, that I felt whenever I visited my grandmother's home.  Her antiques and her notions of interior decoration (pink shag rug in the kitchen, pink marbled wall paper and chandeliered sconces in the tiny bathroom)  made the place, for me, the epitome of class.

Updike's memoir moves on to other topics.  He modestly focuses on his physical weaknesses that, by forcing him to compensate, contributed to his eventual success.  His sense of indignities as one of the poor boys in Shillington motivated his "revenge" of becoming the town's single celebrity.  His account of the humiliations of stuttering turns into an account of his success as a writer in a chapter called "Getting the Words Out." 

I'm amused, at 54, to read his description of being in his mid-50s, a bit foolish-looking to others, a bit oblivious to the current popular trends, and yet feeling that his life is really just beginning.  He had become like the father-in-law that he used to ridicule.

I wonder at the fact that I've now spent time rereading a memoir by an author whose complete works I've read, imbibing fictional versions of those same memories.    There's a part of me that feels ashamed to be spending my time and energy on someone so self-absorbed. 

Still, as Updike tells us, the materialists have it all wrong.  If they deny God and the realm of spirit, they deny the "very realm where we exist and where all things precious are kept" (250).

Well, Updike is wise, and Jung is right:  my Grandmother's house is also me.  When I was about to leave her home for the last time, I burst into tears and sobs that I hadn't had at the funeral.   I ran back to her bedroom and sobbed, not for her, but for the loss of the little boy who had been her grandson: no one else would remember him.  Thankfully, I was able to keep a couple of chairs from her home, which had seemed to me thrones for a young prince.   I have them, still.

So the places of our youth are also symbols of ourselves.  Jung is right, Updike intuits that, and my dreams to this day confirm it. 

The Whipping Man at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre

In the first 120 seconds of The Whipping Man by Matthew Lopez,  a wounded Confederate soldier collapses inside the door of a derelict ante-bellum home and screams out some names.  A black man cautiously advances from a back room carrying a rifle and lantern.  When he realizes that the soldier is a young man of the household, he kneels, lays his hand on the young man's head, and pronounces a blessing in Hebrew, "Baruch Adonai...." 

It's disorienting to juxtapose Jewish tradition with our Civil War expectations, and instantly moving.  The rest of the play unpacks that moment. Plotwise, we learn who those names are, and what has happened to them.  Themewise, the idea of Southern Jews climaxes in a Seder.

We get highly involved with these characters, thanks to the acting of Jeremy Aggers (Caleb, the soldier), Keith Randolph Smith (Simon, the black man),  Another character who first appears as a truly scary apparition through a window, turns out to be comic relief and also catalyst for truth-telling.   He's "John," played by an appealing young local actor John Stewart.

We are embraced by the set, as the beams of the ceiling stretch out over us; and we embrace these three men as they discover the secrets that each is hiding at the start.

The seder itself is a highpoint.  Improvised from rough wartime resources, this ceremonial meal becomes a celebration of release from slavery.  The takeaway moment follows when John, unable to make a choice, is paralyzed with fear.  This is freedom, his mentor Simon says.  And it's not easy. 

Two other moments stand out, because they are so theatrical, and happen almost out of time.  Late in the show we see a kind of flashback with the soldier Caleb standing (he loses a leg in an early scene that induced audible gasps and squirming early in the show), reciting a letter to his beloved, written in the grandiloquent prose of those 19th century letters.  Another moment is occasioned by the fact that Passover in 1865 was also the Good Friday of Abe Lincoln's assassination. Simon re-enacts his  encounter with Lincoln.  Simon bowed; Lincoln bowed. 

The only thing not to like about the show is its title.  Yes, it relates to a revelation in the plot.  But isn't there something that could relate somehow to the freedom, choice, and Passover? 

Meditation for Holy Week: Liturgy as Theatre

Phil. 3:1 To write the same things to you is not irksome to me.

Until Holy Week, I'd had mixed feelings about Episcopal liturgy. The routines were more comforting than "irksome," but I was new to the church, and her traditions did seem to lack spontaneity. 

Then, one Palm Sunday, I understood how all that repetition amplified the impact of small changes. We waved palms, processed to music with bells, chanted prayers, and hissed, "Crucify him!" on cue. The rest of Holy Week brought changes to setting, lighting, and vestments. We re-enacted the Last Supper and sang more austere music.  It hit me then that liturgy is a year-long drama. In fact, it's a musical!  But we're not the audience: we're the actors.  

That doesn't mean we're faking anything.  When I was a sullen teenager, mom used my membership in the drama club to correct my attitude towards my father. "You like to act. You owe it to your father to act as if you can stand to be around him!"  To make my performance convincing to Dad took the effort to ask about his work, to listen to his music, to appreciate the things he did for me.  No surprise:  Acting led to actuality.

In the same way, in church, we recite eloquent prayers even when we don't feel them, we repeat the Creed even though we doubt, and we line up for Eucharist no matter what. Disciplines of Lent and rich drama of Holy Week add emphasis to a year's liturgy.  Taking time to worship as if it's important makes it so.

Creating Innovators with Homework?

In a speech to the faculties of Atlanta-area independent schools yesterday, author Tony Wagner spoke from experience as teacher, administrator, and educational researcher, one who has spent years studying innovators in industry, arts, and education.  He outlined lists of "three most" and "seven most" important practices listed in his book Creating Innovators.During the Q-and-A session that followed, I waited too long to ask my one-word question, "Homework?"  While I waited, I figured out what he'd probably say.

First, if the homework is intended simply to convey factual information, it's a waste of time.  With the world wide web in our pockets, factual information is now a "commodity," worth little. 

But, what if the homework teaches a skill?   Wagner said, in today's market, "It's not what you know, but what you can do with it."   If the homework is akin to practicing a musical instrument, mastering a certain baseball pitch, or working through a new app, then that's a good kind of work.  Could that, too be done in the classroom?  Teams do drill on the basketball court, but the best players practiced countless hours on their own -- Michael Jordan being the famous example. The kind of skill that has to be mastered alone would be highly important to the student, and a waste of class time.

Because Wagner says that the world's job market puts a premium on collaborative creative work, I suppose that he would prefer that class time be spent in getting teams of students to find -- not "the answers," but alternative solutions to problems.   

What would he say about reading assignments in books of literature or accounts of history?  He'd probably ask the purpose for the assignment.   If it's just to learn the facts, he'd say that's not the best use of a student's after-school time.  If the reading exercises a student's discernment, or the application of a lesson to a text, then that's stretching the student's ability, and a good use of time.  Could that time be spent in the classroom, with the teacher available for one-on-one coaching, and time available for students to compare what they learned?   I'd opt for that, if possible -- simply because our lives after school are so full of other things, like blogging, and exercise, and commuting, and dinner, and rehearsals, etc.

But Wagner puts the highest value on passion, and that gives us a kind of homework that will take time and concentraation outside of class.  "If a young person is passionate about something," he said, "they'll master the skills and acquire the information" as needed.  So class time should go to something my colleague Justin Loudermilk introduced to me, his "20% Project."  He allows students 20% of their class time to collaborate on something they care deeply about, and they all take time outside of class to complete it. 

After his talk on passion, collaboration, and creativity, the very first question from a teacher was about grading.  I'm struck by how often we teachers, threatened by a kind of teaching that isn't like what we experienced, stiff-arm it with a question, "Well, yes, but how are we supposed to grade that?"   Wagner said that he'd recommend having only three grades:  A, B, and "Incomplete."  Sounds like my approach, too: to keep the kids working on a project until it's the best they can do with the objectives they face using the skills they've developed by a deadline. 

After all, I felt affirmed in the choices I've made as a teacher, and motivated to find more ways to collaborate.  My writing students are currently at work "exploring" through research topics of interest to them about which they're curious, asking questions that don't have easy answers.  I wonder if I missed an opportunity to make this, too, collaborative?  I used to have a "magazine" project when I taught history, for which students created a kind of portfolio of essays, stories, time lines, graphs, and reviews related to a chosen theme.  It might be worth considering.

My drama classes do collaborate a lot; next year, with my class time extended from one quarter to a full semester, I should consider more ways to have collaboration. 

Jung Over: Dreams the Morning After

I awoke this morning, disturbed by a dream in which a friend of mine dealt with his teenaged son by jerking him outside and slapping him.   His son hit him back.  Watching in anguish, I thought the father had made a mistake.  I followed the young man up to his room, where he curled up on his bed.

Now, pioneering psychologist Karl Jung took dreams seriously as helpful communications from our unconscious minds to our reasoning conscious minds.  The unconscious, he said, communicates not in words but in metaphor, using symbols and stories.  In his view, even when we dream of others, we're dreaming of an aspect of ourselves.  

Me and Mia

Awake in the dark, I wondered where my dream came from. 

Then I heard the breathing of my own teenager -- a puppy named Mia --  curled up in her bed.   Yesterday, she was more than usually aggressive towards other dogs in the park, and I'd been more forceful than usual pulling her aside and insisting that she sit and stay.  I'd been thinking, "I've handled this badly.  I've got to do something, but forcing her down isn't it.  I don't know what to do."  I'd been feeling remorse, affection, regret, yearning for re-connection to the dog. 

The thoughts and feelings I'd had during that event were exactly those that I shared with "my friend" in the dream. Jung was right:  My heart is telling me to pull back and not to confuse Mia with my mixed signals.  I surely don't want her to associate other dogs with my anger, or to think of my hands as instruments of pain.

This seems to be clear evidence that Jung was on to something real.  Where is he in discourse today? 

Psychology was as present in the first decades of my life as weather -- in cartoons, sitcoms, suspense movies, art, magazine racks, and speculative talk among adolescents (when I was one) -- so it's astonishing to me how Freud, Jung, and dream analysis have vanished from conversation.  The last time I heard anyone take any of that seriously was pre-Prozac, around 1990, Jung was ascendant, and Joseph Campbell had a bestselling book about world mythology and archetypes in our dreams and lives. 

At about that same time, The University of the South was developing Education for Ministry, an undergraduate theological course studied through local parishes.  A central feature of this program is a process of "Theological Reflection," by which participants analyze a real-life event for its concomitant thoughts and feelings.  After everyone recalls events in their lives when they shared the same thoughts and feelings, all use their imaginations to concoct a metaphor for those thoughts and feelings.

We are, in effect, inventing a dream that expresses the reality in the language of the unconcious.

The next step in the process is to cast about in culture and Scripture for another story or image that relates.

There you have Jung in a nutshell:   Our faith stories and our ancient myths speak to us universally as dreams speak to us individually.

Homeboys' Blessings

Jesuit father Greg Boyle was interviewed by Krista Tippett for her radio show "On Being."  He once tried to make peace through shuttle diplomacy among LA's street gangs, but he gave up on that: "There is no conflict," he says, "only violence." 

Instead, he has focused on getting members of different gangs to work side by side on other projects.  He tells of blessing one, adding, "While I love you, you can sometimes be a pain in the butt."  The boy-man replied, "The feeling's mutual."

His main insight seems to have been that all of these boys and "homegirls" are fleeing from something, and he offers something positive to want.  He tells of a boy -- now a man on the other side of drug addiction and crime -- whose mother told him at age six to kill himself and save her the pain of raising him.  She beat him, and he wore three tee shirts into adulthood, to cover up the wounds.  "But now I love my wounds," he says. "How else can I help others with their wounds if I don't love mine?"

Is he afraid of death? He quotes the Dali Lama:  "Death?  It's just a change of clothing."

He quoted Ruskin, that our main calling in life is to "delight in each other."  When Krista Tippett asked him about why he chose the epigram for the book, he confessed,"Oh no, it's my Krista Tippett nightmare coming true.  I don't know why I chose it.  Now I'm revealed as totally shallow." But the poet observes how all of us wish to be told "I love you," and asks why we can't be the one who tells thaqt to others.

So, from a hard-hitting, mean streets area of the world, there's a call from the warm and fuzzy side.

Here's a link to his website:  http://homeboyindustries.org/

God's People Grow Up

Romans 1:14 I am under obligation both to Greeks and barbarians.

A lawyer confessed, "I still think of God the way I did when I was 10." At 40, he had a mature understanding of family, law, and country; but it took a few weeks of our class in EfM (Education for Ministry) for his faith to grow up, too.  

In today's readings, spanning 1000 years of history, we see God's people outgrowing their adolescent view of “enemies.”  First, the Psalmist prays for his enemies to "dissolve ... like snails in slime" (Psalms 58:9).  Later, Jeremiah meets Jerusalem’s enemies face to face at the gate, to pronounce their doom. Then Jesus not only faces the despised Samaritans, but welcomes them, dismaying his disciples. Finally, Paul explains to indignant members of the church that he is "obligated" to "barbarians" as well as to them.  

From "slime" to "obligees" is a huge change in attitude towards outsiders. Was it God who grew more accepting, or did God's people need time to accept that God loves all of His creation?  Then, in the 2000 years since Biblical times, has God continued to spur our growth?   I think history answers that question: When Paul wrote, women were property, slavery was common, and power was both inherited and arbitrary.  So much has changed in ways that even Paul did not anticipate.  

I can't speak for anyone else, but, through the Episcopal Church, my understanding of God in the world has changed -- I would say "deepened" and "grown" -- in ways that I wouldn't have approved when I joined thirty years ago.  Change came partly through study, but more through interaction with wise and gentle parishioners, lay and ordained.  I am still learning to open my mind and heart to people not like me, as we are obliged to do.

Is Theology Just Inflated Self-Expression?

reflecting on John Updike's review of biographies treating Paul Tillich and Karl Barth.  The review was printed in 1976, and re-printed in a collection of Updike's essays, Hugging the Shore (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983.)

I asked a philosophy professor, my friend Susan, what is the basis for any statement by any theologian?   She and I have been reviewing theology from ancient times to modern in the context of the four-year "Education for Ministry" curriculum (EfM) prepared by the University of the South at Sewanee.  Episcopal churches across the country sponsor classes.

She had no ready answer, and agreed with me that each theologian seems to develop assertions based on Scripture (and other theologians) read by the light of personal experiences and temperament. 

Before reading one more chapter in our EfM text concerning theologians Barth and Tillich, I turned to John Updike, recalling that he'd been influenced by both.  As book reviewer, and even as novelist, Updike always seems open-minded.   He judges his subjects lightly by their own intentions as expressed in the subject's own words. He draws our attention to patterns and doesn't have to add much commentary.

After reading a couple biographies, Updike highlights what Barth and Tillich had in common (826).  In broad outline, they shared a lot:  sons of pastors both born in 1886, students in Germany, socialists, lovers of arts, exiles from Nazism.  Both respected "play" as an important aspect of living. Tillich emerged from World War I a "virtual atheist" while Barth, army chaplain,  compared himself to a trumpeter who makes no sound.  Neither was a faithful husband. Hannah Tillich considered mixing his manuscripts with all his porn and letters to mistresses, and wrote of his tantrums whenever she caught him;  Mrs. Barth evidently accepted her husband's  female "personal assistant" and traveling companion into their household throughout their marriage.

While Barth's "last word" was "not a word such as grace but a name: Jesus Christ," Tillich's mission was to be a bridge (his word) between culture and Christianity.  Updike observes, "But a bridge has no content, just traffic" (833).  He quotes Tillich's reflection on being " a dreamer" from adolescence on, with the danger of mistaking "imagination for reality" (832).  It's in this context that Updike opines that, for Tillich at least, theology is just "inflated introspection."  Updike is pretty harsh about Tillich's theology, calling it vague, and giving samples to show that Tillich's "theological affirmations take place at the weakest possible level of the verb to be," as in The Courage to Be.

Updike clearly favors the book about Barth, and also Barth himself, who appears to be a happy warrior.  In old age, both theologians doubted their own value (835)  "Am I a phony?   I fear so," wrote Tillich; while Barth wrote "All the success that life has brought me is no use at all."  Updike agrees, writing --

Theology is not a provable accumulation, like science, nor is it a successsion of enduring monuments, like art.  It must always unravel and be reknit.

Updike neatly summarizes the life's work of both men:

Both confronted the apparent withdrawal of God from the world around them -- Barth by claiming that He was Wholly Other and thus immune to detection, Tillich by suggesting that He was present, weakly, in everything (836).

So far I've been getting my theology from texts about theology, not straight from theologians.  I might think differently if I were to get a stronger personal feeling for these people, as I do from knowing Augustine's life story and Aquinas's lovely lyric "Humbly I adore thee...."  But, theologians from Origen onward seem only to have been fabricating metaphors that are unraveled by critics who find loose threads, and re-knit, in a cycle that repeats century after century. 

Knowing that the cycle is a cycle is valuable; and knowing the source against which all these theologians exerted their imaginations is valuable; and coming up with our own metaphors based on our own experience is valuable -- indeed, it's half of what we do in EfM.  But reading what others in other times came up with to describe their experiences of Scripture?  It's a bit like reading a book of crossword puzzles that someone else has worked through.

Andrew Lloyd Webber: The First Things That Come to Mind

JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR begins with a thrilling overture by Andrew Lloyd Webber that I can still hum for you 40 years after I last heard it.  The overture, in turn, is lifted from a thrilling confrontation between Pilate and Jesus, still the most intense passage of musical theatre I know.  At ten, having seen the show and then memorized the 8-track tape recording of it, I resolved to write an opera -- it's still on my bucket list.   I even tuned into the Tony Awards that year to root for SUPERSTAR against the big winner that year, a show called COMPANY by someone named Sondheim who didn't yet mean anything to me. So I'm a fan of Webber from way back.

I recently directed Webber's JOSEPH AND THE AMAZING TECHNICOLOR DREAMCOAT, performed by a group of middle school actors who put all of their energy into the roles, charming the audience.  My bassist (age 13) sometimes jumped up like a rock star, and my drummer (14) added variety.  Playing the keyboards, I was swept along by the bouncy fun of Webber's score, even while I was aware that page after page we were simply repeating the same unvaried, undeveloped snippets of riffs familiar from classic pop/rock songs. 

So my recent production of JOSEPH underscored what I've thought about Lloyd Webber since SUPERSTAR:  Here's a composer with immense facility who, time and again, settles for the facile. 

For example, take JOSEPH.  The story in Genesis gives a composer/dramatist some opportunities for rich layers of feeling: a loving father believes his conniving sons' story that his favorite son has died, the brothers repent, Joseph weeps and forgives them, and concludes, "What you intended for evil, God intended for good." But for those moments in the play, librettist Tim Rice and the composer settled for irrelevant pastiches of a western song and a calypso, and a straightforward repetition of the opening idea that, if you want "to be famous, to be a big success," then  "any dream will do." One lovely balad, "Close Every Door," mentions a "promise" from beyond this world, but that's as close as Rice and Webber get to the heart of the material.   

What else comes to mind with Andrew Lloyd Webber?  I was thrilled by "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" when I heard Karen Carpenter perform it in context, complete with the lead - in of Juan Peron's bombastic recitative and the crowd's insistent chant, "Peron! Peron!"  Excited, I bought the original recording of EVITA. But then I saw it, and felt embarrassed for the performers, who expended all that sweat and sound for nothing:  A girl from the farm becomes serial mistress, sleeping her way to the top.  What was I supposed to care about here?     I memorized the LP of CATS, but walked out at intermission during two different touring productions, so bored that I spent the first acts scribbling in my program all the ways that the choreographer found ways to stage the dancers rolling, leaping, kicking, lining up, circling....  What was the point?  I saw JOSEPH in Washington and thought, "My kids and I could write something this good in a couple hours."  I eagerly bought the cassette tape of the PHANTOM score when it first appeared, but when I popped it into the car's tape player, I blushed to hear something so obvious as the opening A-minor chord slipping down in half-steps and then the stupidly irrelevant and inappropriate disco-pop song that follows -- "The phantom of the opera is there, inside your mind."   (I did like the operatic pastiches, though).

I loved the REQUIEM and the VARIATIONS.   The variation that turned into  "Unexpected Song" moves me every time I hear it, though the lyrics (added much later) fumble the title's analogy -- "Like an unexpected song / That no one else is hearing."  Huh?

I bought the CD for SUNSET BOULEVARD with Glenn Close as star, and then saw a touring production with Petula Clark, who brought humor to the role of Norma Desmond.  I enjoyed the show, a "beauty and beast" variation in which the aged has-been movie star is beast and the handsome young screen writer is beauty.  I've listened to it again tonight, and I'm thrilled again by the momentum of the opening sequence, and I admire the efficiency of the composer as he recycles the same tunes over and over.

The same year that SUNSET was a hit, Sondheim's PASSION told the same story of an attractive young man beset by an obsessive ugly woman.  Both make a listener uncomfortable; Sondheim with Lapine looks deeper than the creepy side, while Lloyd Webber and his collaborators settle for the obvious "echh" side with pity for the celebrity who's lost her fame.

I'm interested in some of Lloyd Webber's other projects.  I eagerly listened to ASPECTS OF LOVE, which some critics compared to Sondheim's A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC, but it seemed bland.  WHISTLE DOWN THE WIND got pretty bad reviews, but I was interested in the premise, taken from an obscure 50s movie about kids who mistake a fugitive for the second coming of Jesus.  THE BEAUTIFUL GAME sounds interesting, a musical about soccer and the troubles in Ireland, but it, too, failed to catch on.  I don't recall what it was that kept me from ordering the CD, but I retain the impression that, once again, Lloyd Webber was said to have flirted with something exciting and meaningful, but had settled for the first thing that had come to mind.  My mentor Frank Boggs was impressed by THE WOMAN IN WHITE, but, as so often seems the case with A. L-W., , it was the technical presentation that he lauded.

I read a review of the PHANTOM sequel LOVE NEVER DIES in a London Theatre newsletter, and it praised the music for being Lloyd Webber's best in decades, while lamenting the stupidity of the book.

If the critic is right, then LOVE NEVER DIES is the exception that proves the rule: Lloyd Webber often settles for the first thing that comes to mind.  He said as much when he admitted spending more time than usual,  half a year, on the REQUIEM,   He cuts corners.  He outlines a melody, he sets it to a strong, expressive harmony; but then he repeats it to fill spaces between the big balads or pastiches.

Still, I love watching Lloyd Webber at the piano with Sondheim in a YouTube video, where the two mash up "Send in the Clowns" and "Music of the Night" in tribute to producer Cameron Mackintosh.  It's no exaggerration to say that, between them, these two composers instigated  all of my intellectual life -- whether we're talking about religion, music, lyrics, or aesthetics in a more general sense.  

I can thank Sir (Lord?) Andrew Lloyd Webber for so much.  So "Thank you" is the second thing that comes to mind.  

Daron Vroon's Sermon:: Miracles, Magic, and more

Reflection on sermon by Father Daron Vroon of St. James' Episcopal Church, Marietta, Georgia today; and on meditations by Jeremiah Sierra printed in Forward Day by Day in November 2012 (go to www.forwardmovement.org)

Responding to today's Gospel reading about the wedding at Cana, our young associate rector Daron Vroon made a strong impression on me and everyone else who spoke to me after the service.  

He began by tellling us of a comedy sketch by English comic Rowan Adkinson, who adds to John's gospel a couple of miracles, in King James' English: he turns a carrot into a rabbit and saws a serving girl in half who is magically restored.  "Surely this is the son of God!" Adkinson has servants exlaim.   Fr. Vroon said it was funny but disturbing to equate the miracle of Jesus with a magic trick.  If God is a distant "watchmaker" who occasionally "interferes" with nature, the questions arise, "Why doesn't God do this more often to prevent disasters?  Why doesn't He interfere to help me?" 

But that view leaves God out of our daily lives.  Instead, Fr. Vroon  asserted that God is ground of all our being, all the time.  He quoted St. Augustine's sermon on the same Gospel reading, pointing out that the making of wine is always a miracle, just as the resurrection of Lazarus is not less awe-inspiring  than the birth of an infant.  God energizes nature, Fr. Vroon says, and a miracle is simply a clear view through nature to what God is always doing for us: sustenance, transformation, resurrection....

I've long enjoyed reading Forward Day by Day, a booklet printed and sold for $1 in Episcopal Churches.  This past issue's meditations on daily readings in our prayer book were especially interesting in November.  Here are some comments that I check-marked in early mornings when, flanked by faithful dog Luis and anxious puppy Mia, I read these meditations on scripture:

On Luke 13:10-17, about the woman whom Jesus heals on the sabbath, Sierra writes,  "My to-do list is supposed to organize my life and make it easier, but instead it becomes a cloud of failed ambitions looming over my head."  How true!  And, worse, "the internet...ends up being a tether we can't seem to cut."  But this was as true 2000 years ago, when people were bound by religious rules.  "God frees us from our guilt and sin: why can we not let ourselves...breathe a little?"

In another meditation, Sierra admits, "When my girlfriend or some other prophet challenges me, I ...have to work hard to refrain from [stoning] the prophets who are sent to help me."

About the prodigal son, Sierra observes that one son "thinks he has run away from the love of his family, but, like his brother, he never left."

In another meditation on James's admonition to "be quick to listen, slow to speak," the author remembers working with the public at the church office. "It was easy to get angty... But when I kept quiet and heard them out, I'd be able to help in small ways." 

About the line in Luke 16 that no slave can serve two masters, the author  tells us about buying stuff as a sop to his loneliness.  "It's not that money doesn't matter.  It's that money serves as empty calories for our hungry hearts." 

Responding to James 3:13-4:12 "Do [these conflicts among you] not come from your cravings that are at war within you?" the author comments, "Like fruit, we rot from the inside out, and we usually don't notice it until something bites into us.  [Sometimes] it's difficult to locate the source of our anger and anguish...."  I know that last feeling especially well.  It's the main reason I write in my journal, to locate the hidden source of nagging feelings.

Sierra's meditation about the parable of the servant who buries his master's investment ends with these words:

But we shouldn't let other fears get in the way -- the fear of risk, the fear of losing the gifts that we've been given.  When we do this, we end up burying what we have in the dirt, and we end up as paralyzed by fear as the servant who buried his gold.

Robert Olen Butler's Fiction

Garrison Keillor highlighted writer Robert Olen Butler on today's "Writer's Almanac" on NPR, and I'll take the occasion to review my own appreciation of him, written in 2007.  That article begins:

Four books by Butler that I've enjoyed.

I'm always a little afraid when I start to read fiction by Robert Olen Butler. I know he's going to draw me into a corner of our world made strange in some wonderful way through a character's eyes. I know that he'll surprise me. I also know that, looking back on the story or novel, I'll see that the surprise was inevitable, usually implied from the start. I know well the feeling of delighted anticipation that often grows as we approach the climax. But I also know its opposite, a feeling of strong dread that makes me regret having started in the first place.

Most wonderfully, Butler's fiction often builds towards something dreadful that turns into a something joyful, surprising, and still inevitable. That worked on a grand scale in his novel MR. SPACEMAN, and repeatedly in short stories, which are his specialty....

Read the rest:  http://smootpage.blogspot.com/2007/01/anticipation-and-dread-robert-olen.html

Benjamin Franklin v. Brat Farrar: Why History Beats Mystery

Reflections while reading two books:  novel BRAT FARRAR by Josephine Tey (1950; Scribner Paperback 1997) and biography BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, AN AMERICAN LIFE by Walter Isaacson (2003; Simon and Schuster paperback 2004).

Hey, B. F. is the monogram for main characters in both books that I'm reading now!  Is that proof that truth is stranger than fiction?  Reading both a chapter of Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin and a chapter of Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar in one sitting, I can attest to one thing:  When an author provides a quirky detail so ridiculous, touching, or coincidental that the reader thinks it must be made up, then non-fiction is at its most appealing, and fiction is at its worst. 

I've reached the part in Isaacson's biography where Ben Franklin successfully obtains France's commitment to American independence.  But his every move was reported to England by his secretary Edward Bancroft, a spy.  More surprising, and more fun, is that Bancroft speculated on trade and rushed his insider information to his stock broker before he reported to the King's spymaster Paul Wentworth, who also had a financial interest in the information.   We read reports by Wentworth about agent 72 and 51 (Franklin and Deane) who are hot for 107 (Independence) (Isaacson 345).  He invited American Silas Deane to rendezvous at an exhibition in Luxembourg and a certain public bath on the Seine, though Deane replied simply that the spy could drop by the American's office anytime (344).  Franklin uses British involvement and "secret" counter-offers of peace as leverage to make the French act sooner than later, and he plays up the American victory at Saratoga to get the treaty that made independence possible.  The outline of the story and the basics of the characters are already well-known to me; the details make the history personal, and I now look at a century note with a knowing smile as if that portrait reminds me of an old pal.

Now, friends have lauded Josephine Tey to me for decades, and I find much to admire in her Brat Farrar.  I especially enjoy those elliptical passages where something important happens between two lines in a manner that calls to mind either her contemporary Noel Coward or else Harold Pinter.  Here, we meet the title character and a man named Loding, and we know the basics of their initially adversarial relationship in the first words they speak:

"Well?" said Loding at last.
"No."
Loding took a mouthful of coffee.
"Squeamish?"
"I'm not an actor."  (Tey 26)

Other characters converse in the same understated manner:

"What became of Cousin Walter?"
"Oh, he died."
"In an odour of sanctity?"
"No. Carbolic.  A workhouse ward, I think."  (21)

Tey sets up her novel of suspense in a way that appeals to me, alternating chapters between predators and the intended victims.   We quickly get the idea of what's going to happen, and so we wonder how far it will go before the victims realize how they're being duped.

Still, I'm exasperated by all the novel's fictions that are stranger than truth.   The boy's body was never found;  the young man with the striking resemblance to the long-lost boy just happens to be an orphan with a past that's a blank; the unscrupulous actor who knows the family just happens to encounter the false twin just at the time when the family estate is due to go to the surviving brother; and -- wouldn't you know? -- the old dental records perished with the late family dentiist.

While reading the biography feels like a story I already know is opening up for me,  reading the crime novel feels like a series of predictable crises are closing in.  It was a relief to put down Brat Farrar and to open Benjamin Franklin.  

This may be an example of something Stephen Sondheim describes in his second volume of lyrics, Look I Made A Hat, when he and a playwright friend were bored stiff at a play filled with purportedly exciting events and dramatic plot twists.  Incident is no substitute for surprise, the playwright remarked.    Author Frederick Buechner once described (in The Book of Bebb) a high school class's stories filled with the "requisite number" of suicides, terminal illnesses and car crashes because young writers try to use death to make up for the lack in their stories of "anything that resembles real life."

I usually love to read mysteries, so I'll have to think a bit more to figure out what line this one crossed.  

Arts Promo, Sports Style

(Speech for an arts awards assembly in the Middle School of The Walker School today.  I've cut out the names of students.)

A week ago, a seventh grade girl presented an inspirational speech from a movie by Sylvester Stallone, and then we saw an exciting video based on that speech.  We saw gladiators prepare for battle, a man lift a huge weight, and a dad tell his boy that it's not about how hard you hit, but how you take hits and still go on.  

Arts teach something like that.  To show how, I can imagine the video I'd make.

First, we'd see a middle school band starting a new piece, and we'd hear a noise like cars honking in a traffic jam in Marietta as the train goes by.  Closeup of Mr. Kofoed, smiling through gritted teeth.  He says, "Let's try that again."

Cut to Mrs. Simpson's art class.  A girl works on a colorful picture of a bird.  Suddenly she crumples it up and pulls out another blank page.

We see 8th graders scatter all over this auditorium.  Some girls squeal, "Oh, it's a death ray!"  Some boys are crawling under the stage yelling, “I found a bomb!”   Suddenly, one boy on a metal platform falls down screaming, "My leg! My leg!" The teacher runs over to the boy, in a panic.  Someone says, "No, B----, you don't even come in yet."  The boy jumps up.  The teacher, relieved, wipes sweat from his brow.

Cut to girls dancing to "All I Want for Christmas is you."  Their smiles seem forced.  They all turn different directions as a boy goes by on a skateboard, laughing at them. One girl says, "A---, that's not working."  The other girl sighs, "Take it from the top."

Cut to another bird picture.  The girl crumples up this one too.  New blank page.

We hear something like the sound of seven hungry cats in a cage, and we see a closeup of Mr. Johnson saying to his orchestra students, "That's so much better than yesterday!  Now, can we work on playing it together?"

We see Mrs. Hawk, telling a group of sixth graders, "You can be anything you want to be!  A star athlete, a clown, a toothbrush.  All you have to do is imagine it."

Cut to another bird picture.  This time, the girl adds a crooked branch -- frowns, but keeps going.

There's a picture of the sun rising over the third wing of Walker School.  We hear the voice of Mrs. Walker, stern, but caring.  "You all have different personalities, and you all have different voices – especially L----   -- but you all must listen to each other and blend as one voice!  Now, start again from ‘Hallelujah!’”

As the chorus begins to sing, we see Mrs. Simpson hanging a beautiful picture of the bird and branch in our Middle School hall.

Finally we hear Mr. Loudermilk while credits scroll across the screen:   Art is always about sharing your ideas with others who have ideas of their own, and working through draft after draft, rehearsal after rehearsal, giving up some ideas and adding new ones, adding layer on layer of detail until it’s something better than you dreamed of. 

That’s not just true in art.   It’s how we live and work and build our lives.”

Cue the theme from Rocky.  Video, over.