LEARNING TO SAY "MAYBE LATER"

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    When bloggers blog about being too busy to blog, I wonder why they didn’t take the time instead to blog about something other than not blogging. But now I understand; I feel that I owe you an explanation of why my blogging is so spotty these days. (Sorry; that sounds like a medical problem.)
    The trouble is, I’ve been busy. My work at KUAT constitutes only about 45 percent of my income; the rest flows from my work with the printed word. As the Tucson Weekly’s arts editor, every week I write one or two articles (mostly reviews of plays) and do light editing on one or two other stories. I contribute 1,000 words a week to the All Music Guide (mini-bios of composers, and program notes on compositions). I’m billed as a “contributing editor” to Strings magazine, which means I have one or two or three or maybe even four articles plus a couple of CD reviews in every issue of that monthly magazine. I write longer reviews and features for the bimonthly Fanfare magazine. Once or twice a month I do a couple of hours of proofreading for Madden, the company that puts out glossy magazines and visitor publications like Tucson Guide. About once a month I proofread and sometimes index a book for Rio Nuevo, a local publisher of books of regional interest. And during the downtime from all this, I write for other publications.
    I never have to pitch story ideas to editors. At the Weekly, I do whatever I want. Otherwise, editors e-mail me or call me with assignments. I’m not in prestigious magazines like the New Yorker (I wonder why they never call), but it’s an easy and reasonably lucrative life, and laziness and greed are my two strongest motivating forces. This may be the only profession that makes them compatible.
    Last month, the assignments started piling up. It happened around the time I was appearing in a short-run play at Invisible Theatre, essentially portraying myself as a heckler in Susan Claassen’s A Conversation with Edith Head. I had maybe 30 lines scattered through the show, but rehearsals and performances kept punching holes in my schedule for a week, and I never quite regained my equilibrium. By the beginning of this month, I had a pile of assignments that I really needed to finish off, but were showing no signs of coming to completion. I’d already done the research and interviews for several pieces, but hadn’t found the right time to sit down and write the articles. (Most of these things I can toss off in no more than two hours, once the interviews are done, so it isn’t as if I have to struggle with the muse for days on end.)
    Finally, last weekend, I sorted out my schedule and figured I could easily finish off several pieces already in the works this week, pull together by the end of the month/year two or three other articles they’ve been waiting for at Strings, make substantial progress on a book about the Navajo reservation I’m doing some heavy editorial work on for Rio Nuevo, fulfill all my usual weekly commitments, and start fresh in January with a couple of big pieces on the Bach cello suites and violinist Kyoko Takezawa. After devoting most of Saturday to household stuff, all I’d have to do on Sunday would be skip the concert being presented by the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music (of which I’m vice president), stay home, polish off a piece for Strings on adding pizzazz to your viola playing, complete a potential February cover article for Stage Directions on the new Mesa Arts Center (that’s where I was last Wednesday, instead of on the air), and write two theater reviews for the Weekly. Which I did.
    But then I got a call from the editor of Fanfare, who announced that the magazine’s Webmaster had just died; would I take over the job? OK, fine, even though that means learning new software and having one more little thing to do every two days and something big to do every two months. On Monday, an editor from a local publication I haven’t written for before called to ask me to do a particular story, due the middle of next week. Sorry; no time for what would amount to a little investigative piece with so short a deadline, given everything else I was up to. I recommended another writer, and the editor said she might check with her, but she might also just hold the assignment until I had more time. Gee, thanks. Not this year.
    Then the editor at Rio Nuevo e-mailed me, asking if I could come in the next day to do the final proof on a new little book about poisonous critters, then compile the index. Sorry, no time this week. Well, what if I did the index over the weekend? It’s just a little book. OK, OK, I’d do the index, later, but not the proofing.
    Then late yesterday the editor of a local publication for which I’ve written fairly regularly called with an assignment, due early next week (he always calls about a week before something is due). This would require less work than the piece I’d turned down the day before, a couple of phone interviews, a little Internet research, maybe a drive by a building downtown rather than actually venturing inside it if I’m going to keep my time down. The whole thing, including the writing, would take only two or three hours. OK, but no way could I turn it in by Tuesday, since I wouldn’t even be able to think about doing this until about then. So I got an extra day. Thrilling.
    My problem, obviously, is that I’ve never learned to say “no,” but I am apparently getting better at saying “later,” which is fine until “later” becomes “now.”
    So there you have it, my too-busy-to-blog post. Probably the first in a series.

SEALED FOR YOUR PROTECTION

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Leftists love to quote John Stuart Mill’s remark that "Although it is not true that all conservatives are stupid, it is true that most stupid people are conservative." I have a musical corollary to that: Claims for the “Mozart Effect” aside, classical music doesn’t make you less stupid, but stupid people are ignorant of classical music.
    Here’s the latest evidence that complete idiots and asses are in charge. The victim of the stupidity: composer, music journalist and blogger Kyle Gann. He operates a little online music service he calls Postclassic Radio. At that site, you can hear a wide variety of contemporary art music, hardly any of it available commercially or easily. Gann is providing exposure for composers whose music otherwise might not be heard beyond Downtown Manhattan, and absolutely nobody is losing money because people would rather listen free to Postclassic Radio than buy the CDs it plays—again, you can’t buy much of this stuff, and those discs that you can buy are things you probably would pass up because you’d have no idea what the music sounds like. Everybody benefits from what Gann is doing, and nobody loses.
    But Gann has been found in violation of the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, because he dares to play more than two consecutive tracks from the same CD. The law is intended to keep people from downloading or making available huge chunks of commercially available discs, thus cutting into the legitimate profits of record companies. But the morons in charge of protecting the rights of the record companies don’t understand that classical music is dominated by multi-movement works. If you don’t play more than two tracks of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or any number of other compositions new and old, you’re not playing the whole thing. Gann tried to explain this to the Powers That Be, but they remain recalcitrant in their ignorance.
    You can’t expect all people to know all things; that’s why this so-called information society developed, so we could become better informed. But the willful ignorance exhibited by the people cracking down on Gann is intolerable. Why do we give power to people who defend their right to stupidity? I suppose it’s called democracy.
    Meanwhile, Gann has figured out a work-around. The “permalink” option isn’t working, so to read the update go to his blog and find the entry called “Take the Blue Pill.”

REVIEW: TUCSON SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA/GEORGE HANSON

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Shakespeare has provided great fodder for composers over the past couple of centuries. The plays’ passions are strong, the plots and characters familiar, and they easily translate into highly effective music in the grand Romantic manner, music that can tell a tale even without benefit of Shakespeare’s words.
    Not all efforts to transform Shakespeare into music are equally successful, though, and last night’s Tucson Symphony Orchestra concert under George Hanson began a bit weakly, gathering strength piece by piece.
    Richard Strauss’ Macbeth is by no means a tale told by an idiot, but what it signifies is open to question. Strauss’ music doesn’t really resonate with the action, characters and setting of the Scottish Play; the work could just as easily be titled King Lear or, for that matter, The Song of Roland—anything with a bit of tumoil and regal pomp. This is the composer’s very first symphonic poem (although it was published later in the series), and while it’s smudged with many Strauss fingerprints, it hasn’t really taken on the mature Strauss polish; it sounds like something by one of those young composers in the early 20th century imitating Strauss until they could find individual voices (Szymanowski’s Concert Overture comes to mind).
    Hanson seemed a little reluctant to throw himself fully into the piece; he drew expertly judged dynamic swells from the orchestra in the opening section, but he didn’t maintain the headlong sweep this score requires if it’s going to hold together. The various components—trumpet fanfares, ominous woodwind phrases, string tremolos—rarely cohered, and conversely the periodic interruptions weren’t sufficiently volcanic. This was a performance on the verge of becoming effective, falling just short of success. The next time Hanson conducts Macbeth the interpretation will surely be more settled, but in truth this is not a work that bears frequent repetition.
    In contrast, Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet holds up to almost anything, and it was in good hands last night. Hanson emphasized the contrast between the creamy, legato Friar Laurence theme and love music and the bite of the conflict music, although this latter lost some of its edge in the tense, quiet passages.
    The best music and performance of the evening came after intermission, with selections from Prokofiev’s ballet treatment of Romeo and Juliet. In part because of Prokofiev’s native dramatic-romantic sensibilities and in part because Prokofiev had the luxury of telling the story over the course of two and a half hours, this is by far the most varied, richest and truest translation of Shakespeare into music, full of longing, rapture, humor and violence.
    Hanson and the TSO found it all in the 45 minutes of the score they offered, a well-chosen selection that followed the action of the story and included all the ballet’s major themes. The performance may not have been perfect—woodwind and brass balances, for example, weren’t always ideal—but it was full of character and the confidence that was lacking in the Strauss. One example of how well the performance worked: Hanson whipped the orchestra mercilessly throught the swordfight music leading to the death of Tybalt, while maintaining a solid bass line. For once this passage sounded urgent and dangerous; taken more slowly, it can seem more like cartoon music (as can similar material in Prokofiev’s Alexander Nevsky).
    Hanson and the orchestra played these two Romeo works just five years ago; the next time they prepare a Shakespeare program, I hope they’ll dust off something different, and something stronger than the Strauss. For starters, TSO performances of Dvorák’s Othello, Tchaikovsky’s Hamlet and Berlioz’ Roméo et Juliette are long overdue.

HANK AND THE VIRGIN

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Two items of mine darken the pages of the latest Tucson Weekly. First, Arizona Theatre Company does a fine job with a script that should have been better:

What's cookin' at Arizona Theatre Company is a good lookin' revue called Hank Williams: Lost Highway. Well designed, acted and sung, the show could be improved by only one thing: jettisoning the first act and rebuilding the play around the second-act crisis, thereby taking time to develop the elements unique to this country singer's story, and using the music to help tell that story rather than merely to punctuate a breathless narration of the man's whole damn life.

    You’ll find the whole review here. There’s also a preview of this weekend’s Christmas concerts by the Tucson Chamber Artists, a small, professional-quality choir:

The Tucson Chamber Artists are setting themselves apart by offering two performances this weekend of music that's not particularly easy to sing, in a program whose texts emphasize the rose, the queen of flowers, a symbol of Mary in the Christian tradition. Threading through this assortment of everything from unaccompanied Renaissance pieces to tone-cluster modern works will be several familiar carols.

    Read the rest here.

WHORES AMOK

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Why are so many Hollywood movies predictable? Because marketing experts conduct preview-audience surveys asking whether or not the viewers like the ending, among other things; if the test audience doesn’t get the ending it wants, the movie gets reshot. Why are so many clone novels being published? Because manuscripts are vetted by publishers’ marketing departments, which now have more control over the fall and spring lists than any editor.
    And we find marketers muscling into classical music. The New York Times reports that Glimmerglass Opera has had composer Stephen Hartke rename his forthcoming opera because a word in the title might offend some people. The word? Whore. The original title was Boule de Suif, or The Good Whore; now it’s being called The Greater Good, or the Passion of Boule de Suif.
    Says the Times, “Officials of Glimmerglass, the summer festival in Cooperstown, N.Y., denied they were being prudish but said the word could have kept patrons away. The composer, Stephen Hartke, and the librettist, Philip Littell, acquiesced, and Mr. Hartke said that he was contacted in July by Theresa Grover, the new marketing director at Glimmerglass, who said ‘whore’ might be a problem.”
    So this was a marketing decision imposed on a work of art. It’s surely one of the dumber examples of marketer muscle-flexing. Gee, I’d think more people would be put off by a string of French words they can’t pronounce than by the word “whore.” And, by the way, nobody has taken the whores out of the opera itself. Marketer Grover must think patrons will happily attend an opera about a whore as long as they don’t encounter that naughty word in the title. Or maybe she has no idea what the opera is about. Content doesn’t matter; image is everything.
    The larger irony here is that Theresa Grover’s own profession bears a certain resemblance to the world’s oldest. Her cell phone ring tone, no doubt, is "Call me madam."

EVER AFTER

posted to Cue Sheet by James Reel

    Philip Hensher has contributed to the Telegraph a fine and unexpected essay on the art of the last line:

One of the favourite games of literary people is that of best first lines. Everyone enjoys reciting them; the bizarre (Earthly Powers), the haunting (Rebecca), the august (Anna Karenina), the casual (Howards End) or the strangely anonymous (Jane Eyre). First lines are great fun. But they aren't really as important to a novel as the last lines. From a terrible first line, a novel may recover; the last line is what it leaves a reader with.

    The entire article is well worth reading, although its own last line is not as memorable as I’d hoped. (Still, it’s superior to what you find in the New Yorker, where there seems to be a house rule that every story and article must trail off into triviality.) Hensher also leads the way to a few novels I haven’t read, but now want to. It’s impossible to resist a book that ends, "Yukiko's diarrhoea persisted through the twenty-sixth, and was a problem on the train to Tokyo."
    In my customary unoriginal fashion, I once wrote an essay on the first lines of novels, back when I was a columnist for the late, lamented e-zine The Whole Wired Word. Nothing ever really dies on the Internet; here it is again.

    I LIKE A NOVEL THAT, once nestled in my hands, throws open its cover and shouts, "Honey, I'm home!" I like a confident, grand entrance, a first sentence that announces itself with a flourish, takes charge, shakes up the place.
    Few novels begin so boldly. Which has little to do with the quality of the tale that follows. Like the poor but honest boy who overcomes disadvantage and adversity to make good, a remarkable book may overcome a drab beginning. William Faulkner, for example, tended to open with some fairly ordinary scene-setting, often with a reference to light. Half the time Raymond Chandler would do something even duller, pointing out some ordinary building in the most ordinary way.
    Nor do great first lines necessarily spawn great novels. You often get the feeling that, like the aspiring but untalented novelist in Alfred Uhry's grossly overrated play The Last Night of Ballyhoo, the author has squeezed every last drop of her creative juices into the initial sentence, and nothing but dry pulp follows.
    A novel's first sentence can be the hardest part to write, and so it usually ends up being little more than a stretch at the barre before the real pirouettes and leaps begin. It rather mechanically starts to depict a setting, or introduces a character by lineage or locale. Contemporary American novelists almost never dare to begin with some sweeping observation, like Tolstoy's celebrated "All happy families resemble one another, each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Modern Americans dare not philosophize right off the bat; in fact, it's terribly unfashionable to make a bold statement anywhere in a novel. Ours is now a literature of reticence and evasion. So an audacious opening line is arresting not just for its style, but for its novelty.
    Consider this pratfall entrance from Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, or Ardor: "'All happy families are more or less dissimilar; all unhappy ones are more or less alike,' says a great Russian writer in the beginning of a famous novel (Anna Arkadievitch Karenina, transfigured into English by R.G. Stonelower, Mount Tabor Ltd., 1880)."
    In a single sentence, Nabokov parodies our history of bungled translation of Russian into English (he typically fabricates the bibliographic details), and broadly hints that we've entered a parallel universe where familiar things are somehow out of kilter. It's the perfect fanfare for this particular novel.
    A more serious philosophic pronouncement lurks at the beginning of Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House: "No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream." The statement initially seems quite rational, even clinical. Its topic, though, is disturbing, and the concluding clause, bringing in the dream lives of insects and birds, introduces a crucial element of fantasy. Jackson could hardly have crafted a more appropriate opening.
    Still, a great initial sentence needn't cram a novel's subject and tone into the space preceding the first period. It's enough just to give the sentence an odd twist that sets it apart from the drab journalism most of us spend too much time reading.
    "Queenie was a blonde, and her age stood still, / And she danced twice a day in vaudeville." So begins The Wild Party, a novel in verse by Joseph Moncure March. Not only does this sentence set up the strong beat that will carry through the flapper-era tale, but it tosses off the curious phrase "and her age stood still." Queenie is eternally youthful, certainly, but the phrase hints that, despite her looks, she's no spring chicken. It's a joke, too -- "her age" never stood still: The Jazz Age was the most jittery period of American history up to then.
    A single well-turned sentence can tell us a lot about the self-knowledge of a character, especially if that character is the narrator. James Agee crafted a lovely and revealing line that eventually would open his unfinished novel A Death in the Family: "We are talking now of summer evenings in Knoxville, Tennesse, in the time that I lived there so successfully disguised to myself as a child."
    Even more self-aware, and far more pugilistic, are the words that greet us in J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye: "If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth."
    A single sentence can also quickly tell us what sort of society we've dropped into. Here's the beginning of Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear It Away: "Frances Marion Tarwater's uncle had been dead for only half a day when the boy got too drunk to finish digging his grave and a Negro named Buford Munson, who had come to get a jug filled, had to finish it and drag the body from the breakfast table where it was still sitting and bury it in a decent and Christian way, with the sign of its Saviour at the head of the grave and enough dirt on top to keep the dogs from digging it up." You can tell right off what segment of society, no matter how ill-equipped, holds the power, and what segment gets stuck with the dirty work, and how all the pretty pieties of religion won't save these people from the ugly habits of their fellow animals.
    That wonderfully distasteful image of the corpse being dragged from the breakfast table is a fine bonus, too. Sometimes an ordinary narrative sentence can be redeemed by some strange detail being plopped into it, like the silly prize in a box of Cracker-Jack.
    Lightning Song is not Lewis Nordan's best novel—that distinction falls jointly to Wolf Whistle and The Sharpshooter Blues—but it does boast Nordan's most cunning opening: "One day in the summer when he turned twelve years old and when a fragrance of sweet alfalfa hay and llama musk was drifting through the windows and into the house on a breeze from the pastures and cool shade of the little barn where pigeons cooed in the rafters, Leroy Dearman realized that the day had finally come."
    "Llama musk"? That's the detail that warns us we've entered a slightly twisted world.
    There's nothing slight about the twist in Harry Crews' universe, as you can tell straight off in Feast of Snakes: "She felt the snake between her breasts, felt him there, and loved him there, coiled, the deep tumescent S held rigid, ready to strike." That's the perfect first sentence: It forces you to read, even against your will, the second sentence.
    As you might guess, I'm most attracted to opening lines that carry a whiff of the grotesque. Three of my favorites:

    I have been afraid of putting air in a tire ever since I saw a tractor tire blow up and throw Newt Hardbine's father over the top of the Standard Oil sign.

—The Bean Trees by Barbara Kingsolver

    In the seventh year of the People's Republic of China (1956), in a remote village in Yunnan Province, Kuo Hsiao-mei gave birth to a son with extraordinarily well developed earlobes.

—The Laughing Sutra by Mark Salzman

    Three melons and a dwarf sat in the front seat of Marilee's '72 Dodge, but the cop was not amused.

—Rocket City by Cathryn Alpert

    The perfect opening line needn't be a joke or have anything unusual about it at all. There's nothing more direct than the beginning of Paradise by Toni Morrison: "They shot the white girl first."
    Six words, and we're already full of urgent questions. Who are "they"? Who did they shoot after the white girl? Or is it that they first shot her, then did something unspeakable to the corpse? The last word is "first," which manipulates us into demanding "What happened next?" One short, brutal sentence forces us into the novel's action.
    Rarely, the first sentence can be a page-turner in a more literal sense. From drop-cap to first period, the opening sentence of Donald Antrim's The Hundred Brothers occupies two and a half pages. It names each of the hundred brothers, except the narrator, with methods that initially smack of dry Biblical genealogy, then become more anecdotal. Serpentine clauses alternate with more concise utterances, and the whole baroque structure culminates in a funny jolt of colloquialism:

My brothers Rob, Bob, Tom, Paul, Ralph, Phil, Noah, William, Nick, Dennis, Christopher, Frank, Simon, Saul, Jim, Henry, Seamus, Richard, Jeremy, Walter, Jonathan, James, Arthur, Rex, Bertram, Vaughan, Daniel, Russel, and Angus; and the triplets Herbert, Patrick, and Jeffrey; identical twins Michael and Abraham, Lawrence and Peter, Winston and Charles, Scott and Samuel; and Eric, Donovan, Roger, Lester, Larry, Clinton, Drake, Gregory, Leon, Kevin, and Jack—all born on the same day, the twenty-third of May, though at different hours in separate years; and the caustic graphomaniac, Sergio, whose scathing opinions appear with regularity in the front-of-book pages of the more conservative monthlies, not to mention on the liquid crystal screens that glow at night atop the radiant work stations of countless bleary-eyed computer bulletin-board subscribers (among whom our brother is known, affectionately, electronically, as Surge); and Albert, who is blind; and Siegfried, the sculptor in burning steel; and clinically depressed Anton, schizophrenic Irv, recovering addict Clayton; and Maxwell, the tropical botanist, who, since returning from the rain forest, has seemed a little screwed up somehow; and Jason, Joshua, and Jeremiah, each vaguely gloomy in his own "lost boy" way; and Eli, who spends solitary wakeful evenings in the tower, filling notebooks with drawings—the artist's multiple renderings for a larger work?—portraying the faces of his brothers, including Chuck, the prosecutor; Porter, the diarist; Andrew, the civil rights activist; Pierce, the designer of radically unbuildable buildings; Barry, the good doctor of medicine; Fielding, the documentary-film maker; Spencer, the spook with known ties to the State Department; Foster, the "new millennium" psychotherapist; Aaron, the horologist; Raymond, who flies his own plane; and George, the urban planner who, if you read the papers, you'll recall, distinguished himself, not so long ago, with that innovative program for revitalizeing the decaying downtown area (as "an animate interactive diorama illustrating contemporary cultural and economic folkways"), only to shock and amaze everyone, absolutely everyone, by vanishing with a girl named Jane and an overnight bag packed with municipal funds in unmarked hundreds; and all the young fathers: Seth, Rod, Vidal, Bennet, Dutch, Brice, Allan, Clay, Vincent, Gustavus, and Joe; and Hiram, the eldest; Zachary, the Giant; Jacob , the polymath; Virgil, the compulsive whisperer; Milton, the channeler of spirits who speak across time; and the really bad womanizers: Stephen, Denzil, Forrest, Topper, Temple, Lewis, Mongo, Spooner, and Fish; and, of course, our celebrated 'perfect' brother, Benedict, recipient of a medal of honor from the Academy of Sciences for work over twenty years in chemical transmission of "sexual language" in eleven types of social insects—all of us (except George, about whom there have been many rumors, rumors upon rumors: he's fled the vicinity, he's right here under our noses, he's using an alias or maybe several, he has a new face, that sort of thing)—all ninety-eight, not counting George, brothers and I recently came together in the red library and resolved that the time had arrived, finally, to stop being blue, put the past behind us, share a light supper, and locate, if we could bear to, the missing urn full of the old fucker's ashes.

    This circus-act writing risks alienating impatient readers, but cons the rest of us into following along. Whether the style is extravagant like Antrim's or stark like Morrison's, that's what a great opening line is supposed to do. As Tolstoy never quite observed, each bad first sentence is bad in its own way, but all great first sentences resemble each other: They demand not to be the last sentence we read in the book.