Lyricist Sammy Cahn: So He's Responsible!

Reflection on the life and work of lyricist Sammy Cahn 1913-1993. See sources listed at the end of this article.

"Call me irresponsible / Yes, I'm unreliable / But it's undeniably true, / I'm irresponsibly mad for you!"  (Cahn, 1962).  Lyricist Sammy Cahn was proud of the "neatness" of the partial rhyme between "unreliable" and "undeniably," and he liked to point out that those five-syllable words come from a guy reared in "a one-syllable neighborhood."  He was responsible for dozens of songs that I've enjoyed singing with Frank and Tony and Cleo for many years now, but I've never been sure which songs were his.  That's because so many of his songs share the quality of sounding so natural that no one had to write them, says Mark Steyn, citing the universally-known first lines of "Let it Snow!" :  "Oh, the weather outside is frightful / But the fire is so delightful...." 

(L-R) Composer Jimmy Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn, and Frank Sinatra
http://www.theottofiles.com/?p=398

Even those five-syllable words sound natural, once our ear accepts "irresponsible" in the first line.  Cahn often had to work to integrate difficult words or phrases into his songs, writing on assignment from movie execs who wanted him to work the title of a movie into the theme song.  This one was for a movie called "Papa's Delicate Condition," a euphemism for the main character's drunkenness.  "Irresponsible" was another euphemism, used often in the script; thus, this song is for an irresponsible, self-deprecating and charming man (to be played by Fred Astaire, but ultimately portrayed by Jackie Gleason).

Early in his memoir I Should Care, Cahn tells how the eponymous ballad nearly wrote itself.  "I should care, I should go around weeping," he wrote.  What could follow but, "I should care, I should go without sleeping?"  Another song illustrates the principle:  "Starting with the 'ABC' of it / Right down to the 'XYZ' of it / Help me solve the mystery of it / Teach me tonight." 

Mark Steyn points out that repeated phrases account for a large percentage of any Cahn lyric.  "Come Fly With Me" mentions "flying" three times in the first ten syllables.   "Let it Snow!" is repeated three times at the end of each stanza.  Cahn told Steyn that that's not just repetition,  "That's lyric."  In poetry, in essay-writing, even in stories, repetition feels like missed opportunities to be specific about setting, place, intentions, nuances. In lyrics for songs intended to be sung in parlors and dance halls across the country, you don't want to be too specific; you want something catchy (from Renaissance "catch," or refrain) and pleasantly predictable.  

In 1985, Cahn expounded on this quality of his lyrics when he told interviewer Terry Gross that a song's title implies "the architecture" of it.   For example, in his memoir, Cahn describes writing one of his Oscar-winning songs.  As often was the case, the title was a given:  "Three Coins in the Fountain."   All he knew about the film was that three women visiting Rome throw three coins in a fountain and make wishes.  He quickly sketched out these lines:

Three coins in the fountain,
Each one seeking happiness,
Thrown by three hopeful lovers,
Which one will the fountain bless?

Composer Jule Styne instantly worked out the melody, "which meant Styne was three-fourths done with the song because the theme repeated three times."  That's the music's AABA "architecture."  But Cahn had a big problem:  "I'd said all I had to say with those lines I'd written."  He just repeated the idea, adding in a reference to Rome, as each "heart" is "longing for its home."  He needed to develop some idea in a "bridge" to a climax.  What idea was left to develop?  He handed Styne a single line, repeated:  "Which one will the fountain bless?  Which one will the fountain bless?"   Styne was "incredulous," and said, "It stinks."  But he built the music up under the repetition.  The lyric ends with "Make it mine!  Make it mine! Make it mine!"   (Cahn 174).

While Cahn intended this to be an illustration of resourcefulness and craftsmanship, his story confirms my distaste for the song.  In words cribbed from a pan of Neil Simon, I'd say Sammy Cahn had nothing to write a song about, but he wrote it anyway.  Sinatra hands us the song wrapped in strings, but it's an empty package.  Cahn commented ruefully in 1985 that the song had made a lot of money for him in its day, but that day had passed.  I'd observe that it's the kind of schmaltz that led to the folk-rock reaction, to eschew craft in favor of "authenticity."

Cahn tells a similar story about the assignment to write a title song for a movie called "The Tender Trap."  Once he had thought of the rhyme "snap," the song "snapped" into place.  On inspiration, he added a repetition to each stanza:  "Those eyes, those sighs, / They're part of the Tender Trap" (150). He draws on his own experience for the next line: "You're acting kind of smart, and then your heart just goes 'whap'";  then there's a honeymoon "at a spot that's just a dot / on the map."  "You fell in love," he concludes, "and love is the tender trap."  It's a pleasure to see it all fit together so easily, so naturally.

Apart from Cahn's tales of writing songs, his memoir leaves us with a couple of strong impressions.  From the first, he was the little guy who was able to push himself into the company of the big boys.  In fact, from the lower east side of New York to the street in Hollywood where his neighbors included Judy Garland and some other big-name stars and producers, what we get is a feeling of Cahn with a pack of guys who interacted with each other a lot like 8th Grade boys, where Frank Sinatra was "the popular boy": Blue jokes, insult jokes, pick - up baseball games, some rough-housing, some misbehavior (with gambling, booze, and women), some tiffs and -- Cahn's specialty -- elaborate musical skits to "honor" guys on their birthdays. 

The other strong impression is of the first marriage, what he called "Camelot," which broke up when the wife Gloria felt somehow unsatisfied.  Cahn has an epiphany during an awkward session with his wife's psychoanalyst, who goads him into punching the analyst's couch until tears flow.  Cahn reflects, about hatred,

It might feel good for a while, like when your eye itches like hell and you rub it and it feels so good that you rub it some more -- then you pay like hell for your momentary indulgence with a sore and puffed and maybe infected eye for days to come. (186)

He preferred the approach of his gentle father who couldn't "whack" his children even now and then.

To the perennial question "Which comes first, the music or the lyrics?" Cahn quipped, "The phone call."  At the time of his memoir, 1974, he was on Broadway in a revue of his own "Words and Music."  (Summer, 1974 was my first visit to Broadway, and I vaguely recall passing by the theatre.)   Happy as he was about that, he seemed a bit bewildered that, for years, "the phone hasn't been ringing."  Except to write parodies of his own songs for special occasions, he didn't write what he called "money songs" again. 

My survey of the internet for "Cahn's last years" brought me a lovely anecdote in a blog by Derek Sivers, who was 20 when he assisted Cahn at his office.  Cahn was evidently irascible, and others in the office avoided him.  But one morning, when Sivers found Cahn cursing the coffee machine, Sivers laughed and said, "Mr. Cahn, I like you."  He writes that "a mask dropped" and Cahn replied gently, "Thank you."  A couple of years later, Sivers had a vivid dream of encountering a much-younger Cahn and reassuring him that his songs would still be valued 40 years later.  Again, "a mask dropped" in the dream, and Cahn thanked Sivers.  The young man wrote the vivid dream, to find out the news hours later that Cahn had died that morning, January 15, 1993.

 I recommend my sources:

• Interview with Terry Gross, recorded in 1985:  http://www.npr.org/2013/12/13/250738322/celebrating-the-centennial-of-lyricist-sammy-cahn
• Podcast with extensive sound clips of Cahn's songbook, curated with commentary by Mark Steyn:  http://www.steynonline.com/5653/aint-that-a-kick-sammy-cahn-all-the-way
• "Sammy Cahn said thank you" by Derek Sivers is a touching view of Cahn by a musician who met him in his last years.   http://sivers.org/sammy-cahn 
• Memoir  I Should Care: The Sammy Cahn Story by Sammy Cahn.  New York: Arbor House, 1974. (Gift of Chrys Street). 

The Met's Falstaff: Life is Good

Reflection on the live-in-HD broadcast from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera yesterday of Falstaff by Verdi, Boito and, of course, Shakespeare.  The production starred Ambroglio Maestri in the title role. Robert Carsen directed.

Director Robert Carsen has updated the look of Falstaff to the world of I Love Lucy, comfy and droll from the get-go.  It seems so natural for those Merry Wives to meet for a two-martini luncheon at a wood-paneled club in Windsor, fussing with their purses, oohing over a fancy dessert, and dishing on that fat knight, Falstaff.  The finale of Act II is a blissfully chaotic deconstruction of history's largest kitchen -- pastel cabinets, red-check table cloth, brand-name detergents filling a space the width of a basketball court.   

A cursory look for "Verdi's Falstaff" on the internet yields these basics:  it's Verdi's final opera, his only comedy, written over the four years approaching his 80th, drawing on material from three of Shakespeare's plays.  Its longest aria is only about 90 seconds long, so it disappointed those who expect "a tune you can hum," but everyone else seems to agree that it's Verdi's benediction, celebrating love, sensual pleasures, and reconciliation.

I tried to notice the music while the cheery characters' antics kept distracting me.  Each scene began with a different fast-paced ostinato in the bass, making me think of Sir John himself.   My favorite musical moment, aside from the finale (see below), followed Sir John's cup of wine at the top of Act Three.  He has climbed exhausted from the Thames river, waked in a stable in his muddy long johns, and sung a despairing little aria about the cruelty of life.  But when Falstaff sings how wine spreads throughout the mind to restore the senses, notes in the orchestra bubble up, and spread outwards to more and more instruments.

As the director said in an interview between acts, the finale gets us out of indoors for magical moments in nature.   There's elaborate hoodoo about a huntsman's spirit, fairies, witches, and such; but the magic is in the music and stagecraft.   Director Carsen brings in "spirits" on wagons covered in white cloth.  Once Falstaff understands that he has been hoodwinked and humiliated yet again, the young lovers married, the jealous husband reconciled to wife and daughter, then musical magic begins:  Falstaff sings that life is a joke, and others take up his words and melody a cappella at first, building with orchestra into a magnificent celebration.  

As the fugue reaches its climax, we see that the white platforms now constitute a giant banquet table, laden with food.  Chandeliers drop into view, and the whole company sets to a feast as the curtains close.

I had tears streaming down my face at the end.  Sigh.  It's been a hard few weeks, and I was glad to be washed in the waves of good feeling from this wedding of music and story.

Adding to the general sense of community and warmth, the Met treated us to backstage interviews.  Maestri's wife translated for an interview between Renee Fleming and the gigantic baritone where he demonstrated his own cooking skills in that oversized stage kitchen.  Such interviews as these, with stars and with stage crew, draw us into that Met community, if only through satellite technology.

Grafton's W is for Wasted: Well-Woven and Warm

Reflection on W is for Wasted, by Sue Grafton.(New York: Putnam's, 2013.)

One pleasure of reading Sue Grafton's latest detective novel is to appreciate her skill in weaving nearly a dozen different strands into a single net.  Another pleasure, something of a surprise to me, is that she touches our emotions in unexpected ways. 

As detective Kinsey Millhone tells us right away, the story connects the deaths of two men who never knew each other.  One is an unscrupulous Private Investigator named Pete Wolinsky whom she knew slightly, and one a homeless man who carried her name and number in his pocket.  We learn Wolinsky's story through third-person flashbacks (presumed to be Kinsey's speculation after the fact), interspersed through Kinsey's forays into the homeless community and a distant town where the homeless man left wife and children years before.

Encounters that seem incidental do figure into the eventual grand design.  There's the young loser who sings, his sisters (one sluttish, one shy), their mother and their family's ex-neighbor with dementia, the P.I.'s long-suffering wife, Kinsey's sometimes boyfriend Dietz the P.I. in Nevada, an ugly encounter with "Boggarts" ("bad fairies" among the homeless), and researchers studying pharmaceutical  remedies for addiction. There's Kinsey's encounter with details from her paternal family history.   Oh, yes: her landlord adopts a cat named Ed.  I kid you not: all of these are interconnected by the time we reach the page-turning finale.

Along the way, we meet the rotund and rebarbative Pearl White, and her young buddy with blonde dread locks and braces, Felix.   Kinsey opines about the homeless several times, seeing sometimes no harm in them, and yet resenting how Pearl games the system.  A frustrated businessman tells Kinsey how he faces a life of debt over his own wife's $90 K hospital bills, while "some program" will take care of Pearl if she ever gets sick.  A funeral on the beach for the homeless man and one of his homeless friends near the end of the book took me by surprise, bringing tears to my eyes when passers-by were stopped by the solemnity of the occasion.  The eulogy includes this observation:

Both the urge to rescue and the need to condemn fail to take into account the concept of [the homeless people's] personal liberty, which they may exercise as they see fit so long as their actions fall within the law.  ...The homeless have established a nation within a nation, but we are not at war. (483)

Others we meet, who seem to be unsympathetic, do gain our respect, if not our sympathy, thanks to telling details imagined by Grafton.  The shy youngest daughter of the homeless man seems to be way off-topic when she tells about a Great Dane always jittery about going to the vet's, for fear of being put down. When the time came to put him down for real, the cooing and petting of his humans calmed him, for once.  "If I'd been there," she says, thinking of her father's death on a lonely stretch of beach, "I could have held Daddy's hand" (224).   The detective Wolinsky is certainly despicable in many ways, but his adoration of his wife, his shame, and his determination to please her, make him sympathetic, too. 

As we've come to expect, there's a suspenseful action-packed showdown involving the cat and a scalpel:  pretty creepy and exciting.

My only complaint is with Grafton's editor.  Must encounters of substance be separated by pages of detail about Kinsey's eating, grooming, and driving?  I swear, one passage told us how Kinsey stopped the car, turned the key in the ignition, put on the parking break, opened the door. etc. etc. etc.   There was so much of that stuff early in the book that I would not have pushed through except that I've come to trust Grafton's judgement in the long haul.

 

The Weight of Bernstein's Mass

Jubilant Sykes in Mass, conducted by Marin Alsop

President Kennedy's widow asked Leonard Bernstein to write a mass for the opening of JFK's memorial arts center in 1971.  What Bernstein wrote is probably far from what she had in mind. I've sometimes called it Bernstein's Mess,  But, God help me, I love it intensely.

I'm not alone in feeling this way.   A quick search netted this gem of observation from someone who wore out her LP of Mass with repeated listening, as I did:

For myself, I love [Bernstein's Mass] but also find it cheesy and corny at times, not just dated; feel it relies on a reaching and sentimental twist to find its ending amidst a lot of devolving hyperbole. I also find it incredibly beautiful, especially in its details--more beautiful, the more closely you look at it.  (from a blog by Elizabeth Tamny)

Between forty minutes of stuff that's "cheesy and corny" but fun, and a half-hour of "devolving hyperbole" at the end, there's a half-hour of music that has color, variety, ingenuity, beauty, and a weight that has anchored it deep in my own life.   Let's take up Ms. Tamny's suggestion to notice the "details" that make this section of Mass "more beautiful, the more closely you look."

For me, the heart of Mass begins with Bernstein's setting of Psalm 130, De Profundis ("From the Depths"). The basses sing from the depths of their range.  Punctuated by timpani, and built up with overlapping imitations in chorus and orchestra, the music reaches ever-upward, until a breaking point when the chorus dissolves into choral yapping, a foretaste of the musical chaos to come.  This section ends on the words Spero! Sperat!   ("trust" or "hope")

During the next several minutes, Bernstein will open up the fourth wall in a few ways. The Celebrant, central character in this theatre peace, will mention members of the cast by name in prayer.  Bernstein will give us a look into his own process for composing, as his Celebrant will appear to improvise a couple of melodies.   A few minutes later, the Celebrant will sing in Hebrew, for no apparent reason except the words' personal resonance for their Jewish composer.  I'm not complaining; I'm touched.

After the chorus sings "Sperat!" a boy's choir continues the "hope" theme singing "My soul waits for the Lord" in Latin.  We've heard the tune before, at a similar moment of repose early in the Mass, when the choir sang the words, "Almighty Father, incline Thine ear."  The boy sopranos sing it simply, but the adult choir echoes each phrase with near-frantic urgency.

This little interlude builds to an instrumental version of the same tune, orchestrated to sound like dance music in some Middle Eastern bazaar, the strings a little off-pitch, the beat something odd (I'm guessing 7/8).  The libretto describes a "fetishistic dance" adoring the sacraments.  It's thrilling and meant to be more visceral than spiritual.  We heard it early in the Mass, a setting to the words In nomine Patris et filii, ("in the name of the Father and of the son"), and we'll hear its distinctive beat throughout this section, sometimes just on bongos, an ominous thread underlying sweet music.

With "Our Father," Bernstein deliberately reminds of how Mass began, to draw our attention to significant differences.  At his first appearance, our Celebrant, dressed casually, strummed a guitar and told us to "Sing God a simple song.../ Make it up as you go along."  In the numbers that followed, he donned more and more ecclesiastical garb while street people and marching bands and rock singers and whatnot all had their say.  The celebrant thus appeared to be more and more alienated, both from his flock and from that "simple" faith he proclaimed at the start.

Now, heavily robed, he literally re-composes that faith.  He sings "Our father" accompanied by one finger on a piano, as if he actually might be making it up as he goes along. The phrases meander to the upper edge of his baritone range, where he sounds exposed and vulnerable. His "amen" reaches up a fifth, sounding more like a question than a statement; and that interval becomes accompaniment with guitar clearly meant to remind us of "Simple Song," only the text here expresses resignation, regret, and determination to "go on" even when "our illusions fail." 

Now he does indeed go on, ringing the sanctus bell.  What follows is a delight all the more delightful against this dark background.  Two groups of boys toss around the phrases of the Sanctus as in a game.  The orchestral accompaniment climbs from deep down to high above the boys' highest notes. Like fireworks, the orchestra bursts at the pinnacle, notes cascading like sparks.

The orchestra subsides mostly to just the bongos that echo the beat for that "fetishistic dance" (nomine patris), a beat soon taken up by woodwinds and strings.  But first, the Celebrant continues to re-compose his faith from the ground up, plucking a couple of guitar strings and seeming to improvise a melody from the pitches: "Mi alone is only mi /  but mi with sol / means a song is beginning ...to grow... take wing, and rise up singing / From me and my soul."  Without pause, he proclaims, Kadosh! Kadosh! Kadosh! Hebrew for "Holy."

With that bongo still going strong, the Choir takes up the Celebrant's "Kadosh" and sings in Hebrew, "All the heavens and earth are full of His glory," while a pair of flutes chase each other upward like playful birds ascending.   The volume and density increase, and then the Street Chorus joins in for "Holy Holy Holy" in English. They subside. Then it's back to "Kadosh" for a bigger finish on the Hebrew phrase, "B'shem Adonai!" (In the name of the Lord).

This part of the Mass is sweet, mysterious, and somehow painful to hear.  Certainly the strange mixture of English, Latin, and Hebrew is part of the mystery;  the intertwining of the voices and instrumental parts, tending upwards, expresses yearning.   It is music and text beyond doctrine, beyond ethics and morality, operating on me at a level I don't fully understand:  that's where my faith comes from.  While there is much music in the world that I can say I love, and much that has an emotional effect on me, Mass is in a class by itself.

Back around Bernstein's 70th birthday, I wrote him a fan letter telling him all this.  I also confessed to singing parts of Mass in the car at times when I've been most exultant and most frustrated.  He hand-wrote an appreciation of my appreciation.

Peter Abrahams' Oblivion: Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma

Reflection on the novel Oblivion by Peter Abrahams, published in 2005.  I read it on a Kindle.

Remember Churchill's description of Russia as a "riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma?" Peter Abraham's Oblivion starts simply enough, but by the end -- Churchill didn't have enough synonyms to describe it!  But there is a key to unlock all the boxes, and the prize is worth having.

The novel opens with detective Nick Petrov giving dramatic testimony that convicts a murderer.  We learn that "drama" made him famous, first when he found the clue to end a serial killer's reign of terror twelve years before, and then when a movie was made about that investigation.   Before he's out of the courthouse parking lot, he's been hired to find a missing teenage girl.  He learns quickly that the girl follows a band called "Empty Box" that sings how you don't always know what's buried in your own backyard.  His investigation takes him places:  an airport hotel, a dive, a small desert town's high school, a nasty trailer, and his own secluded cabin in the mountains. 

Then the context for this whole investigation changes.  It's not a spoiler to tell that the headache nagging Petrov through the first chapters turns out to be an inoperable brain tumor that affects his body, his memory, and some aspects of his personality. A new intuitive sense of people replaces dispassionate reasoning.  The stern voice of his late father hectors him.  Self-doubt also changes him, and he begins to wonder how much of his "dramatic" career really has been play-acting and covering up. 

The missing girl case is one box inside a larger box inside yet a larger box, and one begins to suspect that there really are things buried in Petrov's own "backyard."  By the action-packed conclusion, Petrov is fighting not just for his life, but for his own sense of it: Is he really the good guy?

Author Peter Abrahams writes in third person, but keeps the focus tight on Petrov's perceptions.  The book is rich with distinguishing details about minor characters, but nothing extraneous to the puzzle.  When I used the "search" function on my Kindle to remind myself of one character who reappears late in the book, I recognized that Abrahams had planted clues to the true nature of this character from his very first appearance.

Petrov briefly partners with a dog, giving an intertextual thrill to readers who know The Chet and Bernie series written by Abrahams under the  pseudonym Spencer Quinn.  (See a compilation of my reflections on Chet and Bernie.) 

Rhymes with Integrity

Mark Umbers, Damian Humbley, and Jenna Russell
as Frank, Charley, and Mary

(reflection on the High Definition transmission of Merrily We Roll Along, music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, book by George Furth, directed by Maria Friedman.  Production at the Harold Pinter Theatre, summer of 2013.  Also, Stephen Sondheim's book, Finishing the Hat, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).

About Stephen Sondheim, the commonplace comments are, "You can't hum his tunes," "His songs are too cerebral," and "He sure does know how to rhyme!"

Since I saw director Maria Friedman's 2013 revival of Merrily We Roll Along broadcast in HD from London last week, I've marveled how natural-sounding rhymes bring home the characters' thoughts and feelings with a snap that makes the listener chuckle, or wince.  Finding myself humming the song "Growing Up" non-stop,  I've realized that song haunts me for an oh-so-cerebral reason:  added to the score four years after the show closed on Broadway, this song snaps together the story's characters and themes with the score's musical motifs.

Purpose for "Growing Up" The commonplace comments about Merrily are, "It's told backwards," "It was a fiasco in 1981 that ended Sondheim's collaboration with Hal Prince," and, "You don't like the main character." In Sondheim's own words...

Frank, the central figure, is entirely unsympathetic for the first half hour of the show.  He is arrogant, an adulterer, a betrayer of his best friend and the cause of near-suicidal alcoholism in the woman who loves him unrequitedly. (Sondheim 395)

Sondheim doesn't disagree:

I just happen to like stories about unsympathetic characters, because I trust the author to tell me why they interest him. That was the purpose of "Growing Up"...(396).

Four years after the short-lived run of Merrily on Broadway (so short-lived that I never got to use my tickets), director James Lapine revised the show with Sondheim and book writer George Furth. He suggested a song for the third scene to give the audience "a progress report on [Frank's] moral state." Sondheim obliged with a song that "allowed the audience to feel affection for Frank an hour earlier than they had in 1981."

Set Up for "Growing Up" So, in the fully-integrated version of the show, Frank sits down to a piano. He's alone in an unfurnished room, trunks and suitcases unopened around him. He's back from a cruise, beginning a new life after divorce. His closest friends Charley and Mary have just visited, but the joyful reunion almost fell apart in a disagreement about Frank's next move: Will he collaborate with Charley on the politically idealistic musical they've always wanted to write, or put that off again so Frank can pursue a Hollywood deal that'll pay child support? The adults worked through their differences in the tense middle section of an otherwise joyful paean to "old friends." Now, Mary and Charley have gone off to an old favorite night club to wait for Frank, who stays behind to take a call expected from Gussie, a Broadway star, wife of his producer / patron Joe. 

Because Merrily We Roll Along is told backwards, we know what's "ahead." Frank, at a party some years from now, surrounded by sycophants, denounced by ex-friend Mary, despised by second wife Gussie, forbidding any mention of his ex-friend Charley, will proclaim "I hate my life.  If I could go back and start over....!" 

But there's a lot we don't know, yet, about what brought him to this piano in an empty apartment.  Sondheim's song laces together strands of Frank's past. Given the backwards flow of this script, "Growing Up" foreshadows what we'll hear later. Sondheim invests later moments with resonance.

"Growing Up," part one Frank softly plays steady chords and hums a melody.  Then he sings words, as if to Charley and Mary,

Thanks, old friends ...
Keep reminding me...
Frank's old friends
Always seem to come through.
Frank will, too. 

No tricky rhymes here, just a natural sounding statement of affection and gratitude. He continues his thoughts about the decisions ahead:

So, old friends,
Now it's time to start growing up.
Taking charge,
Seeing things as they are.
Facing facts,
Not escaping them,
Still with dreams,
Just reshaping them,
Growing up...

It's a gentle tune, every phrase reaching upward in a way that feels positive.  With a couple of rhymes, now, the lyrics still feel like something a guy might say to explain himself across a table in a coffee house. 

Yet there's more going on, here:  We in the audience have heard those steady chords once before during the overture, along with what Frank hums.

When we will hear those chords again, in the second act, it will be years in the past, when Frank and Charley are about to find commercial success. They're at a swanky party, where Frank accompanies Charley on "Good Thing Going," a song they've written for their idealistic musical Take a Left. Frank is about to take a sharp right: Charley doesn't know that their hostess Gussie Carnegie has just seduced Frank into promising her that song for a frivolous rom-com she hopes will boost her career. Charlie's lyric, a gentle breakup ballad, could describe Charley's and Mary's relationship with Frank, their regret that "it could've kept on growing, / instead of just kept on."

While the accompaniment for "Growing Up" is borrowed from "Good Thing Going," the vocal line comes from another source, a motif we will hear at other crucial moments in Frank's life. Compare "So old friends / now it's time to be / growing up" to Mary's advice for Frank when divorce seems to have shattered his life: "Now you know,/Life is crummy, well,/ now you know." While Mary's song is uptempo, and the second and third pitches are reversed, "Growing Up" is still a variation on the same tune. So is the tune Gussie sings in mockery of her own guests: "Meet the Blob, / The bodies you / read about. / The ones who know everyone / that everyone knows." Using that same wise-cracking "now you know" motif, Gussie lets Frank in on her private joke -- flattering him, buttering him up for seduction. Moments later, Gussie sings her own slow, seductive version of "Growing Up."

But in the present scene, the tune comes across as a gentle affirmation of acceptance.

"Growing Up" interruption Then there's an outburst of short musical phrases that twist around within an interval of just four steps of the scale,  a little like kids' sneering "nyeah- nyeah nyeah" on a playground: 

Charley is a hothead.
Charley won't budge.
Charley is a friend.

Charley is a screamer,
Charley won't bend.
Charley's in your corner.

We've heard that twisted little tune several times already. It's the second motif of the overture. It starts the innocent little figure that the keyboard plays early in the song "Franklin Shepard, Inc." As that song grows into a furious indictment of Frank for abandoning friends and ideas, that little mocking motif snakes under most of the song.

But, for now, at the climax of "Growing Up," Frank's outburst grows to a high note on the word "change" before it subsides in the pair of lines that follow, which rhyme like an old adage:

Why is it old friends
Don't want old friends to change?
Every road has a turning,
That's the way you keep learning.

The "turning" of a "road" is a metaphor developed in the opening number, and repeated at transitions between scenes: "Bending with the road, / Gliding through the countryside, / Merrily we roll along, / Roll along, / Catching at dreams" (384).

"Growing Up," first ending Frank's conclusion pulls all these strands together:

Trying things,
Being flexible,
Bending with the road,
Adding dreams
When the others don't last.
Growing up,
Understanding that growing never ends,
Like old dreams --

Frank qualifies this last one:

Some old dreams --
Like old friends.

The vamp returns for "Good Thing Going," and, with the apparent end of the song, Frank has made up his mind to meet his friends, to leave Gussie and her "blob" world behind, but then, suddenly, she's there. She snuck in while he was playing.

She tells Frank that she has left her husband. He rebukes her for leaving a man devoted to her who is Frank's patron and friend. Why now, asks Frank. "Because I saw tonight that I could lose you." She continues Frank's song:

Growing up
Means admitting
The things you want the most.
Can't pursue
Every possible line.
Folding tents,
Making choices,
Ignoring all
Other voices,
Including mine...
You're divine...

"You're divine" is a non-sequitur, but it keeps the integrity of the drama, as Gussie is turning from rhetoric to outright seduction.  The phrase is a bit far-fetched, but not for Gussie, whom George Furth endowed with memorably precious dialogue, as when she tells her guests to "fermez all those bouches".  At this spot, where the twisty mocking motif comes in, Sondheim stretches it out in legato phrases, and orchestrator Jonathan Tunick brings in the saxophone to make it into a sultry tune:

You decide on what you want, darling,
Not on what you think you should.
Not on what you want to want, darling,
Not from force of habit.
Once it's clearly understood, darling,
Better go and grab it.
Things can slip away for good, darling.
What is it you really --?

She finishes with a come-hither gesture, and Frank follows her to the bedroom.  He's hooked.

But Frank fought the good fight, and every word of this song rings true. It's realism, it's common sense, it's appealing:  Who doesn't want to grow?  Who doesn't realize that realities change?  Who can't identify with "wanting to want" what one "should?" 

And That's Just One Song Every scene, every song in Merrily We Roll Along displays such integrity. 

But if the songs are good, who needs all that? Why should Sondheim and Furth have taken such care to integrate music, lyrics, and dialogue, along with story, character, and theme? 

They do it to create a world for the actors -- and audience -- to inhabit.  In an interview before the broadcast, Mark Umbers ("Frank") tells us that "Sondheim does all the work for you," unlike other writers who leave gaps for the actors to cover over.  Director Maria Friedman's staging and her cast's performances match the material in integrity and skill. Moment to moment, we feel that what we see and hear is really happening;  everything fits;  and, for the man who has lost his integrity, there is no escape from the consequences.

Happily, Friedman finds a way to emphasize a possibility for redemption at the very end.  When we first see Franklin in her production, he's pacing alone at night, considering a manuscript bound in red. Then follows the party where he says that he hates his life, and that, if he could go back, he'd start over.  After the beautifully hopeful anthem "Our Time," sung by young Frank, Mary, and Charley on a rooftop under a clear starry sky, the scenery and ensemble fade away, and we're left again with Frank in that living room.  He's back to clutching the red manuscript, which we now recognize to be the play that he and Charley always wanted to complete.  Could he be ready for a new start?  There's hope.

"Honest" Onegin

From left to right, from rural to royal: Met Opera, Oct. 2013

(Reflection on the presentation of EUGENE ONEGIN by the Metropolitan Opera, live in HD, October 5.)

Interviewed during the Met Opera's HD broadcast program, conductor Valery Gergiev deflected an invitation to wax eloquent about the luscious romanticism of Tchaikovsky's music, saying simply that Tchaikovsky's music for Eugene Onegin is "beautiful and honest."  I've heard of beautiful music, natch, but "honest?"  Yet, the more I think back on the opera, the more I understand what he means.

The arc of the story is simple, as adapted by the composer from Pushkin's novel in verse:  naïve Tatiana confesses passionate love for Onegin, a worldly neighbor, but he rejects her in a cool, civil manner.  A season later, Onegin's flirtation with Tatiana's married sister results in his dueling with Tatiana's brother-in-law Lensky, who dies.  Escaping the scandal abroad, Onegin returns years later to find Tatiana married to a Prince, now a mature woman, elegant, self-confident, and wise.  He falls passionately in love with her.  She rejects him. 

So, what makes Tchaikovsky's treatment of this material "honest?"   Operatic "honesty" might refer to a composer's sticking to the pure line of the story, unadulterated by extraneous ballets and choruses added just to please the audience.   It might also refer to the composer's eschewing showy vocal technique that might draw more attention to the singer than to the character.

Tchaikovsky does embroider that pure arc.  Strictly speaking, we don't need the first twenty or so minutes of the opera, during which Tatiana's mother and a servant reminisce about an early romance and a chorus of rustics celebrates the fall harvest.  We could do away with some big company dances at the two parties.  We don't need the aging French fop who sings Tchaikovsky's parody of insipid lyrics.  We could drop the tenor Lensky's couple of arias about memories and regrets, since he's just a plot device to explain Onegin's years away.  We could lose the bass aria for the Prince, who sings how much Tatiana has brought to his life, and how he adores her;  he is, after all, just a minor character. 

After such cuts, we'd still see a good show.  We'd see the young men Lensky and Onegin comparing the coquettish sister to introspective Tatiana; Tatiana's wonderful scene first preparing restlessly for bed, then drafting letters to Onegin, crumpling up each draft until she writes a direct and hopeful confession of love, which she completes at sunrise and sends by messenger before she can change her mind; Tatiana's standing silent while Onegin lectures her about the insurmountable differences between them; the duel; and then Onegin's awakening at the Prince's ball, with the private duet that follows.    

Yet the story would not be honest without the social and thematic context that these "extras" provide. 
When Tatiana's mother and her servant sing the refrain, "God sends us habit instead of happiness," it's homely wisdom that comes back at the end when regal Tatiana leaves passion behind in favor of contentment, duty, responsibility, and affection for a Prince who loves her. 

Tchaikovsky's dances, so popular that I was humming going into the theatre,  provide in themselves a social panorama against which we can see Tatiana's rise.  At first her world is shabby-genteel, characterized by rustic choruses, the energetic polonaise (in somewhat cramped quarters),  and the heel-kicking cotillion dance at the party celebrating Tatiana's name day.  Yet she is already set apart from that world, as we see by that French dandy's song for .  In a roomful of people who don't seem to know the difference between fashionable and elegant, she endures his first verse with polite attention, and the second with growing embarrassment. 

The grand waltz that begins the final act provides us a background of true elegance, where Onegin wanders aimlessly, drinking, bored.  When Tatiana enters with her entourage, we see the difference between true "class" in the sense of "nobility," and what Onegin has -- a mere sense of privilege and entitlement.

There's another kind of honesty in Onegin.  Tchaikovsky lavishes attention on these characters because he loves them.  He gives them room to speak for themselves, letting the music swell and subside, grow dense with agitated action or light with just an instrument or two in accompaniment, as fits their reminiscences and expressions of contentment, affection, or regret.   Because of the time that Tchaikovsky takes to let Lensky speak, when Lensky dies, we feel the loss as acutely as Onegin;  when Tatiana returns to her husband, we know she has made a good choice.  Only her selfish sister and that damn Frenchman fail to warm our hearts.

I've seen three productions of Onegin, now.  Atlanta Opera performed it at the Atlanta Civic Center a few years ago.  The Met projected an abstract production in HD, using little more to create scenery than autumn leaves, chairs, a couple of carpets, and snow.  Now we have the Met's new production, with more literal settings, setting tongues wagging about the drabness of Tatiana's country home.  It seemed appropriate to me.  All three have sent me out overwhelmed by affection for the characters, wonderment at the deftness of the storytelling, and appreciation for the variety, expressiveness, beauty and, yes, the honesty, of Tchaikovsky's music.

Honesty means following all the elements of the story within the parameters of the form wherever these take the composer.  

Brainwashing?

Thanks to my cousin Arwen for posting this on her Facebook page. 

Teenager Ethan Metzger responds in "slam" poetry style to a cynic who assumes that religious tradition and behavior is the result of parents' brainwashing.

I'd add only that he has proven the value of that "brainswashing" by living it.

Go to  COL Live

Education: Drill It In or Tease It Out?

Teachers who expect more from their students will get better results than those who expect less. This is the core idea in an article, "Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results," by Joanne Lipman, and she'll get no argument from me, there. She uses for example her high school orchestra teacher, who berated students at practice and applauded them for good performances. Grateful and successful students played their instruments at his funeral.

But she couches her insight in an article that seems to extol rote learning above any alternatives, and to deride the notion that knowledge is "teased out" of students.

Granted, when every bow must play the same phrase the same way; when the conjugation of certain verbs must become automatic; when certain formulae are required to solve problems -- then drill is necessary, and a teacher who can motivate students through the tedium is a good teacher.

But it's the experience of every writer, every reader, every mechanic, every physicist or mathematician who ever solved a problem, that knowledge is constructed inside, developed through engagement with some matter, often through collaboration. I do recall memorizing things for a test; but the standout moments in my years of schooling all came when teachers weren't telling me anything. Instead of prescribing and demanding, they simply situated me and my classmates where we had to figure things out for ourselves. When we realized that we needed help, they provided it.

For example, Mr. Leon Scott once asked our Literature class why atheist Hemingway loaded The Old Man and the Sea with Christian imagery; then, Mr. Scott left the room while we puzzled it out. He's the same teacher who required us to write on a topic of our own making about a Faulkner novel of our own choosing, forcing me of necessity to develop lifelong habits of close reading. I'm grateful for an education professor who opened up his library of resources to me and assigned three papers about the three worst problems I faced in my classroom -- and I developed ideas that still guide my teaching.

Is drill the way that we teach reading? Not if we're after appreciation and understanding! I've taught students who could rattle off dozens of prepositions, but didn't apply that knowledge to distinguish Jefferson's main idea in the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence from the prepositional phrases around it.  

Is writing best taught by "hard" teachers who find faults? I'd simply observe that "good" writing and "correct" writing are two different things. I wish more teachers and parents knew this! A "tough" writing teacher and I shared a student who, she said, "couldn't write." I rushed to show her something he had written for a test in History class, in which he displayed insight and a creative approach to the question. She read the essay, and commented only on the spelling errors and a run-on sentence. I am eternally grateful that the boy was not present. What good could that comment have done? I see only how discouraged he would be, his good work unappreciated.

Hard teachers emphasize results; good teachers emphasize the process that will lead to results -- though maybe not in time for the end of the grading period.

This debate comes up often. Even a sports ignoramus like me has heard a great deal about the contrast between "tough" Bobby Knight's coaching methods (screaming, abuse, tantrums, drill, drill, drill) and the kinder, gentler methods of Coach K, John Wooden, and "the Zen coach" Phil Jackson. The consensus seems to discredit Knight.

My own mentor, Frank Boggs, taught us so much about music without "drill and kill," without humiliation, without sternness. Our tastes (I speak confidently for my contemporaries, too) were influenced by the New Yorker cartoons and articles that he pinned to his bulletin board, by recordings he played us, by his own example. We learned to watch the conductor when he unexpectedly asked for changes in dynamics and tempo, even during a performance -- and it was exhilarating and hilarious.

Unlike the "tough" teacher in the article, he didn't wait for us to be perfect before he put us onstage; some of us were pretty rough-edged when he gave us our first solos, but that was ok: He was allowing us to grow into poised and confident performers. He certainly told us a lot, but I remember most what he asked. For example, he wondered aloud why Vivaldi sets the comforting phrase "peace on earth, goodwill to men" in a minor key, acquainting us with the idea that music can say something independent of the words.

Mr. Boggs recommended this article to me; I'm glad he hadn't read it when I first walked into his chorale room forty years ago!

Reflection on an article by Joanne Lipman. "Why Tough Teachers Get Good Results." The Wall Street Journal online. September 27, 2013. Ms. Lipman is co-author, with Melanie Kupchynsky, of "Strings Attached: One Tough Teacher and the Gift of Great Expectations," to be published by Hyperion on Oct. 1.

Civics Lesson for Republicans: Thank You, Senator McCain

Reflection on remarks made by Senator John McCain, September 25, 2013.  Video, quotes, and commentary by "Owen" at  Carbonated TV, a CNN site
 
"Do you argue to win?"  

Over thirty years of my asking that question, thousands of middle school students have said, not just yes, but heck, yes (to avoid demerits for stronger language).   

When I point out that the Constitution and Justice systems of our nation are built on the idea that we argue to find the truth, young students are baffled.   It's the simple idea (on which science is based) that truth emerges from fair, informed, reasonable debate.  From TV and bumper stickers, they thought our nation was built on "God, guns, and guts" or else something vague like "freedom" which seventh graders hear as "unfettered access for me to get stuff." 

"Freedom" is another word for mutual respect, period.   Anything else is license or privilege. 

Respect for each individual person means respecting property and freedom of speech; it comes with the responsibility to respect the others'. Inevitable collisions between a majority of people in a community and those in the minority will have to be resolved in compromise, arrived at through a process of, you guessed it, fair, informed, reasonable debate.

Though this process has frequently been marred by repression and violent conflict, US history is largely the story of our growing into "a more perfect union" in which fair, informed, reasonable debate can involve all who live here. 
 
Name-calling, obstruction of those procedures, gross generalizations, and the "win-at-all-costs" mindset poison the process.  They poison the spirit of the process.

Senator John McCain recently stood before the Senate to remind those who call themselves Conservative what Conservatism used to mean.  Responding to some twerp in his party who equated a stand against "Obamacare" with the stand that Germans should have made against Hitler (!), McCain methodically enumerates the ways in which fair, informed, reasonable debate and also compromise resulted in the Affordable Care Act. 

McCain cites more than a year of working through committees and hearings, a month of focused debate (weekends included), and dozens of Republican amendments accepted by the Democratic majority.  

McCain reminds his colleagues that the healthcare reform was a major issue in the last campaign.  "The people spoke... and re-elected the President," McCain concludes, adding, "much to my dismay."  He doesn't like it, but will he obstruct the law from going into effect?
"Elections have consequences," he admonishes those hotheads, and "respect [the] outcome of elections that reflect the will of the people."

That's real conservatism.  That's what makes America exceptional.  Those other guys who call themselves conservative?  They need to go back to seventh grade.  

Redemption in NPR Reports

"Redemption" used to mean, for me, "going to heaven after you die."  Jesus' words give us some of that, but more often he's talking about redemption that we can make happen here on earth, the kind that NPR has given me in two arresting stories this month.

Shon Hopwood
Photo:  Sang Cho / Courtesy of The Daily of the University of Washington

First, reporter Melissa Block facilitated a conversation between law student - memoirist Shon Hopwood and the judge who sentenced him to prison for 11 years, Richard Kopf.  At the time of his sentencing, Hopwood promised to make a better life for himself, and the Judge skeptically said that he'd wait and see.    In prison, Shon discovered his aptitude for legal research and argument, leading to outstanding success helping his fellow inmates.  Now he has been appointed to the second-highest law court in the USA.  Judge Kopf says bluntly that his "gut feeling" about Hopwood's poor potential "sucked."   Hopwood graciously demurs. 

Then, this morning, I heard the follow-up to a report on doctors treating brain cancer in children.  That's hard enough to listen to, but this morning's report by Joe Palca focused on how pediatric oncologist Jim Olson can stay upbeat when he must say, so often, "This tumor will take your child's life."   Olson related how he had to stop on the way home from losing his first patient.  Instead of feeling crushed, he found himself elated, walking with a light step.  Why?  The parents of the child hadn't fled the hospital as he'd expected, but had sought him out, hugged him, and told him that his words had helped to "make our child's death as beautiful as his birth."

These are two stories of many that we hear on NPR in which thoughtful, intelligent people find ways to redeem horrible situations.

Joe Palca's report on pediatric oncologist Jim Olson  http://www.npr.org/blogs/health/2013/09/13/221043643/treating-kids-cancer-with-science-and-a-pocket-full-of-hope

Melissa Block  Shon Hopwood, Judge Richard Kopf  (story audio: http://pd.npr.org/anon.npr-mp3/npr/atc/2013/09/20130905_atc_06.mp3?orgId=1&topicId=1001&ft=3&f=219295368 )

Photo:  Sang Cho / Courtesy of The Daily of the University of Washington

Remembering Professor Irving Holley: The Essence of Education

It's natural that a teacher's personal web site would include tributes to his own outstanding teachers.  Recently, I learned that General and Professor Irving B. Holley has died, when his grandson sent me a kind note about my profile of his grandfather.  Professor Holley and his message should have the widest audience possible, so here's the text of my tribute to him:

One of five books by I.B. Holley.

The opening gambit in Dr. Holley's class shook me up more than any other single thing any teacher ever did. I knew immediately that my advisor John Clum had been right: "He'll make a scholar of you." Up to that point, I'd had no idea what that meant.

He welcomed us to a seminar on the meaning of "the liberal arts," a phrase that meant nothing to me, though I'd spent six years at two "liberal arts" institutions (Westminster, Duke). We would have readings to do for our class discussions (and shame and woe to anyone who ever came to class unprepared to discuss the readings in depth!), but we would have no quizzes, no tests, and only one graded assignment, to write a research paper. The first draft would be due in December; the second draft would be due in May. My eight classmates and I had been sitting at a seminar table for about five minutes while this wiry, feisty little general with cotton-white hair and thick glasses spoke to us. According to the schedule, we would be there for the next two hours. But what would we do all that time? Then he set an 8x10 black-and-white photograph on the table.

"As we pass this photograph around, I want you to make observations. You first." He handed it to me.

"I see Civil War soldiers around a cannon," I said.

"That," he said firmly, "was not an observation. It was an inference. We'll do those later. What do you see?"

Chastened, I said that I observed what appeared to be a cannon. He nodded his approval, and I passed the picture to the student on my right. Each one of us observed a detail. The ninth student had a tough time observing something that the rest of us hadn't seen. Then the picture returned to Gen. Holley. We were relieved to have passed our first test, and waited to hear the point of it.

"Now, do it again." He passed the picture to me once more.

The picture made the rounds three or four more times, as we saw more and more details that we hadn't noticed before. Then he passed it around several more times for us to make inferences from all the details.

What we did with that picture -- noticing details, drawing conclusions -- is what we then did with facts found in our research. He said that, by making us dig deeply under a "little postage stamp-sized" piece of the history of Duke University, we would learn one most valuable lesson: how much there is to know about everything. Or, how little we know about anything.

My first draft, grandly titled "A History of Drama at Duke," was the longest paper I'd ever written. There were twenty-some typed pages, with four pages of additional notes and sources. I'd read old news articles, interviewed retired professors who remembered early plays on campus, and I'd put together what I thought was a finely-written essay.

But on the title page, Dr. Holley wrote a whole paragraph about how the title mis-represented the paper. On every page he pointed out facts not verified, inferences not based on facts, whole decades of information that I'd skimmed over. He spent more time writing the comments than I'd spent writing the paper.

Especially he asked me over and over again, "How do you know this?" And ultimately he asked, "Okay, if this is factual, then, SO WHAT?"

This paper became my obsession, and my pleasure. The final draft contained not a single sentence from the first draft, it focused much more narrowly on just one thread -- how an academic program emerged from one of the many drama clubs on campus -- and was forty-some pages long with forty more pages of notes and sources, with an appendix listing every play performed between 1920s and 1979. That paper remains in the Duke Archives, and I'm proud to see it listed in their web site, and to learn that my work has served as a resource for other researchers in the years since.

There are two other anecdotes about him that I'd like to preserve here.

• One time we came to class prepared to discuss a sixty-page essay that he'd reserved for us in the library to read. He surprised us by telling us to take out a piece of paper for a pop quiz! He asked only one question: "Define 'belletristic.'" None of us had any idea. "Yet you came to class after reading that essay, you saw that word, and none of you was even curious as to what it meant?" He was scornful. How could we hope to learn if we skipped over what we didn't know? I never made that mistake again.

• He taught us to be careful to keep records of every source, every idea, and to keep these labeled and dated. I went out to buy a file cabinet, I started to use folders for different topics, and my whole approach to school work, and even to play, changed. I had to laugh, though, when he called me in for a conference. After some pleasantries, we both took out pads and we each made notes about what the other man was saying! It seemed to me that we could have saved time simply by writing down our own words and exchanging pads.

In my own teaching career, I've tried to give my junior high students a sense of what General Holley gave me.

The Sound and the Furry: Paws for Reflection

Reflection on THE SOUND AND THE FURRY by Spencer Quinn, latest in the Chet and Bernie detective series.  (Atria, division of Simon and Schuster, 2013.)

When a one-eyed bayou matron asks detective Bernie Little if he believes in heaven, Bernie answers, "I think it's right here...But in very small moments."  One page later in THE SOUND AND THE FURRY, Bernie hands a Slim Jim to his dog Chet, our narrator, who pauses to reflect, "What was all that talk about heaven and small moments?  Totally over my head... but for some reason I remembered it while I was downing that Slim Jim" (219).

That's as close as Chet gets to reflection, and as close as any book in this immensely fun series gets to theology, but it rings true.  Even during an ordeal underwater that has the reader panting for breath, Chet keeps up his own spirits, fighting for life moment to moment, wondering at his own endurance, the beauty of the moon: "And all around me sprang up tiny moons, bobbing on the water as far as I could see in every direction, beauties piled on beauty" (205).  Soon, from the moon, he hears Bernie's voice, "Doin' good, Chet, doin' good" (209).  These are moments of appreciation and love that sustain Chet through a hellish experience.

The author Spencer Quinn (pseudonym for Peter Abraham, a writer of suspense and YA mysteries) plays an extended game with us, moving the story forward on two tracks.  There's the Chet track, an exuberant and discursive inner monologue.  Then there's the Bernie track, moving the detective plot forward through canny questioning of people involved.  For instance, in Chapter Three, Bernie pushes for the straight story from his client Vannah, why she's hiring a detective in L.A. to find her brother-in-law in LA,, while Chet pushes under the desk to get at a bag of Cheetos.

The two tracks give us two kinds of language.  Much of Chet's narration dwells on telling observations of human body language, "one of my specialties" Chet tells us (279).  For instance, at an implied insult,

Bernie's head bobbed back the tiniest bit, kind of like he'd been hit.  He hadn't been hit ... but just the same I got ready to do something about it, hard to explain.  And at that very moment, I also felt Bernie's hand on my collar.  My brown collar, in case you're interested:  black is for dress-up. (31)

The Bernie track gives us repartee, as an appreciative bartender notes, "back-and-forth of witty nature" (53).   For example, after Bernie offers an addict fifty dollars for information, this exchange ensues:

"[Now] you're clean?" Bernie asked.

"Clean enough," said Mack.  "Maybe not squeaky."

Bernie lowered his bottle, gave Mack one of his direct looks.  "I'm paying for squeaky." (95)

In such dialogue, what's missing is more important than what's there, and it's not always just funny, as in this exchange between Bernie and drug dealer Cleotis, who has just recalled receiving $550 from the missing person at 9:10 p.m. the previous Saturday:

"You're very precise," Bernie said.

"This is a business," Cleotis said.  "I keep records."

"In your head?"

"It's that kind of business."

Bernie gave him a look.  "Someone like you --"

"Don't even say it," Cleotis said, the vagueness gone from his eyes now; in fact, they were a little too bright, in my opinion.

Bernie nodded. (152)

In the drug dealer's threatening silence, we get the self-knowledge and self-loathing that would have been diffused in some rant like "don't tell me I'm smart enough to be in a legitimate business.  You don't know the circumstances that brought me to this."

About the plot, I'm afraid that I was too wrapped up (or just rapt) by all those small moments of heaven that I didn't keep track of its ins and outs concerning shrimp, oil, and a gang from Texas.   But I appreciate the story for bringing us Chet's first exposure to the Mississippi River, New Orleans, rain, and an alligator.  It's typical yet delightful for Chet, facing the vast maw of an amphibian about to swallow him, to feel satisfaction at recognizing it from Animal Planet.

You've got to love a narrator like that!  Seriously.

Note:  See my reflection on Oblivion, a novel written by the same author under his true name, Peter Abrahams.

"What's Necessary to Salvation?": Wrong Question!

At St. James' Episcopal Church, Marietta GA, our associate rector Fr. Daron Vroon hit a grand slam with his sermon this morning, and here's my instant replay:

He took off with a line from today's reading in Isaiah 58: If you call the Sabbath a delight... then you shall take delight in the Lord.  He was commenting more directly on the story in Luke 13, in which authorities chide Jesus for healing a woman on the Sabbath, and Jesus retorts, "Which of you on the Sabbath does not untie his ox or his donkey... and lead him to water? And ought not this daughter of Abraham be set free from bondage on the Sabbath?"

Fr. Daron quickly summarized the usual take on this story:  It demonstrates that the old laws are not necessary to salvation.  Problems arise because Jesus doesn't speak here of faith v. works. and he says elsewhere (in Matthew, for example) that he comes to fulfill the law, not to eliminate even one letter of it.  Jesus certainly says nothing here about not honoring the Sabbath.  So,  "Is honoring the Sabbath necessary for Salvation?" Fr. Daron asked.  With a smile, he said, "Wrong question!"

Fr. Daron says that we Protestants are reading our old debates into Jesus' remarks. That would be "Isogesis."  Instead we should look for what to take away from them  - "exegesis."  (I'm reminded of my old pal Brad Mullis, now a rector in North Carolina, who used to claim that this terminology was confusing: "I looked in the Bible and I can't find this extra Jesus!") 

When we don't limit our reading to just that issue of salvation, what we see is a story of how the Sabbath means much more than the legalists saw.  "It's not an obligation," Fr. Daron said, "it's an opportunity for refreshment, healing, and worship."

He moved on to discuss how our prayer book, our liturgical calendar, and our own parish provides a lot more opportunities for refreshment, healing, and worship than just the Sunday service.  Instead of focusing on what's needed to "scrape by" into Heaven, our Anglican tradition is much more positive and rich.

I'd say that's a grand slam that rounded all the bases:   A reminder that Anglican theology has long emphasized the goodness of God's creation (including the Sabbath), a caution against the neo-legalistic focus on what's necessary for individual salvation, and a clear explanation of our numerous prayer and singing services for our many members and guests who come from other traditions.

Inspirational Vignette: Little Old Boy in Pool

This year, my first assignment for the seventh graders has been to write for their classmates an inspirational essay, 300 words, based on an anecdote.   The assignment purposefully blurs the lines between "story" and "essay," because the best parts of essays (and speeches, sermons, etc.) are always the narrative parts.  Also, the anecdote is best when there's strong sensory detail that encapsulates the whole scene for the reader.

One of my students has written of rescuing his little brother from the deep end of a pool.  The kicker of his essay is that his little brother got in the water again, and again tried for the deep end.

This reminded me of a unique experience that I'd like to share:

For one summer, I was Associate Director of a pre-school summer camp in Mississippi.  One of my charges was known by his initials as "R.A.," born with some condition that had kept him indoors, tied by feeding tubes to a machine.   At age four, he was finally weaned from the machine. But he looked like an old man:  bony, bald, wizened, bags under his eyes.  He had never run outside or gone swimming.  He'd had no playmates.

His first time at a swimming pool, he begged me to take him in.  He clung to me, and I recall not only the sharpness of his fingernails digging into my neck, but the hot tears that rolled from his eyes, down my cheek, because he was that close.  He trembled.  He was terrified as I waded with him through the water.  I offered to take him back to land, but he insisted:  he wanted more.

There's a lesson in how he felt such fear and, at the same time, such strong desire to live.

Forward Day by Day: Are We Secure Enough Yet?

Luis, who loves morning "quiet time"

Many mornings, once the coffee is brewing in the kitchen, I sit at an antique roll-top desk in a corner of my den, surrounded by photos of family and friends,  Luis the 13 - year - old dog at my side, and I read the day's meditation in Forward Day By Day.  This pamphlet is published quarterly and distributed through churches across the world (www.forwardmovement.org).   The jumping - off - point for each meditation is the scripture assigned for each day in the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.  This week, at the end of this quarter, before retiring the old pamphlet, I'll record insights that I underlined and starred with my right hand while Luis nudged my left to stimulate his morning massage between the ears.

June 5, Luke 17:20-37, "those who lose their life will keep it." Author Daniel Simons in boyhood "lived with low-grade anxiety" about the idea of the rapture.  "The irony is that Jesus was hoping for the opposite behavior.  ...Trying to make life secure is a sure way to anxiety: 'Is it secure enough yet? How about now?'  And conversely, when we invest deeply in what is now, where God is always present, we find that fear falls away."   A perpetual worrier myself, who has worried since June 5 about preparing for the upcoming school year, I'm grateful for a reminder to enjoy the sunshine and old Luis while I may.

June 6, 2 Corinthians 8:1-16.  Simons, an Episcopal priest who serves at Trinity Church, Wall Street, NY, NY, knows about poverty and homelessness.  Why, he wonders, do people with the least among us also show joy and generosity?  Simons rejects the folk notion that poverty produces joy, but "generosity in any situation creates more of itself," and the poor more quickly take the risk of sharing their little.  "Generosity is a gift that keeps on giving," he writes, and adds, "there are not too many times a day to say 'I love you.'"

June 10, Deuteronomy 30:1-10, "For the Lord will again take delight in prospering you....when you obey...."   Simons writes, "God's promise of blessing for good behavior is a comforting feature of religion, but it's only one end of a spectrum of God's relationship with us."  Jesus is at the other end, "God's presence in the midst of -- and not just in spite of -- catastrophe" for the innocent. 

June 12, 2 Corinthians 11:21 ff.  "I will boast of the things that show my weakness."  Simons points out that Paul, "in an inverted way, is bragging."  But "he is trying to point people beyond a sense of earned accomplishment... to something more radical: identifying with our weaknesses.  Why would anyone do that?"  Simons takes an idea from Buddhists, the "beginner's mind."  In meditation, they say, "see yourself as always beginning" instead of thinking how long you've been at it. 

My own worries and also new ideas for teaching after 33 years' experience reminds me that I'm always beginning.  Writing is the same way; as a teacher of writing, I should show kids that it isn't something that gets easier with experience; you only have more options to choose from.

June 15,  Luke 20:1-8, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I am doing these things."  Simons remembers as a young deacon being advised, "the deacon's primary work is to give the work away." In education as in church work, giving away responsibility "increases the collective power" of the group  "When authority is about control it often ends in death; when it is about invitation it leads towards life."

June 17, Acts 1: 1-14, "It is not for you to know the times or periods that the Father has set...."  Simons likes to know how things work, and the apostles want to know God's plans for them before they "dive in and live in" their lives of faith.  "That, in the end, might be the leap of faith:  not believing the unbelievable, but stepping into an experience without the answer."

June 22, Acts 4:32-5:11, the story of Ananias and Sapphira, who kept back some of the proceeds from a land sale when they said they were giving all to the Church.  When Peter calls them on their lie, they fall dead at his feet.  "Their sin is solely their self-inflation -- saying that their gift was the entire sale price.  This was a version of 'keeping up with the Joneses,' since other believers were also selling their possessions to contribute to the new church."   Peter says they were deceiving God,

And since this is impossible, it is really about deceiving the self.  And what is so damaging about self-deception is that when we do it, we cut ourselves off from ourselves.  Conscience gets dull; we can't orient to truth, to the greater good of the community. It happens imperceptibly.  ...[Let's reflect on] where our own integrity might need a tune up.

Beyond Belief in My Bright Abyss by Poet Christian Wiman

Reflection on My Bright Abyss: Meditations of a Modern Believer by Christian Wiman (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013).

Wiman during interview with Bill Moyers. See www.OnBeing.org

Christian Wiman's slender but rich book My Bright Abyss is the author's attempt to complete a poem he started years ago:

My God my bright abyss
into which all my longing will not go
once more I come to the edge of all I know
and believing nothing believe in this:

He tells us that he'd hoped to distill his theology into a single rhymed stanza.  Now it takes him 182 pages of prose to reach some tentative conclusions.  But why should we pay attention to what a poet believes?   Neither theologian nor clergyman, Christian Wiman writes with authority, stemming both from his years in extreme pain at the edge of death, and from a poet's disciplined habit of weighing alternatives to every word or image he chooses, to find just the one that hits the truth.  (read my article about some of his poems here)

He anchors many of his theological meditations to the world of things with some strong anecdotes.  At age 12, he alarmed and awed the congregation at his small Texas town's fundamentalist church when he fled the altar call crying; he does not understand what happened to him.  He tells us how his unexamined belief system (my words, not his) melted when he went away to college, and how he transferred "that entire searching intensity onto literature" (34).  He pays tribute to his Grandmother, with her intuitive and deep appreciation for the world of her senses, and to her mentally challenged sister, his "Aunt Sissy," waitress in a roadside café (36), and wonders at the difference between their final moments in hospital.  There's a period of travel and short-lived love affairs encapsulated in a poem set in a Prague apartment, where a falcon alights outside the window (44). 

Most of the book draws on Wiman's overarching story of the turnaround in his own life:  poet, editor of Poetry magazine, he found the love of his life, rediscovered faith with her (they step into a church on a whim, 68), and, shortly after, was diagnosed with a rare incurable cancer.  A remarkable set of pages were written years apart: He writes that the "still small voice" of God in Isaiah is both "more powerful" than whirlwinds and earthquakes, but also "not altogether apart from them" (146), concluding that one may need to experience "terror and pain" to hear that voice. After a small space on the paper, he writes of how years have passed since he wrote the previous sentence, during which he has experienced great pain, but also the joy of twin daughters.  People wonder how he could "bring children into a situation so precarious," and he understands the question. "But then we see them offering each other flowers they've picked from the backyard ... or stopping amid their madcap play to kiss each other," and he asks, "How could we not have had them?  How could they not be?   How could such life, such love, ever have remained latent and dormant within us" (147)?

In a way, the whole book is an argument that Wiman has with himself over theology.  He sometimes thinks, "I'm simply wandering through a discount shopping mall of myth, trying to convince myself there's something worth buying" (117).  About dogma, he writes that it provides...

the ropes, clips, and toes spikes whereby one descends into the abyss [of knowledge of God].  But I am also a poet, and I feel the falseness -- or no, not even that, a certain inaccuracy and slippage, as if the equipment were worn and inadequate -- at every step.  (117)

As often happens with Wiman, he takes back the word "falseness" to find the more accurate word and image. Elsewhere, the whole passage is contradicted by a diarist who gives up on finding modern substitutes for "annoying" words such as "humility" and "grace," because "these are word-vessels ... saturated with content through ages of thought and use...." (Anna Kamienska, 141).  For another example, no sooner has Wiman developed the appealing idea,"Silence is the language of faith. Action -- be it church or charity, politics or poetry -- is the translation," weak in the ways of all translations, than he qualifies his own analogy, reminding himself that silence loses its power without those actions (107).  Similarly, faith that isn't held in common, i.e., with a church community, is only ego (127).  He has no truck with vague new age spirituality, either, quoting George Lindbeck: "You can no more be religious in general than you can speak language in general" (141).

Wiman's central tenet comes to us in opposites.  When he makes his striking observation that "pain islands you" (148), he writes with the authority of one whose bones have cracked from cancer growing inside the marrow.  With the same authority, he turns that around, telling us that pain actually joins us to each other and to God through Christ's suffering at the moment that he cried out My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?   He is a Christian for this, not for the hope of resurrection or the truth of Christianity compared to other religions, or because of his childhood in the church:

• I am a Christian because I understand that moment of Christ's passion to have meaning in my own life, and what it means is that the absolutely solitary and singular nature of extreme human pain is an illusion.  [Not suggesting that "ministering angels" will comfort you, but] that Christ's suffering shatters the iron walls around individual human suffering, that Christ's compassion makes extreme compassion -- to the point of death, even -- possible. (155)

Wiman's faith and literary tastes meet where "insight is still sight" (119), between opposites of mere matter and abstract ideas.  Among poets at these poles are William Carlos Williams, whose verse focuses on things, and Robert Lowell "who had such a tremendous imagination for language but so little for other people" (46).  In between, Wiman gives us Richard Wilbur's "Hamlen Brook": drinking from a stream, the speaker pauses to notice the life under the surface, shadows deeper, the reflections on the surface, and finally, the satisfaction of the drink that comes with "an ache / Nothing can satisfy" (120).  Wiman reprints this to illustrate how "some singular aspect of reality... seems to acquire a life in excess of itself" giving us a feeling "more complicated than joy," because that "excess" keeps going while the perception of the thing is instantly lost in time: "to name is to praise and lose in one instant.  So many ways of saying God" (119). 

He writes admiringly of the "devotional poets of death" among the modernists, especially Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, Samuel Beckett, and Camus, and dismisses the postmodernists who value "nothing more than anything else" (50).  But while he once believed that "concentration on death concentrates life" and "Death is the mother of beauty," his ideas changed when death stopped being an abstraction (57-58). 

But he doesn't go for the conventional idea of afterlife, either, for a beautifully simple reason: "Death is here to teach us something, or to make us fit for something" (105).  It has to be final.  He makes a strong case that life is change, and the popular idea of "life" eternal, self intact, but without choices, without suffering, without anything left to complete -- is a contradiction in terms.   

Two chapters struck me strongly, and I'll take another blog post or two just to deal with those, "Hive of Nerves" and "God is Not Beyond."