Sondheim's FOLLIES "Encore"

In the early 70s, influential critics at the New York Times panned Stephen Sondheim's first two collaborations with director Harold Prince, COMPANY (1970) and FOLLIES (1971). In spite of those reviews, the musicals garnered much favorable critical attention and Tony Awards. Still, those reviews contributed to a popular conception of Sondheim as "cold," "cerebral," unhummable, and "too clever by half."

This weekend, the paper's head critic Ben Brantley sets the record straight, reviewing a concert staging of FOLLIES in Broadway's "Encore!" series:

The brittle shield of ice that was once widely believed to encase anything Stephen Sondheim wrote continues to melt apace. On the heels of John Doyle’s intense back-to-back revivals of “Sweeney Todd” and “Company” on Broadway, this “Follies” definitively tears off the stigma of cerebral chilliness that was attached to it when it opened 35 years ago.
Directed and choreographed with winning sensitivity by Casey Nicholaw, and acted with a blend of complexity and clarity that rarely happens in musicals, the Encores! “Follies” opens a floodgate to a dizzying rush of feeling from the first strains of its overture. That opening music, conducted by Eric Stern, glitters with grandeur, lyricism and an uneasy undercurrent of fragility. It is the sound of beauty with fracture lines, just about to crack.

Another recent article by Gina Bellafonte contains comments about the current revival of COMPANY directed by John Doyle. She, too, corrects earlier failure of perception:

“Company” seems so sophisticated now partly because of its prescience. It opened a few months before the publication of “Play It as It Lays,” Joan Didion’s deadening novel of ... the psychological consequences of a ruptured national morality. “Company” is unquestionably a cheerier affair, however much it resists its own optimism, but no less ambivalent an indictment of the sexual libertinism to which the 1960s gave sanction.

...It has been fashionable to think of “Company” as an endorsement of marriage steeped in resignation and reserve. But the show lacks the dismissiveness that that interpretation implies. This production suggests that a marriage, or a lasting one, anyway, is not about a union of two impassioned souls forged against the world. It is a communal enterprise, its success sustained by the order of social life.

None of this is news to me. FOLLIES has sent shivers up and down my spine since the first time I heard a scratchy LP of it, and finally seeing it on Broadway in 2002 (?)
showed me even more than I'd expected. I've seen several productions of COMPANY, and I played "David" in a production at Duke University in 1979, but it wasn't until I saw a couple of productions in one year that it deeply moved me: one production on a small "mod" set of trapdoors and platforms reminiscent of "Laugh-In" at Actors Express, Atlanta, and the wonderful big production (directed by orchestrator Jonathan Tunick) at the Kennedy Center Sondheim Celebration in the summer of 2002.

Following that celebration, Ben Brantley wrote similar thoughts: "After seeing the six musicals in this series, I began to think that Mr. Sondheim may be the most emotional composer in the history of musicals." He points out that earlier productions hadn't the "clarity" of the later ones.

Directors and actors may be better at realizing what Sondheim and his collaborators were doing. Possibly, without the pressure of creating a new thing, later directors have been able to focus their productions more acutely.

"A Doorway into Thanks": Mary Oliver's Thirst

(response to THIRST, poems by Mary Oliver, 2006)

Everyone expects some virtuosity in art. "Even I could do that!" means the painting (or poem, or song) isn't even worth disliking. I've heard people say that about music by John Adams, and they were mistaken (see earlier blog entries on him). Now I'm tempted to say the same things about these poems by Mary Oliver.

Take for instance the second poem in this collection, "Walking Home from Oak-Head." It begins with the phrase, "There's something about the snow-laden sky in winter. . . ." How many cards in the drug store right now begin the same way? "There's something about a Mother. . . There's something about a good friend. . . There's something about (fill in the blank). . . ." Then, Oliver's poem is about stopping by woods on a snowy evening. Whose idea this is, I think I know! Without the complex rhyme scheme in Frost's poem, this one proceeds in groups of little lines, each indented one step beyond the one before.
     Anyone
               can
                   do that.

Yet, I'll admit it: there really is something about a snow-laden sky in winter that causes "elation," just as Oliver says, and I'm kind of glad that she made me remember it. And when she describes the snow's falling "casually, then irrepressibly," that's nice, too, though not remarkable.

We expect, if not virtuosity in word play and compression, then at least some kind of insight that might not have occurred to us. Here, again, Mary Oliver finds some angles on things that, while not revelatory, are at least pleasantly reminiscent. There's a poem from the perspective of the patient donkey in the gospel that bears Jesus into Jerusalem, whose burden turns out to be -- as Jesus said in another context -- light. Several poems here focus on a dog named Percy, or maybe a series of dogs named Percy, whose cavorting on the beach provides me with vicarious pleasure and reminds me to try to accept the present as dogs do. My own pups teach me the same lesson.

Now, this particular collection of poems is, I understand, a departure for Ms. Oliver. She's had a reputation for politically stringent, environmentalist verse. But this book collects poems published in such periodicals as The Episcopal Times, Spiritus, and Nature and Spirituality. Following the death of a long-time partner, Mary Oliver went into an orthodox Christian church - whether RC or Episcopal, I'm not certain. Several poems here refer to newfound faith, prayer, and eternal life. Has faith made her "soft?"   [See a short worship service that's a collage of poems mostly from Thirst]

One insight does emerge from the collection, which, along with those pleasant images and reminders, is enough for me to want to keep this collection nearby. It is that poetry and prayer and perhaps even the secret to a good (and eternal) life is simply what she describes in a poem called "Praying." You "pay attention" and "patch a few words together"...

                             . . .this isn't 
a contest but the doorway

into thanks, and a silence in which
another voice may speak.

That feels right. Poetry, like prayer, doesn't have to be about virtuosity. I'm satisfied with any "doorway into thanks."

Met Opera's First Emperor Banishes Critics

(response to the Metropolitan Opera's high-definition broadcast of THE FIRST EMPEROR, a new opera by Tan Dun and Ha Jin, and to a couple of reviews of it in the NY Times and Atlanta Journal Constitution.)


When I couldn't drop everything, fly to NYC, and buy a $400 ticket to see the Met Opera, I had to take the word of critics. Now, with high definition live broadcasts to a big screen movie theatre in Atlanta, I can see for myself how wrong the critics were. The creators of THE FIRST EMPEROR, from librettist and composer through to the designers and choreographers, right on down to the performers - even the chorus and orchestra - showed imagination, ingenuity, and evident pleasure in creating a dramatic spectacle that is a world apart from anything else I've seen.

As we hear some alien sounds from the orchestra, a visitor from Chinese opera appears in front of a vast curtain depicting the unfinished wall of China and Chinese characters. This visitor, "Yin Yang Master" with a mocking red face front and a demure masked face behind, sets the tone for the epic story: beware irony, he seems to say. He sets the action two thousand years ago.

The curtain opens on breathtaking spectacle and sound. Stairs occupy the whole stage from curtain back to its upper reaches. The chorus is arrayed in rows dressed as soldiers modeled on the famous clay modeled soldiers of that time. It's several minutes before we hear anything that sounds like our Western music. The Yin Yang Master screeches and laughs, the chorus slaps its thighs in rhythm, and even the orchestra is shouting, growling, and whooping on cue. In front, a line of serious looking men bang drums with stones, and knock or rub the stones together. A percussionist in costume knocks ceramic pots that make bell-like sounds.

When Placido Domingo enters, he demands "Silence!" and calls for a new kind of music to replace this ancient sound. (In a documentary feature at intermission, we learn that Tan Dun based this opening sequence on pictures and literary descriptions of the music of the time, though no one knows how the instruments were played.) Domingo as Emperor Xin (for whom "China" is named) sets up the metaphor that shapes the entire opera, the yin and yang of Music and Silence, Light and Shadow. He calls for his old friend, his cellmate from a time in his life when he was jailed, a composer whom he calls "Shadow."

When Shadow is captured by Xin's prospective son-in-law the general, the conflicts of the piece are clear at once. The general loves Xin's daughter, while the princess (petulant, energetic, and disabled by a childhood injury to her legs) is immediately interested in her father's "shadow," and the composer himself defies the emperor whose army leveled his village, enslaved his people, and killed his mother. Motivating the plot, Xin is determined to have a piece of music that will unify his vast empire. We sense, then, that some piece of music will somehow be the climax of this opera, and we've been warned that it won't be what the emperor ordered.

Along the way to the end, we have great moments.

There is the romance between Princess and Composer, which miraculously restores her ability to walk. He won't eat or speak or even open his eyes, in defiance of the emperor; she extracts a promise from her father that she can marry him if she can make him speak. This is a wonderful seduction scene, in which the action is amplified by lurking presences behind the actors: percussionists bowing hand-held bells, and dancers making suggestive moves glimpsed under the stairs.

There is a scene of a chorus of slaves building the Great Wall, singing of their only dream: to lie in a grave on a hill side near home. Tan Dun's music here is notable for simplicity and sparse accompaniment - mere glances of orchestral sound - and for extremely long diminuendos. As they sing in their drab slaves' costumes, the Composer wanders among them dressed finely in blue. He is now the Princess's lover and Emperor's employee.

During a thrilling orchestral interlude, we watch the ceremonial dressing of the Composer for the Emperor's inauguration, at which the long-awaited national anthem will be heard.

The final scene is a grand spectacle that begins with the conventional song of praise that the Emperor would expect. By the end, however, the Composer has had his most-appropriate revenge.

Alien as the setting and some of the music was, there were also many parallels to traditional operas. The doting Verdi father is here; the willful and erotic Princess Salome is here; the chorus of Hebrew slaves from Nabucco is referenced. And, of course, the Emperor is MacBeth. Having fought his way to the top of the world, he has lost everything that made the triumph worth having -- friendship, family, love, and respect. His triumph is a mockery of him, and a tragedy for his kingdom.

Critics said that the audience was bored, that the opera needed extensive cutting, that Domingo looked ridiculous, that the story line was unclear. Sorry, critics: we've seen it with our own eyes, and you're way off-base.

Anticipation and Dread: Robert Olen Butler's Fiction

reflection on HAD A GOOD TIME: Stories from American Postcards by Robert Olen Butler (Grover Press, 2004).

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.

What I've described sounds perhaps like a formula, along the lines of O'Henry, and Butler's work is anything but formulaic. More than any creative artist I know (besides Stephen Sondheim and Tom Stoppard), he keeps challenging himself to wring quality from unlikely sources. In this collection from 2004, HAD A GOOD TIME, each story is his extrapolation from actual postcards from the 1890s to 1920s. An earlier collection TABLOID DREAMS took off from headlines he found in the National Enquirer, and one of those stories, "Help Me Find My Spaceman Lover" was the basis of his novel MR. SPACEMAN. The collection that I read first was A GOOD SCENT FROM A STRANGE MOUNTAIN, in which every story concerns Vietnamese immigrants living in the area of New Orleans.

I'm still working on my own interpretation of something he remarked in the radio interview that brought him to my attention back around 1990. The interviewer pointed out that Butler, a Vietnam War veteran, had been labeled as a "political writer." Butler agreed that his writing was political, but not in the way that people usually mean. Parties, policies, and beliefs, he said, are all superficial signs of any person's political core, which he says is much deeper, established very early in life.

If I were to try to put Butler's creed into words, it would be like my own effort to define Sondheim's creed. It would have something to do with deep empathy, understanding even repulsive people. Get beyond class, race, groups, careers, beliefs - and you reach the unique and valuable person. The Christ-like alien in MR. SPACEMAN prepares himself to reveal the truth of our universe by walking among us, trying to experience our daily grind, and by using a brain scanner to inhabit the stories of people he plucks up from Louisiana to his spaceship. I'm reminded of an emblematic line from Flannery O'Connor, "Even the meanest among them sparkled."

Another element of his creed would be that violence never achieves its perpetrators' real objective.

So it's with a mixture of anticipation and dread that I'm going to look for his latest collection, SEVERANCE, which grows from his most daunting, least promising, challenge to himself: Each story is what goes through the mind of an individual during the estimated ninety seconds of consciousness left when the head has been severed from the body.

Cartoon Puzzles: The Real Intelligent Design

(Reflections on THE NEW YORKER BOOK OF CARTOON PUZZLES AND GAMES by a team of writers who call themselves "Puzzability." Foreword by Will Shortz and Robert Mankoff. Also, a report on NPR's Morning Edition about the efficacy of crossword puzzles for staving off senility. Memories of another novelty book in French "Mots De Gousses, Rames" )

If you don't believe in God, this may change your mind:

From thousands of cartoons printed in THE NEW YORKER over the decades, eight appear on pp. 116-117 of CARTOON PUZZLES AND GAMES. One word is omitted from each caption. The letters of one missing word overlap letters of the next one, and so on: waver, averages, start, tartan...and so on. That's pretty cool But arrange them in order in a grid, coiling from the outer squares to the inside, and all the letters down the middle of the grid spell the caption of a ninth cartoon.

That's what I call "intelligent design." And survival of the fittest has nothing to do with it.

When I work this puzzle, I think exactly what Will Shortz says in his introduction. (He's the NY Times' affable puzzle editor, familiar to me from years of hearing him on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday). "I haven't just solved something, I've discovered something that's pretty. And I don't know how the people who put this together did it."

A gift from my friend Kitty Drew, this book makes me shake my head in disbelief, even while I'm laughing at cartoons and working through possible solutions to the different styles of puzzle. Shortz makes another apt observation: "When the incongruous parts of a cartoon come together, you want them to come together in a rush -- a snap. That's what produces a burst of laughter. It's the same thing with puzzles." Some of these cartoons are by Charles Addams, whose Addams Family cartoons are etched deep in my memory from around age 5.

That experience of "snap," when incongruous things suddenly fit, and when everything works vertically, horizontally, meaningfully, humorously - well, that's what you get in Bach, in Stephen Sondheim's lyrics and music, in a staging of Tom Stoppard's best plays (Arcadia, foremost). An earlier blog entry quotes Duke Ellington when he said that the "snap" (he called it "the fitting") was the same as happiness.

For me, this is evidence of God. Sure, logical positivists say that such puzzles should make me believe in the capacity of the human brain, not in a supernatural being. Fair enough. But, what on earth explains anyone's desire to put together such totally useless wonders as these?

I'm reminded of a small book I saw twenty-five years ago, apparently in French. I say apparently, because it's actually in English. Under the pretense of collecting folk lyrics from provinces in medieval France, with all the obscure imagery explained in copious footnotes, the author actually was giving the reader Mother Goose Rhymes (he called it "Mots de Gousses, Rames") with a thick French accent. For example, a poem ostensibly about a drought that reduced one apple harvest in the 14th century begins, "Pie terre, pie terre / Pommes qui n'y d'aire" ("pity earth, pity earth / apples that never reach the air"). When read aloud in French, it produces "Peter Peter Pumpkin eater." Got it? That guy didn't do it for money or popularity; few people could "get" the joke. Did it help him to propagate the species? Naw. Did he have too much time? What motivates someone to do something like that?

For me, writing music is satisfying in the same way. And, just as I don't go back to revisit crossword puzzles I've completed, I don't think often about the songs I've written -- only the next one.

In case anyone needs another reason, there's some evidence that exercising the brain in mid-life builds up a "cognitive reservoir" that ameliorates the inevitable effects of the brain's aging. Crossword puzzles, along with mentally stimulating work and continuing education (learning an instrument or a language) serve that purpose, according to a report on this morning's NPR.

Round 'n' Round with Poets 'n' Dogs

(references to a review in POETRY of Dec. 2006, a review by Joel Brouwer, poet-blogger Greg Rappleye's review of Brouwer's review, and my own review of Brouwer's own poem.)

I'm amused. A day after shaking my head over those literalists who deny that any interpretation is involved in their reading of Scripture (see my review of Rob Bell's VELVET ELVIS) , I find this statement by Irish poet Paul Muldoon, quoted with commentary by Brian Phillips in POETRY:

"The poem is, after all, the solution to a problem only it has raised, and our reading of it necessarily entails determining what that problem was." But since this process is inevitably speculative, it also means that the reader creates the writer, that we can bring to reading anything we like, that the poem has no end.

The "problem" is to communicate an experience with any inner effects or reflections, as succinctly as possible. Of course, ye literalists, of course, the readers will bring their own background to an interpretation. We know this from the usual Law School Jury 101 experiment, in which the class witnesses some extraordinary event and immediately writes accounts of the event that disagree. When the event is also meaningful, the room for interpretation expands.

Minutes after reading the review in POETRY, I was checking blogs for comparisons to my own review of Joel Brouwer's wonderful poem "A Report to the Academy" (see "Joining the Moments, Enjoying the Moments", Dec. 10). Along the way, I found an illustration of this phenomenon: two poets disagree on how to read a third poet, and I disagree with both!

The blogger-poet Greg Rappleye at Sonnets at 4 a.m. decries "Joel Brouwer's ice-axing of Roy Jacobstein's A Form of Optimism (Northeastern University Press, 2006); a review that appears in this morning's New York Times Book Review. "

Rappleye presents the following poem by Jacobstein, and follows with his own comments:

THE DOG RACES IN FLORIDA

He can't stop thinking
of his mother, contorted
in her last bed, her voice

Running to empty, able
only to repeat A point, I need
a better point, and unbidden,

he flashes to the dog track
in Florida, the loudspeaker
growling over its own static

Here comes Swifty--and they're off!:
a mass of yelping greyhounds
chasing that tiny tin rabbit

trailing the black Buick coupe.
Around and around the tamped
dirt the pack strains. Anyone

would have bet the dogs
had learned by now no matter
how fast they run, Swifty runs

faster. Then the point breaks
clear: They know and run anyway.*

I read the poem as an original (and nearly cynical) comment on the futility of life; a suggestion that many of us will choose to go on living in futility no matter how unwise that choice is. I do not read it as a sentimental comment about anyone's mother, as a sweet insight about the "Great Chain of Life" metaphor, or whatever it is that Brouwer claims the poem to be.

So Rappleye sees cynicism in Jacobstein’s poem, and Brouwer sees a sentimental message in it.

What I bring to Jacobstein’s poem is the way my dogs enjoy running for its own sake, chasing and barking at each other with no "point." So, I don't see the cynicism, and I don't see the sentimental message "Life goes on," but I do see an insight that I consider to be more positive than either: that the "point" is beside the point, as running is what the dogs do well and enjoy. Good for Swifty, too bad about the mother who wanted more.

Enjoyed as well the fact that Brouwer in his review derides "the 'anecdote + reflection = insight' school", while my whole review of his poem makes much of the fact that it reports an insight reached by reflection on an anecdote.

Teaching Technology When the Power Goes Out

(This is a response I've drafted for a report to the National Writing Project, for which I've participated in a group of teachers looking for ways to use technology in the classroom "more thoughtfully." Education )

In the first minutes of our team's first meeting, the power went out campus-wide, and we were left in the dark for a couple of hours, leading immediately to the question, "What's our back-up plan if the technology fails?"

Since then, that question has broadened to this one: "What do we teach with technology that couldn't be learned as well without it?" Collaboration, research, editing, and writing for a broad audience have always been possible and desirable in the classroom, and posting a piece of writing to the internet now makes all those experiences much easier to achieve. Still, that's old learning, just speeded up, and techno-phobes could thereby argue that technology is a luxury, not a necessity.

But, in developing our workshops, we all found ourselves addressing the dangers posed by the easy flow of shallow or false information, the rhetorical manipulation of visual elements such as images and layouts, and the digressive nature of text that allows a reader to jump to hyperlinks instead of following any thought to a logical or nuanced conclusion. Of course, these are all opportunities, too, for those who have a critical appreciation of them.

To be discerning citizens, our students must develop the appreciation both for the old-fashioned kind of long-form, developed writing, and for the new kind that develops in bits of verbal and visual text.

Rob Bell's "Velvet Elvis": Seeing Through Brick Walls

(Velvet Elvis: Repainting the Christian Faith by Rob Bell, 2005 - a Christmas gift from friend Dr. Roger Wilk.)

Rob Bell's title Velvet Elvis comes from a painting the author found, which the artist signed simply, "R." Bell imagines that the artist was so proud of his work that he didn't bother identifying himself, as he expected to be known through the ages anyway, as the one who painted the last, greatest, all-sufficient work of art. Of course, that's absurd. That's how Bell introduces his main concept: Christianity, as we've received it, is a picture from its time. It's great. But God wasn't finished when it was.

Bell's ideas seem to me to be pretty mainstream, at least in the Episcopal Church, but they are presented colloquially and packaged to appeal to people who grew up in the 90s. The cover depicts a young man in baggy jeans falling through darkness, the type is sans serif, and the page numbers are computer-ish (e.g., "p. 54" is "054"). Bell makes wise guy asides, and his pages are good for readers raised on USA Today and internet chat rooms: lots of paragraphs consist of six words or less. Much of what he says also finds expression in my blog entries, especially in the idea that the story of Adam and Eve and the story of the Exodus happen to us as individuals, to us as a community -- again and again. It hardly matters if they happened once in history.

Bell wants to appeal to those put off by people he calls "brickians." Brickianity is Bell's word for seeing every doctrine as a hard brick. Brickians' main concern isn't life, but life hereafter, and that's threatened if even one brick is pulled out, because the whole wall will tumble.

Bell offers a counter image, faith as a trampoline that supports and exhilarates, and doctrines as the flexible springs. He gives the virgin birth of Jesus as an example, merely showing how the story of the Virgin Mary can justifiably be accounted for in more than the literal way. If we learned that "virgin" could mean simply "young wife," he asks rhetorically, "Is the way of Jesus still the best way to live?"

But huffy bloggers, brickians all, read Bell's gentle, self-deprecating book as an attack, arrogant, deliberately controversial. That passage that points out reasonably how the story of the Virgin birth just might be read as something other than the writer's account of an historical event gets singled out in blogs for particular invective. The story (never mentioned in other gospels, or in any of the writings of Paul or other epistles) is defended as a "core" belief, demonstrating what Bell said about Brickians: unable to read the Bible as what it is (not a book, but a library), they feel threatened by light thrown on any doctrine.

One blogger who thinks he's being clever observes that a trampoline can work without some of those springs. Well, right, that's Bell's point exactly. Another blogger goes on to assert that every word of the Bible, right down to the verb tenses, represents a choice made by the creator of the universe. What a difference it would make if the blogger would see what's obvious, that every word and verb tense is a choice made by (1) a human writing about what he remembers and (2) several intermediary editors, translators, copyists, and councils, and (3) that doesn't make any of it a lie -- any more than any other memoir or textbook -- and it is to be read with consideration for the source(s) as any other writing would be.

I'm reminded of three influences that brought me out of "brickianity" :

• Four years of study with the Education for Ministry program out of the Episcopal School of Theology from University of the South at Sewanee. (I suspect that Bell isn't aware how his ideas resonate with traditional Episcopal theology. He does make references to "empty ritual," in which I detect a whiff of his scorn for the Episcopal church.)

• "Repaintings" of the gospel in the fiction of Flannery O'Connor, Graham Greene, and especially in THE BOOK OF BEBB by Frederick Buechner (see my essay on that at My Favorite Novel )

• The root of it all: a walk across the main quad at Duke's East Campus fall of 1978. I was in distress, because my fundamentalism was threatened by an acquaintance whose literal reading of the Bible led to what seemed like an inescapable (and repugnant) conclusion. My friend Kendrick Mills, serenely Catholic, just laughed. "My God isn't so petty!" he said. He once asked me, incredulously, "So, you're faith depends on proof?"

Let the brickians tend their wall. I prefer Bell's vision, especially in a personal passage where he describes some moments of extreme joy and significance in his life when God spoke to him without Scripture. These are coupled with examples from Scripture of Paul and early Christians quoting pagan sources for the truths found there. He's trying to show that the Bible, like the Velvet Elvis, contains enough to live on. The English prayer book said as much in its earliest preface - 1549 -- but thank God for the contributions of later artists, composers, playwrights -- and religious thinkers.

New Episcopalians: Are You Comfortable?

(Reflections on a parish meeting and survey. Religion )

I'm a card-carrying partisan of the Episcopal Church. When our parish survey asked, "Why do you come to St. James Church?" I realized that I attend first, because it's Episcopalian. That it's a small, welcoming church is secondary. I wonder if we take for granted that everyone who attends fully appreciates our distinctive qualities?

Here's a draft of something that might answer some FAQs, fitting on a laminated card peeking out from behind the prayer books and hymnals. It's intended to highlight some of the Church's wonders, to explain parts that might seem alien. I welcome comments -- click on "comments" below to amend my draft, or to explain why this is a bad idea.

Are you comfortable?
While we hope that the Episcopal Church feels right to you, we realize that our church doesn't fit well with secular culture.

We are comfortable with silence.

Our music's more than fast or slow, happy or sad. Some of the music has been heard in churches for over 1000 years, and some is new. Our music sometimes expresses awe, yearning, anguish, or peace. Our lyrics are sometimes in the original languages of ancestors; other words are thought-provoking poetry.

Our service involves everyone. It's not a show or a class. While clergy lead the service, we all read, we move, we pray together, pray in silence, we sing, we eat and drink. The sermon is one part, not the core, of our worship. The focus is always on how God reaches to us.

We're traditional and modern. We are comfortable with the latest technology, and we're engaged in world events; yet we share prayers and practices with worshippers across the centuries.

We are comfortable with tension. We can agree to disagree, united in worship.

We think of faith as an action, not just a belief. It's what you do, trusting in God. We're comfortable with the fact that faith can change with maturity and understanding.

We believe that God still speaks. Our lectionary takes us through God's word every three years; we study the Bible and our prayers come from Scripture. We also believe that God continues to speak to us through reason and experience.

Rumsfeld's Conscience

(Response to Rumsfeld's resignation. News and History | Religion )

This isn't the first time that Donald Rumsfeld has left the helm of the Defense Department to someone else, under fire from all sides. It will be the last. Combative to the end, he has tried not to show the doubts that must roil within him. Here's some of what he said at the ceremony honoring his retirement Friday:

"It may well be comforting to some to consider graceful exits from the agonies and, indeed, the ugliness of combat. But the enemy thinks differently," Rumsfeld said at the ceremony.... "Ours is a world of unstable dictators, weapon proliferators and rogue regimes, and each of these enemies seeks out our vulnerability," he said. "Ours is also a world of many friends and allies, but sadly, realistically, [these are] friends and allies with declining defence investment and declining capabilities," he added.

(source: TV New Zealand, tvnz.nz.co)

A retrospective piece at National Public Radio ended with news that hasn't been headlined these past few years, that Rumsfeld and his wife have made regular visits, every two or three days, to Walter Reed Medical Hospital to cheer up injured soldiers. We also heard a snippet of Rumsfeld's own taped message to the troops, how he wished that he could meet every individual soldier, "look you in the eye, shake your hand" and express appreciation for courage and "professionalism."

As an actor, I see these bits of the Rumsfeld script and sense the effort it takes him to convince himself that, in spite of everything, he has done the right thing. Those visits to Walter Reed show in those words "agonies" and "ugliness," and he clearly has wanted to find a "graceful exit." But "the enemy" has determined his choices, and he is aware that the price is being paid by those soldiers.

Is there any other way? Does religion apply, here? "What Would Jesus Do?" is a fair question to guide one's personal decisions, but Jesus never accepted the role of King that others put on him. An individual can shame an enemy by "turning the other cheek," and an individual can choose martyrdom. But for a leader to "turn the other cheek" submitting his people to suffering for the sake of his own conscience -- that's unthinkable. There are kings and "judges" in the Hebrew Scriptures, and they are often advised by God to do things that don't seem worldly wise -- to march around Jericho silently without attacking, or to go into battle against the larger force just trusting in God, or to send a shepherd boy into battle against the other side's champion. They also do "ugly" things, as when the wily Jews pretend to accept the other's side's peace offering -- that is, the men of the other side will undergo the Hebrew rite of circumcision -- and, in the enemy's vulnerable state, massacre every man and enslave every woman.

Rumsfeld has clearly been considering other options. Could we step back a pace and seek a more united front with our friends and allies? Rumsfeld says no, they won't measure up. Could we retreat within our borders, take a defensive posture, and work for containment? Rumsfeld perhaps dismisses these options too easily in that line about "a world of unstable dictators, weapon proliferators, and rogue regimes," especially when he adds that "each ... seeks out our vulnerability." Truly, not one of those enemies seeks more than self-importance and self-perpetuation. Attacking the US in rhetoric mostly, in sneaky assaults through small terrorist cells sometimes, is a way to maintain power in lands shaken with feelings of inferiority and failure, where self-respect depends on having an outside force to blame.

There's also this issue of our own credibility, and here's the trap in Iraq. We fear if we "cut and run" now, as we did in Vietnam, we embolden our enemies for now and for the future. But that's the thinking that kept us in Vietnam long after the best-informed leaders knew there was no hope. President Kennedy admitted privately in 1963 that we were achieving nothing by staying there, that he would remove us after he won re-election. His successor, facing a futile situation, swore that he'd not be the first President to lose a war. So we stayed in Vietnam another twelve years simply to "save face," at the cost of fifty-eight thousand men and the loss of everything we claimed to be fighting for.

There's another religious approach, from a different religion. The Hindu epic Bagavad-Gita begins with a Rumsfeld -- Prince Arjuna -- surveying his army in the moment before ordering an attack. Considering that it's a civil war, Arjuna shudders to think that no matter which side wins, both sides lose brave warriors and family. The rest of the epic occurs in the space of that first minute, as the god Vishnu demonstrates to the Prince that the apparent differences between wins and losses, death and life, enemies and friends -- are actually infinitesimal on the vast scale of real life. Vishnu concludes that the only thing a Prince can be responsible for is his own duty.

Now, if a Secretary of Defense becomes aware that the premises for his decisions are flawed, it is his duty to do something about it. In his last weeks in office, Rumsfeld submitted a gloomy report admitting as much. He, Cheney, and Bush attacked on the premises that Hussein was a participant in the vast Al-Qaeda conspiracy with WMDs on line, and that the Iraqi people were united in their desire to be rid of Hussein and that they would be grateful to us and ready to cooperate. Within a month of our invasion, all three of these premises were in doubt. The rest has been an effort to make the best of a bad mistake, and to turn it to good, somehow.

Here's where the promises of religion do come in. The truth is, no choice is final; God works through any situation; we do not need to be trapped by what we have already decided.

Sondheim - Bernstein - Weill: "Saga of Lenny"

( Sondheim's tribute to Leonard Bernstein. Drama | Music ) For Leonard Bernstein's 70th birthday celebration, Sondheim wrote new lyrics for "The Saga of Jenny" from the Kurt Weill - Ira Gershwin musical Lady in the Dark. Thanks to YouTube, we can watch Lauren Bacall singing it at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NIaqfNabeLQ .

Poor Lenny,
Ten gifts too many,
The curse of being versatile.
To know how bad the curse is,
Will need a lot of verses
And take a little Weill.

The lyrics cut perilously close to the bone, fingering sore spots in Bernstein's career -- i.e., the perennial complaint that Bernstein spread his talent too thin, the ridicule from some quarters that greeted his attempts to be "with it" (whether "it" was atonality or rock music) --

Lenny made his mind up
At forty-six
That maybe atonality
And rock would mix.
Though it certainly was serial,
With rhythm on top,
It had lots of snap and crackle,
But not enough pop.

-- and the painful and public upheaval that his family experienced when he "came out" and left his wife Felicia. In the song, Bernstein's mother Jennie is quoted as saying, about marriage, "I don't care if he picks a / Schlemozzle or a shiksa" if he'd just make up his mind. Sondheim doesn't shy away from these painful facts, but he turns them to humor, and builds to a generous and loving conclusion. I admire this greatly. The music cleverly incorporates hefty chunks of Bernstein's own music.

Two personal notes:

The pianist is Paul Ford, who accompanied the original casts of SUNDAY..., INTO THE WOODS, ASSASSINS, and the 1985 FOLLIES concert, not to mention his work with Mandy Patinkin. He was also the man who, fresh out of high school, was both teacher and pal at Atlanta's Northside School of Performing Arts during my summer there. He's the one who introduced me to the name of Stephen Sondheim, and he even tried to get me to see A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC with him during our field trip to New York in the summer or 1974 (but I saw RAISIN instead, to my ever-lasting regret). And Paul told me that his favorite musical (at that time) was LADY IN THE DARK. I still have a photocopy of "The Saga of Jenny" that he gave me.

Then, the video brings back memories for me, because I wrote Lenny a long letter for that 70th birthday, telling him honestly how much his music had (has!) meant to me from my very earliest memories of wearing out Mom's WEST SIDE STORY L.P., to the influence his MASS had on my own religious development, and finally to becoming a composer myself. I got a reply to "W. S. S.*" (with an asterisk: "*Did you notice that you have the same initials as West Side Story?") and a dream-come-true offer to meet with me to discuss a possible collaboration. A project with Peter Schaffer (another idol of mine) had stalled, and he was looking for someone else with a facility with language. I'm afraid that a follow-up phone conversation made clear that he was also looking for a worshipful young male companion, confirming the worst reports of him. Within the year, he had died.

Happily, the experience didn't sour me on his music, which still pushes my emotional buttons the way no other music does.

Sondheim's Religious Vision

(Regarding my own article: Drama | Music | Religion )


The 50th issue of The Sondheim Review (vol. 13, number two) contains an essay by yours truly under the heading "So Many Possibilities: Sondheim's Religious Vision."

UPDATE: After The Sondheim Review folded, I revised the article and re-posted it on this blog. See Sondheim's Religious Vision.

Joining the Moments, Enjoying the Moments

(response to a poem and two articles in an issue of POETRY, Dec. 2006)

This blog is one way I have to salvage something from days on end of mere busy-ness. Of course, my dogs live moment to moment, and their lives teeter between lazy contentment and eager anticipation -- and I love them for it. (They're celebrating the completion of breakfast by running up and down the stairs, barking at each other as I write.) Why should a human need more than that? Because our brains are organs for making sense of what we encounter, and making sense means finding a connection between any thing and everything else.

A poem works, if it works, by stringing together words and images that go together in some surprising way, and the poem in turn suggests a connection to something in our experience. Prose does the same thing, only the connections are visible a mile off and well-marked, making it easier to read but padding the impact with all those subordinate clauses and transitional phrases.

The latest issue of POETRY includes an apology for its publishing more prose than poetry. Evidently, the editors had slim pickings this time. They needn't apologize when the essays are so rewarding. One, "Humor Anxiety," touches on the theme I've mentioned in this blog before, the discovery that a good poem and a good joke have much in common. Another one by Australian critic Clive James considers the pros and cons of tightly constructed formal poetry in eight pages of loosely connected prose paragraphs. Along the way, James finds delightful similes and cites apt examples. But, like real life, you've lost some of those by the time you get to the end, and you wish you had a poem that could wrap it all up in a nutshell.

Then I flipped to the front of the magazine to read the poetry in it, and found just that poem, on page one.

The poem is by Joel Brouwer, author of two books of poetry and professor at the University of Alabama. It's called "A Report to the Academy." The whiff of ironic humor entices. At first, I couldn't get much sense from it, but I did get the outline of a little story: man alone on an all-night bus ride through New Jersey, passing both "starry refineries" and "cattail ditches." Been there, seen those. The rider, immersed in Kafka, is surprised to arrive "presto" at the Port Authority in the morning. He walks twenty blocks to the home where the soon-to-be mother of his child is asleep. He fixes her breakfast, and she wakes up and greets him.

That's the real life part, and not all that remarkable. But one line in it struck me as a clue to reading the scenes and thoughts together with something bigger than one man's bus trip. Lost in his book, arriving before he even noticed the scenery, he "has been cheated of . . . a considered fingering of his long / and polished rosary of second thoughts." If not distracted by Kafka, he'd have been worrying -- evidently about impending marriage, mentioned in the last couple of lines. On a hunch, I checked out Kafka's biography, and found, as I suspected, that the author never married, afraid of surrendering independence.

Why a rosary? Is it because it suggests prayer? Maybe, but certainly it's a useful image because it calls to mind a sequence of beads, fingered in a cycle, each of which is supposed to call to mind a specific image. This poem itself works that way. The poem mentions Kafka's times in a "sanatorium," echoing an earlier line about a green tile that reminded the young man of a sanatorium. When he cracks open eggs for breakfast, we remember the "egg-white" sky in the first line; and when we see the "taut carapace" of his lover's belly, it's another kind of egg containing an embryo. The rosary of images leads to a paradox: "that the knowledge that dooms a marriage / is the knowledge prerequisite to marriage." Yes, like Kafka, he wants to maintain his separate identity; yes, when she asks him "what have you brought us," he knows it's too late to go back to singleness; and, yes, he's not unhappy about it. The question is academic, hence the title.

In an essay "Listening for the Flavor," Clive James calls himself a "diehard formalist," but he seems very open-minded so long as a poet strings moments of experience or insight together. "Formality and informality are just two different ways of joining the moments up," James writes. He adds what I've known since I first learned to love rhyme, that

the formal poem has a better, not a worse, chance of joining the moments up, so that its ability to contain them, and intensify them with a symmetrical framework and a melodic structure, becomes a satisfaction in itself.

This calls to mind music, which works entirely through patterns set up and then somehow varied. Just as James writes of formal poetry as a "system for manufactured unpredictability," John Updike once depicted a priest in rehab who called Bach's music "machines" for setting up tension and release.

All of this is exemplified in Bouwer's poem. It doesn't rhyme, but its twenty-six lines run consistently ten syllables. It's a simple anecdote developed through moments of growing consciousness that reach their conclusion not through rhetoric or argument, but by images that repeat with variations. In the end, it's just a few moments that suggest more than moments: a momentous acceptance in the man's life. And we feel good about it.

Make Someone Happy: Remembering Betty Comden

(Occasioned by Betty Comden's death at 89 two days ago. Jeff Lunden's radio remembrance of her on NPR Saturday Weekend Edition is playing as I write.)

The closest I ever got to Betty Comden was in 1979, when I just missed a matinee of ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, the musical that she wrote with life-time collaborator Adolph Green and composer Cy Coleman. When star Imogene Coca took time off, Betty Comden filled in. A friend of a friend who saw her that week, commented that she looked "petrified." 

She was probably out of practice. In the Thirties, she and her pals Judy Holliday and Adolph Green wrote comedy sketches and song parodies because it was their only way to get on stage -- a very small stage at a cabaret, "The Village Vanguard." Holliday went on to become a beloved star, but Betty and Adolph kept getting turned down for performing gigs while they were chosen for writing scripts. When their buddy Lenny Bernstein asked them to write a musical play based on his ballet FANCY FREE, they wrote ON THE TOWN with parts for themselves.

From that time on, they were writing scripts and lyrics. In Hollywood, they wrote the script for that epitome of movie musicals, SINGING IN THE RAIN. On Broadway, they wrote scripts for the kinds of shows that filled theatres in the 50s, when costs were low, front row seats cost under $12, and creators were putting shows up and taking them down at a rate of one or even two per year. That is to say, these shows were flimsy and disposable, fun and light, not built to last. Does anyone remember their Fifties and Sixties shows SUBWAYS ARE FOR SLEEPING? DO-RE-MI? FADE IN, FADE OUT? BONANZA BOUND? Comden and Green wrote most often with Jule Styne, and none of their shows has been revived except PETER PAN and BELLS ARE RINGING (short-lived revival in '02). Another show with Bernstein, WONDERFUL TOWN, had more success, but only marginally, two years ago. By the late Sixties, Comden and Green's style seemed dated. Their attempt to be "with it" was a musical with an all-black cast starring Leslie Uggams, HALLELUJAH, BABY -- not a good experience, Styne said, years later. They wrote script-only for a big hit, APPLAUSE.

But Comden and Green weren't nonplussed. At least in public, they always remained the wide-eyed college graduates who were being allowed to play theatre with the professionals. I saw them on a Public TV talk show with composer-conductor Andre Previn, when they gleefuly challenged him to name any symphony by any composer, and they would be able to perform the tune of the third movement (usually the least flashy and least remembered part). And they did.


I got to know them through an LP called "A Party with Comden and Green," a Christmas present from Mom and Dad in 1977. In their "Party," recorded live, they joke through a retrospective of their career. The mood turns a bit more somber when they introduce some new material for a revue they wrote with Cy Coleman. Evidently, that revue was focused on the world of the near-future. For it, they wrote lyrics for a dissonant waltz called, "The Lost Word":

What was that word they wrote songs about?
Wrote poems about?
What was that word that made strong men weak?
And weak men strong?
...What was that word like a lightning flash,
That could change a life at first sight?

It's a lost word, from a lost world,
A powerful word from a lost world.
It had magic. It had music.
But it's vanished away. . .

I always guessed that this song expressed the regret of three Broadway vets who were feeling that America had passed them by. They wrote the lyric in the mid-70s, seeing how our culture had turned cynical about all our institutions including marriage. Obviously, the works of Stephen Sondheim spoke to such disillusionment. (They admired Sondheim unabashedly, and, in 1985, performed in an all-star symphony orchestra performance of his FOLLIES).

Through all this time, Betty and Adolph were happily married (not to each other), and they met every morning from the early 1940s to his death in 2002. Betty remembers that they would discuss possible projects, or just gossip. Eventually, with composer Cy Coleman, they found their footing again, under direction by Sondheim's collaborator Harold Prince, to create ON THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, in which they re-imagined the nineteenth century operetta as a smart, glittering Art Deco farce. The oversized characters sang big-voiced songs with lush orchestrations. Even the love duet "Our Private World" was really a display of the two leads' narcissism. Later, the three collaborated again on THE WILL ROGERS FOLLIES, which made no impression on me when I saw it in 1992 (I think).

Of all the lyrics they wrote, a few remain as standards, and a few more are standards among the cognoscenti. "Just in Time" and "The Party's Over" from BELLS ARE RINGING, with "Make Someone Happy" from DO-RE-MI are in the first group, as "Lucky to Be Me" and "Lonely Town" are in the second.

But Comden and Green's "special material" numbers are what make them special, and those, alas, can be appreciated only in context. A song for a lead-foot woman cabby seducing the tourist sailor away from his outdated guide book. . . a dance for down-on-their-luck stock investors. . . a French lesson that turns into a love at first sight. . . a duet for the back-up singers of a sister trio ("The Banshee Sisters") whose lead singer has run off with all the words . . . an actress with two scripts in hand, choosing between the roles of a gin-soaked divorcee or saintly Mary Magdalene. . . a roomful of people with nothing in common trying to make "nice talk." These flights of fancy were their specialty.

These were hard-working, self-disciplined people whose work always expresses one thing: the joy they took in making it. In words that Betty Comden wrote and also sang with Adolph Green:

Fame, if you win it,
Comes and goes in a minute.
Where's the real stuff in life to cling to?
. . . Make someone happy,
And you will be happy, too.

Linda Pastan's Poetry for Giving Thanks

(for Thanksgiving, an appreciation of Linda Pastan's poetry, referring especially to her collection The Last Uncle, with a nod to Billy Collins Picnic, Lightning)

For this Thanksgiving, I met my parents, their younger friends the Curzons, and their older friend Mary for dinner at "Antica Posta" (the old Post Office, transformed to an Italian restaurant). I had pasta and truffles; they all had fish, except for an osso bucco. Sometime before the entrees arrived, the conversation turned to macabre deaths of young people, and I was reminded of Billy Collins's meditation on a line from Nabokov's novel Lolita (quoted from memory): "My photogenic mother died in a freak accident when I was three (picnic, lightning)." Collins has some fun imagining all the serio-comic ways a person can die (meteorite, safe fallen from window, stroke ).

But this brought to mind another poet whose work often touches and surprises me, Linda Pastan. I often return to her collection Carnival Evening. I took her slim volume The Last Uncle with me to re-re-read before the Thanksgiving service this morning, and had it in my car as I drove to the restaurant this evening.

She, too, has a meditation on sudden death, with a Russian Jewish twist. Hers is called "The Cossacks," as she explains: "For Jews, the Cossacks are always coming. / Therefore, I think the sun spot on my arm / is melanoma." I can identify, being a hypochondriac who feels the symptoms of whatever fatal disease has recently made the news. Our conversation tonight hovered briefly around how frightened I once was of death-- of "catching a heart attack" from my grandparents, I remember.

While the title poem and many others in this collection find fresh ways to express the sudden recognition that one's life can't last, there's an intriguing idea here that's new to me.

In "The Vanity of Names," she muses on how the house of her body will crumble long before the house in which she lives, and she imagines how future inhabitants will appreciate the same beautiful fall of the sunlight on the same wall (something I can identify with in my gift of a home), and how her house -- stripped of all her belongings -- will enter the dreams of future generations (as my Grandmother's home is so much a part of my dreams). But to acquiesce in this, she says, is to love the unwritten future / almost as well as the fading past. This, she implies, is impossible. Another poem, "After a Long Absence, I Return to a Site of Former Happiness," touches on the same subject. It seems that the years haven't changed the old home at all, and this bugs her:

And as I see how easily I'll be replaced on earth,
I think if there's a poem of affirmation here,
a poem without bitterness or a shadow
of self-pity, then someone else must write it.

We want to cling to the past, and we like to think the world is going to hell as we near our end. I feel this impulse in me already, at 47. Mary feels it even more: "Remember that Broadway musical Stop the World, I Want to Get Off? That's me." I like this strange notion of holding the past and future to be equally lovable. That's a bit of Hinduism, isn't it? "Hold pleasure and pain as equal," says Krishna in the Gita.

With this theme is a related one, how past and future are continuous, as when her napping grandsons are disturbed by the noise of her old piano downstairs because. . .

my son is playing the kind of music
it took him all these years,
and sons of his own, to want to make.
- "Practicing"

Another poem conjures the ancient Greek "Fates" brought to mind by images of women in her family who sewed together from 1900 to 2000 - and she connects the "thread" of fate or time, and sneaks in a reference to those scissors, too, with which the Fates snip a life. A sweeter poem remembers the day she realized that her mother Bess had a life before motherhood, brought to mind when her newborn granddaughter is named Bess.

Linda Pastan is good at pleasure, too, just appreciating weather, her husband, leaves, dogs, literature. I love her "Travelogue" in which she confesses that, like me, she often has a printed page between her and the places where she travels, looking up from a mystery to see mountains of Greece, for example.

She is a poet of gratitude, sharing this in common with John Updike and less well-known poet Lawrence Raab, about whom I hope to write soon.

[See links to my other reflections on Linda Pastan's work at my my poetry page.]

Verse Noir

(response to "The Collector's Tale" by David Mason, from his collection Arrivals.) I'm currently reading stories by Raymond Chandler, whose novels defined the "hard-boiled" detective sub-genre. Maybe his influence on me is at work, but I believe I've just enjoyed a hard-boiled poem noire in David Mason's book Arrivals. Called "The Collector," its first-person narrator is a laconic antiques dealer ("I thought of all the dead things in my shop. / No object I put up was poorly made") relating how he suffered the visit of an alcohol-soaked acquaintance, unwillingly hearing his confession of manslaughter. Like Chandler's detective Marlowe, the narrator affects detachment but allows himself to be drawn into others' lives in spite of himself, saying, "I listened -- that I regret." Like Marlowe, he feels ambivalent about the law, but he adheres strictly to his own unexpressed moral code. The mood is dark, the milieu repellant, and, at the center of the story, there's a grotesque object. Its story is nested in the story of the alcoholic nighttime visitor Foley, whose story is nested in that of the narrator. Its structure and mood make me think of Heart of Darkness, as we penetrate deeper to a horror, and remain haunted by it even as we emerge from the encounter. I suspect that Mason has constructed this elaborate setting to amplify the effect of that object -- the shrunken head of a black man, fashioned into an ashtray. Once we've seen it, we see Foley's righteous indignation at the inhumanity that it represents, and how the object haunts Foley, and the narrator, and now, the reader. The narrator speaks in rhyme A B C C A B C, a pattern that subdues the rhymes. We suspect we're hearing a regular pattern, but cannot apprehend it as we read. This control and understatement puts his verses at one more remove from us -- contrasted with Foley's unrhymed outpouring of story, with its cursing and rambling. As a story alone, it works. It hasn't much plot, but it's creepy as anything by Chandler, or Edgar Allen Poe.

From NWP Convention: Critical of "New Literacies?"

(thoughts from the general session of the National Writing Project convention in Nashville today. Education )

Not long ago, I read an article about education in Weekly Standard that used quote marks to drip sarcasm on phrases such as "educator" and "creating knowledge" and "constructing understanding." I suppose that the same author, mocking trendiness in education, would mock the National Writing Project (though it's remained consistent in its principles through more than thirty-five years' growth) and would also snicker at the mention of "new literacies" in an address by Katherine Yancey, the chair of National Council of Teachers of English.

But the "constructivist" theory of teaching is no goofy innovation. When I was a student at Oxford, I attended just a few lectures, about which my professors were apologetic. To them, lecture was the unwelcome innovation, borrowed from American universities -- to have an expert stand up for an hour to present knowledge. The better model, used for centuries, was the tutorial, in which the experienced scholar converses with the younger one, considering questions about what they've both read. The tutor assigns, questions, listens to answers, and critiques those answers, challenging the student to articulate his opinion more clearly, changing the student's understanding in the process. In case the "instructivists" miss the point, that time-honored method is to use questions, various readings, and the students' own words to "construct" knowledge. Research, essay-writing (essay meaning "trial"), and debate -- these are all instruments of the best education because they engage the students in acquiring information, weighing opinions, and synthesizing it all. That's reading critically, the real aim of education.

"New Literacies?"
So what's to fear in "new literacies?" Yes, it's a clumsy phrase, knowing that "literacy" never had a plural form before, being literally the acquisition of "letters." Worse, from the point of view of the scoffers, the "new literacies" include images, sounds, and mixed-media.

But the old literacy was pretty limited in scope. It's only recently that a sizable proportion of the world's population could read at all, and more recently still that a sizable proportion had access to inexpensive books; and it's only a small proportion of that population who ever did read critically.

I suppose that the Weekly Standard guy thinks that time spent in front of a screen is time better spent in front of printed paper. But what inherent quality do books have to make them superior to any other "literacy?" Readers can take time to read, mark, and consider with a book, not so easily with video. Also, the writer must construct a book with logic to make sense, left to right, page to page, building an argument or story with some kind of sequence and meaningful connection from one paragraph to the next. Yes, it's true: interactivity disrupts all that.

But what proportion of adults ever learned to read critically? It was always small. And a small proportion of books were ever so good -- Mein Kampf springs to mind as the example of a tome without reason.

The era of books may have been a brief interregnum between times when learning and communication involve images and sounds. Long before the books, there were oratory, drama, graphics, song, and open conversation, all with the potential to influence citizens' hearts and minds.

The essential thing is, as always, that the largest possible proportion of our population learn that a "critical view" simply means that the viewer is aware of a message's form and context as well as its content.


Constructing Knowledge?
Let's acknowledge that critical readers are always choosing what they value most from the text (or picture, or movie, you name it) according to their own interest, prior knowledge, and intentions -- "constructing" their own meaning of the text.

Another speaker (Sheridan Blau, 28 years the director of the South Coast Writing Project in CA) used Adam and Eve to mock the traditional "instructivist" approach. What was the snake but a pedant who saw knowledge as something that could be consumed? Rather, emphasizing this year's theme of "Writing for a Change," Blau used examples to show what every writer knows: that putting one's thoughts and experiences into words always transforms how we think and sometimes transforms how others think and act. If only Adam and Eve had been writing reflectively in the Garden, he mused, they would have responded differently... and we'd be meeting comfortably undressed.

Mock This!
With alarm, I heard some teachers yesterday tell how their school system has forbidden instruction in writing because it's detracting from instruction in reading, and students' reading scores have been dropping. Now, that's an educational innovation that's worth mockery.

The teacher who told us of this had in hand data obtained from comparisons of similar classrooms with similar teachers who differed only in their approach to teaching writing. The ones who treated writing as a way to learn (by constructing) instead of just as a way to assess what kids have learned, had students who scored higher on reading, too.

Yes, let's be critical of "new literacies" -- in exactly the way we're critical of books, of oratory, and of editorial writers.

Barber of Seville, Butchers of Baghdad: Same Planet?

(further reflections on the Atlanta Opera's THE BARBER OF SEVILLE, on news from Iraq, and an interview of Gore Vidal by Bob Edwards on Sunday. Music News and History Religion )

Prior to THE BARBER OF SEVILLE, I listened to an interview with Gore Vidal, who impressed me as an arrogant, cranky, crackpot. With great confidence he told us that the Mafia was behind the death of John Kennedy and Bobby couldn't do anything about it because the mob had info about JFK's assassination plans for Castro. To the suggestion that conspiracy theories suggest nuttiness, he said America is run by conspiracists -- "the Bush gang" stealing elections left and right, Enron cheating everyone, and media. He said America is hated or scorned the world over, and Americans are lulled by a conspiracy of teachers and media into thinking that we're a great nation and envied the world over. Economists, he said, rate our quality of life below 30th in the world, and "nobody has health care." Sour, bitter, arrogant, and foolish.

Then I saw the opera, and was wholly wrapped up in playful music, playful lyrics, bravura singing, and the playfulness of the characters.

Coming out of the opera, I had to confront some news from Iraq involving more bodies found tortured, more American troops killed, and horrors that I can't conceive at the amputee ward of Walter Reed hospital.

Does the agony in Iraq make the delights of Rossini appear trivial, irresponsible, wasteful, phoney - distraction from the terrible truths? Can they really be on the same planet?

I'm inclined to think that the hateful bombers and beheaders are the ones trapped in unreality. Rossini, Sondheim, Mozart, Shakespeare -- these represent us at our best, our most generous impulses, our playfulness and appreciation of life. They keep us free of our gross concerns and consuming anger; may the same spirit, expressed in camaraderie among soldiers, sustain the troops trapped in crossfire between humorless factions.

Rossini, Poulenc, LaChiusa: Opera's Special Charms

(response to The Barber of Seville, performed by the Atlanta Opera Company, and a radio broadcast from Houston Grand Opera of John Michael LaChiusa's Send and Poulenc's La Voix Humaine. )

Rossini's music, even during a second-act thunderstorm, stays airy, light, and dry. The characters are all endearing. "Figaro" (played by Hugh Russell) sang with bravado as he boasted how his imagination bubbles with ideas like a volcano, and how money sets it to bubbling. The Count Almaviva (Bradley Williams) is his less-bright buddy whose rank and wallet save the day a couple of times. There's a great battle of wits and wills going on between Rosina and her guardian Bartolo and Rosina and Figaro. She seems so modern, so like a bored thrill-seeking teen girl of today -- except for some extraordinary high and light notes. Even bad guy Bartolo is endearing -- having as much fun catching his ward and her male admirers in their schemes as they have circumventing him. All of them do the tongue-twisting patter that earns scads of applause.

This production also stayed light and airy. The first image is a back-lit blue scrim, and the silhouette of a musician. Then we see bicyclists, more musicians, and eventually three free-standing town homes that look flat -- before windows open and we see as many as three characters in a room behind the window -- the effect being the same as when Wile E. Coyote disappears behind a thin tree trunk. Interiors were portions of walls dropped in from above, colorfully papered.

Rossini did some post-modern reflexive bits, such as the pastiche of other opera styles during a music lesson scene, and when Bartolo mocks the girl's aria, and later, when Figaro impatiently tries to get the lovers to stop their duet to escape. Wonderful moment is Act One finale, in which the main characters are mortified, "like statues," singing one syllable per measure, and Figaro sings supple lines around them, playing with the convention of their facing the audience in place.

These must all be familiar to opera fans, but they're new to me. I'd expected something cute and stylized, not vital and warm and self-knowing.

John Michael LaChiusa's one-woman, one-act opera Send, performed on the radio by Audra McDonald, had some of those same qualities. His music utilized sampling technology to allow McDonald to sing words against thoughts -- overlapping her own voice in duets. The situation is simple: the 30-something woman has sent her phone number to the man who replied to her personals ad on line -- and she's been waiting hours for him to call. While she repeats "five minutes more," she daydreams about the possible ways this on-line relationship might develop, the way people do -- and castigates herself for being so dependent on this dream of romance.

LaChiusa and Rossini share in common their attention to keeping a steady pulse going throughout the evening, though relieved sometimes by silence, or very lightly textured accompaniment.

Poulenc's piece is something else. He draws us uncomfortably into a clutching woman's desperate world, as we listen to her curses, cajoling, self-abasement, flirtation, and delusional chatter on the phone to her ex-lover. Intense, hard to take for the length of the act. I saw a production of this with a memorable set: Instead of the woman's apartment, we saw a red sports car, crashed into a telephone pole on some country road, and she crawls out of the wreck to talk on her cell phone. But there's more: the swell of the hill and the odd object hanging down from above the phone pole resolve into the dashboard of a car and its rear-view mirror. In that mirror, we see the road behind her, and images flashing of her memories, of "his" eyes, of her reflection. . .

Throughout the Rossini, I was thinking how much more real and delightful this two-hundred -year - old piece is than most Broadway musicals I've seen.

Bees, Butterflies, Worldview and Metaphor

(response to D. H. Tracy, "Bad Ideas," in Poetry, November 2006. Poetry Religion )

D. H. Tracy's essay "Bad Ideas" in the latest Poetry is rich and fun to read, thanks in part to his own apt similes, and thanks also to his outlining a scheme for analyzing and appreciating poetry on the level of one's own premises about life. But aside from those, I take personal interest in the way some of his examples relate to a recent posting here ("Faith as Rational as Language?").

His scheme borrows from a 1947 article in which an "unserious" poet is dismissed by a "serious" critic, "serious" denoting "an awareness of premises, a belief in the validity of those premises to the exclusion of competing ones, and the will to execute them." Understanding the seriousness of a poet or a critic aids one in understanding their work, in ways that Tracy describes.

Along the way, Tracy employs some striking imagery of his own. A certain critic judges a poem "upstream of the poetry itself," meaning that he's critiquing the poet's philosophical forebears before he even gets to the text. He contrasts the seriousness of Milton to the unseriousness of Donne and Marvell, "playing with ideas like brokers playing with pork bellies." I like "bees and butterflies," his analogy for contrasting serious and unserious poets. And, at least for Dante's unserious readers, Dante's Divine Comedy is "a kind of theme park for medieval theology."

I'm interested in some bits that Tracy takes from poets' works and letters. William Butler Yeats received this note from his father about William Blake:

I know that Blake's poetry is not intelligible without a knowledge of Blake's mystical doctrines. Yet mysticism was never the substance of his poetry, only its machinery.... The substance of his poetry is himself, revolting and desiring. His mysticism was a make-believe, a sort of working hypothesis as good as another.

That's so sensible, especially when contrasted with the junior Yeats' lifelong efforts to "cobble together a mythology that was not make-believe." In my personal reflection on faith and metaphor, I opined that the metaphors of faith are useful for thinking about one's experiences and choices regardless of whether the metaphors are "make-believe." How would one even know the difference? I did add that the metaphors and mythology of Christian faith stand up to experience and strike me as more true than more worldly wisdom.

But when a friend of Gerard Manley Hopkins expressed something along the lines of what I just wrote, the poet chided, "It is long since such things [i.e. the doctrines and stories of faith] had any significance to you. But what is strange and unpleasant is that you sometimes speak as if they had in reality none for me." The whole time that I was writing my own reflection last week, I was hearing the voice of one of my guiding lights, Flannery O'Connor, saying, "If the sacraments are just a metaphor, to hell with them."

Now, aside from that, I also like these lines by James Merrill (sorry, I've never heard of him), expressing an "unserious" look at the world and poetry:

Not for nothing had the Impressionists
Put subject-matter in its place, a mere
Pretext for iridescent atmosphere.

I've written something along those lines about my favorite detective novelists, how the story is just an avenue, and the interest in the sights passed along the way.

Finally, Tracy quotes from a long poem "Essay on Psychiatrists" by Robert Pinsky, and these make me want to read the rest. In the lines cited by Tracy, a professor addresses his young Lit. students about the very thing I loved in the eighteenth century poets, how

...Sometime in the middle
Of the Eighteenth Century, along with the rise

Of capitalism and scientific method, the logical
Foundations of Western thought decayed and fell apart.
When they fell apart, poets were left

With emotions and experiences, and with no way
To examine them. At this time, poets and men
Of genius began to go mad....

...and the ideas which were vital
To them are mere amusement to you.

from Robert Pinsky's Essay on Psychiatrists
full text

Tracy admits that "Whoever holds ideas to be more than mere amusement will at the very least risk being unappealing," but he admires their courage.

Poetry | Religion