posted by James Reel
NPR news reported this morning that those incendiary Mohammed cartoons were published in a “small Danish newspaper.” Well, I have it on good authority that “Jyllands-Posten, the Danish paper that originally published the 12 caricatures, has a circulation of about 175,000 and is Denmark's largest paper.” I suppose from NPR’s perspective, anything with less circulation than the Washington Post and New York Times is “small.”
Also, I have to grit my teeth every time Haiti comes into the news. The place was settled by the French, and Haitians speak their own form of French today. U.S. newscasters pronounce the name of the capital city, Port-au-Prince, as if it rhymed with “prints.” But it’s French, folks, and more or less rhymes with “prance.” That’s the only way the “Port-au-” part makes any sense. If I could get newscasters to pronounce that correctly, and if I could strike the redundant “au jus with gravy” from all restaurant menus, the Francophile in me would be … less discontent.
radio-life,
February 8th 2006 at 8:26 —
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posted by James Reel
Gyorgy Ligeti wrote his String Quartet No. 1 just over half a century ago, but somehow I’d never heard it until last night’s Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concert by the Artemis Quartet. What spectacular music! I was predisposed to like it, because I’m enthusiastic about Bela Bartók’s quartets, and Bartók was a heavy influence on Ligeti at this early stage of the latter’s career. Even so, you can hear in this quartet hints of the composer Ligeti would become once he fled Hungary, particularly in its exploration of unusual timbres, like the spooky glissandi underlying muted solos near the end.
It’s intense music with moments of whimsy, and it got a precise and harrowing performance by the Artemis Quartet. The few slips I noticed were trivial. The cellist, for example, during a long passage that repeated a rhythmic pattern punctuated by the so-called “Bartók pizzicato,” where the string is plucked so hard that it snaps back against the fingerboard, missed one pizz near the end. Big deal. Why do I bring it up? Simply to show how I’d have to dig deep into the performance to find something to complain about; all the really tough stuff—and there are lots of challenges here in terms of timing and ensemble—came off spectacularly well. The group even brought a rock’n’roll rawness and force to a couple of the folk-dance rhythms toward the end. Like, wow, man, it’s psychedelic: the Gyorgy Ligeti Experience.
I have to admit that I was not as impressed by the rest of the concert as I’d hoped, after hearing the Artemis Quartet’s gripping new Beethoven recording for EMI. The tone in the opening Mozart “Prussian” Quartet was a bit thin for my current taste, but it was a perfectly acceptable performance. Similarly, the reading of the Schubert A-minor quartet had much to commend it, but for the most part I missed that sense of singing line that Earl Carlyss, formerly with the Juilliard Quartet, stressed was so essential to Schubert when I interviewed him on the subject a few weeks ago. Perhaps my expectations were unrealistic. But the Ligeti—the composition and the performance—made the evening overall a tremendous success.
Classical Music,
February 8th 2006 at 7:40 —
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posted by James Reel
LitLine/The American Book Review has posted a list of what it calls the 100 Best First Lines from Novels, and there’s trouble right from the start. What’s the very best line, ever?
1. Call me Ishmael. —Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Now, wait a minute. What’s so great about that sentence? It’s about the shortest sentence in a very long, book, which is amusing, but that doesn’t make it great. In fact, there’s nothing great about those three words; they just happen to launch a great book. Just as a great composer like Mozart did not write only great works, a great book can be full of not-so-great sentences. And that’s one of them. There’s no way “Call me Ishmael” can compare to, say, the item in third place:
3. A screaming comes across the sky. —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)
Pynchon’s sentence, also short, is arresting. Melville offers a desultory introduction; Pynchon runs up and screams in your face.
I wish people who make lists like these would actually give some thought to the contents, instead of just looking for an excuse to list their favorite books (including a couple that only an unreformed and probably unemployable lit major would have read).
I’ve already had my say on first lines, which you can encounter here.
quodlibet,
February 6th 2006 at 10:39 —
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posted by James Reel
No review of last night’s Tucson Symphony concert from me today. I didn’t go, and I don’t usually write reviews of events I don’t attend. Imagine that.
This is the second TSO concert I’ve missed this season, and I must say that I don’t agonize anymore over not showing up. Not that there’s anything inherently expendable about the orchestra; to the contrary. But now, if I have too much other work to do (as I did last night), I can give my tickets away or send my wife off with a substitute chaperone without the least regret. And I’ve even taken to leaving Arizona Friends of Chamber Music concerts at intermission so I can get to bed at an hour that’s reasonable for someone who whose alarm goes off at 3:55 a.m. No guilt there, either.
It wasn’t always thus. First, there was the issue of wasted money; I paid for the concert experience, and I was determined to show up and stick it out to the end of the program, no matter what. (I also felt cheated when I didn’t get what I felt was my two hours’ worth of entertainment if the difficulty of the music or lack of rehearsal time resulted in a short program.) But I also felt there was an implied pact between the performers and me as an audience member. They (presumably) worked hard to prepare the concert, they showed up, and they (presumably) performed as well as they could to the very last note. I, in turn, owed them my presence and close attention the whole time they were on stage. Unlike some people, I was never arrogant enough to stride indignantly out of the auditorium between (or during!) pieces if I didn’t like what I was hearing, because things might always improve, and often did.
Of course, the musicians don’t really care whether it’s my butt or somebody else’s in the seat. So as long as I give my ticket to someone instead of creating a disheartening gap in the row, I’m still fulfilling my obligations to the performers. And that leaves me free to stay home and fulfill my obligations to editors who do care what seat my butt is in—the one at my computer.
Still, I’m beginning to think that I’m giving up the wrong things—concerts, pleasure reading, hiking, strict schedules of exercise and cello practice, good movies. If I were to simplify my life further, I’d be seriously tempted to reduce my workload (and income) and indulge in life-enriching nonsense.
tucson-arts,
February 3rd 2006 at 8:27 —
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posted by James Reel
Although it's Thursday, I have nothing of my own to promote in the latest Tucson Weekly, having found it prudent to let the week pass without contributing anything. (I'm not fully absent from the pages; Jimmy Boegle scolds me a little for something else in his editor's note. I do so love the attention.) Instead, I'll recycle for you an essay I wrote sometime in the late 1990s that is vaguely, extremely tangentially, and probably not really related to the current James Frey made-up memoir controversy ...
PROPONENTS CALL IT literature of witness. I think of it as social voyeurism. A First World writer dons an L.L. Bean pith helmet, jets off to some jungle hell, is horrified by reports of exploitation and slaughter, and catches the next flight back to the home computer to document it all in a slim volume of outrage and elegy. The book moves its American and European readers to momentary despair.
Back in the jungle, the atrocities continue.
I do not question the sincerity, integrity, or physical courage of such a writer. Nor do I claim that the nature of witness literature requires any artistic compromise. I merely question the relevance of witnesses now that the actual participants may testify on their own behalf.
Consider the work of Carolyn Forché, a distinguished, still youngish American poet who balances the elusive allusions so dear to academics with passion and conscience. Her first collection, Gathering the Tribes (1976), develops the themes of kinship and ritual. In many of these poems, she assumes the persona of her Slovak grandmother. In a few others, though, she insinuates herself into Native American culture, and seems something of a poseur when taking on a heritage other than her own.
The Country Between Us followed in 1981, shortly after Forché served a two-year stint as a human rights activist in El Salvador. Compared to Gathering the Tribes, her style is now even more direct and less self -conscious, but the subject matter is suddenly more artificial: political oppression and torture of mind and body on a scale alien to any U.S. citizen at this end of the 20th century. Whatever Forché may have experienced in El Salvador, these poems make her seem little more than a second-hand witness to atrocity. The people in her poems have already been mutilated, or killed, by the time they enter her text; this is by no means an account of direct experience. Forché has mounted an aesthetic colonization of others' anguish.
Fortunately, Forché remains aware of her status as an outsider, with outstanding results in the poem Return. The poet, back in the U.S.A. and snug in a supermarket -- the chain, not coincidentally, is Safeway -- frets over what she has observed in El Salvador, and how she is unable to change anything there. A friend admonishes her:
Your problem is not your life as it is in
America, not that your hands, as you
tell me, are tied to do something. It is
that you were born to an island of greed
and grace where you have this sense of
yourself as apart from others. It is not
your right to feel powerless. Better
people than you were powerless. You
have not returned to your country, but
to a life you never left.
Clearly, Forché's need for kinship in an alienating world has remained constant since
Gathering the Tribes, and her work in Central America has made this need even more intense despite its apparent futility. Even when the poems in this second collection resist the gravitational pull of politics, they orbit a sense of oneself as isolated from others, a sense of how individuals grow apart and are separated by huge differences in interests, commitments, and intentions -- the "country between us." She is, more often than not, writing about universal concerns that resonate through her personal cares.
This rarely happens in her most recent volume,
The Angel of History (1995). Forché overcame several years of writer's block by writing about silence in a larger sense: how the perpetrators of this vicious century's most heinous acts refuse to admit their crimes, and how victims remain reluctant to discuss their experiences. Naturally, Holocaust ash blackens many of these pages.
Forché is even farther removed in time and place from these events than she was from Salvadoran sadism, and although she now steps outside her Carolyn Forché persona more often than in earlier poems, she seems less a witness than a tourist logging her snapshots. Here we are visiting my aunt in Brno. This is us on our daytrip to the concentration camp. Here's a photo we took on our layover in Hiroshima.
I'm being unfair to what is, in truth, a moving lament. But Forché does not persuade me that the lament is her own. She is a noble plagiarist of experience.
Which puts her in good company. As Edward Said posited in
Culture and Imperialism, and as many a post-colonial lit-crit twit has parroted since, the great figures of Western literary culture have long conspired with grasping politicians to justify not only the colonization of foreign lands but the domination of foreign cultures and collective imaginations. I need remind you only of Joseph Conrad's
Heart of Darkness, in which an Englishman's confrontation with Darkest Africa (not to mention the blacker aspects of the British Empire) culminates in the scrawled journal entry, "The horror, the horror!" And perhaps I should bring to your attention Rudyard Kipling's
Kim, in which an English boy raised "wild" in India prefers to go native and live like the subcontinent's denizens, who are shown to be by turns comic and sinister, although the boy's innate English intelligence eventually allows him to become a cunning undercover agent for the Crown.
The post-colonialism whip is too often employed to flog long-dead writers produced by a society far different from our own, except in its smugness. But post-colonial theory does sound a useful warning to contemporary writers endeavoring to speak for other cultures. Those cultures are perfectly able to produce voices of their own, thank you.
Consider as a single example Taslima Nasrin, a feminist poet with an aggressive social conscience, who emerged from (and found it necessary to flee) Bangladesh. In an online essay, Harry Russo III situates her succinctly: "She uses the repressive, male-dominated culture of her homeland as a vehicle for her indictment of men, governments and zealots who dismantle human spirit and dignity through isolation and oppression." All I need add is mention of Taslima Nasrin's one collection in English, translated by Carolyne Wright:
The Game in Reverse (1995).
Does the development of literary expertise within oppressed developing nations mean that Western writers should now ban other cultures from their word processors? Not at all. The dictum "Write what you know," when taken literally, would clutter the closeout catalogs with even more novels about self-absorbed professors of creative writing. It is our nature, as creative writers and readers, to explore new realms, at least in our imaginations. But we cannot afford to lose ourselves in those exotic realms, as do, to their peril, the protagonists of Paul Bowles'
The Sheltering Sky.
(Interestingly, Bowles is one of the few American writers to penetrate a foreign consciousness with complete success. Hie thee to Bowles' third and finest novel,
The Spider's House, and meet the complex, conflicted Muslim youth Amar; he makes Kipling's confounded Kim look like a Saturday morning cartoon.)
Carolyn Forché's admonishment from a friend plots our safest course, with its reminder to each writer and reader that "you were born to an island of greed and grace where you have this sense of yourself as apart from others." If we stand detached, yet not aloof, we may observe with greater clarity -- and report with the compelling sadness and longing of the stranger within the gates.
quodlibet,
February 2nd 2006 at 8:25 —
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