Economist Wilhelm Ropke: "It's the Soul, Stupid!"

(reflections upon reading WILHELM ROPKE: SWISS LOCALIST, GLOBAL ECONOMIST by John Zmirak, Library of Modern Thinkers, ISI Books, and P. J. O'Rourke's tongue-in-cheek article, "We Blew It" in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, November 17, 2008).

While I was reading John Zmirak's biography of economist Wilhelm Ropke (1899 - 1966), whose advice behind the scenes lifted Germany out of its post-war starvation to become Europe's economic miracle, I saw this from wise-guy conservative writer P. J. O'Rourke, writing about the failures of the Republicans and his dread of the Democratic regime to come:

What will destroy our country and us is not the financial crisis but the fact that liberals think the free market is some kind of sect or cult, which conservatives have asked Americans to take on faith. That's not what the free market is. The free market is just a measurement, a device to tell us what people are willing to pay for any given thing at any given moment. The free market is a bathroom scale. You may hate what you see when you step on the scale. "Jeeze, 230 pounds!" But you can't pass a law making yourself weigh 185. Liberals think you can. ("We Blew It," in the WEEKLY STANDARD, November 17, 2008, p. 33)

When Ropke advised dropping the price controls that both the new German government and their benevolent American protectors wanted to ensure against "chaos," there was indeed a brief period of outrageously high price jumps and panic. But, before the voices of socialists could prevail, prices righted themselves, and citizens were relieved at last to see products on shelves that had been horded because the prices they could fetch weren't even close to their true values. Up to then, cigarettes had been more acceptable currency than the German marks (140).

But, for Ropke, the value of the free market is not its efficiency, whether as a setter of prices or as a producer of consumer goods. Rather, he sees the free market as one guarantor of individual human freedom and dignity, measured not by the consumer goods one owns, but by the freedom one has to do meaningful work, to make choices for one's own life, and to have a positive impact in one's own small communities - family, church, town.

Smallness is the key, here. He deplored concentration of wealth, no matter whether it was concentrated in the hands of a few corporations, or in the hands of a swarm of government bureaucrats. So, while he was no Galbraith, he wrote his own critique of the affluent society in 1959:

Who can really be at ease in the presence of the growing concentration in economic life, which goes hand in hand with the increasing dependence of the masses? Who can fail to see that our civilization is being destroyed by the progressive commercialization of things that are beyond economics, by the obsessive business spirit that confuses ends and means and forgets that man does not live in order to work, but works in order to live, and thus perverts all human values, by the empty bustle and sterile excitement of our time? ...Who can fail to be shocked by the largely meaningless and uncultured extravagance of the rich, here in Europe as in America? (from Ropke's AGAINST THE TIDE, 1959, quoted in Zmirak, p. 53)

He courageously stood up to ridicule from the Left after the war, and explicit threats from the Right during the ascendancy of the Nazis. In 1933, he "committed career suicide" by speaking out in a forum in Frankfurt against all schemes for state control of the economy to benefit "the worker" or "the fatherland." To his audience of Nazi academics and those merely cowed by the Nazis, he called Hitler's movement "a mass revolt against reason, freedom, humanity, and [rules] that enable a highly differentiated human community to exist without degrading individuals into slaves of the state" -- after which, Ropke and his family had to flee into exile (36).

His opposition to planned economies didn't make him a fan of "laissez-faire" or "libertarian" capitalism, either, because he saw in his own country's history the cozy relationship between capital and government that led to monopolies and government interference on behalf of corporations, resulting in another kind of concentration of wealth in the hands of a few self-serving entities -- just as bad, to his mind, as concentrating it in the hands of a government bureaucracy.

With this goal of human dignity in mind, Ropke made room for occasional government intervention in his free market capitalism, so long as these were temporary and "compatible" with market forces that keep prices at their real value. When the Great Depression hit, Ropke advised government intervention "to preserve the social fabric that made a market economy possible"(p. 33).

He discerned the process by which concentration of wealth in the hands of monopolisitic big businesses "deprived many citizens of the chance to become their own masters, either as artisans, independent merchants, or small farmers." Naturally, they try to regain power through unions or the state. Concentration of the workers in mass production and in cities result in the "proletarianisation" of the masses -- making them easy marks for Marx. Ropke sees mass - produced "nihilistic entertainment products" as a by product of this undesirable collectivisation.

His prescription is something that sounds like John McCain's "ownership society," making sure that the state work to put property and choice in the hands of individuals, not because it's efficient, but because it breaks the process of "centralisation in every connection" (175) and homogeneity. He thinks that stratification, "hierarchy," is a good thing, echoing Edmund Burke's critique of France's egalitarianism. He even hoped, like Jefferson, that every one could own a piece of land, though

He predicted the dangers of "suburbanization" -- the hours spent commuting, the resulting
pollution, the ever-wider physical separation of the work from home, and of rich citizens from poor -- in 1944, decades before urban sprawl would become a political issue (179).

This is what I like: an economist who says, "It's not all about money." Or, to paraphrase the words that Bill Clinton's advisors used to keep him on-message during his first campaign: "It's the Soul, stupid!"

A Couple of Issues of Poetry

(reflections on POETRY magazine, October and November issues, 2008)

Billy Collins is represented by a couple of poems in the November issue of POETRY, and these follow the same rough pattern that make many of his poems good for reading aloud. In "Her," for instance, he begins with the kind of depiction of a literal sensation or place that makes the audience think, "I've felt that." In "Her," it's the noises that are ubiquitous in suburbia. Then, he shoots off on a tangent. Here, it's a particularly quiet hour. In part three of a Collins poem, the tangent reaches some unexpected destination: Here, the overheard intimate conversation of two Spanish - speaking workmen.

Some of the seven poems of Sarah Lindsay in the October issue of POETRY share this tendency to set up something literal and clearly imagined, only to slip off into some unexpected direction that still somehow relates. All of them were interesting, and some were delightful.

"Tell the Bees," she writes, "they must know...." It's bad news, and the speaker wants everyone to hear. With a touch of whimsy, she writes, "Tell the water you spill on the ground, then all the water will know." But once the news has spread, "nothing has changed."

With scholars at some archaeological dig, she burrows in the questions raised by a finding about the "So-Called Singer of Nab," before she draws back to view the archaeologists themselves from an ironic distance.

Another poem asks the rhetorical question, "Who needs to hear a quagga's voice?" A quagga, she tells us, is a subspecies of zebra last seen in the South Pacific around the time that Krakatoa blew. She imagines that last of its kind, "curving its cream and chestnut stripes" when it "sank to its irreplaceable knees, when its unique throat closed with a sigh." Against the backdrop of an earth-shattering extinction, she touches us with her story of a very small extinction.

She describes the outdoor wedding of an apparently artsy and green couple: "No animals were harmed in the making of this joyful noise." She celebrates the music of the moment that could not and should not last, embodied by the Zucchini Shofar of the title. "What is this future approval we need; / Who made passing time a judge? / Do we want butter that endures for ages, / or butter that melts into homemade cornbread now?"

Finally, she has a small poem in which a fleeting feeling of contentment is compared to a moth -- implying that it will shortly flitter away in search of some new brightness.

Another poem in that issue is fun, Craig Arnold's "Uncouplings," taking off from the cliche, "There is no I in teamwork" with anagrams: "There is no we in marriage / but a grim area."

Many poems in the November issue strike me the sort that "you had to be there" to get, and I generally didn't want to be where they were taking me. Among all these was one very attractive gem by Philip Levine. He muses on why we worship mountains:

You probably think I'm nuts saying the mountains
have no word for ocean, but if you live here
you begin to believe they know everything.

Doctor Atomic Staged Two Ways

(reflections on the opera DOCTOR ATOMIC by composer John Adams and librettist / director Peter Sellars, from primary source materials and poetry. Performed at the Metropolitan Opera and broadcast on HD two weeks ago, and staged for a concert performance in Atlanta's Symphony Hall at the Woodruff Arts Center this weekend. Photo from website of the music publisher Boosey and Hawkes, Boosey.com)

I settled into the last unsold seat of the orchestra section of Woodruff Arts Center's Symphony Hall in Atlanta, smack in the middle of Row D. It was a great seat for counting every silver hair on the back of conductor Robert Spano's head, and for watching the intense concentration of the cellists. I watched them bow and pluck and occasionally use their bows to beat the strings, and noticed the subtle sound they made in the larger texture of sounds.

That was one way in which the experience of seeing a modestly staged concert version of the grand opera DOCTOR ATOMIC in Atlanta Friday was more exciting even than the fully staged version at the Met viewed in closeup on HD two weeks ago -- even though the wonderful cast was exactly the same. This concert was their "original cast recording" session.

The stage was arrayed simply and effectively, staged by director James Alexander. Spano and instruments crowded right up to the edge of the stage. At the back, the chorus sat in everyday work clothes, in character, and some wore white coats suggesting scientists. Above them, the broad wall was a screen for still photos of the Manhattan Project and the Atom Bomb test site. There were also some animated computer graphics. Platforms set up between the chorus and the orchestra constituted the entire set. "Doctor Atomic" himself, Robert Oppenheimer, played by baritone Gerald Finley, sat at a 40s - vintage office desk, decorated with photos and cluttered with papers. There was a rocking chair suggesting a living room for Mrs. Kitty Oppenheimer, played by Jessica Rivera, whose martini glass told us how she spends her days while her husband works on his top secret mission. Other scientists and a general at the military base occupied a platform above and behind those two, with a couple of 40s - style office chairs.

I have to say that I didn't miss the Met's three storey beehive of office cubicles or the gigantic model of the "Fat Boy" (the bomb itself) during the action. The chorus, in work clothes and some white coats, made some trademark Peter Sellars' gestures in unison, and those were effective enough. For example, they turned in unison to face an image behind them, or they covered ears or mouths when the principles discussed the need for secrecy, or they simply reached their hands up at certain moments of indecision.

We gain by NOT having close up cameras trained on the singers' faces. Finley, as Oppenheimer, sits at his desk not singing much of the time, but sipping a martini and smoking, while his "good angel" Robert Wilson (tenor Thomas Glenn) and "bad angel" Edward Teller (baritone Richard Paul Fink) debate matters of conscience just upstage of him. That simple dramatic structure, made so clear here, was muddied by the camera's back-and-forth, in-and-out movements in the HD broadcast. Teller was charming and Wilson was earnest, but we got to see them in their off-camera moments, too, and these singing actors created characters that we enjoyed even when they weren't singing.

We gain by being able to see Spano keeping all the pieces of the composition together, and, aurally, we get some wonderful effects as when a figure in the double - basses spreads like a wildfire across the orchestra. Behind us, the "surround sound" effects were more effective than the HD transmission could be, especially as the moment of the big explosion approaches.

Then there are the voices. Finley is wonderful, and makes his highs and lows seem effortless, while he concentrates on his character's thoughts. Separated by a platform, he still suggests the erotic connection to his wife Kitty as soprano Rivera sings the long sinuous lines of a Muriel Rukeyser poem that the Oppenheimers evidently knew, "Am I in Your Light?" Eric Owens as the General gets the laugh lines for the show -- snapping at the meteorologist that he wants better weather, and describing in delicious detail the brownies that wrecked his diet. The meteorologist was James Maddelena, whom I've seen in two other Adams premieres, as Nixon in 1987, and as the captain of the Achille Lauro at THE DEATH OF KLINGHOFFER production in Brooklyn, early 1990s.

This time around, the aria based on John Donne's "Batter My Heart, Three Person'd God" arrived at the end of Act One like the showstopping big hit of a Broadway show, and it thrilled. This time, I picked up echoes of that number in two or three places that follow in Act Two, a respectable technique that I've not heard in Adams' work before. Perhaps the space between me and the live performers helps me to pick up the sounds that I don't get when the opera came at me like a wall.

So, the HD experience is wonderful. But I'm much more enthusiastic about DOCTOR ATOMIC now that I've seen it live.

Updike's Magic Revisited at Eastwick

(reflection on John Updike's novel THE WIDOWS OF EASTWICK, and an appreciation of Updike called "A Fan's Note on Updike's Long Game," by Adam Gopnik at the website of the National Endowment for the Humanities at http://www.neh.gov/news/humanities.html.)

Of Eastwick's trio of witches from Updike's 1983 novel (which was set in 1968), all three are now widows, but only Sukie is still on the youthful side of 70, and she's making her fortune as a writer of romances. Sukie sits unblinking at her laptop describing a widow served in bed (double-entendre fully intended) by a younger male slave who harbors deep resentments against her, when her male "wife" enters the room with groceries. He's the younger brother of a woman cursed and killed by the coven all those years ago, and he has sought revenge. Reflecting on the conflation of fantasy and reality, and how sexual relations require some theatrical and imaginative art, she thinks how cave painters thrust themselves through moist crevasses to paint their artwork, intended to bring their next hunt to fruitful climax. There you have Updike's big themes tied together in a single image: magic (here substituting for religion), sex, and art.

While I enjoyed revisiting Eastwick and watching the witches deal with the long-range consequences of their past deeds, I was fascinated more by discerning Updike's process of writing the novel. He slightly augments the sub-titles of his original outline to become the Coven Reconstituted, Malefica Revisited, and Guilt Assuaged. He sets the exposition in faraway places that fit his theme, as Alexandra visits ancient tombs in Egypt and reflects on pharaoh's doomed attempts to hold on to life through priests' preservatives and artisans hopeful provisions. Then, after hooking up with Jane, the two visit the tombs of the first emperor of China, and the tomb of Mao, eerily similar. There are teases of magic, but Updike, like Hawthorne his model, always provides the reader a natural explanation for what seems to be a witch's spell. At last, Sukie joins the trio when her husband dies suddenly (Jane's magical doing?), and they make a trip together to their old home, Eastwick, in Rhode Island.

Once there, Updike's strategy is clear: to re-create the story line of the original novel in reverse. From chapter to chapter, this means re-encountering the coven's old nemeses and lovers, or their families. The central portion "Malefica" was about their curse on the woman they envied, and "Malefica Revisited" is about a curse going the other way. While the original novel begins with the arrival of satanic Darryl Van Horne (identified now with Jack Nicholson's cinematic embodiment of the character), and ends with his strong presence disintegrating, this novel builds up to an encounter with Van Horne by proxy. And, as the subtitle "Guilt Assuaged" suggests, these witches work magic to bring blessings to lives that they had once cursed.

To say that we can see Updike's efficient craft at work is in no way a complaint. Updike fancied himself a visual artist before he was a literary one, and this novel is simply a reversal of the patterns of lights and darks from the original, rather like Monet's identical views of a cathedral in different lights.

On his design, Updike hangs insights about our age, about aging, and his favorite themes. The visits to graves of long-passed empires occasions thoughts about the US and future decline. All references to magic bring up the idea that witchcraft simply takes advantage of processes in nature already at work under the surface -- like cancer, like giving birth, like electrons and their charges. At a funeral, he compares such ceremonies to blindfolds worn by prisoners before a firing squad, small comforts to help us get through big changes (p. 232). Repeated chores are lightened in youth by expectation of something to come (283). Revisiting an old home inspires opposing thoughts. One can suddenly recognize the "bliss" of living in a certain place that has been concealed by the "plod" of daily chores (p.234). On the other hand, aren't all places less magical than they are remembered (p. 288)? These elderly women don't relate to teens, even the ones who are related to them, and see them as strange and alien:

Eastwick's children, flaunting their growing power, ignoring the old woman sitting in a parked car, vying for attention from their peers with female shrieks and boisterous boyish jokes, testing freedom's depths... Little do they know, Alexandra throught, what lies ahead of them. Sex, entrapment, weariness, death. (235)

I recently read an appreciation of Updike at the NEH web site. There, self-proclaimed "fan" Adam Gopnik writes of Updike's long career. He writes that one wants to "triangulate" Updike...

with Richard Wilbur, for a stubborn graceful adherence to craft and finish in a time of improvisation and amnesia; with Wallace Stevens, for the intimation of the numinous in the ordinary Sunday mornings of the mid-Atlantic states; and with Shakespeare himself for the ability to get himself expressed fully, unimpeded, and for the desire, even in the face of time, to set down, for readers still unborn, all the sweetness of our common life.

So true. And Gopnik writes about Updike's constant theme:

And he is a moralist, too, of a surprisingly old-fashioned kind. Throughout all that varied work, one theme has risen and been repeated over and over. Updike’s great subject is the American attempt to fill the gap left by faith with the materials produced by mass culture. His subject is how the death of a credible religious belief has been offset by sex and adultery and movies and sports and Toyotas and family love and family obligation.

In Updike's novels, those attempts to substitute the material for the spiritual are doomed; but the material, the spiritual, and the imagination are all closely interrelated, and that's the magic in both Eastwick books.

Ten Commandments as Ten Beatitudes

(excerpt from sermon by Rev. Kirk Lee, delivered at St. James Episcopal Church, Marietta, GA, October 5, 2008)

I didn't think there was much new to say about the Ten Commandments, but Rev. Kirk Lee tried. He questioned the advisability or even possibility to "put aside" the "overlap between public and private spheres of moral and religious life." He capped his sermon with a new spin on the old "Shalt nots." Here are excerpts:

We live in a day where the very concept of some type of objective, independent morality is being questioned. ...Where are we going to find such a standard?

...We could depend on human feelings, as illustrated in [the] song, "how can it be wrong when it feels so right?"

Or ... we could rely on majority vote. How can it be wrong if 55% of the people voted for it? Right?

The problem with these choices is that feelings change, and the majority often shifts its position.
...We need something or someone who stands outside of the world, outside of just being human, outside of the community, who can look in and give us direction. That someone can only be God.

Some people complain that the Ten Commandments are just too inflexible, too narrow and negative. ... But they are not all negative. ... When we turn them over, we find the ten most positive statements about life ever written. Here is how they look:

Blessed are they who put God first.
Blessed are they who need no substitutes for God.
Blessed are they who honor God's name.
Blessed are they who honor God's day.
Blessed are they who honor their parents.
Blessed are they who value life.
Blessed are they who keep their marriage vows.
Blessed are they who respect the property of others.
Blessed are they who love the truth.
Blessed are they who learn the art of contentment.

Thanks To and From Composer John Adams

(Reflections on John Adams' autobiography HALLELUJAH JUNCTION, just published by Farrar.)

Twenty years ago, when I learned to love John Adams' first operatic composition NIXON IN CHINA, I was struck by the librettist Alice Goodman's statement that she had intended to represent each character in the most generous way possible, as they themselves would want to be represented.

While several of the themes emerging from Adams' autobiography take us through conflicts with others, Adams follows Goodman's example. We can read between the lines that Adams doesn't care for the music of some of the composers mentioned here, and we can guess that he had some run-ins with some collaborators. All those composers, teachers, and even an ex-wife get, at worst, the benefit of the doubt. His suggestion that Philip Glass sometimes composes on auto - pilot is balanced by his acknowledgement of borrowings from Glass and works by Glass of immense beauty and power.

Other themes in the book: Gratitude for the influences and efforts of his parents and teachers . . . gratitude for his experiences in both serial music (exemplified by Boulez, p. 32) and also the avant-garde music of the late 60s (exemplified by Cage), though he came to see both as dead ends (and he frankly admits now that a lot of that new music, lacking "shape," was "pushing the boredom envelope" 85) . . . gratitude for performers and patrons who allowed him to indulge in some failed experiments in the 70s . . . and a broad, historical view of music's "evolution" that includes a short history lesson on 20th century music (102 ff.) and a rumination on whether there's progress in any aspect of human life, much less in music itself, certainly rejecting the idea that increasing complexity is necessarily good. So there's another theme: Defending his works (though not all of them) from his critics.

I love this description of his collaborator Peter Sellars, how he speaks "in full paragraphs, punctuated by sudden peals of laughter that was . . . the result of amusement at what his words had managed to conjure" (126).

He is his own fairest critic. He acknowledges that the Houston premiere of NIXON (which I saw in 1987) probably didn't deserve much higher than a passing grade, and that KLINGHOFFER in Brooklyn (which I also saw) was just what I thought: unclear in its staging, unclear in its focus early on, and a bit long-winded in several spots. He gets most defensive on this topic, denying point by point the critics who accused him and his collaborators with favoring Palestinian terrorists because they once again allowed these characters to be presented as they themselves might want to be presented.

Since the falling-out with Alice Goodman is pretty famous, dwelt upon in another book THE JOHN ADAMS READER, I was especially interested to see how Adams treats her with respect and appreciation. He writes,

She could move from character to character and from scene to scene, alternating between diplomatic pronouncement, philosophical rumination, raunchy aside, and poignant sentiment. And she did all this in concise verse couplets, exhibiting a talent and technique that has nearly vanished from American poetical practice. (136)

His citation of lines from Pat Nixon's aria "This is Prophetic" brought tears to my eyes, as he focused my attention on an aspect of the words that I hadn't seen so clearly before. Here are the lines that he quotes, as Pat Nixon piles image of America on image in the form of a prayer :

Let lonely drivers on the road
Pull over for a bite to eat,
Let the farmer switch on the light
Over the porch, let passersby
Look in at the large family
Around the table, let them pass.

Adams comments, "It was part of Alice's genius to be able to handle images of Americans -- so routinely abused in magazine and television advertising -- in a way that recaptured their virgin essence, making them, when Pat sings them, not cliches at all but statements of a deeply felt, unconflicted belief." I'm pretty sure that Adams and I reach different conclusions about politics and religion, but it's clear that, in this book and in his art, he speaks what I believe, that humanity is deeper than all our economics and policies and creeds.

Other posts on this blog that focus on composer John Adams:
Doctor Atomic Staged Two Ways
30 Second Composer on John Adams
Musical Landscapes
Slow Motion Emotion: John Adams' Christian Zeal and Activity.

Stalin's Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith

(reflection on Stalin's Ghost by Martin Cruz Smith, a detective novel.) Kept up late and awakened early by the effort of getting another school year off to a good start, I've been reading non-fiction articles here and there since August, and I've grown restless, yearning almost physically for a book that creates a different world that I can return to at the end of the day, or immerse myself in on a weekend afternoon. More than plot, more than appealing characters, this reader craves the sensation of being in a different world. It's not just descriptions that I need, but a rich texture, defined by that world's history, the outlook, the mood, and the language. To achieve all that requires that the action must be filtered through the moral vision of some central consciousness, just as Henry James said. I've written elsewhere on this blog about how Raymond Chandler's novels are less like following a plot than they are like touring another world -- Chandler's L.A. -- and detective Marlowe is the vehicle. Chandler narrates in third person, but filters all through Marlowe's perceptions. In the same way, novelist Martin Cruz Smith has taken me to Russia through detective Arkady Renko. I saw the movie made of Cruz's first Renko novel GORKY PARK back when it came out in the mid-80s, and I read a follow-up, POLAR STAR. I remember nothing of the plots behind those titles, but I remember Renko, decent, generally beat up by enemies and circumstances, and I remember the atmosphere on the ship Polar Star, literally dense with fog and grime and rust, filled with menace. Not a place I'd like to be, but a rich place to visit, especially as you're pulling for Renko to fight his way through. STALIN'S GHOST conjures the new Russia, where the Stalinist past is truly being resurrected. The ghost story that hooks Renko and us into the plot actually fades away fairly early on, and I admit that I can't exactly explain what was behind the ghost's appearances. By mid-book, I'd forgotten which corpses perished in which circumstances. Even by the end, I was having trouble remembering which female character had lived with Renko, and which was someone he'd met more recently. That's due more to my erratic reading schedule than to the complexity of the story. But what I won't forget is that texture. It's comprised of layers of snow, the sense of skeletons both real and metaphorical under every surface, ill-lit rooms, vodka, wealth and grimy poverty, and menacing hulks in black berets belonging to special forces OMON. There are some settings that stand out: the eerie old subway station where Stalin's ghost has appeared, the chess championship played under TV lights at a gaudy casino, and the spectacle of a chaotic dig of a mass grave -- with live land mines -- outside the town of Tver. The plotline is direct: Arkady guesses that a certain OMON soldier named Isakov is behind a series of suspicious deaths, and he pursues Isakov to prove it. Everything else is embroidery: Arkady's lover has left him for Isakov, and Isakov is running a political campaign that appeals to "patriots" (i.e., those who idealize Stalin as the miracle-worker who saved Russia from the Nazis and enemies within). There's a sub-plot: Arkady is also trying to locate Zhenya, a slight twelve-year-old chess prodigy, anti-social and on the run from his own abusive father. The two plots intersect when Zhenya finds Renko, and transfers his personal allegiance to Isakov. Renko plods on, ridiculed for his integrity, mocked as a cuckold, and attacked by Isakov's partisans. What hurts most is when the boy Zhenya scorns him for his weakness, especially for not carrying a gun like the hero Isakov. A couple of personal resonances for me. I visited Russia in 1977, and remember wandering the streets of Tver, then called Kalinin. In the mid-1980s, I had the great pleasure and challenge of dealing with a twelve-year-old Ukrainian refugee whom I could easily imagine doing what Zhenya does, in the same situation.

Effective Nonsense: POETRY in September

(Reflections on issues of POETRY magazine, September 2008).

In the September 2008 issue of POETRY, two poems by Alan Shapiro give effective expression to the myth that whatever is bourgeois, whatever is orderly, whatever contributes to the workings of nine-to-five polite society, must be phony, confining, and inimical to Real Life. The first of these two poems, "Gas Station Rest Room," goes to the underbelly of the beast and delights in its soils and smells -- words so evocative of their subject that I'd rather not re-read, much less quote them. But the graffiti there, in its furtive energy, seems to declare

heaven
is here at hand
and dark, and hell
is odorless; hell is bright and clean.

It's almost convincing, until you remember any graffiti you've seen lately, the angry or pathetic quality of the discourse there.

More true is Shapiro's other poem, "24/7," which seems to take place inside the convenience store that fronts that gas station restroom.

The one cashier is dozing --
head nodding, slack mouth open,
above the cover girl spread out before her on the counter
smiling up
with indiscriminate forgiveness
and compassion for everyone
who isn't her.

Other verses describe the laser beam of the scanner that "drifts free in the space that is the sum / of the cost of all the items that tonight / won't cross its path." There are "columns onto columns / under columns" of packed goods without

any trace
of bodies that have picked
packed unpacked and placed them just so
so as to draw bodies to the
pyramid of plums

Though to call a convenience store a "paradise of absence" is a little like shooting fish in a barrel, it makes me see the commonplace in a new way, especially at the end, when night "press[es] the giant black moth / of itself against the windows / of fluorescent blazing."

Both poems explore the feeling we all get looking at Hopper's paintings of urban alienation, especially "Night Hawks." Looking at that one, we are the giant black moth pressing up against the illuminated window. (Edward Hopper. Nighthawks, 1942. Oil on canvas; 33 1/8 x 60 in. (84.1 x 152.4 cm). The Art Institute of Chicago; Friends of American Art Collection.
Courtesy The Art Institute of Chicago)


But as Shakespeare observed, nothing is good or ill but thinking makes it so. I know one pre-teen for whom every convenience store was paradise, a place of tantalizing choices where I could exert my power to choose -- by drawing a few quarters from my pocket.

The same issue of POETRY also includes whimsical self-portraits by Philip Larkin, some scrawled in the margins of the agenda for a library staff meeting. There's also another thought-provoking article by Clive James. "It is possible that Shakespeare spoiled us," he says, by cramming his plays with so many flashes of metaphor and "his Olympian playfulness." By contrast, the sonnets work more with "syntactical tricks ... to compress and energize plain prose statement." James takes issue with the notion that what's plain and clear in poetry must be simple-minded.

The next best thing to reading a poem and getting it, is reading someone else's writing that open up the art to you.

Music, Morality, and Horror: Salome Slays Sweeney Todd

(reflections on seeing an High Definition broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera's production of Richard Strauss's SALOME in a movie theatre at the same time that I'm learning the piano parts for Stephen Sondheim's SWEENEY TODD for a production by teens at The Walker School.)



The moral horror that we feel when we see SALOME is different from the visceral horror of SWEENEY TODD.

The stage violence of SWEENEY is intended to startle us, and to evoke laughter, and even to be cathartic -- as we enjoy seeing the despicable judge come face to face with the man he wronged. The corny diminished chords that open and close Sondheim's score, heard first on a reedy organ and last in orchestral accompaniment under Sweeney's final lament, frame the action in a long, long tradition of melodramatic music for old movies and even older stage shows.

SWEENEY ends with a "moral" that also comments on our vicarious pleasure in seeing Sweeney's schemes finally succeed: "To seek revenge may lead to Hell, /but everyone does it, though seldom as well / As Sweeney...." Which adult has not felt the need to seek revenge, maybe outraged at some fellow drivers in heavy traffic? We at least recall revenge fantasies from adolescence. Of course, revenge is a "dark and hungry god" that doesn't stop when it devours its original object, as it does in SWEENEY, so we also get the self-satisfaction of feeling morally superior to Sweeney, and we accept the caution at the end in a spirit of fun.

As pianist, I'm enjoying more than ever the other kind of fun involved. Just as the plot criss-crosses the characters and incidents in an elaborate pattern of coincidences and inevitable surprises, the music is doing the same thing. Hearing the piano accompaniment alone, I'm discovering how underscoring for one character ties him to another. I'm learning how songs that I've loved for thirty years as distinct creations are actually variations of each other.

SALOME ends, like SWEENEY, with a bloody embrace and a sharp edge cutting off the life of the title character, but the experience is different. There is little in the way of vicarious pleasure, here. Quite the opposite: Every kind of sensual pleasure is presented during the hour - and - some minutes of the opera. On stage are "the beautiful people" in silky evening dress (Queen Herodias resembling Elizabeth Taylor in her prime), luscious music, drinking and eating, erotically explicit dancing. Instead of vicarious pleasure, these images evoke disgust. That's literal, too, as "dis + gust" means "loss of taste." These guests, especially the Princess Salome, are bored with their pleasures, and are hungrily looking for novelty. They find it, holding their drinks, and lounging around listening with mixed horror and fascination to the prophesies of doom emanating from the well on stage. The King himself is wearied: tired of the mother, he's pursuing the daughter. The most horrible part of the opera may be her attempt to seduce the ascetic Johannan. She sings, first, "I love your body," and she rhapsodizes on its whiteness like ivory. When he rejects her, she immediately reviles his body as "white like a corpse," then coos, "I love your hair." Ditto: he rejects her, and she fixes on another part of him, his mouth. Unable to shake his moral resolve, unable to comprehend a life guided by something other than appetite, and stung by rejection, she resolves to get what she desires by other means.

The rest follows inevitably from that encounter. There's the King's promise to give her anything if she'll "dance" for him, the spectacle of her dance with its thrilling music, and the ghastly fulfillment of her desire when she holds the prophet's head in her hands and sings, "I want to bite your lips as I would bite into ripe fruit." Even the king is sickened, and orders the guard to kill her in the opera's last seconds.

Strauss's music swells and churns with each whim of appetite, coming into focus with chorale - like accompaniment whenever Johannan sings.

Both shows confront us with our worst secret impulses; SALOME, digging deeper, is the more horrifying.

Tweens in Kindergarten

(reflection after directing middle school actors in ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN, adapted from the works of Robert Fulghum by playwright Ernest Zulia and composer / lyricist David Caldwell.)


At the height of its popularity in the early 90s, ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED IN KINDERGARTEN spawned, along with this theatrical adaptation, many imitations and parodies. My dogs' vet still displays a poster about what we learn from dogs; a New Yorker cartoon has a rumpled businessman reading the book, while beside him a more intense Japanese man in a business suit reads ALL I REALLY NEED TO KNOW I LEARNED WORKING MY BUTT OFF IN ADVANCED GRADUATE COURSES.

I myself rolled my eyes when others talked about the book. Did we boomers need one more voice telling it's okay not to grow up?

But the opening moments of the musical adaptation won me over, and won our audience over, too. The lyric tells us to "share / play fair ... clean up your own mess... hold hands and stick together when you cross the street," and that's all pretty cute. But then my young actors, all ages ten through fourteen, sang

Be aware of wonder
Think of the seed in the paper cup
Who knows why the root grows down and the leaves grow up?
But we're all like that,
And just as the seed, the bee, the mouse, and the goldfish all will die some day --

Well, so will we.

When my cast spontaneously put their arms around each other in the pause before that last line, I melted. Then there's the question in the scene that follows: "What ever happened to 'Yes, I can?'" It's what kindergarteners say when they're asked if they can sing or dance or draw.

Directing this ninety-minute musical with around twelve hours' rehearsal (squeezing it in three weeks before Homecoming and other schedule conflicts), I realized again how this is really my main purpose as a teacher. More than any set of specific facts or skills, it's my job to save middle schoolers from losing that sense of ability: Yes, we can write if we work at it . . . yes, we can find the information if we look intelligently enough . . . yes, we can appreciate great art for ourselves . . . yes, we can become the parts we play and sing out without having to be the best singers around.

Other scenes touched on the power of a teacher who gives a committed student freedom to go off in an unplanned direction. . . on the power of Beethoven's music, doubled by the knowledge that "Mr. B" was miserable and angry. . . on the trivial nature of much that we let preoccupy us.

One particularly effective sequence shows a young father and his toddler son growing up together. On stage were three boys, ages twelve and thirteen. As they took turns narrating and portraying the story of a young father in 1963 with a three year old son, the same father thirteen years later, and then the same pair thirteen years after that, grown men in the audience wept.

Having young students playing the roles of adults looking back on childhood gave the script a new layer of irony, as the audience knows from experience what the actors are learning only vicariously.

Thanks to teachers who helped to make this production possible in a very short time, Ayren Selzer and Regena Simpson.

Parade: You want theatre to be uplifting?

(Reflection on a production of the musical PARADE, book by Alfred Uhry, music and lyrics by Jason Robert Brown. Directed for Wildwood Summer Theatre of Bethesda, Maryland, by Kristina Friedgen.)

PHOTO from Hal Leonard, Music Publisher website

You want theatre to be uplifting? How about a love story, where a young couple married by arrangement learn to love each other deeply? How about a show in which all main characters -- not just the romantic leads -- lose their cynicism, overcome their fears, and stand up for what's right? How about a fast-paced musical in which the songs accelerate the action, gleam with wit, and evoke deep emotion? What if there's humor in every scene? Alfred Uhry wrote the script and Jason Robert Brown wrote both music and lyrics for just such a show, PARADE, originally directed on Broadway by Harold Prince around 2000. But the typical reaction to their masterpiece, even from its original critics, is what I overheard in the lobby of Atlanta's Fox Theatre years ago, from a voice edged with sarcasm: "Well, THAT was uplifting!"

So it was a surprising choice for a youth musical theatre camp in Bethesda, Maryland, but their production made me wonder how anyone could feel anything other than elated by the show. Director Kristina Friedgen, recent graduate of the University of Maryland's theatre program, chose a fresh-faced young man with a soaring baritone voice, Jonathan Loewy, to open the show alone on stage. He's a Confederate recruit off to fight the Union invaders who threaten the honor of the "red hills of home," the town of Marietta, Georgia, twenty miles north of Atlanta. A silhouette of those mountains in sunset shines behind him, as he carves his initials in a twisted tree. He marches off confidently to war. It's the unique power of musical theatre that this soaring martial anthem carries us across fifty years to accompany a military parade on "Confederate Memorial Day" in April, 1913.

It's a fateful day in Georgia history with consequences that reach far beyond the lives of the characters in this play. On that day, a young Marietta girl, Mary Phagan (played by Kristina's sister Katie Friedgen -- a sophomore in college playing a spunky thirteen-year-old girl) took the train into Atlanta to collect her dollar and change for a week of labor at the National Pencil Company. She was never seen alive again. Raped and murdered, her body was discovered in the basement of the factory on April 27. Suspicion fell on two men. One of them was a black man who worked at the factory. This was at a time when the hanging of black men, with and without judicial proceedings, was such a routine matter that photos of lynchings were sold and sent out as postcards, conveying the unmistakable message, "Georgia knows how to keep blacks in line." So the politicians involved felt that their public wouldn't be satisfied with another routine hanging.

For this reason, the factory's business manager Leo Frank became the scapegoat. He was the one that Mary went to see for her salary. Other managers and workers took the day off for the parade. For the purposes of the prosecution, Frank was easy to paint as an untrustworthy man with hidden perversions, because he was a Jew from that Yankee Sodom, New York City. Frank made prosecution even easier because he was shy and pedantic, perceived as cold and arrogant. Actor Ben Lurye plays the coldness with humor, and convincingly plays Frank's extremes, from near-hysteria to warmth. In Friedgen's choreographed enactment of girls' lying testimony, he also dances and sings as a slimy predator - very convincing, two inches over-the-top and funny.

The rest of the plot, spanning two years, is simple: Prosecutor Hugh Dorsey railroads Frank through the trial to a guilty verdict and capital sentence, buying and bullying witnesses into made-up testimony. But the persistence of Frank's wife Lucille and second thoughts expressed by the judge pump up the conscience of lightweight pretty-boy Governor Slaton. The governor's investigation leads him to commute Frank's sentence to life in prison. Citizens of Atlanta, outraged, mob the governor's mansion and Slaton flees the state, while citizens of Marietta break into the jail and pull Frank out to hang him. When the crowd preserves the "honor" of their community by punishing this Yankee, those red hills of home appear again on the backdrop, and he is hanged from that same tree that has been there on stage since the first scene.

The Leo Frank case excited nation-wide attention just before World War I and the Bolshevik Revolution. It coincided, then, with anti-immigrant hysteria and the Red Scare. The culture at large was re-thinking the Civil War and interpreting Reconstruction in a way popularized by the silent movie BIRTH OF A NATION, in which heroic Ku Klux Klansmen rescue the honorable South from greedy Yankee businessmen and their barbaric minions, the freedmen. In the immediate aftermath of the Frank case, the Ku Klux Klan was re-born, and the Anti-Defamation League was formed.

Director Friedgen made sure we knew all about the plot before we saw the show. She visited Georgia archives and put together an historical display of artifacts and film for the curious audience to study. Instead of focusing just on what happens next, we were free to pay attention to the growth in the characters. Lucille Frank, played by Sherry Berg, begins as the Jewish socialite, an assimilated southern belle none too happy with her marriage. In her crisis, she defends her husband, faces the crowds, and finds the inner confidence and resources to gather evidence to overturn the conviction. Governor Slaton wants nothing to do with this dirty matter, especially as he sees political enemies using the case to gain popular approval; but he risks everything to re-open the case. Our narrator for the evening is a drunken, cynical newsman Britt Craig, who feeds the public frenzy by printing innuendo and lies of the politicians; but, he is chastened by Lucille's example of strength and integrity, and ends the show trying to make amends.

The climax of the show isn't the hanging, but a sequence of scenes and songs building in hope throughout the second act. Leo and Lucille sing an energetic and optimistic duet, "This is Not Over Yet." The next several minutes show the re-opened investigation and pardon. There's an ominous ensemble number, "Where Will You Stand When the Flood Comes?" staged so that we can see all the parties caught up in a flood of emotions. Waves of words and music overlap to dramatize the public's being whipped up into mob action. Another duet by Leo and Lucille bookends the sequence with a song, "All the Wasted Time," an ecstatic love song. By now, thanks to strong voices and nuanced acting by the young performers Lurye and Berg, we've forgotten that we're watching kids, and we're involved in their relationship, and we're fooled for a moment into forgetting what lies ahead.

In the interest of full disclosure, I did see the show as a guest of Kristina. I saw the show with her mother Gloria, Uncle Ernie, Aunt Mary, cousin Matthew, and great-aunts Millie and Terry. I taught Kristina and her sister Katie at the Walker School in the late 90s, when they played roles in MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM, LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS, HER YANKEE SECRET (by yours truly), and INTO THE WOODS, Jr. How wonderful to see how young students have pursued their interests and grown into mature artists!

Billy Strayhorn: In the Mantle of Duke Ellington

(Reflections on LUSH LIFE: A BIOGRAPHY OF BILLY STRAYHORN by David Hajdu.) PHOTO CREDIT: Kalamu.com

Duke Ellington's mystique starts with his sound. The mood is indigo indeed, as even the up tempo numbers have a dark overlay, and even bright spikes of brass sound a little like screaming. Then, there's Ellington's regal elegance in dress, but also in his courtly enunciation, and elevated diction -- "Beyond category." He kept himself and his band above the indignities of segregation by such means as buying a private rail car to avoid having to sleep in segregated hotels. While other bands performed songs and hits, Ellington also wrote film music, music suites, sacred concerts, instrumental songs in the form of Shakespearean sonnets, and adaptations of symphonic music. The fact that Ellington did all that exerts gravity that pulls even his pop songs out of the orbit of lightweight tunes by his peers. He added to the mystique with his memoir MUSIC IS MY MISTRESS, so clouded with impressions and tangents and idiosyncracies that I couldn't make sense of it. That's one reason I sought out this biography of Billy Strayhorn, though it really doesn't lift the cloud of mystery surrounding Ellington. It just shows how much Strayhorn wrapped himself in it.

[My reflection on a biography of Duke tells of Strayhorn's death and makes one of my best pieces, ever: Duke Ellington Can't Sleep (06/2014)]

For Strayhorn, the Ellington mantle was a cover that protected him from the vicissitudes of a career in music, and from the society's disapproval of gay men; but if Ellington offered paternal protection, he also kept Strayhorn in line. Son Mercer Ellington reflects that his father's men were all like sons to him, and, in the old aristocratic manner, he let his sons fight for position beneath him, though Mercer also at one point says that Duke "pampered" Billy more like a daughter.

The heart of the book is the chapter "So This is Love," about Billy Strayhorn's arrival in New York City as Ellington's newly hired arranger. Before then, we've read about Strayhorn's life in Pittsburgh, despised by his own father for being "mama's boy," growing to be composer and lyricist of school shows, accomplished pianist, student of classical music. We've studied the richness in his music and lyric "Lush Life," and we've laughed at the pretensions of the eighteen year old lyricist's "dreaming of a week in Paris, [when he] rarely walked past Frick Park" -- and we've combed it for signs that he intended the double meaning in the first two lines, "I used to visit all the very gay places / Those come what may places." Author David Hajdu concludes that Strayhorn had not lived any such "lush life" to that point, in the restricted social and musical milieu of Pittsburgh.

Now, in New York, Billy Strayhorn is living two dreams -- his, and Ellington's, too. Already knowledgeable on high culture, on modern composers, and music theory, Strayhorn studies a book on etiquette and buys fancy socks (p. 78). He moves in with a lover. And, musically, he provides the sophistication and polish that Ellington wanted and didn't have the patience or time to complete. Some of Ellington's aura, says one intimate, "was hocus-pocus -- grand gestures and particular five-dollar phrases that he'd pronounce with dramatic emphasis. Meanwhile, he never really read anything except the Bible . . . and he knew far less about the fine arts, including other composers, than he liked to let on" (Herb Jeffries in Hajdu, p. 78).

So Duke, taking care of business, needed Strayhorn to finish himself. There's some hint here that Ellington was temperamentally averse to finishing anything at all, to the point of avoiding divorce (he just moved in with #2) and avoiding the unpleasantness of firing a musician (hiring a replacement and leaving it to the guys to figure it out).

The major theme of Hajdu's book, perhaps over-emphasized, is the idea that Ellington got all the recognition for Strayhorn's work. Exhibit "A" is Ellington's signature song, "Take the 'A' Train" clearly labeled as Strayhorn's, but always thought of as Duke's. It was one of several songs that Strayhorn and Mercer Ellington composed overnight when Ellington and other members of the composer's union ASCAP had a dispute with the Broadcasting industry. To go on the air, the band needed a new repertoire of songs by non-union composers Strayhorn and Mercer Ellington.

Hajdu makes a big deal of showing how Duke gets the applause and shares the composing credits for works that Strayhorn did alone. The extreme example is a Broadway show (BEGGAR'S HOLIDAY -- I've never heard of it) for which Strayhorn composed songs, played in rehearsal, and even composed music for act two during act one of a preview performance (p. 103). Ellington got sole credit for composing, Strayhorn for "musical arrangements," and Ellington got critical acclaim (though the show failed). For Strayhorn, that was some kind of breaking point, and he sulks away from Ellington for some time.

While Hajdu implies that Strayhorn had made a Faustian bargain, gaining the freedom to indulge his taste for martinis and to live "out of the closet" in return for his soul, it's hard to see it that way, because Ellington seems to be no Mephistophiles. At worst, Ellington seemed to be a bit preoccupied, maybe presuming that everyone had the same feeling of team spirit that he had.

The best evidence for that is how the big turnaround in their relationship happened at the exact moment that Duke was strongest. Duke's career was on the skids when be-bop and small ensembles and rock and roll killed off the big bands. He kept his alive, paying his men their salaries from the royalties for his pop songs (p. 141). Then came Duke's big break, a performance at Newport Jazz Festival in 1956. Hajdu says it was a "referendum" on Duke's whole career. His showmanship, pumping his fist to keep tenor sax man Paul Gonsalves improvising chorus after chorus of one song, brought the live audience to rush the stage, and brought world-wide acclaim for the live recording. Suddenly Duke's face was on magazine covers, and his career was reborn, greater than ever.

In his great success, Ellington reaches out to Strayhorn. Ellington promises, from now on, "whatever you want" (p. 152). They do the high-falutin' projects such as the Shakespearean program and Tchaikovsky arrangements that emphasize Strayhorn's particular talents. Ellington makes sure to emphasize Strayhorn's role, on stage, in credits, in interviews.

By the time of Strayhorn's early death from stomach cancer, Ellington is a gracious, loving, openly appreciative leader.

Go to Youtube and look for Ellington Strayhorn for several videos of Duke paying tribute to Strayhorn, playing Strayhorn's music, and, in one, featuring Strayhorn as soloist with the band.

To McCain and Obama: "A Cause Higher Than Yourself," Yourself!

In an article called "Self - Interest is Bad?" in the Weekly Standard (July 21, 2008), senior editor Andrew Ferguson has a lot of fun with the phrase a "cause higher than your own self-interest." He abbreviates it CGTYOSI, and shows how both candidates preach on this theme. He runs through a list of others who've said it before - including Reagan and LBJ, Jesse Jackson and Newt Gingrich.

His essential point is that any politician who uses this phrase is betraying the "condescension" of the chattering classes -- academics, news media, lawyers and politicians.

Why does a candidate feel compelled to exhort his nation to a higher cause...? He reveals a low opinion of his countrymen by doing so. He implies a population lost in self-absorption and narcissism, each member ignoring others in pursuit of selfish ends.

Ferguson predicts that either of the candidates now gallivanting across the globe promoting themselves will be "hectoring" us for the next four years,

with the implication that as we go through the day getting our kids out of bed, packing their lunches, helping them with homework, dragging ourselves to our jobs, enduring an hour's commute, so we can make enough money to meet our mortgage, attending PTA meetings, feeding the dog, going to church, mowing our neighbor's lawn while he's on vacation, planning a birthday party, saying a prayer for a sick friend, picking up a six-pack for our brother - in - law on the way home, writing a check to the Red Cross, shopping for an old roommate's wedding gift, pretending to listen to the tedious beefs of a co-worker, telephoning an aged aunt, and otherwise doing what it is we need to do to make our lives mean something, we are merely pursuing what our two presidential candidates consider our selfish interest.

For now, of course, each of the two men, McCain and Obama, points to himself as an exemplar of service -- even as he avoids his family, neglects his job, and hands his everyday obligations over to poorly paid subordinates, all so he can fulfill his lifelong ambition of becoming the most powerful and celebrated man in the world.

Well - said. The chattering classes (of which I am, alas, typical) think that we are the Ones Who Know, and it's why the largest sub-category of chatterers are suspicious of Ones Who Manufacture and Ones Who Don't Want To Be Told From Washington How To Run Their Lives and Their Businesses.

Frankie and Winnie and Ronnie and Maggie: Two Histories, One Story

(reflections on RONALD REAGAN AND MARGARET THATCHER: A POLITICAL MARRIAGE by Nicholas Wapshott, and CHURCHILL AND AMERICA by Martin Gilbert.)


A British Prime Minister takes the reins of Parliament in a time of deep crisis and immediately makes contact with the American President. The PM is exhaustingly energetic and unrelenting in pursuing the interests of the United Kingdom and the free world (in that order), prolix, optimistic but impatient, worried about the short term. The President is relaxed, self-confident, and sympathetic to the PM but content to go his own way as US politics and interests demand.

That was pretty much my pre-conceived notion of what I would find in two recent books about US - UK relations focused on Roosevelt - Churchill and Reagan - Thatcher, and these two books confirmed what I'd expected. Each fills in with details that are sometimes endearing, as world-shaping decisions worked through personal relationships. In both books, there are stretches when the British PM is dismayed and hurt to find the President cavalierly disregarding urgent personal requests, and the PMs both flatter the Presidents and cajole them to get what they want.

Gilbert's book starts with Churchill's American mother's background, and carries through every childhood essay and every visit to the states, before it hits those two years when the UK was standing up alone against the Axis. Wapshott's book lays groundwork for the eight years when Reagan and Thatcher worked together by giving us parallel biographies of Reagan and Thatcher, highlighting the sources of their strong convictions that freedom and markets are the only hope for humankind.

Jokers at the Gate: Batman and Barbarians

Before I reflect on some 9/11 resonances of both the new Batman movie and the opera WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, I'd like to celebrate a couple of comic book covers that feature the characters who drive this latestBatman movie. One is the Joker, who first appeared in 1940 and was a grim, scary, implacable murderer with ironic humor, and the other is Two Face, the once-good District Attorney who decides to be good or evil depending on the flip of a coin. Both characters went through years of being campy, comfortable figures before they were resuscitated by Denny O'Neill and Neal Adams. It's Adams' art you see in these pictures.

When, within twenty four hours, I encounter the image of "barbarians at the gates" in the summer's blockbuster hit movie and in an opera by Philip Glass, is it coincidence, or a sign of the times? Both THE DARK KNIGHT and WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS explore a question that has troubled our national imagination since 9 / 11: Do we have to break our own laws to defeat those who respect no law?

In the new Glass opera WAITING FOR THE BARBARIANS, with libretto by Christopher Hampton from a 1982 novel by J. M. Coetzee, there are literal barbarians at a literal gate. The main character is a Magistrate on the frontier of an unnamed empire who takes it upon himself to return a barbarian girl to her tribe after she has been maimed in cruel interrogations by his superiors. He believes the officials' fears of invasion are based on manufactured reasons or misunderstanding; and he believes, in any case, that an emergency does not excuse injustice.

In the new Batman movie DARK KNIGHT, it's another magistrate, District Attorney Harvey Dent, who refers to barbarians at the gates. Arguing with Bruce "Batman" Wayne about the need for a vigilante to protect the population, he tells how the Roman Republic would grant emergency powers to a vigilante until peace was restored. It's a nice touch here that Batman himself reminds him that Caesar was that vigilante, who became a tyrant. Dent says, "You either die a hero, or live to see yourself the villain," and the rest of the story develops that idea. By the end of the movie, Batman has re-focused his efforts to sustain the official good guys.

In the opera, we never see the Barbarians except as noble outsiders, so the deck is stacked against those sun-glassed, shiny-weaponed officials of the empire and their counter-offensive. But the magistrate himself is an ambiguous character. The sun-glassed Colonel tells him more than once that the two of them are the same. How? It's not entirely clear, but we do learn that the Barbarian girl, far from being grateful to the magistrate, was in fact frightened of him. "You were always somewhere else," is how another character puts it. "She never knew what you wanted from her." We've seen how his care for her bandaged body gradually eroticizes. Does the libretto mean to suggest that both magistrate and colonel, as representatives of this empire, know only mediated versions of the barbarians? The sunglasses are a clue that both representatives of the empire have trouble with their vision.

In the movie, we have barbarians all right, led by The Joker, a character who has embodied chaos since he was created for a dime comic book in the 1940. (The man who drew that first image of the Joker admires this latest incarnation of the character as closest to the original Link to interview. ) This is the most grim Joker of all that I've seen on screen, yet he remains fun to watch for all the old reasons. His clown face and quips are so incongruous with his violence (as with the horrific little action that follows the line, "Watch! I'll make this pencil disappear!"), and gratuitous spectacle -- exploding hospitals, choreographed assassins, a pyre of cash. He enters the debate between Batman and Harvey Dent, too, arguing that law cannot beat someone who simply disregards all laws, all codes, all plans. He dares Batman to kill him.

It's a debate that the Joker loses. More than once, he tells Batman, "You are alone." Everyone is either cowed or corrupted; all you have to do is mess up their plans. Yes, some try to stand up to him: "copycat" citizens in Batman suits and an elderly man at a party both tell him to his face, "We don't have to be scared of you." He pulls out his knife and sends them off. But we also see his grandest plan foiled because people in the end do not act in the frightened, self-preserving way that he expects, and Batman is able to tell him, "You are alone."

No doubt the directors of the opera and the movie want to resonate with our 9/11 world. The first image in the movie is an aerial approach to the glass facade of a skyscraper. The Joker is called a terrorist, and his arsenal includes military weapons and, several times, improvised explosive devices. We see crowds heading for the bridges and ferries to get out of town, as they did on 9/11. The opera focuses on hooded detainees and what officials are now calling "enhanced interrogation techniques."

I checked blogs to see if anyone else saw the Batman movie as a 9/11 movie, and I ran into a long conservative blogger's analysis of the movie as an allegory, with Batman being George W. Bush, using force outside the usual law to deal with the emergency of motiveless terrorists. I think that's pretty far-fetched.

But, while one works in big images and sharp contrasts, and the other explores a small personal corner of this problem (with Glass's elegant, atmospheric music providing contemplative tropes that expand the simple action), both works reaffirm what I've taught students for 28 years now: Have faith in the law, and stick to it, or the enemy has already broken down your gates.

SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE: Detective Novel in Tights

(Reflection on SOON I WILL BE INVINCIBLE, first novel by Austin Grossman, a games programmer and PhD candidate in English lit, with more thought about Sue Grafton's mystery series.)

A day after writing that Sue Grafton's detective - narrator Kinsey Millhone is sort of like her VW bug, homely, an underdog, but scrappy and dependable - I encountered a narrator like her who really is a machine. She's Fatale, a half-Robot Amazon built from the remains of a plump 5'5" woman who lost her memory and 1/2 of her body in an accident vacationing in Brazil (near the Amazon? coincidence?). She chose her name from a list, she tells us, and sometimes regrets not choosing "Cybergirl," which would have been easier for check-in clerks to pronounce and spell.

The novel sounds like it might be a recipe for a quick comedy sketch: To write a straight-faced crime fiction, obeying all the rules of the form, as if our planet really did contain "one thousand, six hundred, and eighty-six enhanced, gifted, or otherwise-superpowered persons." In fact, the notion of fitting super-herodom snuggly in the real world lies behind some recent movies and some old TV shows, too: THE INCREDIBLES, SKY-HIGH, and the old GREAT AMERICAN HERO. Of course, there's SMALLVILLE and HEROES on TV too. For that matter, it was this approach that made Marvel comics so distinctive and kind of annoying from their beginning in the late 50s. One commentator quipped, "They'd be too busy to get up from their analysts' couches to save a cat in a tree."

So there's fun to be had here, but it wouldn't last if the story didn't develop well, and it does. Like a Grafton novel, it's a story with characters who have pasts that impinge on the present, and there's a mystery at the start: Where is CoreFire, the mightiest hero of them all? Did his nemesis Doctor Impossible finally get him? Because chapters alternate between Fatale's voice and the villain's we know that he has no idea. As in a detective novel, we get a corpse about one-third of the way through, and we build up to the confrontation and answers in the last third.

Here's a sample of Fatale's narration. She's feeling out of her depth being asked to join "The Champions" super-hero group. Assured "You'll do fine. We all get our start somehow," by the group's leader, a part-alien masked girl named Damsel -- recently divorced from a Batman-style human named Blackwolf -- Fatale reflects

I guess we do at that, although some people get born with flight and a force-field, while others get ground into the Brazilian pavement. Funny thing.

Then Fatale's challenged to spar with one of their members ("Elphin," warrior elf left behind when Oberon and Titania went back to the elf dimension).

She gestures to the mat, like she's not sure I'll understand English. I don't know what she thinks I am. A knight in patchwork armor? I wonder if they've explained it to her -- the accident, the operations, the rest of it.
I shrug. "Bring it on."
"I would not hurt thee." Christ.
...It's not that I'm scared. I'm pretty good at this; I've just never fought a world-famous superheroine. I've never fought someone with her own pinup calendar and herbal tea brand. The truth is, I was halfway hoping for a shot at Damsel herself. There are tricks you can try with a force field. (p. 59, Vintage paperback).

The other narrator, "Doctor Impossible," is a mad -scientist who dropped out of Harvard after his seventh sophomore year, unable to stick with any program. He was the geeky kid, he tells us, and that stays with him, even now, when he's super-strong, impervious to bullets, and working on a doomsday machine that will alter the earth's orbit at his command. As we'd expect in any detective fiction, we have more than one scene in a dive bar, this one for super-villains.

I step through a slit in the plastic sheeting and into the light. It's going strong tonight, thirty or forty of us milling around, the usual assortment of half-brilliant, half-unlucky types sitting in twos and threes. A man made of rock. Something like a demon-woman, horns and a tail. A man clad in metal armor, holding an ax; a pale blue man, translucent....
I've forgotten what it's like out here with the smaller operators, people like the Pharaoh or the Quizzler, cutting deals for a few grains of plutonium or a high-tech crossbow. I'm not a natural mixer. And there's the difference in education. I look around more carefully. Villains fight villains, too.
"Doctor Impossible! Hey, Doc!"
A familiar red costume waves to me. He's sitting at the bar with a few guys I don't know, but I know Bloodstryke from the Thailand days. He's basically okay, for a guy whose armor drinks blood. (p.102)

Of course, it's fun to pick up on parallels to DC and Marvel comics, to detective novels, and to Austin Grossman's other areas of expertise: there are analogies to computer game "environments" and programming, and references to fiction. From Shakespeare, there's the Titania reference, and a living undersea computer named "Phathom - 5" from THE TEMPEST song ("Full fathom five your father lies..."), and a woman who disappeared with three friends to become rulers in a fairy tale kingdom, only to come back and become a character in a series of children's books now also made into movies: Narnia, anyone?

Sue Grafton's Alphabetical Mystery Novels: ABC and Do, Re, Mi

(Reflections on Sue Grafton's S IS FOR SILENCE, involving earlier novels in her series, including I, J, K, L, M, N, and O.)

Writing detective fiction must be a lot like composing music. How much can a creative person do with the same handful of keys? The composer and mystery writer have to meet certain expectations: grabbing our attention early, setting a mood early, introducing some new material in the first half of the piece, repeating certain material over and over until we "get" it, and leading up to some climaxes (in music, "cadences") at intervals before reaching the finale.

The analogy is an easy one to see in Sue Grafton's series, since her alphabet series overlapped the musical scale for the first octave, at least. About those, I can say nothing, because I picked up "I IS FOR INNOCENT" pretty much at random from a grocery store book rack when I was desperate for something to read. Judging from those, I'd say that, like a composer, she is learning from doing, and she is setting herself some new formal challenges along the way.

Of all that I've read, S IS FOR SILENCE has the most formal experimentation, and it's very much a musical form. Grafton has written a novelist's equivalent of a Rondo. Late musicologist Karl Haas used to compare a rondo to a musical sandwich: bread, then something new, followed always by bread, and so on. The novel S IS FOR SILENCE begins on July 4, 1953, the night that little Daisy Sullivan and babysitter Liza Mellincamp last saw Daisy's mother Violet (and her yapping little Pomeranian dog). The next chapter begins thirty-four years later, when grown-up and messed-up Daisy hires detective Kinsey Millhone to find out once and for all whether her mother abandoned her that night, or was killed by her abusive husband, or something else. For the rest of the novel, there is this alternation between chapters about the forward-moving (and backward-looking) investigation and chapters focused on what each of the characters was doing July 3 and 4, 1953.

This formal choice was a good one. We got to know the victim, warts and all, and Grafton got to branch out from her usual first-person persona to get into the outlooks of her different characters, including a couple of very different adolescent girls. I looked forward to wading in these little pools of past, and then I looked forward to seeing how each new piece of information ("Oh, Violet was seeing this man, too") fit into the picture that these characters were presenting of themselves 34 years later.

There are certain formal characteristics that Grafton continues in all the novels that I've read, but she always finds a way to vary them. First, there's the first - person narration by Kinsey Millhone, whose car is an apt image for herself: a battered but reliable Volkswagen beetle. In all the novels, the event that gets the story going is violence that happened months or years before. New violence waits until much later in these books. Grafton manages to squeeze Millhone into corners just at the moment that the detective "gets" it -- the criminal has also figured out that she's got it -- and there's going to be a violent confrontation.

Reading I, J, and K, I was at first annoyed by what seemed to be intrusions. In my notes, I asked, "Padding, or reality? Do we need details about drinking water, sorting mail? misspelling? clothes? her Spanish class? the annoyance of telemarketers?" I'm glad I wrote all that down, because I could appreciate later when Grafton brought those digressions into the mainline of her plot -- as when Kinsey uses the ploy of being a telemarketer to elicit information from an unsuspecting suspect.

Grafton also seems to find a way to break routine, to distinguish one novel from the others. S has its rondo form; K grows into a meditation on night life, as Kinsey loses sleep investigating the murder of a "sex worker." L takes her cross-country, trying to reach the point of origin before the scary villain does -- and he's hot on her heels. In O, she is confronted with a misjudgement of her own youth, and she's working to clear the name of her first husband. N is set almost entirely in a sort of "town of the damned," where the entire population seems to be hostile and dangerous.

Once in awhile, we see inside the mind of the author, and that's a quality I like in music, too, to see a process of development at work. Grafton displays her own brainstorming for possible plot twists in those places where Kinsey sits with scattered index cards, looking for connections -- a ritual that Kinsey does in every one of these novels. I imagine if we checked Grafton's work room, we'd see index cards pinned to a bulletin board. Kinsey's reflection on her work is undoubtedly an expression of Grafton's own feelings as she's deep into a novel. This is from J:

At this stage of any investigation, I'm inclined to impatience. It always feels the same way to me -- as though this is the case that's finally going to do me in. ... I don't always succeed in the way I anticipate. The problem with being a PI is there isn't any rule book.

There's one other element hard to describe, but very easy to appreciate: the books have heart. I don't mean tear-jerking stuff. Some boyfriends come into the background, and those are the least interesting things in the books. But sometimes Kinsey is insensitive, or angry, or vindictive. Grafton works these out in graceful moments of self-awareness and remorse. I especially liked Kinsey's reflection, when a difficult witness is formally polite to her, and they end the conversation cordially: It's not that we're nice to the people that we like. We like the people that we're nice to.

I hear that T is another twist, told from the point of view of the killer. That's been done before, but not by Grafton. I'm looking forward to grabbing it up soon.

Boy Gets Girl, Boy Doesn't Deserve Her : All's Well That Ends Well

(A reflection on the preview performance of ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL at the Georgia Shakespeare Festival in Atlanta.)

Suppose, once upon a time, there were a beautiful, clever, generous, and kind girl named Helena, secretly in love with the son of the Countess whom she serves. Suppose she makes a bargain with the King of France, sick unto death: If she cures the king's disease, she marries the man of her choice; otherwise, she dies. Suppose she works a miracle, restoring him to youthful vigor. He lines up all the eligible young men in the court for her, and last in line is the young Count whom she adores. She gently teases the men, who are all anxious to have her, before, hesitantly, and modestly, she says to her love Bertram, "I dare not say I choose you, but I do give myself." What happens next?

It's the strangest moment in a Shakespeare play that I can think of, and I'm sure it's the reason why I've only seen two productions of this play -- compared to more than a dozen productions each of TWELFTH NIGHT, AS YOU LIKE IT, and MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM. Not only does Bertram reject her, to the shock of everyone in court and in the audience, but, he does worse. He takes her hand when commanded to disregard her social class (the King giving a very democratic speech about true worth stemming from actions, not from birth), then rejects her in private. He mocks her: When you can get the ring off my finger, and bear me my own child, then will I be your husband. Then he betrays the King by joining the enemy's army. The girl Helena spends the rest of the play pursuing him, and we're all asking ourselves, "Why?"

Directors have to pull out all their tricks to make this one work. The only other production I've seen (Alabama Shakespeare Festival, ca. 1985) framed the play with a spot of light on a young couple in a slow waltz, obviously enthralled with each other. Only at the end do we recognize them as Helena and Bertram, and, remembering the way the play started, we think, "Okay, he's a jerk, but it's inevitable that he'll learn to appreciate her." This one begins the play with tableaus from the celebratory ending, and a balletic "dumbshow" that anticipates key elements of the story: Helena's selection of Bertram, the use of blindfolds (Bertram is literally in the dark at a key plot turn, and a subplot involves blindfolding the character Parolles), her rejection, and the long road to reconciliation -- symbolized by laying a long white cloth flat on the stage and having Helena advance "uphill" along the cloth, one laborious step at a time. The director borrows images from this dumbshow throughout the play to remind us of the inevitable ending -- when Helena and Bertram again stand at opposite ends of that white cloth, and this time, they come together joyfully.

Still, what's wrong with this boy? In the program, the director asks what this play would be, if it were focused on the boy. The director's intriguing answer is that this is a sort of "Labors of Hercules" or "Adventures of Theseus," in which a hero, having somehow brought dishonor to himself, goes through experiences that make him a man. With that in mind, the director did a lot of good. He cast as Bertram an actor smaller than everyone else in the cast except Helena and the jester, and the actor projected the insecurity of an eighth grade boy in a grown-up situation, awkward with formal gestures, always a little isolated, eyes constantly checking to see what kind of impression he's making. Embracing his mother as he leaves to join the King's court, his formal embrace becomes a little boy's hug. This emphasis fits with the script, as Bertram follows a braggart soldier the way a young teen might be awed by an eighteen-year-old jackass.

So it's about the girl who grows up before the boy does, and then she gets him when he's really ready. Okay: That ends well enough for me.

Singer Carmen McRae: Beyond Perfection

"Singing" just begins to describe what the late Carmen McRae did with a song. Here's more about her life than I ever knew, from wikipedia:

Carmen Mercedes McRae (April 8, 1920 – November 10, 1994) was an American jazz singer, composer, pianist, and actress. Considered one of the most influential jazz vocalists of the 20th century, it was her behind-the-beat phrasing and her ironic interpretations of song lyrics that made her memorable. McRae drew inspiration from Billie Holiday, but established her own distinctive voice. She went on to record over 60 albums during her career, and enjoying a rich musical career, performing and recording in the United States, Europe, and Japan.

In the rest of the article, I learned that she acted roles in several movies and TV shows between 1960 and 1990, and that emphysema forced her to quit singing but not to quit smoking in 1991, and it killed her. Of the dozens of hours of recorded music by her that I've heard, I have a favorite two seconds, and they tell us how McRae's performances reached beyond perfection.

These two seconds come in a remarkable song composed specifically for McRae, "I Have the Feeling I've Been Here Before" from the LP I am Music. The album's producer Roger Kellaway wrote the music. The Bergmans, A(lan?) and M(arilyn), wrote the lyrics. My copy of the album has gone the way of all my vinyl -- into the dumpster. I expected to be able to replace all my treasured Carmen albums with CDs, but that hasn't happened.

The two seconds I have in mind come near the end of the song. Its beginning is an ascending scale from low in the range to high, skipping past the upper tonic and still higher. Ensuing lines parallel that shape in whole or in part:

I have the feeling I've been here before
More often than I care to tell.
And though the signs have been more clear before,
By now I know them pretty well...

She sings about how she knows the "smile, the look," and she adds with emphasis (as if she's rolling her eyes), "I know the look!" But the lyric develops, "Although I've been on the losing side / that carpet ride / is always worth a try." It concludes, "The only news when you've been here before / is: who will say good-bye." That's the end of the lyric. But it's the place where the instrumentalists do their improv, and Carmen joins in when the music comes back around to the line, "Though I've been on the losing side." That's where I find my favorite two seconds: Carmen rides the swell of the instruments into her loudest and highest notes in the song, as she stretches the word "losing" into four syllables. It's a musical train wreck: her voice breaks at the high point, and she doesn't quite hit the note she's thinking of before she comes back down and recovers for a quiet finish.

What I love in those horrible two seconds is what makes her better than perfection. She was a team player and a fearless improvisor. She fed off of what she heard, and she sought opportunities to sing with musicians who would push her into new territory, such as her live duet with Dizzy Gillespie on a ballad "Miss Otis Regrets," her album of unrehearsed first takes with pianist George Shearing, and a live concert of duets with avant-garde singer Betty Carter. While she was capable of crooning velvety tones, Carmen McRae was willing to push her characterization outside of "pretty." The kicker is, it's a studio album, and Carmen could have done another take. I'm guessing that she was satisfied with this take, warts and all, maybe because the rest is so good, or maybe it was part of her integrity as a performer, as the overshot pitch and cracked voice were part of her spontaneous living of the moment.

Spontaneity and genuineness are part of her performances, whatever the venue. The closest I ever got to seeing her live was in the late-Seventies, a time when her career had a "resurgence," according to her fan web site. A friend of mine named Pam saw Carmen McRae two times, six months' apart. Pam also saw Carmen McRae's friend Sarah Vaughan twice during that same period of time. Pam reported that she loved both the first time, but the second time, she was disenchanted with one of them. According to my friend, Sarah Vaughan repeated every nuance and gesture, including the supposedly spontaneous jokes and comments about how she appreciated that particular audience. Carmen, on the other hand, was clearly enjoying herself, was truly responding to differences in the audience, and did not repeat her performances, even when some of the songs were the same.

I never knew Carmen McRae except through her music; but it was the special quality of her performance to make us feel like old friends. Happily, YouTube makes it possible for me to see her live, and I plan to enjoy what's there, now that I've been reminded how special she was.

"Peace be Within Thy Walls" at St. James Episcopal, Marietta GA

View from inside St. James's narthex to Church Street, twilight

Psalm 122: "Peace be within your walls"

Our walls at St. James bear stone tablets, so old that some engraved letters have blurred. The stones honor parishioners who worshiped here before these very walls existed, before the train tracks were laid, before Church and Polk were streets. Some of their birth dates reach back more than 150 years.

For those earliest parishioners, candles were an everyday utility, not a lovely enhancement of worship. "All things in heaven" were close by, not light years away; and "things invisible" didn't include bacteria and UV rays. When they prayed for "this nation," they were thinking of twenty-some states east of the Missisippi, not a world power. For them, it was unthinkable to sit in the congregation next to divorced individuals, or people of any background other than Anglo-Saxon. They would not have been familiar with women in positions of leadership in the church or anywhere else, or with anyone who didn't wear a hat in public. As late as 1960, it was scandalous to some when a Roman Catholic of Irish descent went hatless to his own Presidential inauguration.

But cast back another 150 years before our earliest parishioners were born, and find yet another world before steam engines, telegraph wires, and the Constitution. In that world, ten miles was a great distance, aristocracy was esteemed, democracy was disreputable, and judges from the Salem witch trials were still living. Composers of the music that we call classical hadn't been born.

Yet with those parishioners of other centuries, we worship with the same rites, recite prayers in the same way, often using the same phrases. With them, we know Lent, and we  look forward to Easter. We all have heard today's reading from Romans, Paul's rebuke to a church that drew a sharp distinction between Jew and Greek, assuring them that "the same Lord is Lord of all."

There is peace and comfort in realizing that our church walls enclose a community in time as well as in space. Whenever the peace of this community has been disturbed by conflict -- and that has happened regularly for centuries -- there is also peace in remembering what has blurred with time, and what time has not touched.

St. James, the nave, 1918