Rat Pack Redux: Grown Ups, ca. 1960

(reflections on the musical revue The Rat Pack Live at the Sands, performed at Atlanta's Fox Theatre, Sept. 30, 2007, and THE DEATH OF THE GROWN UP by Diana West.)

Sinatra, and to a lesser extent Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin, were the model adults whose images on tv and voices on the radio filled the background of my first decade. I can't say I liked them. In fact, they creeped me out. Somehow, though I was something younger than six, I knew that Frank Sinatra was singing about death when he got to the last verse of It Was A Very Good Year, "I'm in the autumn of my days." The lyric, the ominous strings, and his world-weary delivery spooked me. Now it makes me chuckle to think that Sinatra then was years younger than I am now. The whole song is a juvenile view of maturity, each verse remembering a decade in terms of girls' hair and alcoholic beverages. Around the same time I heard Sinatra's buddy Nat King Cole singing Young At Heart with its equally spooky last lines, "If you should survive / to a hundred and five. . .." If? IF? That song sent this morbid little child in a panic to his grandmother for reassurance that, yes, she and I would survive. Ditto, My Way, in which Sinatra describes his entire life in the past tense.

I've since grown to appreciate the craftsmanship of the great American Songbook that Sinatra championed, to admire Sinatra for championing it and for adding his own edge to the songs, and I've grown to love the sound of the fifteen-piece band that Nelson Riddle arranged for. So I attended a traveling revue that ostensibly recreates highlights from a two-week Las Vegas act that Sinatra, Martin, and Davis did.

I hoped that RAT PACK LIVE AT THE SANDS would give me a taste of what it was like to be an adult in 1960, and it did - revealing to me something unexpected: if this was entertainment for adults in 1960, then the great shift decried in Diana West's THE DEATH OF THE GROWN UP was already in full swing (pun intended). The whole Rat Pack shtick was one joke repeated endlessly: "We're grown men, behaving badly. See us indulge ourselves, insult each other with locker-room banter, and try on silly costumes." Not that this production did it badly. The Sinatra imitator's delivery of songs was to my ears indistinguishable from the original's. But in this context, even the best of the romantic songs came off as polished and bloodless, and the shlocky ones as ironic. No wonder the Boomers at first found them to be tired and phony.

In the foreword to a book of Sixties music that was published in 1971, the editor contrasted the "more authentic" Sixties folk-rock style with the artifice of the earlier era. That, too, is silly. The folk-rock style simply substituted a new kind of artifice, one that had been around for decades. I think of that atrocious faux-folk hymn by an Ivy League anthropologist "I Wonder as I Wander" (Christ would die "for you and for I" -- me shudders at the affected grammar). It's just the two hundred year old idea of the "noble savage" updated. Now, the songs in that book by Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell seem like Brahms compared to the audio graffiti they call hip-hop -- all in the name of being "real."

All of this makes me doubtful that Diane West has correctly diagnosed our problem. She acknowledges that the 20s pop culture was also iconoclastic and devoted to self-indulgence in sex and alcohol and making fun of responsible adults, but tries to make the distinction that the youth in 20s pop culture at least wanted to become adults, and the rules of adulthood were still acknowledged. That's a weak argument, as "being adult" in 20s pop culture -- that is, being a sophisticated adult -- meant casualness about sex and drinking. Think of the Algonquin Round Table, Cole Porter's best and worst, and Noel Coward.

I wonder what West would make of this lyric:

What's going to happen to the children when there aren't any more grown-ups?
Thanks to plastic surgery, and grampa's abrupt demise,
Grandma Rose has fixed her nose, but doesn't appear to realize
That pleasures that once were heaven
Look silly at sixty-seven,
And youthful allure you can't procure
In terms of perms and shots . . .

It's by Noel Coward, written in the Thirties, and revised for a 1950s TV special. I like Noel, but his stock in trade was naughtiness and making fun of people who obey rules. His "I Went to a Marvelous Party" is an egregious example of this, as every punch line sneaks up on a suggestion of nudity or sex, as if those were hilarious in themselves - talk about juvenile!

Truly, so long as Ms. West is pinning her observations on show biz personalities, she's missing the bull's eye. Show biz must be novel, must be "cutting edge," must mock status quo, and its performers are always posing and begging to be liked. That's inherently immature.

I think it's less about maturity, and more a version of the classic country-mouse, city-mouse fable - or their cousins the ant and the grasshopper. Today, thanks to education and media and brand name availability, we're all city mice and grasshoppers, oriented towards consumption, novelty, and the expectation of instant gratification, and expectation that someone else will provide - because we city mice have more important things to do. Isn't that the essence of childishness?

Curmudgeon with a Heart of Gold: Philip Larkin

(reflections on Philip Larkin's Collected Poems, Anthony Thwaite, editor, published by Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2003.)

I didn't think I knew Philip Larkin's poetry until I came to page 57 in his Collected Poems, where I recognized a poem that I read thirty years ago for a high school exam. I didn't have to re-read it; I've remembered it by its outline all these years.

The poem is "Wires," and its eight lines rhyme in this distinctive pattern: A B C D D C B A. The "A" rhyme is "fences." The poem depicts young steers on the "wildest prairies," brushing up against the wires (rhyme D), challenging the limits of their lives only once, and, discouraged by their "muscle-shredding violence," retreating back to the A rhyme -- "Electric limits to their wildest senses." Figuring all this out, and how the poet substitutes cows for those of us who experience a pain of rejection and never try again, and seeing how the rhyme scheme mimics the sense of the poem, I got an "A" on my in-class essay for Dr. Roberts.

Coincidentally, the poem that caused me to buy this collection is on p. 58, "Church Going," a title that suggests both going to a church, and a church going to seed. Discussed elsewhere on this blog, the poem describes a man on a bike stopping to investigate an empty, barely-used antique church, sensing an importance to this "shell" of an almost extinct faith, dedicated to the most important things in life - "marriage, and birth, / and death, and thoughts of these."

Together, these two poems exemplify Larkin in two of his favorite modes. Sometimes, he looks with some regret on a wiser or more beautiful past. Sometimes he looks upon life as a thing of beauty that people like him miss because of their own cussedness, shyness, or distractedness. His earliest published poems in this collection are the least interesting, encapsulated by a bitter little poem about being outside of a dance club, looking in ("Reasons for Attendance," 48).

His mastery of language and form allow him to compress a lifetime of incidental pleasures in single lines of a seemingly bitter reflection on old age ("Sad Steps"144 between toilet and bed in early morning, looking at the cold distant moon, or "The Old Fools" 131) .

He often seems to be a curmudgeon, cynical and dismissive. The truth is, he's grateful for the beauties of life and bitterly regretful for being one of those cows afraid to take what life has to offer.

Third Take on Second Coming by Walker Percy

(reflection on Walker Percy's THE SECOND COMING, New York: Picador, 1999. )
When I graduated from college and started teaching in Mississippi at an Episcopal school, in 1981, it seemed to me that everyone I knew was around 45 years old and much enamored of Walker Percy. His father W. Alexander Percy was a beloved author of Mississippi, and Walker was a celebrity in New Orleans, a city that Mississippians seemed to adopt as their own. On top of all that, he was a convert to Roman Catholicism from atheism and thus very attractive to all my Episcopalian friends. He'd had several bestsellers and prize -winners around that time, such as THE LAST GENTLEMAN, LOVE AMONG THE RUINS, and LANCELOT. I enjoyed THE MOVIEGOER, his first novel, and experienced what he describes in that book -- a kind of alienation from our own lives as we compare actual places with their equivalents in the media -- when I found my first experience of New Orleans being mediated by his descriptions. I read his non-fiction about human language's qualitative difference from any animal communication (MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE).

Percy's best-seller at the time was THE SECOND COMING, and I bought it eagerly. Two or even three times I tried to get through it, but bogged down around the third chapter. Recently, I returned to it, determined to finish it. I've succeeded, and here's my report, 27 years late.

There are two threads to the plot. We see middle aged widower Will Barrett in a crisis. His symptoms include sudden blackouts, emotional detachment, and obsession with the idea that current (1979) trends show Jews heading for the Holy Land: a sign of the End Times. Two memories haunt him: the hunting expedition with his father who botched an attempt to kill his son and then himself, and a teenaged encounter with a beautiful girl. He plays golf and socializes with a pretty unpleasant group of golfing friends.

That beautiful girl is a connection to the other strand of the story, grown up and doing everything that money can buy to keep her deranged daughter safely out of her life. That daughter, Allison, follows a detailed set of instructions written to her by herself, just prior to electroshock therapy, telling her how to escape from the asylum while doctors presume her to be too disoriented to need minding. She finds shelter in an abandoned estate's decrepit greenhouse, close to the the golf course where Will Barrett plays.

Naturally, the two meet, and, not coincidentally, both are heirs to a great deal of money. That's the plot, and things click satisfyingly into place at the end.

Once again, I almost put the book down. The problem is that Barrett is tedious, as his creator (Percy, not God) plays him two ways, both as a deluded man to be mocked for his paranoia, and as a wise fool whose bemusement at the foibles of life in the USA, ca. 1979, echoes Percy's own in his non-fiction. Sometimes, Percy doesn't even seem to be trying to disguise that his character is only a mannequin to dress up, as when he asks, "What to make, reader, of a rich middle-aged American sitting in a German car, holding a German pistol with which he will in all probability blow out his brains, smiling to himself and looking around old Carolina for the Jews whom he imagined had all disappeared? (134)" Barrett is most tedious in a far-fetched scheme to prove once for all if God is real. I could take that, but his rambling letter about it nearly kills the novel. The energy is sucked out of the narrative by something that he identifies early in the novel as "the great suck of self (14)."

The most real and lively parts of the novel are the ones that focus on real and specific details, when Percy lets us follow the thoughts of the main characters as they solve problems. Both Will and Allison are pretty lethargic and detached, but they (and Percy's book) come to life when they have some specific problem to solve, such as how to move a heavy stove or how to engineer an escape from a mental institution. Allison is funny as she applies this same kind of mechanical problem-solving to her growing feelings of love for Barrett (239-240).

At one point, I thought that the gist of the book might be the one expressed, tongue-in-cheek, by Voltaire in CANDIDE: the only real happiness in life is "to make our garden grow."

What ideas does Percy want to convey? He often writes of people living comfortable and evidently good lives who are somehow unhappy. I was reminded of 9/11/2001 in this book from twenty years earlier, when a sniper fires on Barrett and he suddenly springs to life, once aware of the "concealed dread and expectation which, only after the shot is fired, we knew had been there all along" (16). Barrett's father, he realizes, was trying to save his son from a living death, and, by implication, all the other characters in the book (and readers) are living such lives. "Ah," Barrett thinks, "there is a difference between feeling dead and not knowing it, and feeling dead and knowing it. Knowing it means there is a possibility of feeling alive though dead (324).

The medical crew in this book and the lukewarm Episcopal priest, a self-conscious do-gooder, seem to see life as mechanical. Percy, himself a trained doctor, is keen on showing that we are more than mechanisms. (This is his MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE, with language the key.) When Barrett is under psycho-tropic drugs, and feeling fine at last, he wonders, "Does it all come down to chemistry after all" (307)? We are encouraged to see that his contentment is not life, and the seemingly contented characters all around him are similarly drugged by TV, social projects, fitness, and fundamentalist religion.

An incidental pleasure of the book is Allison's peculiar way of speaking, as her repeated electro-shock treatments have made her native language strange to her. For example, she realizes that she loves Will Barrett as she reflects, "With him, silence didn't sprout" (251).

Overall, I'm glad I visited Walker Percy one more time. But, on the whole, I'd rather spend the time with Updike or Buechner, authors with similar concerns and a greater love of the their characters.

Playing's the Thing

(reflections on Stuart Brown's discussion with Krista Tippett on the radio program SPEAKING OF FAITH. See links.)

After retirement, workaholic researcher Stuart Brown started the National Institute of Play to study "play" behavior in humans and other animals. I was struck by a few points that he made.

As an educator, I was interested in an anecdote about a businesses that innovates through play. The boss says to a group, "Here's the general problem, here are the general parameters. Now, create a solution. When they get stuck, it's time to play -- and the solution will emerge."

I was also struck by his emphatic separation of "play" from "competition." In animal play, he notes that the larger and stronger creature handicaps the smaller one to even the game. Competition, by definition, is working to exclude; play is inclusive. I've learned to use the format of competition instead of tests in my history class, but I try to put the emphasis on everyone's learning and everyone's enjoyment. There may be a better way to do it.

Finally, as the radio show focuses on faith, he was asked about religious ramifications of his studies. Having just described lionesses engaged in a spontaneous ballet -- movements imitated for pleasure, for their own sake, with no purpose -- he concluded, "There's more in us and in other animals than ions zipping around a nervous system." The exact same thought brought me to believe in God, listening to Stephen Sondheim's gratuitously layered trio at the start of A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC's ("Now," "Soon," "Later") which is intricate far beyond an audience's ability to appreciate it at first hearing.

Visiting the web site, I was treated to a slide show of what happened when a wild polar bear encountered sled dogs on chains. The photographer braced himself for an ugly event - but the creatures cavorted and tumbled. The bear returned the next few nights for more! Here's a direct link to that slide show: Speaking of Faith, polar bear slide show.

My First Greek Tragedy: Aeschylus' Persians

(response to Aeschlus' play THE PERSIANS (472 BC) , adapted by Ellen McLaughlin, produced by Theatre in the Square of Marietta, GA)

It's hard to know how much of this was Aeschylus, and how much was interpolated by the adapter Ellen McLaughlin, but I was touched by the poetry and by the author's empathy for the losers, his enemies, in war.

The playwright Aeschylus was himself a participant in both the battle of Marathon, when Athens repelled Darius and his Persian army, and an eyewitness to the battle of Salamis, when 300 Athenians defeated the imperial army of Xerxes, amassed to avenge his father Darius's humiliating defeat.

The first lines are for chorus, the old men and advisers of Persia who tell of the glorious day that "thousands on thousands" of men from black Ethiopian horsemen to Egyptians, Indians, and Arabians joined the Persians to sail in their "tall ships" to Athens, the one spot that refused to pay tribute to Xerxes's empire. After the sounds of marching and horses faded, and all they could see was the dust kicked up by the army, they say that silence swept into their capital city like water on the beach.

Before too long, a messenger comes in with news that Xerxes fell for a trap, forming his ships into a tight cordon around Athens's harbors, only to be rammed from behind, ships splintering from direct hits or from accidentally hitting each other in confusion. The elite corps were hacked to pieces, under the watch of Xerxes in his "privileged high position" on a cliff above.

As a drama, there's not much happening here. It's just the slow realization that the mightiest empire on earth has been cut to shreds, and that there's nothing left to do but to mourn the dead.

The production, however, looked wonderful, and kept the unfolding information interesting with visual variations on a theme. What we saw was a town square in Persia, stone walls decorated with a mural of Persian soldiers. Each counsellor had his / her own garb. A well stage right was elevated, and actors frequently dipped hands or cups or cloth into the water there. Stage left, from the Prologue to the end, a stream of red sand fell as in an hour glass to make a mound that, in the course of the action, will be spread by the hand full across the stage. Surrounding all is a curtain tattered at the edge and colored red, like the sand.

Poles spearing spheres, decorated like Faberge eggs, operated as decorations and as ceremonial staffs at different times in the show.

A dead king rises from the well; the actors dipping into the well bring up red sand and pour it on themselves as if it were water -- a shocking change after we've seen water poured from the same well. At the end, last to enter, the boy-king whose rash decisions are responsible for this massive defeat kneels under the falling sand and pleads with his people to join him in mourning the dead for whom he takes responsibility.

I wonder at the Greek playwright and war veteran writing this empathetic portrait of the Queen mother, the humiliated and horrified soldier-messenger, and advisors, in the the extremity of their agony. The last to enter is Xerxes himself, tortured by guilt and shame, longing for death. Would the Athenians have exulted in their enemies' humiliation and pain? Only one small passage of dialogue praises the Athenians, as the Queen of Persia seeks to understand how Athenians can possibly organize themselves into a fighting force without a strong king to enslave and order them.

Naturally, we see this now as a parallel to the mighty USA withdrawing from Iraq. Is Bush Jr. the Xerxes making a misstep to correct his father's missed opportunity? A recent animated movie called 300 played with the same parallel in reverse: the 300 Athenians are the brave free men throwing themselves into battle against a vast Iranian enemy.

That this same ancient battle can be played either way throws us back on the realization that war never changes in its broad outline: it will always be "our bright boys" marching confidently into destruction, whether they win or not.

While I was taken by this production, I have to complain about the acting. While the cast threw themselves into their roles with energy and intensity, the ones who resisted the easy solution of screaming their grief and anger were the ones who came off looking best; others seemed to be indulging in that 70s style of acting with a lot of pained facial expressions, trembling hands, and screamed lines. People around me snickered throughout the show. It didn't help when the dead King emerged from Hades in an impressive breastplate, a flimsy skirt, and skinny legs in tights. He should have stayed in the well!

Summer Poetry : Time to Catch up on Praise

(My monthly review of the periodical POETRY)

The "summer break" issue of POETRY begins with three pieces by poet Tony Hoagland that strike me as more wise than wise-guy, leaving none of the bitter aftertaste left by his collection WHAT NARCISSISM MEANS TO ME. (I bought it for the title!) "Barton Springs" moves past a matter-of-fact acceptance of death ("my allotted case of cancer") to the poet's resolve to quit complaining about life and, "because all things are joyful near water," he hopes there's "time to catch up on praise." Another poem, "The Big Grab," deals with ways that commercialism has "hijacked and twisted" our language: "Nothing means what it says, / and it says it all the time." The third in Hoagland's triptych ends again on a note of praise, including an incidental image that seems just right, of description being the "affectionate cousin" of narrative, "description / which lingers, / and loves for no reason."

This issue features "Q & A" with some of the poets, a feature that I hope will continue. I was relieved to read comments by Joanie Mackowski after enjoying her poem in which a woman painlessly and suddenly dissolves in air and blows away, aware of all the places that her particles go. It was a well-imagined little story, with a peculiar mood, but I was afraid that I had missed in it some kind of metaphorical commentary on women's life today. In fact, Mackowski says, "It's a short comedy: a woman appears, granulates, and then the marries the world. . . And comedy does not mean all funny, of course: tragedy and comedy together make a Mobius strip, each around the edge from the other." She compares it to Ovid's metamorphoses, only without gods to excuse the magic.

Another Q & A with Alice Friman adds to the appreciation of her poem "Art & Science." The poem plays around with puns and whimsies, comparing the behavior of our molecules to the social behavior of ourselves. "Then is it not passing strange," the poem asks, that "this vast multitude [of molecules and cells] jostling" just "wants to be alone?" She comments in the Q & A on her intentions to be "Smarty-ass clever ( I hope) with all those interior rhymes" until the end, when "the wordplay ceases, and all that busyness funnels down to quiet, solidifying into the single image and the single note." She has in mind, she says, the musical model of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major.

A poet named Todd Boss describes a scene in couplets of lines of just two beats, with no end rhymes until the conclusion, but with similar sounds on every accent, as "the nervous birds" or "a school for unruliness." The opening lines are worth remembering for the visual aptness of the image and the way he uses that to introduce his theme of "making":

shifts, mercurial,
like modeling clay,

the million thumbs
of wind at work upon it,

the artist unable to come
to a single conclusion.

Some big name stars, old friends of mine, appear here as well: John Updike, Richard Wilbur, and Billy Collins. These guys have always made it their business to praise and appreciate, and their works consistently illustrate Hoagland's notion that describing life is a way of loving life.

Al Qaeda Alternative

I've listened to Krista Tippett's radio program SPEAKING OF FAITH this morning. The teaser for the show was American Muslim Eboo Patel saying this:

Young people want to impact the world. They want their footprint on Earth, and they're going to do it somehow. So when people say to me, 'Oh, Eboo, you know, you run this sweet little organization called the Interfaith Youth Core and you do such nice things, you bring kids together,' I say, 'Yeah, you know, there's another youth organization out there. It's called al-Qaeda, and al-Qaeda's been built over the past 25 years and with lots of ideas of how you recruit young people and get them to think that this is the best way they can impact the world.'

Tippett then said,

So much of the news of recent years has a religious component, for good or ill, and often involving the young. Since I interviewed Eboo Patel, I watch this unfold with a Gwendolyn Brooks poem ringing in my ears — a poem that he has taken as his rallying cry. It is called "Boy Breaking Glass":

"I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration."

I spoke with Eboo Patel two years ago, just before Muslim youth in suburban Paris began to set their neighborhoods on fire, and weeks after four young Muslim men walked into three subway stations and boarded one bus in London with bombs strapped to their bodies. In light of such events, Eboo Patel is puzzled by people who patronizingly describe his own projects as "sweet." He sees the work of honoring the vast spiritual longings and religious energies of the young of every faith as work of extreme urgency for us all. At 23, he founded the Interfaith Youth Core, now at work across America and in several countries.

He calls Al Qaeda and their ilk "religious totalitarians," a phrase more apt than "conservatives" or "extremists":

Well, for me, it's the best word, and you can also use "extremist" or "radical," but totalitarianism means people who are committed to condemning or converting or killing everybody who does not share their interpretation of their religious tradition. That's what a totalitarian is. And it's dramatically different than an evangelical or than a conservative or than a traditionalist. You can believe that everybody except your tribe is not going to share heaven with you and still live in perfect peace and harmony and be an excellent neighbor.

(from Krista Tippett's journal at the web site of SPEAKING OF FAITH. See my link near the heading of this blog.)

Note to Self: Check into Poetry by Derek Walcott

(After reading a review of SELECTED POEMS by Derek Walcott in WEEKLY STANDARD, August 13, 2007.) A recent review of Selected Poems by Derek Walcott has brought the Nobel Laureate to my belated attention. In his Nobel lecture (1992), he describes a recent visit to his native Trinidad, which has a sizable East Indian population. He describes the preparations for a traditional Indian play, play as worship, but by people several generations removed from the land of those traditions. He writes:

I, out of the writer's habit, searched for some sense of elegy, of loss, even of degenerative mimicry in the happy faces of the boy-warriors or the heraldic profiles of the village princes. I was polluting the afternoon with doubt and with the patronage of admiration. I misread the event through a visual echo of History - the cane fields, indenture, the evocation of vanished armies, temples, and trumpeting elephants - when all around me there was quite the opposite: elation, delight in the boys' screams, in the sweets-stalls, in more and more costumed characters appearing; a delight of conviction, not loss.

What does all this have to do with poetry? "Break a vase, and the love that reassembles the fragments is stronger than that love which took its symmetry for granted when it was whole." (Read his speech at Nobel Prize. org.)

The review in WEEKLY STANDARD by writer Patrick J. Walsh praises Walcott for his "passion" and, in a broad sense of the word, his religiousness. Walcott clearly believes in meaning, and poetry as a way to distill it. Maybe that's an old-fashioned notion. Writing of his own students at Boston University, Walcott relays how young students "repeat what other teachers have told them: 'this thing has too much melody...you should not use rhyme.'" This is peculiar to American culture at this time, he says, and concludes, "I think when democracy becomes too assertive it becomes fascist."

I'm not sure how to interpret that. The teachers, and probably their teachers, are going to have developed their critical opinions in the era when modernism and Marxism were closely intertwined, and for them, rhyme, universality, and form itself were considered elitist, controlling, and fascist. For those teachers, "God" is an embodiment of all that's wrong with traditional society. Walcott mourns the loss of God in literature and life.

I'm not sure I could enjoy his poetry in the way I've enjoyed Lawrence Raab's, Linda Pastan's, or Jane Kenyon's. I read that he has updated Homer and created other epics. I suspect that he sustains a tone of portentousness that would wear on me.

But I do love this excerpt, cited in the review:

Rhyme remains the parenthesis of palms
Shielding a candle's tongue, it is the language's
Desire to enclose the loved one in its arms.

Three lines, three metaphors, and a whole creed's worth of beliefs are there, returning to his theme of "love," and language as a way to "embrace" or "reassemble" on a page what is loved. And, as one who likes to write rhymes, I can attest to taking the kind of loving care he describes here. The second rhyme must be like the second parenthesis, enclosing something meaningful, or it's no good. Bad rhyme, which fills pop music and youthful poetry, is empty parentheses. Good rhyme moves beyond expressing an idea; its rightness and neatness make it identical with the idea.

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.

Briefly, the play has one setting, the garden house of a centuries-old British estate. In that location, scenes alternate between life there with a bright young lady and her tutor and his many liaisons with women of the household in the early 1800s, and life there in the 1990s as some academic types dig through their old papers and try to piece together what really happened. Stoppard makes fun of easy targets: pedantic academics who casually discuss Byron, Thackeray, Coleridge as if these were people they knew. In their own minds, the air is rarefied; but we also see how fatuous they are. The academics seem more connected to life in "their period" 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 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 portion of the story, in a confrontation between Bernard the Literature don and Valentine the Math genius, with the woman historian Hannah (in whom both are interested) watching. 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 [I'm quoting from memory].... if all the answers are in the back of the book, what's the point?" What these characters demonstrate as they talk and talk and talk, is the pleasure in finding out through investigation, surmise, and testing hypotheses.

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."