Lawrence Raab's Probable World: A Boomer's Poetry

(Reflections on THE PROBABLE WORLD, a collection of poems by Lawrence Raab, published by Penguin Poets. It's out of print, last time I looked.)

The poet's a Baby boomer: His imagination was shaped by comic books and movies, and his poems include space aliens, mutant humanoid crab monsters, dogs, Jimi Hendrix. Reflecting on his not serving in the army, he is not proud, he writes. His poems also touch on Bosnia, terrorism, and Columbine. Also, dogs, God, Emily Dickinson, youth, a father who died early.

Lawrence Raab doesn't rhyme, and I've not always been able to find a regular metrical length to his lines, but always close to five or six stresses. On a page, his poems seem to be organized in regular stanzas of three, five, or six lines each.

His tone is wry, gentle, whimsical. Some characters recur in the poems: a dead father who was distant in life and who appears as an enigma in dreams -- the wife who wants his imagination to settle closer to home, who says that, if the truth doesn't seem probable, he's better off toning it down -- the happy dog who brings such pleasure by feeling such pleasure.

I notice how his poems often build to an image of evil or violence and then reminds us of all the times that such bad things did NOT happen.

He shows humor, verbal mastery, wide range of references, balance, and appreciation for life outside himself. One poem speaks of "Respect" for Frost and Larkin, whose poems represent them better than their bitter and selfish personalities may have deserved. He is generous, wise, and I've returned to reading his collection (and his Collected Works) again and again.

Stoppard's ARCADIA: Math and Tenderness

(reflection on Tom Stoppard, occasioned by seeing a performance of young adults in ARCADIA at Push Push Theater, Decatur, GA)

Reflecting on an excellent college-age student production of Tom Stoppard's ARCADIA, I'm reminded of a comment made in an interview by composer - lyricist Stephen Sondheim: "In the age-old debate between form and substance, substance wins, hands down; but form is more fun." This play has so much content, with more than passing reference to late-eighteenth century literature, early Romantic trends in landscaping, chaos theory, and fractiles. But the fun, and the feeling, lies in the form.

In the garden house of an ancient English manor, scenes toggle between centuries. In the early 1800s, the room is visited one particular week by a bright adolescent girl, her handsome young tutor, and many women of the household who flirt (at least) with him. In the 1990s, academic types dig through artifacts and try to piece together what really happened at the earlier time. Stoppard makes fun of easy targets: pedantic academics who casually discuss Byron, Thackeray, Coleridge as if these were people they knew. The academics see themselves as high-powered intellectuals; but we also see how fatuous they are, connected to life in "their period" more than to the people around them. At the same time, of course, Stoppard's jokes and story depend on his audience knowing most of what these academics know.

The life circa 1809 is the heart of the play, and we do fall in love with the young lady who seems to intuit mathematical / physical equations that will come to represent cutting edge cosmology in the late 20th century. Her tutor Septimus Hodge is a resourceful and attractive character, unflappable, generally ironic, but genuinely interested in the girl and her insights.

The substance of the play comes to a climax in the 1990s, in a confrontation between Bernard the Literature don and Valentine the Math genius, watched by the historian Hannah in whom both are interested. Valentine has said that all of Bernard's (and Hannah's) research about Lord Byron and his love affairs is merely trivial -- "just personalities." Bernard retorts, "Why does scientific progress matter more than personalities?... Oh, you're going to zap me with penicillin and pesticides. Spare me that and I'll spare you the bomb and aerosols. But don't confuse progress with perfectibility." He goes on, "If knowledge isn't self-knowledge, it isn't doing much, mate. Is the universe expanding? Is it contracting? Is it standing on one leg and singing 'When Father Painted the Parlour'? Leave me out. I can expand my universe without you."

What Stoppard says, and demonstrates so convincingly through these polished but real characters, is that the big questions are interesting, the ones on the biggest scale and smallest scale - big bang, or sub-atomic particles -- but it's the unpredictable nature of what happens in between that makes life worth living. Hannah, after the big blow up, makes a comment about faith. She says that she has no problem with God or spirit, but she can't stand the notion of an afterlife: "If we're going to find out everything in the end -- if all the answers are in the back of the book, what's the point?" [I'm quoting from memory]. What these characters demonstrate as they talk and talk and talk, is how finding things out through investigation, surmise, and testing hypotheses is such a pleasure.

I've seen many Stoppard plays: HOUND, ROSENCRANTZ, TRAVESTIES, JUMPERS, BIRTH OF LOVE, ROUGH CROSSING, THE REAL THING -- and I've read most of the rest. Tenderness is a quality that we don't find often in Stoppard's plays, and it's what he leaves us with in this wonderful play: the image of the tutor teaching his brilliant student to waltz by the light of the candle that will, we know, start the fire that ends her life. This is by far the best play of his that I've seen, and I could stand to see another three different productions.

Teaching Beauty: Art, Philosophy, and Religion

(reflection on a review by Joseph Phelan of ONLY A PROMISE OF HAPPINESS: THE PLACE OF BEAUTY IN A WORLD OF ART by Alexander Nehamas in THE WEEKLY STANDARD. Phelan is editor of Artcyclopedia.com. I've also read Nehamas, "An Essay on Beauty and Judgement" in the Threepenny Review, 2000, printed at http://www.mrbauld.com/beautyheh.html).

Teaching kids drama, music, and literature, I'm often asserting that there is quality in the arts that one can appreciate whether or not the art is to one's taste. Pushed to explain, I would say that good art will show human invention or ingenuity, that it will display some kind of abstract pattern or design, and in some way these elements will touch our view of our world outside of the art. Work that adds no value of imagination, design, or insight to a found sound - image - object - story is of little or no artistic merit.

For our musical show and tell, we found much to appreciate in all the recordings that students brought in, with one exception. One dismal rap recording was a poor excuse for art, the words being formulaic, the music being merely repetitive -- no design, no development, no buildup, the insight nil, and the emotion a generalized attitude. It was like listening to bathroom graffiti. But John Cage's infamous "piano" piece called "Four Minutes" (and some seconds) is a work of art, because the performer's not touching the keyboard for four minutes makes the audience aware of the sounds of their world as a kind of music in a way that they had not done before. I'd be willing to argue that it's not exactly musical art, but it's good theatre.

A professor of philosophy at Princeton, Alexander Nehamas, has recently published a book to reopen discussion of beauty, a concept that's been dismissed as an old-fashioned relic of social elites who made their ideals of aesthetic beauty something that had to be studied in prep schools and universities to appreciate. "What is art?" became a rhetorical statement instead of a question, and John Cage knock-offs in all genres chipped away at the idea that any human creation of any sort could be judged better in any way than something else.

The reviewer of that book emphasizes a relationship between beauty and love that I didn't find when I went to an essay by Nehamas. The reviewer, Joseph Phelan, begins with an anecdote: Rainer Maria Rilke was so taken by a fragment of Greek sculpture -- torso of Apollo -- that he thought to himself, "You must change your life." Phelan goes on to write about his own experiences "loving" works of art in such a way that he wants to live with them, spend time with them, think about them, explore side avenues.

This is what Nehamas also talks about, that art is beautiful when it attracts us by pleasure. This isn't the kind of pleasure that pornography promises, something that swells then loses its attraction the way chewing gum does. Instead, it's the pleasure of anticipation. This is where earlier writers on art, such as Immanuel Kant, Matthew Arnold, and Harold Bloom get it wrong, along with many many teachers I know: interpretation will not get you to appreciate the beauty. The beauty attracts first, promising depth, and then you want to dive in. Interpretation is part of the diving.

Thus, those of us who find the works of Shakespeare, Sondheim, Updike, or John Adams beautiful will read every word we can find about them, and will chat about them endlessly in web sites.

Here's how Nehamas says it, several ways:

To find something beautiful is to believe that making it a larger part of our life is worthwhile, that our life will be better if we spend part of it with that work. But a guess is just that: unlike a conclusion, it obeys no principles; it is not governed by concepts. It goes beyond all the evidence, which cannot therefore justify it, and points to the future. Beauty, just as Stendhal said, is a promise of happiness. We love, as Plato saw, what we do not possess. Aesthetic pleasure is the pleasure of anticipation, and therefore of imagination, not of accomplishment. The judgment of taste is prospective, not retrospective; the beginning, the middle, but never the end of criticism.

Nehemas imagines that art can become something shared, enjoyed, and the basis of a community. "Harold Bloom describes a solitary encounter, but like everyone who is in love with a book or a picture, he can’t wait to tell us about it. In telling us about it, he participates in a community he is in the very process of creating." Nehamas adds, "It is a dangerous game, pursuing the beautiful. You may never be able to stop." -- because exploring some good work of art makes you want more, and to appreciate what's different in other works, widening your understanding and community. This is what Sondheim did for me, pointing me to composers that influenced him (Ravel, Gershwin, Reich), to artists who included him in their repertoire (jazz singer Cleo Laine - who took me to a whole new stable of composers), and to poetry as a branch of lyric writing.

This brings me again to the radio interview I heard a couple of weeks ago, and wrote about here in this blog. It was a discussion with Christopher Hitchens, who's touring with his book GOD IS NOT GREAT. He showed himself to be a wise guy, not wise. He did point me to Philip Larkin, whose work I've been enjoying ever since. But his critique of religion begins from reading Scriptures as a fundamentalist would. When the interviewer pointed this out, Hitchens snapped back, "It's either God's word, or what use is it?" He thinks that ends the discussion, but of course, it's only a start.

Hitchens thinks religion is lies, and art is good. I'd simply retort, "Religion is art." That's not to say that Christianity and the Bible are fiction. The Bible isn't a book, but a library, and it contains legends, poetry, law documents, official histories, informal histories, letters, sermons, and song lyrics. All of these, taken together, are also the testimony of a people whose primitive concept of themselves as a tribe with an exclusive tribal god gradually enlarged to see themselves as agents of one, only, all-inclusive God. It's fact, not fiction, that they saw themselves that way, and continue to do so since the canon was established. Millennia of art, including the participatory drama that is liturgy, have developed from the growth of that community. Can Hitchens see that a leap of faith is an act of imagination? Add Nehamas to the picture, and see also, faith is a pleasure that changes lives and builds community.

Skeleton Man by Tony Hillerman: Skeleton Plot?

After one of those evenings when I "couldn't put it down," reading Tony Hillerman's SKELETON MAN to its conclusion, there was a part of my mind that was involved not in the story, but in noticing how Hillerman put it together. This is the part of my mind that has always wanted to write a thrilling detective novel, and it's learning how little it takes.

Tony Hillerman's detective novels do their job, and more. Besides following detectives who are following a criminal, interesting us in seeing sympathetic characters get through all right (and bad ones get their due), Hillerman also gives us what he knows of life among modern-day Navajo and Hopi people. He has a loyal fan base, respect from his peers in the business, and a PBS series based on his early novels.

The plot of Skeleton Man is simplicity itself: everyone suddenly has a reason to find a cache of diamonds lost in the Grand Canyon. The title refers both to an ambiguous Hopi god who taught his people "not to fear death," and to a hermit who resides near a spot associated with that god. Naturally, in the last chapters, all the characters converge at that spot.

There's the premise. The first chapters show us the different characters, and we hear the same story again and again about the lost diamonds and that hermit who may possess them, as each character discovers an urgent reason to locate that hermit. The middle chapters show us the characters' paths crossing as they come closer to arranging their different routes to the hermit's hideaway. This sounds more intricate than it is, as each character naturally heads to question the same source in the same general location. Finally, of course, Hillerman staggers their arrivals on the same scene, and makes sure that they coincide with a long-building storm of unusual intensity.

Each chapter reminds us of the Skeleton Man myth, and each chapter reminds us that recurring character Jim Chee and his bride-to-be have worries about their impending wedding, amounting to these questions: Will she want to live in his old trailer, close to nature? Will he learn to stop treating her the way he did when he was her boss? Each chapter tells us something about Navajo or Hopi customs -- and mostly the same things, that you don't interrupt someone else's story, that you wait to be invited in without knocking.

While this novel, like others by Hillerman, has a clear plot and all the right ingredients, it lacks one thing: texture. The mythology, the characters' pasts, the characteristics of the land, and the customs are all things that would be worked into a texture, but they're left in separate compartments. I suspect that they are accessories to the story, added to each chapter to fill out the skeleton plot. Otherwise, they'd all meet in the canyon and fight over the diamonds, and be done with it by page fifty, and that's not enough to make a novel.

That's a legitimate way to write detective fiction. It works for me. But it also limits the involvement we can feel when we read. I'm thinking how this compares with the Raymond Chandler novels, which are thick with texture. They draw you into a whole way of seeing the world, and that vision -- including the characters who are part of the texture -- stays with you long after you've forgotten the plot.

No Failure of Imagination: Atheists Find Something More

(reflections on an interview with Christopher Hitchens, a poem by Philip Larkin, and Ian McEwan's ATONEMENT)

On the radio program CITY ARTS AND LECTURES tonight, I heard an interview with Christopher Hitchens, columnist at Slate.com and author of GOD IS NOT GREAT. The interviewer was a believing Catholic who finally reached a meeting of minds with Hitchens around the author's appreciation of the "numinous" in literature. Hitchens went on to speak the following words from his friend, novelist Ian McEwan.

For [Ian McEwan], novels are not about 'teaching people how to live but about showing the possibility of what it is like to be someone else. It is the basis of all sympathy, empathy and compassion. Other people are as alive as you are. Cruelty is a failure of imagination'.

I found the quotation on several web sites focused on McEwan's book ATONEMENT. Maybe Hitchens added something, because I thought I heard him say that this sympathy / empathy is also the basis for morality. It should be.

Hitchens also allowed that a poem "Church Going" by non-believer Philip Larkin could be his creed, so I looked it up. It's wonderful, all right, neatly and regularly formed and reflecting on an anecdote -- the speaker enters an empty and very old countryside church, and hatless, removes his bicycle clips and takes in the silence. His reflection brings him to imagining a future when no one will be left who enters a church for the reasons it was intended. He thinks:

It pleases me to stand in silence here;

A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much never can be obsolete . . .

Not to brag, but all this is also contained in my essay "So Many Possibilities: The Religion of Stephen Sondheim" (Sondheim Review, Nov. 2006) which focuses on the atheist composer-lyricist's trademark ability to give all the characters their own voices, practicing ultimate empathy. In fact, I wrote that, for Sondheim, sin is a failure of imagination. The phrase came naturally to me -- did I dimly recall it from McEwan's wonderful ATONEMENT, or have we both taken the idea from a common source?

Poetry, June 2007

(reflections on the June 2007 issue of the journal POETRY)

Following an issue that apologized for being mostly commentary with little poetry, this one is all poetry. But the number of poems that tickled me is about the same as usual.

The issue begins with several pages of something by Frank Bidart that looks like a poem - consistent with a pattern of two lines, space, one line, space, repeat... interrupted from time to time with prose paragraphs. It's an exploration of an anecdote: as a young man, the poet saw a film of aging dancer Ulanova performing a role that she could no longer sustain in performance straight through. Is it a poem? An essay? An anecdote? The story of "Giselle" itself? A poem can be all of these things, and that's okay with me. At the end, there's a note about how this film, in 1952, taught the author about art. There's a lot here to appreciate and think about .

Much of what follows is crude, or crudeness gussied up. Some of it is posing -- attitude, scorn, ugly. The "f" word appears in five or so consecutive poems, and I just skipped those. Such a word is a sign of laziness. (An exception: it's the key to Harold Pinter's wonderful, creepy play BETRAYAL, carefully placed midway). There's another thing that annoys me in a lot of the poems I read in this journal, poems that fall into lists of proper nouns. Here poems listing flowers by name, or ancient poets.

A poem by John Koethe called "Chester" conjures thoughts of waking with pet at the end of the bed, and that fantasy of "the half-concealed life that lies beneath / The ordinary one, made up of ordinary mornings." A. E. Stallings' poem, "Misspent," touches on the same fear, that days are being mislaid the way bright shiny coins picked up and put in the pocket are spent on trifles one doesn't even recall.

David Yezzi's poem "The Good News" seemed to be a reflection on my own recent experience of meeting an old friend 30 years later. Like the other poems I've mentioned here, it strikes me as being like my own experience. I guess this means that these experiences are pretty universal, and discovering that is one of the pleasures in reading poetry.

A very short poem called "Scree" deftly makes a point about suffering, that it's not a stop, but a misstep from which we recover our footing, unsteadily.

Krista Tippett's Speaking of Faith: I Choose It

(reflection on SPEAKING OF FAITH, radio program and book by Krista Tippett.)

With a new feature called "Beliefwatch," Newsweek is a sign of religion's ever-increasing prominence in our culture, fifty years after Time asked if God is dead. The latest issue of Newsweek questions conventional (liberal) wisdom: "All religions are basically the same: True or False?" Their answer is "false." As a longtime connoisseur of religions, I'd agree.

Still, I'm grateful to Krista Tippett and her weekly talk program SPEAKING OF FAITH for presenting a wide variety of believers of many faiths and non-believers who still have in common certain traits. Her book of the same name is a printing of highlights from that program, framed as a kind of autobiography. Tippett dwells lovingly on her grandfather, an evangelist whom she obviously adored. She grew disenchanted with religion and more enchanted with politics and journalism, and spent her early adulthood working as a "hawk" within the diplomatic corps in divided Germany of the 1980s. The rest of the book, and her program, often bounce between these two poles of ways to face life's challenges, faith or political action. She often implies that they are both faiths of a kind, and power is the one that's illusory.

(She observes that powerful people she knew in her Berlin days, brilliant in speaking on foreign policy, were petty and adolescent in their private lives -- cf. Kissinger in Dallek's book, which I blogged earlier today. The powerless people she met in East Germany, trapped there, were attentive to others and serious and grown up by comparison.)

What happens after Berlin is less clearly defined: some religious re-awakening and study at Yale divinity school, some work among needy inner-city youth, a failed marriage, and battle with clinical depression. But what comes through more clearly than her own story is the one she's more interested in telling, and that's the threads she finds in her wide-ranging on-air discussions with people. The way she was trained as a journalist to ferret out vice in public figures, she is attempting to ask questions that get her guests beyond their public selves to expose their private virtues.

What are the common traits of these guests -- besides articulateness?

First, her guests fall into the first of two categories that long-respected church historian Martin Marty uses instead of liberal and conservative. These are, that religious people are either kind or not:

The context of all virtue in the great religious traditions is relationship -- relationship with God, practical love in families and communities, care for the "other." They insist on reverent attention to the outcast and the suffering and the stranger beyond the bounds of one's own identity [or tribe, or nation - Smoot]. Christianity puts an extreme fine point on this, calling also for love of enemies. (p. 12)

Second, her guests would all agree with with Khaled Abou El Fadl, author of a book called Wrestling Islam from the Extremists. The more important category, they would agree, is not right and wrong but beauty and its absence. El Fadl said that the "underpinning theme" of the Qur'an is that God created male and female, diverse peoples and tribes, "So that you may come to know one another." Tippett interviewed him at a Jewish cultural center, sharing the stage with Rabbi Harold Shulweiss, who agreed with the Muslim. Thinking of actions done in the name of religion, rather than starting with doctrine, the Rabbi postulated that one could ask instead, "Does this action reveal a delight in this creation and in the image of a creative, merciful God who could have made it?" (p. 202-203)

Third, her guests would all agree with the distinction that one of them drew between religion and spirituality. Rabbi Sandy Sasso told her that Moses had a direct encounter with God on Mt. Sinai. Later, he formalized what he'd experienced in the ten commandments. The encounter was the spiritual experience from God; the religion is its man-made container. (p. 180)

Tippett is great at pressing her guests for clarifications and examples to support their generalizations, but it's rare that she really puts her foot down. In this book, she does one time. She's describing the essential idea that she and her guests all live by . . .

. . . that each person's presence, action, and words in the world matter, however inconsequential they may seem against the backdrop of this evening's news. Religions remind us of this fact, this faith. Like any political or economic theory, this is empirically unverifiable. I choose it. (p. 162-163)

How Little We Knew How Little They Knew: Nixon and Kissinger

(reflections on Robert Dallek, Partners in Power: Nixon and Kissinger)
Richard Nixon was "a man of strong convictions, who came up through adversity; at his best in a crisis, cool, unflappable; a tough, bold, strong leader... never being concerned about tomorrow's headlines; ...steely . . . subtle and almost gentle." That's Nixon, in his own words, in a memo to Henry Kissinger dictating what to say about his boss. It was the occasion of announcing the diplomatic breakthrough to China. Nixon wanted Kissinger also to stress how much the President had in common with Chinese Prime Minister Chou En Lai. (Dallek, p. 299).

What I've learned from Robert Dallek's big book about Nixon and Kissinger is mostly this: When Nixon's "Silent Majority" and even his enemies respected Nixon and Kissinger for their competence in foreign affairs, we were giving them too much credit.

Dallek often reviews the events of Nixon's tumultuous Presidency through the memoirs and public pronouncements of Nixon and Kissinger themselves. But Dallek has also had access to written memos, Nixon's diary, and of course, to those infamous tapes, and he shows that, from the very first, Nixon and Kissinger projected confidence, balance, and reasonableness that they did not possess in private. On top of that, we learn how they sniped at each other. Kissinger called Nixon "meatball mind" and more often "maniac" in off-the-record interviews that ingratiated him to news reporters, while Nixon called Kissinger "Jew boy" behind his back "and sometimes to his face, as a way to . . . keep him in his place" (p. 93).

Above all, Dallek drives home the point again and again that Nixon's trumpeted foreign policy was trumped up to win praise "in tomorrow's headlines." He'd planned his entire Presidency, from his near miss in the (stolen?) election of 1960 onward, to focus on foreign policy, the one area of Presidential responsibility where he could hope to have control. But events seemed to spin out of control all over, as Nixon had to deal with war in Vietnam, India's near-war with Pakistan, Israel's ongoing war with Egypt and Syria, Salvador Allende's socialist government in Chile, involvement of the Soviet Union in all of those places, and China's competition with the Soviets. Dallek shows again and again how, behind the doors of the White House, Nixon and Kissinger came to decisions based on how they would look to the public. Dallek also shows that these two men, apart, made decisions to enhance each man's prestige vis-a-vis the other. Time and again, Nixon writes memos to Kissinger and to his staff to make sure that the President got the credit for anything Kissinger did.

I already knew a lot about Nixon. I've read Nixon's autobiography, and Stephen Ambrose's biography. I'd read Nixon's self-justifications in NO MORE VIETNAMS, and Barbara Tuchman's scornful dissection of his Vietnam policy in MARCH OF FOLLY. I'd already heard some behind-the-scenes stories -- the night late in Watergate when Nixon called Kissinger into his office to kneel in tearful prayer; how he discussed his proposed appointee to the Supreme Court William Rehnquist as "Renchler, that Bozo"; and the evening when chief of staff Alexander Haig called Kissinger because England's Prime Minister Heath was waiting on the phone to talk to the President and "the boss is pretty sloshed" -- not an unusual event, judging from the matter-of-fact way the two men discuss how to put off the P.M. I knew how, even late in life, Nixon was still worked up by (I'm quoting him from memory) "the slights, the insults you get early on, around age six, while you're working to make something of yourself, by all those people who just sit around on their fat butts."

Here are a few items that stood out for me:

• During the 1968 campaign, when Nixon was promising "peace with honor" in Vietnam, LBJ announced new peace talks in Paris just before the election. . . and Nixon countered by making secret contacts with South Vietnam's President Thieu to encourage him to boycott peace talks in Paris before the election. LBJ knew of those secret contacts, but couldn't reveal them without revealing his source of information, through illegal wiretapping. Dallek comments that Nixon was thereafter "beholden to Thieu" p. 78.

• After appearing calm, reasonable, and effective in his "Silent Majority" speech on November 3, 1969, Nixon phoned Kissinger three times and chief of staff HR Haldeman fifteen times between 10:20 and midnight to get "therapy," as Kissinger recalls and reassurances, and to give orders to "get 100 vicious dirty calls to New York Times and Washington Posts about their editorials." p. 166

• Nixon to Kissinger, note of November 24, 1969: "I get the rather uneasy impression that the military are still thinking in terms of ... an eventual military solution [in Vietnam]. I also have the impression that deep down they realize the war can't be won militariliy, even over the long haul." Yet he continued to try increasing bombing alternating with periods of asking for guarantees of independence for South Vietnam, four more years, while the North simply waited. p. 183

• Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman (who was 42 years old when he started at the White House) was known as "the Berlin Wall" for keeping people out of Nixon's presence, and keeping the boss's tirades and tantrums and foul language out of public hearing. More to the point, Haldeman decided which of Nixon's non-stop orders were truly to be implemented, and which ones were just "ramblings." (p.98) Frequently, we read of memos that Nixon wrote to Kissinger that Kissinger simply disregarded.

• During the Watergate crisis, especially during Nixon's last year in office, Dallek shows again and again that Kissinger purposefully kept Nixon out of involvements with world leaders, because Nixon was not playing with a full deck (chapter 16, "The Nixon-Kissinger Presidency"). RN tells HK to remind Congress of the President's "indispensable" role in managing the mideast crisis (in which the Soviet Union was threatening to involve its own forces) while RN at the same time was saying that his enemies in Congress were trying to kill him: "I may physically die," he said. In a late night White House meeting, while Nixon was asleep (sedated?), Kissinger, Haig, and others decided how to deal with the crisis, and raised troops world-wide to Def Con 3. The threat worked; the Soviets backed down, and Nixon was on the news proclaiming his toughness. The liberal media were right to be suspicious. p. 531

• The bitterness, the paranoia, the failure to connect personally -- I knew about all that. But I've always believed that these were the dark side of a man who fit his self-description of having "strong convictions," ability, and coolness in a crisis. The Nixon I believed in appears in Dallek's book only during a few public appearances and once in private with Kissinger. That time was in Nixon's White House office when he proposed a toast "not to ourselves personally or to our success [but] to generations to come who may have a better chance to live in peace because of what we have done [i.e., in China]" (p. 290).

Nixon was my first President. I remember JFK's assassination, and I remember LBJ's image on TV. But I recall Nixon's campaign -- and his guest appearance saying "Sock it to me" on LAUGH IN -- and the suspense of election night when racist George Wallace surged and V-P Hubert Humphrey ran close second to Nixon. I saw Nixon's inauguration during class in Mrs. Finkle's fourth grade at Churchill School in Homewood, Illinois. I saw his daughter's marriage. And I accepted his word for truth when he protested that he was not a crook. I felt personally betrayed when the truth came out, and he resigned.

My great aunt Ellen cornered me in my parents' kitchen when I happened to mention that my history students got a view of Richard Nixon that balanced the bad with the good. "I never found any good in him," she said with vehemance. She went on to tell how she had campaigned for a Democratic candidate for Congress in 1970 whose campaign fell apart because of allegations of illegal activity in the news. A couple weeks after the candidate lost, the newspaper admitted that the story of illegality was baseless, and it had come from an unnamed White House source.

Another personal acquaintance of mine involved with Mississippi's Republican Party told of meeting Nixon, who immediately followed up on his greeting with a racist joke, assuming that any white men in Mississippi must enjoy that sort of thing. My former friend was disgusted and embarrassed.

I'm afraid that's my reaction to Nixon, now, too.

Read "Nixon's Voice," my reflection on Nixon in works of opera and fiction. 

New Iraq Strategy Under Ten Words

(responding to an interview with Washington Post Pentagon reporter Thomas Ricks, author of FIASCO, on NPR's "Fresh Air" two days ago; plus Robert Dallek's book NIXON AND KISSINGER; with additional info from Lawrence Kaplan's editorial in THE NEW REPUBLIC ON LINE and an article posted November 30, 2006, by UPI news analyst Martin Sieff.)

"Bottom line: Right people, right strategy, too little, too late."

That's what an American general in Iraq told Thomas Ricks during his latest visit there.

The new strategy, called a "surge" in the media, might better be called "swimming with the people." That's a quote from Chairman Mao's book on how to be an insurgent -- "Insurgents swim with the people," blending in, giving them what they need, making alliances. With additional troop force deployed there, General Petraeus has enacted on a large scale that same strategy, which served him well in the areas he commanded in Iraq in 2005. Troops are stationed in neighborhoods instead of on far bases. While this increases their vulnerability in the short run, they learn quickly "what normal looks like" according to Ricks, and they share the neighbors' interest in stability and safety, and can get the cooperation of the people 24/7 in a way they could not when they sped in from afar and patrolled behind armor a couple hours a day.

It's working. According to Lawrence Kaplan in The New Republic (on line), "Already, attacks and executions in the capital have (depending on the source) declined by one-half to one-third." I've read in other sources that our troops are also getting cooperation with tribal leaders sick of Al Qaeda outsiders.

But Ricks, speaking in the interview aired Tuesday, saw clouds in these silver linings. The Sunni tribal leaders who have opposed our forces may be cooperating because they see that as a way to get some of the training and weapons that we've been giving their Shiite adversaries. In other words, they're gearing up for the all-out civil war that will follow if US soldiers withdraw immediately.

Ricks points out, by the way, that, if we began to pull out now, running convoys to waiting ships and bases in Kuwait at a rate of 30 convoys a day, our forces would still be in Iraq ten months from now -- that's how much equipment, etc. we have there. "And who's going to protect those convoys when it becomes clear to our enemies that we're leaving?" Aside from that, Ricks imagines Iraq's territory hardening into three armed camps (Kurds, Shiia, Sunnis) fighting each other as proxies for Saudis, Syrians, and Iranians -- with Turkey having its own interest in putting down Kurds. Democratic Presidential hopeful Bill Richardson scored points against Hillary by promising to get our boys out immediately, while she anticipates troops being stationed in Iraq for at least another ten years. She's reasonable; he's pandering. But even she said, "We've kicked out Saddam, we've given them a constitution, and they" can't get their act together - so we should get out.

While all this is happening, I've been reading Robert Dallek's book NIXON AND KISSINGER, and Nixon's struggle to make "Vietnamization" work seems so familiar. What is our policy now, except a long-drawn-out version of our helicopter taking off from the rooftop of our embassy in Saigon? "So long! Take care!" In Nixon's many attempts to get North Vietnam's agreement to withdraw -- later settling for a promise to stop attacking -- he knew (tapes and transcripts show him saying as early as 1968, during his campaign) that the enemy had already won and had no incentive to make any concessions. They had only to outlast America's will to keep troops there. Within days of the final peace agreement in January 1973, North Vietnamese forces were attacking our "Vietnamized" defenses all across South Vietnam.

Kaplan compares Petraeus to Creighton Abrams ( a name that has not popped up in Dallek's book, yet - I've never heard of Abrams). Kaplan quotes a recent article about Abrams by retired colonel Stuart Herrington, "having wasted more than three years (until 1968) pursuing a flawed strategy, the Pentagon lost the support of the American population, and was not given the time to get it right, even when it was clear that General Creighton Abrams' pacification and Vietnamization approach might have worked."

Success is even less likely in Iraq. Kaplan point outs that South Vietnam at least had an army and a functioning government. Sieff's UPI analysis of the President's new strategy document back in November includes facetious admiration of the President's stated long - term goal of an Iraq "peaceful, united, stable, and secure, well integrated into the international community, and a full partner in the global war on terrorism." Sieff comments:

That goal is an exceptionally ambitious one, especially as even in the 36 years of Iraqi national independence before Saddam Hussein and his fellow Baathists established the second Baathist Republic in 1968, Iraq was never "peaceful, united, stable and secure."

His article also includes a handy summary of Iraq's history in the 20th century, pre-Saddam:

The British Empire ran Iraq directly as a Mandate of the League of Nations for 14 years, after World War I until 1932, and painstakingly built up and trained the Iraqi army during that time. But within nine years of independence, this same army had rebelled against both the democratically elected government and the British interest in Iraq twice, in 1936 and 1941, successfully toppling the government in both cases.

On the second occasion, in 1941, the Iraqi army sought immediately to join Britain's mortal enemy, Nazi Germany, and was only preventing from doing so by a hastily organized British military invasion and re-conquest of the country launched, ironically enough, from Jerusalem in Palestine, which was then still under British control.

Eventually in 1958, the Iraqi Army succeeded in toppling the British-supported constitutional government and slaughtered the entire Hashemite royal family of Iraq. Both moves proved immensely popular among the Iraqi people at the time.

So when General Petraeus testifies to Congress in September, will he say that the new strategy is working, or not? Ricks says the top brass are sick of arguing over whether the war should have started in the first place, and sick of all discussions of the war being framed as a referendum on President Bush. Rather, Petraeus will lay out what has been achieved, what leaving would look like, and will ask, "Now, you tell us what you want us to do."

The best option of all is somehow to achieve what Bush had in mind from the first, and the best strategy seems to be in place now. But, so long as all our efforts are seen to be cover for our exit - as Nixon's elusive "peace with honor" was (Dallek quotes him saying, as early as 1969, "But what the hell does that mean? It doesn't mean anything!") - it really is too little, too late.

Happy Bloom's Day, June 16

Somehow everything went wrong today. A fat guy passed me on the bike trail; my internet connection failed; articles that caught my eye in a journal were all gloomy ones about the coming Islamic takeover of the world -- somehow related to Hillary's health care plan; and after three days' biking and swimming both, I've gained a pound a day. Then I was reminded, today is Bloom's Day, celebrated by fans of Joyce's ULYSSES world wide. The novel follows friends of Leopold Bloom around Dublin, from waking to sleeping, on the day June 16 in the year 1904. (Info, please)

On this day three years ago, I ran out and bought a copy for myself and resolved to read it through. It was a struggle, but I enjoyed each succeeding chapter more and more, until I hit a wall, in the middle of chapter nine. I think it was taking place in a library. I gave it up and went on to Raymond Chandler, a great new pleasure.

But I decided to try again, and, before I'd reached the end of the first page, all was right with the world. "Stately, plump Buck Mulligan" steps out on the deck of a stone tower in a dressing gown "sustained gently behind him on the mild morning air" and raises his bowl of shaving lather and intones "Introibo ad altare Dei" and calls down the stairs to wake up his pal Stephen Dedalus. If the sheer sound of the first lines don't make you smile, then Mulligan's playfulness does.

And if that doesn't, then there's the playfulness of the author, tossing around much of western civilization by free association: liturgy, Greek lit, Shakespeare, folk songs (and a satire called "Song of the Joking Jesus" that's fun), and Ireland's long sad history.

On another level, we're watching a scene in a play -- in the manner of Wilde, who's mentioned two or three times -- the plump clown, the thin self-conscious poet, and the pompous straight man (Haines, an Oxford man studying quaint Irish ways for his research) whom they mock freely without his ever guessing. Stage business of shaving, dressing, fixing and consuming breakfast, leaving for work, all continue through the banter. There's also a bit of old-fashioned exposition: Stephen's mother has died, he feels guilty about it because he didn't kneel and pray at her death bed when she asked for him to, and he's dressed for the funeral. And they plan to meet later at The Ship.

As I read, the concentration it takes to follow it drew me in to Joyce's world. It's a world without God, his characters say, but not without significance. The criss-crossing of references underlays that world, connecting the physical to the moral (imagination, history, philosophy, emotion). Somehow the same trees that tower over my house began to look to me like a benevolent circle of old friends, and the sun was golden, and the trusty old ceiling fan was bathing me in the same gentle breeze that pervades the opening scene on the tower.

I may never finish the book, but I've already internalized its attitude towards life expressed in the last word: Yes!

Free Markets and Democracy: What Would Buddha Do?

(reflections on ideas heard on a broadcast of SPEAKING OF FAITH. Excerpts are taken from transcripts available at the show's web site. See LINKS in the right hand column of this blog.)

In a recent broadcast of the radio show SPEAKING OF FAITH, host Krista Tippett interviewed journalist Pankaj Mishra, author of An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World. In his conversation with host Krista Tippett, Mishra lumps Marx and Adam Smith together for their grand schemes to change society, and he contrasts them with the Buddha's program for changing society through individuals' responses to the worlds around them:

Mr. Mishra: The pursuit of these utopias in the last sort of 200, 300 years — and they've been pursued most, I think, fanatically in the last 200 years than at any other time, whether, you know, it's the sort of Nazi utopia, the Thousand Year Reich, which was the most sort of disreputable of them all, but also the communist utopia. And now, of course, you see the pursuit of another kind of utopia, the idea of individual happiness through consumption, through desire, and a kind of individual desire which, in the end, really does not respect any limits. It can go to any lengths to fulfill itself. So it is actually, in the end, a recipe for war and violence because you are going to need…

Ms. Tippett: And even just plain old unhappiness.

Mr. Mishra: Plain old unhappiness. Exactly. Because, you know, once again, the whole idea of the person who's desiring something yesterday is not the same person today. And when he gets the thing he desires, he'll have already moved on, so he'll be unhappy again.

I'm not used to lumping Adam Smith and the free market with those evil utopians, because communists and fascists speak of subsuming individuals in the Party, while Smith imagines the collective effect of individuals' own decisions day to day. Without denying that free markets give free rein to individual choice, Mishra has made an observation that rings true. Most interesting to me is his excerpt from Adam Smith's other book that preceded Wealth of Nations, the Theory of Moral Sentiments of 1759:

The poor man's son, whom heaven in its anger has visited with ambition, admires the condition of the rich. It appears in his fancy like the life of some superior rank of beings, and, in order to arrive at it, he devotes himself forever to the pursuit of wealth and greatness. Through the whole of his life, he pursues the idea of a certain artificial and elegant repose, which he may never arrive at, for which he sacrifices a real tranquility that is at all times in his power, and which, if in the extremity of old age, he should at last attain to it, he will find to be in no respect preferable to that humble security and contentment which he had abandoned for it. Power and riches appear, then, to be what they are, enormous machines contrived to produce a few trifling conveniences to the body. They are immense fabrics, which it requires the labor of a life to raise, which threaten every moment to overwhelm the person that dwells in them, and which, while they stand, can protect him from none of the severer inclemencies of the season. They keep off the summer shower, not the winter storm, but leave him always as much and sometimes more exposed than before to anxiety, to fear and to sorrow, to diseases, to danger and to death.

In choosing to compare "power and riches" to "enormous machines," Smith seconds Mishra's thought that free enterprise also constitutes an over-arching utopian program. Of course, a favorite author of mine, business historian John Steele Gordon, would point out that the free market system nullified half of Smith's paragraph above within 150 years of his writing it, as it produced answers to winter storms, diseases, danger, and anxiety.

Another interesting portion of the discussion followed Krista Tippett's "devil's advocate" question. Mishra had just contrasted the Alexander / Napoleon / Hitler model of leadership to that of Indian prince Ashoka, whose conquest and massacres left him suddenly sick at heart, and he managed his empire for years after with sharp limits on state violence. But he's not remembered. She asks:

Ms. Tippett: [A]n American, a modern American, might look at this history you tell and might still compare someone like Alexander and Ashoka, or 21st-century America and India, and say it's clear which version of reality, which ethos is on the winning side. Right? They would say simply this ethos of acquisition and building and progress and power is what, in fact, works in this world we inhabit. Now, how would you respond to that?

Mr. Mishra: Well, I'd very quickly challenge the notion that it works. Where is the evidence that it works? I mean, the 21st century has not started off very well. What I do see is a whole lot of confusion, a whole lot of bewilderment and a whole lot of hatred, a whole lot of violence out there. And, you know, even people, even societies that are supposedly doing extremely well, such as China or India, when you actually start thinking about 20, even 20, 30 years in the future, you wonder about their big populations, you wonder about their great needs. What will these societies need once they come into their own as middle class consumers of the kind people in America are? The amount of oil they would need, amount of energy resources they will have to find to sustain their populations at the standard of living they will have arrived at at that point, if they do arrive at that standard of living. And where is that oil going to come from? You know, I think it's unsustainable, and that's why we're heading towards, and we already have, we already live in such, sort of, violent times. So I'm completely unpersuaded by the notion that the systems we have are working. The fact of power obscures the failures, but the fact that you have to use violence all the time, you know, really points to the failure of all these systems in many ways.

When Tippett asks what Buddha might say about contemporary America and the problems we face with Islamist terrorists, Mishra's responses were not so earth-shattering. He points to the growth (in size, in resources, in intrusivenss) of federal government, and its distance from the decisions of ordinary Americans. He thinks the Buddha's approach would "devolve" decision-making to more local bodies -- and that sounds very Constitutional to me. About the Islamists, Mishra shows no sympathy to the terrorist organizations or leaders, and he decries what they've done in places where he grew up, Kashmir and India (where he speaks of Hindu Nationalists as well as the Islamists), but he offers an understanding of how the cynical leaders gain control of their young recruits:

I knew about the corruptions of jihad, of the leaders grown fat on generous donations from foreign and local patrons, sending young men to poorly paid martyrdoms in Kashmir and Afghanistan. But I hadn't expected to be moved by the casual sight in one madrasa of six young men sleeping on tattered sheets on the floor. I hadn't thought I would be saddened to think of the human waste they represented, the young men whose ancestors had once built one of the greatest civilizations of the world and who now lived in dysfunctional societies beholden to or in fear of America.

The other kind of future once laid out for them had failed. This was the future in which everyone in the world would wear a tie, work in an office or factory, practice birth control, raise a nuclear family, drive a car and pay taxes. There were not nearly enough secular schools to educate these young men in the ways of the modern world, and few jobs awaited those who had been educated.

But the fantasy of modernity, held up by their state and supported by the international political and economic system, had been powerful enough to expel and uproot them from their native villages. Having lost the protection of their old moral order, their particular bonds and forms of authority, they hoped to stave off chaos and degeneration by joining such authoritarian movements as Hindu nationalism and radical Islam, by surrendering their dreams to demagogues like Bin Laden.

It's a book I'm now interested in reading.

Also interesting: I paraphrased a portion of another broadcast of the show. While I didn't like the guest I was hearing that time -- (a first!) -- I liked this quotation from Diedrich Bonhoeffer: "People who love the community that they create will cause it to fail; people who love those around them will create a community wherever they go." Immediately, this calls to mind my boy John Winthrop, whose efforts to create a loving Christian community, a "City on a Hill" in 1630s New England, unravelled one disaffected group at a time as he tried with increasing desperation to make them fit his plan.

May Poetry: Parents and Grandparents

(reflections on poems in the journal POETRY, May 2007)

Writing a poem about writing poems is so cliche, but sometimes it works. The May issue of POETRY opens with Bob Hicok's poem "O my pa-pa" (a cutesy title unlike anything in the poem itself), and it opens with the conceit, "Our fathers have formed a poetry workshop." Much of what follows is funny, at the expense of the sons who write from "the revenge school of poetry." Then he imagines how the father - poets would struggle to get past the common elements in their stories (esp., long days at the office), and he writes how hard it is to write about his own father "whose absence / was his presence" in terms of how he worked "with seven kids and a house to feed." Building things must be feeding the house, and the poet remembers the father's building a grandfather clock with the son who learned from it "that time is a constructed thing, a passing ticking, fancy." He returns to that circle of father - poets and their poems' "reciprocal dwelling on absence," wondering "why we disappeared as soon as we got our licenses." It's a poem of around sixty lines that link one association to the next, from the fanciful start through the particular experience, to tell a universal story.

Hicok's "For those whose reflex was yes" follows, and it, too, passes through a comical scene to something that stirs us. After a peculiar first few words (more about those, later), it launches into a familiar anecdote, how a mother and son fall "into the river's million hands" that pull them down. A man jumps in to save them. So far, so realistic. But shortly volunteers leap in left and right to save everyone else. It's like a slapstick comedy (along the lines of the Tar-Baby), then a kind of nightmare, as their bodies make a "river within the river." It becomes beautiful as the poet imagines this happening for the rest of the "dying day." Now I return to the first words, "Nobody I know is a god," and wonder if this is to say that none of us can know what the consequences will be if our "reflex is yes." Again, this reminds me of my own father, whose words and example have told me, "In situations like that, if you don't act, you'll regret it the rest of your life." The poem's final image seems to bless the making of the choice.

Anne Stevenson, whose work I've enjoyed in previous issues, writes "Inheriting my Grandmother's Nightmare." There's an anecdote behind this, the persona's spilling out the contents of her grandmother's silverware drawer. Contemplating the "lavender world" of the grandmother "turned upside down" as each succeeding generation grows louder and ruder was enough poem for me, a meditation on "the adhesiveness of things / to the ghosts that prized them" as the ghost of the grandmother clings to her spoons decades later. Somehow, the poem moves on to the grandmother's experience of the Holocaust, and that adds a different flavor that overpowers the rest.

Geoffrey Brock's poem "Homeland Security" begins as an infant son's cries "worm" through the poet's ear plugs and sleep at 4 A.M. The poem takes place in the time it takes the poet to decide not to go to the child just yet -- and his mind wanders to the defenses he's laid out to stop insects' assaults on his homeland. The political allusion in the title pops up in a reference to the "patriot ants" from "republics / endlessly perishing." This is political without being polemical, a reminder that, as my grandmother Thelma taught me, no matter what we do to prepare, "there's always something."

The Foreigner: Actor's Play makes an Actors' Play

(reflections after seeing a production of Larry Shue's comedy THE FOREIGNER at Pope High School in Marietta, GA)

To the ranks of great actors-turned-playwrights David Mamet, Harold Pinter, and William Shakespeare, add Larry Shue.

I met the actor Shue during his stint as a leading member of the Harlequin Dinner Theatre, a company that produced musicals in Atlanta and DC, running them a month and then trading them. He was particularly memorable in the title role of WHERE'S CHARLEY? I met him after a performance of I DO, I DO, in which he starred with Dorothy Collins. Gaga over her status as alumna of Sondheim's original cast of FOLLIES, I got her autograph, but just shook his hand.

During that period of his life, Shue was drafting the play that gives him his claim to immortality, THE FOREIGNER. Set in a small bed-and-breakfast near Atlanta in the late 70s, it tells the story of Charlie, a shy Englishman seeking a quiet retreat. His friend Froggy Le Seur concocts a fool-proof plan to allow Charlie to keep to himself: let it be known that Charlie is really Cha-oo-lee, a foreigner who speaks no English. But the plan backfires, as all the inhabitants of the bed-and-breakfast find it therapeutic or fun to speak their deepest secrets to him.

PHOTO COLLAGE: Our production of THE FOREIGNER by the Walker School's Middle School, 2002.

The show had a couple years' run off-Broadway in the early 80s. Shue starred first as "Froggy," then as "Charlie." Then a plane crash killed Shue en route to Hollywood with the screenplay for the movie version around 1984. The play has been in constant production ever since, and I've directed it with middle schoolers twice, most recently four years ago with a cast of devoted and gifted eighth graders.

Now, Chase McCallum, who played Froggy in eighth grade, grown up and graduating from high school, has on his own produced and directed a superb staging of the show, playing Charlie. He drafted Carrie Stallings, another veteran of that fabled staging of four years ago, to reprise her role as the older woman "Betty." Reed McCallum, who followed Chase in my drama program, portrayed the duplicitous Reverend David Lee with subtlety and relish.

Chase chose to seat the audience on stage, closing the curtains behind us, to create an intimate "black box" feel in the large auditorium. His actors inhabited that little bed-and-breakfast for real, ignoring the chatty couple and the rude high schoolers and the video cameras.

As I say whenever some snob claims that Shakespeare was a front man for some aristocrat, only an experienced actor could write this way. Shue generously gives every actor great chances to show off with set pieces and moments of transformation that delight the audience. While words are the source of great fun throughout the play, it's a play about characters, not their lines. Charlie gets huge laughs simply by reacting silently, and he gets to perform a virtuosic story in mime and double-talk (an actor's exercise used in drama class -- to create stories from nonsense lines) . One stretch of the script that makes an audience breathless features the young woman in the play reading aloud from a newspaper to mute Charlie, gradually breaking down from sarcastic debutante to a child bride, vulnerable and scared. The emblematic moment of the play, often photographed, is the mute breakfast scene in which Charlie draws out a sullen boy who is supposed to be mentally deficient. He does it by simply imitating the boy's movements -- another actor's game that any drama student would know. The boy, finding himself in the role of teacher, grows in self-confidence.

In a way, the whole play is about what acting teaches. Charlie tells Froggy (I paraphrase), "I'm acquiring a personality. People hand me pieces of it." The actor always works to assemble the personality of his role, and the good actor finds pieces in his own real life and experience to make the role real. A good actor reaches a better understanding of himself and others in the process.

The play makes reference to THE WIZARD OF OZ in several subtle ways, and spectacularly so in the finale. It's no casual connection. The inhabitants of the bed-and-breakfast are as different and lost as the Scarecrow, Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Dorothy. Through the agency of the imaginary foreigner, each discovers inner resources in time to defeat the forces of evil, and we feel great affection for the characters by the end.

A couple of personal notes, here. First, having seen the play in a professional production, and having spent literally hundreds of hours of my life in rehearsals for equally professional student productions, I had the odd and pleasurable sensation of coming home when I saw the set for Chase's production. The same thing happens when I see a production of SWEENEY TODD or any other familiar musical or opera. Seeing such a play, so familiar, and so rich in feeling, is a bit like participating in a religious ritual -- engendering the same feelings, no matter the size of the church or the characteristics of the priest. No wonder the ancient Greeks worshipped through theatre: these characters are spirits that possesses the actors who play them, and I know them and love them, no matter who embodies them.

Second, we who saw the play Friday night shared the unique and bittersweet experience of being forced to leave at the end of act one. A passing storm blew out the electricity early in the act, and emergency generators provided some fluorescent light for the remainder. Fire regulations required us to leave as soon as possible. Chase, having planned this production for years, remained in character as all of us, audience, actors, crew, filed out in darkness into the parking lot, all disappointed. Impromptu, Chase presented Charlie's "story" for us, with the dumpster as his backdrop - a strange and memorable moment of theatre.

From Zero to Murder Mystery in 21 hours

(reflections following four successful performances of UNDER THE SURFACE, a one-act murder mystery written by the actors and yours truly, their director.)

I've wanted to write a murder mystery since I was a fifth grader discovering "Alfred Hitchcock and the Three Investigators" thirty-seven years ago. Thanks to my eighth grade drama class, I've now had that experience, and it was at least as much fun to create one as it is to read one.

It's my custom to start each eighth grade class by commissioning the students to write their own play, to be around forty-five minutes long, to involve everyone as a character, not to be mere take-offs of movies or other "given" characters, and not to contain elements that would get me fired.

This group quickly gravitated to the idea of writing a murder mystery, the first of my classes to do so. We started with little more than the name of a victim, "Lily," and the notion that she was last seen at a lake, and her body was never found. Soon, we had her social milieu -- twelve friends her age, who have converged on a mountain lake resort town every summer since early childhood. She disappeared at the end of their end-of-the-summer party last summer.

A subset of characters emerged, the "townies" who used to be part of the group, but have been marginalized since the teens grew more aware of social stratification.

Very early on, we discussed the notion of a prank gone wrong. We didn't know what to do with that idea, but we tucked it away. It emerged at just the right moment.

That's all we knew when the class improvised the scene in the anteroom at the funeral home, following the memorial service for Lily. Self-conscious, all the students kept quiet, afraid to say much more than "isn't it sad?" Then one girl startled everyone by saying to one boy, "What are you sad about? You're the reason she's gone!" The play developed from seeds in that one improv.

We filled out depositions on official-looking stationery of the Mountain Lake Resort, NY sherriff's office. Writing as characters, each actor wrote what he or she did on that fateful day in August, in the morning, afternoon, early evening, and at the party. Later, I played "lawyer" for the defense of the prime suspect, and asked for any memories that might exonerate -- or cause problems for -- my client.

I gave my actor / writers some rules of detective fiction:

• We're looking for someone who has motive, opportunity, and character to commit the crime
• Everyone is hiding something
• The prime suspect has to die half way through the story
  

Actors were asked what they thought about Lily's disappearance, and we made a list of those theories. Students were given the assignment to break into pairs and trios, to select activities at different town locations (tennis courts, barber shop, cafe, cabin, beach) where they would argue their different theories. Every reason had with it some memory of an event, and we added flashbacks for those. I asked actors to come up with solid mementos for each memory, and got a letter from Lily, her cell phone, and a ring.

One pair of actors introduced a plot twist: Lily didn't die, but she faked her death to be able to start a new life far away. But she hasn't called her sister recently.

Still, we seemed not to be moving forward in our process of writing the play. All the scenes seemed to be saying the same things over and over again.

With the whole cast assembled, I blacked out the lights in the theatre, except for one circle of light in the center of the floor. I said, "That's the annual bonfire. Okay, go!" Girls chatted about marshmallows, and it was pretty tedious. But each succeeding "take" suggested a new idea, and soon we had a strong scene that included a ghost story, a prank gone wrong, and the topper: discovery of the prime suspect's dead body.

I won't say that the play wrote itself after that. But things clicked into place. We tweaked earlier scenes to lead up to that bonfire.

As director, I had responsibility to come up with the solution to our crime. We had only one more week to rehearse before our first performance, and we still didn't have a final scene.

I felt like we'd written ourselves into a corner. It helped to ask three simple questions: Where did Lily get the money to run away? Why hasn't she called? And who killed her ex-boyfriend at this year's bonfire?

I'll cherish the memory of our class meeting the next week, when I got to do what countless fictional detectives do. "I know who did it -- and he's here among you." Kids saw the logic in the solution, and we went to work making a final scene that would uncover all the secrets.

The hard part was keeping that scene interesting, since it's conducted entirely in past tense, its characters discussing past events. But there's the excitement of discovery to propel them, and we used the technique of flashback to turn narration into action.

Then I did write myself into a corner. We all agreed that the bad guy should set fire to the house bringing his nemesis down with him. How could I possibly have the stage burst into flames, except through some unconvincing light trick?

The solution was already contained in the dialogue: memory of a bonfire prank years ago, when the college-aged characters were mere eighth graders. When the villain ignites the flame, there's a quick blackout and, simultaneously, an off-stage voice yells, "Fire!" Red light floods the stage, and boys rush on, and we gradually realize we're at that bonfire in an earlier, happier time. The last second of the play was the flash photograph of the whole cast smiling for the camera -- eighth graders giving their impressions of college students' impressions of eighth graders!

Watching all the pieces click into place over the last eight weeks (only 21 hours of class time) was immensely satisfying for me, like doing a crossword puzzle, or like seeing my rhymes fit with music.

Nancy Calhoun, Middle School Principal

(remarks for a reception honoring Nancy Calhoun, retiring from the Walker School after thirty-three years' teaching, twenty-three as founding principal of Walker's middle school.)

Today a student pays tribute to Mrs. Calhoun as a teacher, and our headmaster will give his thoughts about Nancy as a colleague and friend. It falls to me, as a member of the faculty in the middle school, to give you the inside scoop on Nancy Calhoun as a boss.

First, you should know that, as a boss, she is strict. That's not to say that she rides us during faculty meetings. She smiles indulgently while we act up like our kids. The girls in the front row pass notes and share candy, the boys in the back throw paper and make wisecracks, and there's always someone to say, "Wait! What are we talking about?" But we can all name the items on a list called Nancy's Non-Negotiables, and we fall in line behind those without question: things like respecting students, keeping parents informed, keeping Nancy informed, and being professional with each other. I've noticed that the list has grown a little since she hired me back in '98.

She's the kind of boss who gets things done. I was told when I started here that Nancy Calhoun always gets what she wants. It's more accurate to say that Nancy always wants what's best for the school, and she has the will and the creativity to get it. We needed room for a music program -- she found space in the gym. She concluded that middle schoolers need single-gender math classes, and she juggled schedules to make it happen. She found the ideal band director who happened to be married to our music teacher, and she convinced the Board of Trustees to change policy. She found the ideal science instructor in England, and she fought the U.S. Immigration Service to keep him.

And, while her faculty is in the classroom helping children to grow, she has made a priority of our professional and personal growth. A few years ago, Nancy instituted book discussions for us -- books about school, but also books about family and personal life. She encourages us to try new methods, or even new fields -- so a former literature teacher now incorporates writing with mathematics; and an art instructor has developed a curriculum for Art History. And just as she shows up to watch our children in countless sports events and plays and concerts to build them up, she writes us very personal notes that show how much she has noticed and appreciated what we do. I was startled in a private meeting with the Headmaster, when he mentioned some things that I'd volunteered to do -- and I realized that Nancy must have been keeping track and telling him. Our dean of students Blair Fisher, at the announcement that he would succeed Nancy, thanked her for seeing leadership potential in him long before he did. And Nancy hasn't stopped educating herself, either -- I know that she began a few years ago to study People magazine cover to cover, when she realized that everyone else already knew who Britney Spears was.

Most of us first met Nancy at our interviews, when it became clear that this boss looks beyond your résumé for one essential quality: to work in Nancy's organization, you have to actually enjoy Middle Schoolers -- in all their potential, and all their intense needs. Then she looks for wide-ranging experience beyond teaching, and interest beyond a subject area. That's why our faculty is so weird, including a math teacher who chases tornados, a science teacher who quotes Chaucer, a Civics teacher who designs websites, a History teacher who writes musicals, and people with backgrounds in business, geology, world travel, parenting, armed services, administration, and showbiz. And when she offered us a position, we all jumped. In fact, Kitty Drew says that she interviewed at another school, where the principal said, "Oh, if you have the chance to work for Nancy Calhoun, take it."

Since this is an insider's view, I bet you all want to know -- out of the public eye, behind closed doors -- is she really so considerate, positive, and well-spoken? Sorry to disappoint any news reporters here, but the answer is, yes, yes, and yes. We can trust that what she says to us face to face is what she believes in her heart, and it's no less than what she says to anyone else. And I bet all of us have had to go behind closed doors with her to confess our own mistakes, and, I, for one, always leave as if I've received absolution from Mother Superior.

These past eight years, I've spent a lot of time working with teachers from Cobb and surrounding counties. I find that, whenever they relax, they talk exclusively about their problems with overbearing and incompetent administrators. Whenever teachers of the Walker middle school relax, we talk about something interesting we've discovered, or ways to reach certain students, or we talk about the arts, or world affairs. I think that says a lot about Nancy Calhoun, the choices she made, the priorities she has set, and the way she leads. And when I tell those public school teachers how we think of Nancy as a colleague, they can't imagine it.

The truth is, we in the Middle School faculty have never referred to Nancy as the Boss. She has been our teacher, and she has been our friend -- and that's the real inside scoop.

Blink: How Words Distort Vision

(Reflection after completing the book BLINK: THE POWER OF THINKING WITHOUT THINKING by NY Times writer Malcolm Gladwell, and a NEWSWEEK review of a book that runs counter to BLINK called HOW DOCTORS THINK, by Dr. Jerome Groopman.)

During our trip to New York, my high school friend Craig Housman bought a pamphlet on throwing playing cards, hoping to be able to slice bread or halt assailants at forty paces with the Queen of Hearts. He was disappointed.

In a way, I kind of hoped that I would finish reading BLINK able to make complex decisions in a single intuitive bound.

With interesting anecdotes propelling the book, each becoming a sort of model, author Malcolm Gladwell seems to move us forward to such a conclusion. Yes, we learn, initial impressions can be right when months of study can go wrong (as in the example of the Getty museum's purchase of an ersatz antiquity on expert advice after initial "repulsion" by "something wrong" with it). But we also see how New York Police, reacting within a matter of seconds to impressions of "something wrong" chased Amadou Diallo, an unarmed and frightened man, to a corner where they shot him to death.

What good is it to know that first impressions are right, except when they're wrong? A new book, HOW DOCTORS THINK, argues in favor of methodical, deliberate decision-making.

To say that Gladwell opposes this would be to caricature his book. Gladwell's stories do share at least one common element. In story after story, experience has taught people things that they cannot put into words. Worse, when they do try to verbalize their insights, the words cause "second thoughts" that actually obfuscate the reality.

There are sports figures who can't explain their own success, or who explain it wrongly (as demonstrated by slow-motion x-ray video of what their bodies are actually doing). . . There's the experienced firefighter who had the sudden intuition "something's wrong here" and ordered men out just before the floor collapsed, but it wasn't until much later, with help, that he realized what had been wrong: experience had taught him to expect more noise and less heat than he was getting from an apparently isolated kitchen fire. . . There are the lab tests that show how something as simple as exposure to a favorable image of black men in authority can undo deep-seated racial stereotyping in black and whites both, and another that measured anxiety in sweat glands and heart rate as subjects chose red cards, long before their conscious minds figured out to flip only blue cards because the red ones were stacked against them.

Gladwell looks at his subject from many angles. He includes a section on a comedy improv team, showing how they rehearse seriously in order to be able to make up thirty minute plays on the spot. One of their rules is to accept what happens in any situation, rather than fighting against it. (114-116). Experience makes the split-second cooperation possible.

Perhaps most interesting is the story of Pentagon maverick Paul Riper's "Red Team" outsmarting a war room full of top brass, confident in their superior numbers, firepower, communications, and strategy. By not using electronic communications, and concentrating force in one direction, Riper "sinks" a dozen ships and "kills" 20,000 Americans before they have the chance to use their big guns. Riper scorns the long decision-making processes instituted at the Pentagon. Too much information, too much intellection, were no match for quick-striking and sly force. Of course, Shakespeare knew this -- see Hamlet.

So, people with experience can trust their unconscious decision-making, unless their vision is blurred by unconscious bias and / or physical panic. A little experience to break stereotypes helps. So does a little bit of time: Gladwell tells how several police forces are now ordering cops to go on patrols solo, because waiting for back up gives them time to get a little more experience with a subject before making a split-second decision that they'll regret. (I won't forget the cop who, finding a black wallet clutched in Diallo's hand, yelled, "Where's the gun?!" and collapsed, sobbing. )

But words create a "verbal shadow" that can alter one's memories and perceptions, while introspection leads to paralysis, death in a fluid military situation.

I've known this a long time. In fact, it's the crux of my senior honor's thesis at Duke University, about Henry James's antepenultimate novel THE AMBASSADOR -- in which the main character Lambert Strether arrives in Paris knowing the truth, then talks himself out of it.

Time Out

(including reflections on the Metropolitan Opera's High-definition broadcast of Il Trittico, and an all-British concert by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra including works by Elgar, Turnage, MacMillan, Maxwell-Davies, and Britten)

Religion and great art have at least this in common: they lift us out of ordinary time.

This was brought home to me Saturday April 27. The day was overcrowded with events, and concerns for pending time-consuming projects weighed on my mind enough that I couldn't get back to sleep when my little dog Luis woke me up at 2:30 that morning.

First on the agenda was breakfast with John R., in town for our 30th high school reunion. He'd bought me dinner on my last night on the Duke U. campus back in 1981. (That next morning, I began a two-day journey to Jackson, Mississippi, where I would stay for 17 years). Now, 27 years later, would we recognize each other? No problem. Would there be talk of old times? Truly, none of that came up. Instead, we each made short work of the previous 27 years, compressing all into just two or three decisive high points and some current themes. (Briefly: his college students' lack of interest is as galling to him as 7th graders' is to me, and we both see this lack of curiosity as something different from what our crowd showed back in the 70s; big decisions seemed to just fall in place for us both; for both of us, the realization has come as a surprise that music is what's more important to us than anything; both bike.) I left feeling very happy, as if all those years are now validated and wrapped up for storage and I'm free to move on to the next chapter.


Then I met Frank Boggs, mentor and early cultivator of my interest in music, at a multiplex to see the last broadcast of the Met's first year of opera-at-the-movies. This one, Il Trittico, had interested me least, on the basis of some commentary in Puccini's biography and the synopses of the three independent one-act operas. Act Three, Gianni Schicchi, is a masterpiece of farce, and I'd seen it already. Acts One and Two are, respectively, a sordid melodrama about a jealous husband's revenge (Pagliacci without the interest of the play-within-a-play), and a tear-jerker set among pious nuns. How wrong I was. Music gave substance to the flimsy stories and sympathy to the stock characters, while Puccini and his librettist took pains to plant themes and plot elements early so that the twists seemed natural instead of manipulative. The acting of the singers was also natural. Director Jack O'Brien and his design staff created the Met's largest sets for elaborately realistic environments, down to the worn cobblestones in the convent.

But the moment that took me out of time, and out of my seat, occurred at the end of Act Three. Schicchi is a great farce, and like all farces, all the characters are caricatures, and even the show's big hit tune is sung by an airheaded young soprano. I thought all the big emotional moments of the triptych were finished, and this was a frothy dessert. But, as Schicchi, victorious, drives all the relatives out of the mansion that now belongs to him, the entire set -- enormously wide, deep, tall, and sober, befitting a wealthy man's deathbed -- sank into the floor. The audience gasped once as they saw the roof of the mansion lowering into view, the two young lovers seated there to sing their little coda to the comedy. As the balcony neared ground level, the audience gasped again, for there, behind it all, in realistic color and detail, was the gorgeous and familiar panoramic view of Florence at sunset. Did millions of dollars go into this effect, which lasted only for two or three minutes to the end of the opera? It was worth it. I've never cried for a scene change before - but this was magic.

The Symphony program included Maxwell-Davies' musical impression of a wedding on the Orkney Islands in Scotland, with amusing (and difficult) musical imitations of a wedding band drunk with alcohol and fatigue, topped with "sunrise" in the sound of the bagpipes. Turnage's piece was a collage of gestures, and constantly delightful and interesting, though I was glad it didn't last a single minute longer. My reason for buying this ticket was to hear my hero Britten's Sinfonia de Requiem, but it was beautiful and dramatic in all the ways that I've learned to expect from Britten - so, not so remarkable.

The program ended with Elgar's most famous Pomp and Circumstance march, played with much greater zest and color than I'm used to hearing for it -- taking us instantly back in rose-colored memory to Queen Victoria's last years.

By the end of the day, I wanted to do anything I could to prolong the time -- shop for groceries, get a Subway sandwich, listen to jazz on the radio, read a book.

Art and religion both tell us that there is time outside of time, and the quotidian concerns that worry us aren't all that important.

Shooter's Fantasies

(Response to commentary by essayist Diane Roberts, who teaches English at Florida State University on NPR's Weekend Edition Sunday, and on the shooting of dozens of students and teachers at Virginia Tech this past week.)

Beginning her commentary with a list of the disturbing graphic violence found in writings of respected authors, among them Williams Faulkner and Shakespeare, Diane Roberts comments on the fatuity of media "rent-a-shrinks" who believe that the Virginia Tech shooter's intentions were evident in his writing.

Her student writers often fill their stories with fantasies of revenge and fantasies of horrible deaths for characters who are their stand-ins. Feeling powerless and feeling oppressed is part of being young; so is feeling sorry for yourself. Dreaming of power, then, is a corrective, along with dreaming of revenge, and dreaming of the gratifying grief and regret at their own funerals.

There's another simple observation by the wise and witty Frederick Buechner in his masterpiece quartet of novels collected as THE BOOK OF BEBB. The narrator, a high school English teacher, comments on grading his juniors' stories with their "usual quota" of fatal car crashes and violence, as the students inject death in their stories to make up for the lack of anything resembling real life in them.

Cho's fantasies weren't different, and it's clear that he felt a lack of "real life" in his own life -- just like many others his age. But a healthy mind draws a line between fantasy and reality.

Speaking Well of the Dead: Kathay, R.I.P.

(reflections on the life of Kathay Walters, friend and neighbor, and on the sermon given at her memorial service in little Alamo, Georgia.)

A preacher at the Methodist church of Alamo, Georgia began his memorial sermon this way (as I rermember it):

I have to admit that I didn't know Kathay Walters. I only met her once, two months ago, at the funeral of her mother. All I know is what I've heard from you [her family]. And I don't know who started it . . .

He was referring to a family feud with allegations of malfeasance, allegations of mistreatment of aged parents, all tangled with property, wills, and harsh words. The minister guessed that he was the first ever to choose Philippians 4 at a funeral oration. It's the passage that I set to music for my brother's marriage, "One thing I know, forgetting what lies behind. . . straining for the prize of the upward call of Jesus." The preacher went on:

. . . I don't know who was right or wrong. But I know this: No one here is going to speak ill of the dead. . . . You, her family, her daughter, her sisters. . . you all remember times when she loved you and you loved her, and you all remember good times. Remember those, and remember that Jesus said no one is fit to be a judge but Jesus alone.

It was a remarkably candid and forceful statement in a situation where preachers usually resort to bromides about death and vague "memories" about a person they knew only in their Sunday best -- or in a hospital gown. The little brick church, whitewashed inside, was big enough to hold about one hundred - fifty people if they squeezed. There was a group at the back of one side, separated by a gulf of ten pews from a family group at the front. Pall bearers across the aisle were separated by another ten pews from where I sat with Nikhil (who moved three years ago into the home where I used to live across the street from her) with his wife Mallika and cousin Amar. At the point when he said to remember the times when she'd loved them, the separated groups began to cry.

With us was Kathay's dearest neighbor friend Dottie, who'd laughed with me on the phone just a week before as she was helping Kathay to plan out a lifetime of reforming her eating habits to accommodate diabetes. Dottie had taken Kathay to the hospital with acute symptoms on the Tuesday, and stayed with her through overnight surgery and violent, excruciating aftermath.

Since the preacher didn't know Kathay, I offer my perspective. There's a lot that I didn't want to know, and there's a lot that was so different from my experience that I just laughed.

I know that her candor was shocking. She was fearless. She wouldn't sit still when she perceived that she or someone else wasn't being treated fairly. When teens down our street attracted a clientele of thugs in loud cars, she called the police to report drug dealing and over-loud car radios. She sat on her front porch with a cell phone to call 911 and a gun in her lap. When the cleaners lost her clothes smoke-smudged in a house fire (that I slept through - notwithstanding the firetrucks and sirens across the street), she sent to insurance companies and small-claims court her long inventories of every gown, blouse, and article of underwear with estimated costs -- dictated to me at my computer. On other issues, she dictated letters to me addressed to the Governor, our Senators, our Insurance Commissioner, the owner of Home Depot (to expedite the opening of his aquarium), and her divorce lawyer, and Oprah.

When I moved into the Owens Meadow subdivision of Kennesaw, GA back in 1998, she introduced herself, demanded that we trade house keys "because neighbors should be able to take care of each other," and she put me to work clearing weeds out of the vacant zone between my house and the next, so that she wouldn't have to look at them. (She also didn't want any haven for snakes.) But she also mowed lawns up and down the street as a service to the neighborhood -- riding her tractor in her short shorts (Kathay was not a petite woman), red hair, hat, sunglasses, cigarette dangling from her mouth.

When I called her from the hospital the morning after a car crash, she took care of my house and my dogs Cleo and Bo, who adored her always. During my long convalescence, she provided me with meals, too.

Some years later, after I'd moved, and Cleo died suddenly, I drove to tell her. I couldn't even get the words out, "Cleo died." She comforted me, and led me straight across the street to demand that the next door neighbor give me his little dog -- who'd played often with Bo and Cleo, and who otherwise never got off the rope tied to the side of the garage -- saying, "You don't care for the dog, and he'll give him a good home." That's how I got Luis. By the way, I'd done the driving for her when her beloved old cat suddenly fell ill (poisoned, perhaps). She buried him in the backyard and swore she'd never leave that house, because he was back there.

She taught me how to make martinis, having been the cute blond waitress in a miniskirt at the Holiday Inn on Windy Hill Road. Back in 1970, she told me, that was about the only place in Cobb County where a man could get a good drink. Late nights in winter, she also liked it when I brought eggnog, which she'd make "dirty" by adding Grand Marnier or Bourbon -- in a proportion about 50-50. She also worked as the head of dining services in a large retirement center, and after planning meals for hundreds a day, she never did learn to cook for one guest. I always left her dinner table stuffed, and carrying tubs of leftovers besides.


When I'd come home frustrated by students, feeling beaten down, she'd sit me on the porch, put a huge snifter of plum wine in my hands, and share her opinions.

Her house was always dark, except for the big-screen TV. She kept it super - cool in the summer, insulated with screens and blankets and curtains on the windows.

I never did write down the words that she would say without having seen them -- "honeysuckers" were weeds on my fence, and the neighbors had a hot tub "ka-huzzi." But I felt it would be a kind of betrayal to write down the words for someone else's amusement, and they're all gone, now. Still, there's one story along those lines that I love: She had little ceramic birdhouses, and little carved ones, too, arrayed on the tops of the kitchen cabinets. She proudly pointed to new wallpaper trim she'd pasted along the ceiling -- "birdhouses," she said. But I looked more closely and saw that those "birdhouses" had moons carved on them, and human ankles visible within -- she'd plastered the kitchen with outhouses. She was embarrassed, but she left them up.

Our friend Nikhil did a bold and fitting thing, writing an appreciation of her in rhyme that took up a full page of the funeral home's sign-in book, an improvised verse that mentioned her big heart and sharp tongue, how she was never shy about speaking what was on her mind.

I'd long been in the habit of taking her out to some of our favorite places, and taking her to some events, besides. We saw The Color Purple and The Lion King, and the new aquarium. We ate often at Buffalo's and Copeland's, and recently, the OK Cafe. She'd dress to the nines in glittery tops and tight black pants, with jewelry and eye shadow. But I waited 'til March 23, a beautiful afternoon, to suggest that we go down to Buckhead to the pricey and trendy Atlanta Seafood Company, with its three-storey copper fish in front. She loved it - had lobster, "white ziffandel," and some of my dessert. It was the last time I saw her.