Dr. Metablog

Overheard Conversation

A long weekend in Santa Fe, New Mexico -- a handsome small city. I don't know of another place in the nation in which the principal economic engine is the making and selling of arts and crafts.  I myself am in the familiar situation: anything I can afford, I don't want, and anything I want, I can't afford. Besides, we're in de-accessioning mode -- a condition which doesn't prevent us from appreciating the astonishingly high level of artistic achievement on display here. Fortunately, there's no cost to hiking in the nearby mountains -- we went to Bandelier National Monument to gasp at the spectacular rock formations and marvel at the Anasazi cliff dwellings. A most enjoyable and worthwhile expedition. The guidebook says that Santa Fe is the product of the melding of three cultures: Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo. I guess, by default, I must be an "Anglo." It's odd to be an Anglo, but not as disorienting as my experience in Salt Lake City, where, as a non-Mormon, I was considered to be a "gentile." 

At breakfast in the hotel, a man at the table next to me told the following story to his friends (I was alone at the moment, pretending to inspect the complimentary USA Today).  "A Hindu, a Jew, and a Republican are driving in a storm. The car breaks down, they walk to an isolated farmhouse and ask the owner if they can stay the night. 'Sure,' he says, 'but I have only two beds. One of you will have to sleep in the barn.' "'No problem,' says the Hindu, 'I don't mind sleeping in the barn.'  But after a half hour, there's knock on the door, and the Hindu says, 'There's a cow in the barn. Cows are sacred. I can't sleep with a cow.' So the Jew says, "Don't worry. I'll sleep in the barn." But after a half hour, there's a knock on the door, and the Jew says, 'There's a pig in the barn. I can't sleep with a pig.' So the Republican says, 'Don't worry, I'll go sleep in the barn.' But after a half hour, there's a knock on the door. It's the cow and the pig."

Actual dialog, captured in the wild.   

My Henry James Problem

I'm reading, or re-reading (what does it matter when it's been fifty years since the last go-around) Henry James' The Wings of the Dove. Once again, I'm variously stimulated, frustrated and infuriated. Has there ever been a writer who cries out to be parodied more than does Hank the J? Try to resist the impulse to make fun house mirrors of this representative, convoluted sentence.

      "Her welcome, her frankness, sweetness, sadness, brightness, her disconcerting poetry, as he made shift at moments to call it, helped as it was by the beauty of her whole setting and by the perception at the same time, on the observer's part, that this element gained from her, in a manner, for effect and harmony, as much as it gave -- her whole attitude had, to his imagination, meanings that hung about it, waiting upon her, hovering dropping and quavering forth again, like vague faint snatches, mere ghosts of sound, of old-fashioned melancholy music."

Let me guess that most of Dr. M.'s loyal readers did not finish reading the quoted bit. They made a good faith attempt at the first few words, then whistled, threw up their metaphorical hands, and surrendered. Or if they did get all the way to the end of the sentence, they were certainly puzzled as to whether they had fully deciphered the Jamesian code. It's not that the sentence has no meaning, but is it worth a reader's time to parse and disentangle its many syntactic knots? Now, dear friends, just Imagine 539 small-print pages of prose, every paragraph on every page loaded with similar abstractions, assertions, modifications, withdrawals, subordinations, and equivocations. It's taxing. James takes it out of you, wears you down.

And therefore let me confess that a big chunk of my Henry James problem is that it's so damn hard to keep the ol' eye on the ball when every sentence is so laborious to construe. In most novels, readers are pulled along by the plot. You might have trouble "getting into it," but once you do, your attention is galvanized and you start to sail. In the case of HJ, there's very little plot, very little in the way of story. It's all hyper-subtle character analysis and teasing conversation. I can't speak for every reader, but I must admit that, while reading Wings, my mind frequently took flight. I regularly had to forcibly snap myself back to attention. It's anything but effortless to stay with the Jamester. 

But let me return to the exemplary sentence that I quoted above. The two key words are "poetry' (line 1) and "meanings" (line 5).  To paraphrase: she (i.e. James's character Millie Theale) has "poetry" and the situation has "meanings." Underneath all the wobbly circumlocutions, that's kind of it.

But neither of these two crucial nouns gives much away. What sort of poetry does Millie 'have,' you might ask?' What particular 'meanings' inhere in the situation? I myself want --crave, in fact -- further definition and explication. That's the novelist's job. If he wants to keep me happy and focused, he has to provide considerably more specificity that HJames deigns to supply. Words such as "poetry" and "meanings" don't constrain a reader;  rather, they are empty vessels into which I, or any other reader, can pour a variety of significations. The reader, i.e. me, is simply asked to do far too much of the work. I resent it, some of the time. 

Which takes me back to where I came in, in the 50s and 60s, when James was the king of the American canon -- or at least he was very much the boss in the Large Eastern University where I was a graduate student in literature. I don't know how my ever-so-civilized teachers managed it, but to appreciate and understand Henry James was framed not as a test of the author's creative skill, but as a test of the reader's sensitivity. James, it was confidently and regularly asserted, was subtle, delicate, loaded to the gills with the most exquisite sensibility. Did I, a kid from Coney Island Avenue, possess the sophistication, the tact, the sensitivity to grasp James superfine insights and his characters' inclinations and velleities?

You know what? I didn't.I failed the test.

James portrays a world to which I could not easily relate. No one in Wings of a Dove works for living.The characters all live off their incomes, derived who knows how? When HJ has to bring two characters together, he has two choices and two choices only -- a dinner party or a chance encounter at a museum. Action?  Yes, the characters travel from one resort city to another. I'm exaggerating just the tiniest bit. There is one character in Wings who has an occupation. Although we never see him at work, Merton Densher is a journalist. Which is precisely his problem. How can he be a suitable mate for Kate Croy if he has a job? How shockingly vulgar! 

It was a chore to take James seriously, especially in 1960 and especially for someone of my background. But then, not to take James seriously, not to understand him, was presumed to disqualify a guy from the serious study of literature. Which turned out not to be the case.   

But I'm glad to say that I persevered with Wings. If I hadn't, I never would have re-read the infinitely splendid, magnificently tawdry piece of dialogue between Densher and Croy that brings Book 8 to a conclusion -- a conversation that's as well done as anything in English since WS lay down his quill in 1613.   

Coming soon to these pages: my Marcel Proust problem. Hint: way worse than my James problem.

Up in the Sky, Ever So High

Today's essaylet is being composed thirty thousand miles above ground, somewhere over, it appears from up here, Utah. I'm flying on Southwest Airlines, the Trailways of the sky -- no frills, no food, no nothing. No passengers to speak of, either. Big ol' three-quarter-empty jet plane. "Nobody's flying nowadays," a stewardess told me. Chalk up another one for W.

Air travel was in its florid adolescence when I was a boy. Propeller-driven planes flew over Flatbush every two minutes on their way to Idlewild (latterly JFK). But not with me or anyone I knew on board. I can't imagine who traveled by plane in those days -- probably only the Filthy Rich, certainly no one from the old neighborhood. In the late 1950s, I remember hearing rumors that there were Cornell undergraduates so wealthy that they regularly made the journey from NYC to Ithaca in the air (while I crawled upstate on a smelly Greyhound that left the Port Authority at midnight and made "rest stops" at East Stroudsburg, Scranton and somewhere in the southern tier before arriving on Aurora Street at 8 in the morning). My very first airline flight (it was on an expense account) took place in 1960 on a 12-passenger Mohawk from Ithaca to NYC. I was one wide-eyed gawker, let me tell you. There were very few flights for me during the 60s but by the 70s, I was more prosperous and air travel became semi-routine. Airlines had once been an upper-class preserve, and there was still some leftover graciousness, especially on the long haul to Europe. Menus and decent food and complimentary wine. But little by little, flights became more expensive and less elegant. Is it my imagination or have they magically shrunk the size of the seat? I recall a particularly bad run of luck when I was routinely placed in a middle seat, surrounded on both sides by plump widestance armrest-hogging smokers.

 

The extinction of the cigarette is a plus, but it's hard to think of another improvement. Nothing to look forward to air-travel-wise but "consolidation," fewer flights, smaller seats, negative frills, and grubbier planes. The great age of the airplane has gone the way of the steamship and the railroad. No more dress up, no more glamor. Just as well, I think, or would be if the decline of service were reflected in a decline of prices.

 

There's no first class on Southwest  -- although what would it matter to me? I never once sat in a first-class seat -- not a single time. In fact, in all honesty I must admit that I indulge a bit of class resentment that there should be any distinction of classes. Although I wouldn't mind if someone offered me something more gracious than one of those nasty mini-bags of over-salted pretzels -- the kind  you have to be an experienced safe cracker to break into.

Number 44 and Number 42

I'm jubilant that, come January 20, we'll once again have a president whose brain waves are dancing, who can bring an English sentence to completion, and who understands that America consists of much more than the Bushian roster of Fortune 500 executives, evangelicals, know-nothings, high school dropouts, gay-bashers, neocon imperialists, dittoheads, gun nuts, military contractors, upward redistributionists, fetus-worshipers and health insurance profiteers. The new president will abandon the present system of government (trust the market -- capitalism is always right!) and return us to the world of evidence and reason. Quite the revolution, isn't it?  And speaking of revolutions, the new president, if you haven't heard, is black (or to be more accurate, black-and-white, which is this country still means, in defiance of all logic, black). How splendid to bury a long-standing racial taboo. Nothing makes me prouder than that we've elected an African-American, Kenyan-Kansan president. With a brain. 

The election of Barack Obama brought me back to hometown Brooklyn of sixty-one years ago. I was eight years old on April 15, 1947, when Jackie Robinson "broke the color barrier." It was Jackie on first or Jackie running the bases that alerted me to the idea that I lived in a conflict-riven society. We (family, friends, neighbors, writers for the Brooklyn Eagle) were enthusiastic about Jackie, but there were those reactionaries and bigots in other cities who were convinced that their world had just come to an end. No question but that the advent of Jackie Robinson was the major formative political experience of my early childhood -- even though it was decades before I could fully appreciate its cosmic significance.   

In my mind, and I think in the minds of others of my generation, there's a direct line from Jack Roosevelt Robinson to Barack Hussein Obama. Two smart, skilled performers; two ferocious but very cool competitors. Two very courageous gentlemen.Two barriers busted all to smithereens.Two milestones in American history. Never the latter if hadn't hadn't been for the former.    

Jackie's fabulously athletic body fell apart early and he died young of diabetes. He was born in 1918, and if he had been blessed with longevity, he would have been ninety years old today.   

Wouldn't that have been a pretty picture -- Jackie Robinson, frail, gray, stooped, leaning on his cane, but still in possession of that marvelous knowing glint in his coal black eyes, sitting right there on the platform in front of the United States Capitol, a tear on his cheek while Barack Obama holds up his hand and swears to protect and defend the constitution of the United States of America. I see it oh so clearly in my mind's eye. It gladdens my fond old heart. 

Latter-Day Confederacy

The Republicans have voluntarily transformed themselves into a regional and agrarian party. If the Democrats play it as it lays, they have the opportunity to create a permanent Democratic majority -- permanent into the foreseeable future, that is. 

McCain was the candidate of a geographical region, not of the nation. How many votes did the Arizona Jekyll/Hyde senator win that were outside of the old Confederacy (reminder: the Confederate States of America were, in order of their secession, South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. The "border states" of Missouri and Kentucky did not legally secede but were allied with the Confederacy)? These states constitute the heart of McCain's support. Of his 162 electoral votes, 113 came from the southern pocket.  he rest came from the otherworldly Mormon states of Utah and Idaho (9 votes) and from impoverished agrarian states, many of them suffering from declining populations, such as the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Montana. In the entire country, the only areas where McCain in 2008 ran ahead of Bush in 2004 were some of the all-white rural counties in the old confederacy and Oklahoma and an occasional retrograde county in undeveloped western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. If anyone in America found Palinity appealing, it was people in the poorest, least educated parts of the continent  -- and also in the atypical Alaskan kleptocracy.

The Democrats made inroads into the new old south because northern Virginia's Washington suburbs and the research triangle area of North Carolina have joined the new century, and because Florida is a haven for northeastern migrants. 

The Democrats are the party of the future: multicultural, educated, international, young, high-tech, entrepreneurial, secular. The Republicans are the part of the past:  geriatric, racist, melanin-deprived, Bible-thumping, rural, poor, less well educated. Their day is over and gone. 

The "pundints" (as McCain calls them) want Obama to govern from the middle. I agree, except that I think that he should govern from the middle of New York, New England, the upper middle west, and the far west -- not a middle somewhere between Virginia and Mississippi. Obama should make an effort to educate the denizens of the American backwater, but if it's necessary to drag them kicking and screaming into the 21st century, then so  be it. But the United States of America can no longer allow itself to be shackled to a mean, recalcitrant, atavistic, pre-Darwinian southland.

It's not longer red state versus blue state. It's all blue except where it's all white.

My Day

My election day was much like that of many Americans, I betcha. In the morning, out walking the neighboring precincts, to knock on doors and rouse up the occasional procrastinator. I was greeted for the most part by enthusiastic thumbs-up Obama voters but also by apologetic laggards whom I forced to swear holy oaths that they would hustle down to the polling place "right now." I encountered one sour young woman who told me that she was so tired of being urged to vote that she was sorry that she had voted. I was on good behavior and did not respond that there was a lot more at stake than her convenience. Later in the day, after the mandatory septuagenarian nap, I talked with a candidate for county commissioner and together we made a last check of the polls. Then to a downtown restaurant where partisans had gathered to await the results. I was nervous as a cat when at first Virginia showed up in the red column and I couldn't relax until Ohio came in blue. Then, moderately joyful, off to a friend's house to watch the long parade of blue states. Lots of shouting and applause. At last the polls closed on the California coast and the US was once gain in the care of a person with brains, education, and values that I could recognize. Then home to watch McCain gracefully concede and Obama accept. Broken sleep, but this morning up early to search the archives for the flag and the flagpole. Right now Old Glory, looking might relieved and cheerful, is flying above all the Obama/Biden and Dem yard signs. A great lift to the world's spirits, and to mine. 

Takacs Geezers

At Grusin Music Hall last night to hear the Takacs play Beethoven and Schumann, always a delight, and also a quartet by Bartok, which is, I'm sorry to say, even after many exposures is still screechingly hard on my tender ears (except for the very amusing pizzicato 4th movement).  Perhaps some day I'll "get" Bartok, but it's been forty years of hard listening and frankly, I'm not there yet.  I'm still hopelessly stranded in melody, harmony, and rhythm. 

Meanwhile the chamber music crowd get older and older.  Anyone with the least amount of pigment in his/her hair is young;  in fact, anyone without a wheel-chair, a walker, an oxygen bottle, or a "minder" is young.  Grusin is the place I take my septuagenarian self in order to feel youthful and vigorous.  I admit that it's a strategy that doesn't have much of a future, but I'm not thinking long term.   

I think Ed and the Takacses should accommodate to their elderly audience.  For example, when it comes time for the violin to play solo parts in the highest register, the notes are barely audible.  It can't just be me having this problem because half of the geezers in the auditorium have sprouted hearing aids.  I think that Ed should make an effort to play the high notes a lot louder.  Or possibly, plug in that near-Strad that he wields so well.  I'm sure that there's a electronic program designed to amplify the top of the register. 

On the other hand, If the Takacs wants to attract a younger audience, there are some changes they might make.  For one thing, it's time to give up on the all-black tuxes.  Why must they all dress like Johnny Cash?  Sequins would be good, or anything glittery.  And those shiny black shoes in an age when footwear has become plastic and colorful?  What's with that?  And how about a little chest hair (or in the case of Gerri the violist, a little bosom)? Bring that Broncos/Buffs/Coors crowd to Grusin!! A new generation of Brahmsophiles.  And why must they just sit there like lumps when they could move around the stage a bit.  An occasional dance step.  Slap that cello, swing those violins from side to side. 

Lots of room for exciting innovations in the world of the classical string quartet.

An Obsession

These last few weeks, I've been reading political news obsessively.  Not just the NYTimes and the WaPo, but the left-wing blogs as well:  Politico and Daily Kos and HuffPo and TPM.  I follow the local political gossip on ColoraoPols.  I check the latest polls on Pollster and 538, searching for trends and differentials.  Worse still, I'm up in the middle of the night almost every night:  what's the latest news from North Dakota, Montana, Florida?  I keep up to date on senatorial and house races all over the country especially where the red candidate is a horror or is running a particularly loathsome campaign:  Dole, McConnell, Bachmann, Sununu, etc.  My days (and my nights) are no longer my own.

I'm not the only one.  Many of my friends are doing the same thing. 

Not without reason.  I believe that the republic is at stake.  If McCain/Palin is elected, I fear for the century and for the country and for the planet.

On days when I do something for the Dems (knock on doors, deliver those flyers that they presume to call "literature," fold-and-stuff) I sleep better.  But I won't be at peace until Virginia is in the Democratic column.  Only then will I breathe easy.  Who knows, maybe I'll be able to get through the night without logging on to the internet to learn exactly how many points Obama is ahead in PA according to Gallup and Rasmussen and Harstad and CBS.

I ran into my friend Mike S. a few days ago.  He had just been to the doctor about his high blood pressure.  While he was all wired up he started chatting with the nurse about Sarah Palin.  His blood pressure shot up 40 points.

I wonder what's going on with mine.