FROM THE TOP?

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.

MISSING IN ACTION

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.

PLAGIARISTS OF EXPERIENCE

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.

STOP THE MADNESS

posted by James Reel

    Mozart mania became so unbearable in 1991 that I’m now an old hand at ignoring the hero-worship and dealing with the man’s music on my own terms. Exaggerated claims for anything or anyone will inevitably inspire a backlash, and, sure enough, David Hurwitz is all too happy to crack the whip:

You see, there is a dirty secret underlying all the hype: Mozart wrote more junk than any other composer of his stature. That’s only to be expected. The fact that he was composing when he was still in diapers is amazing, but let’s not kid ourselves about the importance or quality of the result.

    Indeed. Mozart produced some of the finest works in the repertory, but not every note is golden. “Discrimination” has been a bad word in America since the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964, but the American public could benefit from developing more discriminating taste. Some people are smarter than others; some work harder than others; some have greater skills or sheer talent than others. Some compositions, novels, plays, acting, feats of accounting, auto-body repairs, martinis and manicures are better than others. Not every kid deserves a bumper sticker just for showing up at elementary school, and not every score deserves to be called a masterpiece just because it’s by Mozart.

DEFENDERS OF SLUDGE

posted by James Reel

    Newsday music critic Justin Davidson, guest blogging at The Rest Is Noise, has belched one of the most asinine comments about music I’ve seen in some time:

Simon Rattle's performance of Ravel's Mother Goose and Strauss' Ein Heldenleben with the Berlin Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall were … full of overweeningly magnified detail. You could make out the highlights on all those crystalline tremolos and follow the curve of each dewdrop pizzicato. It seems strange to criticize an orchestra for clarity, both because it is so difficult to achieve and because we have come to accept it as the standard of textual authenticity. According to current orthodoxy, since the composer took the trouble to write all those damned little squiggles into the score (and implied a whole lot more), the best performance is the one that makes audible as much of the filigree as possible. This is, in different guises, the principle that guides performers as ostensibly distinct as  authentic performance practice gurus, minimalist burblers, and Boulez and his Boulezzini. But, really, what's so terrible about about letting the edges of a chord bleed a bit, or letting some of those waves of fast fiddle notes gurgle indistinctly? Sometimes some judiciously applied atmospheric murk–what a pianist would call pedal–gets closer to the essential truth.

    The soundly furious A.C. Douglas comes to Davidson’s defense in the case of Wagner and other composers of heavily larded German Romantic music, but he notes that clarity and precision are essential elsewhere, as in the music of Mozart and Haydn.
    I’ll grant that “gurgling indistinctly” can sometimes be appropriate. Listen to an Arturo Toscanini recording of the very first bars of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, or the initial bars of the second movement of Paul Paray’s otherwise admirable recording of the Symphonie fantastique: their clarity and precision produce a clear pulse, where the music really needs to shimmer. But Davidson’s dismissal of what he calls “overweeningly magnified detail” is distressingly characteristic of the attitudes of New York music critics whose ears have been amateurized by years of subjection to the superficialities of Zubin Mehta and Kurt Masur at the New York Philharmonic. After 25 years of dull, uncaring, kapellmeister-quality performances by what New Yorkers but hardly anyone else believe to be the world’s greatest orchestra, New York critics are absolutely horrified by any hint of musical italicizing, personal interpretation or, indeed, real preparation that would allow performers to do more than just get through the notes.
    It’s not just a New York problem. Unimaginative conductors have plagued other major American orchestras for years: Eugene Ormandy and Wolfgang Sawallisch in Philadelphia, Erich Leinsdorf and Seiji Ozawa in Boston, Daniel Barenboim in Chicago. With minimal rehearsal, they can draw a pretty sound from an orchestra, and that’s enough for dullard critics and audiences who haven’t been taught any better. But how many other people really want to listen to performances delivered with the bland, routine efficiency and lack of involvement you'd find in a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles?
    Well, actually there is a long tradition of critics and audiences clamoring for the work of artistically barren non-entities. In the late 19th century, Hans Richter trained the English to prefer his bland, metronomic performances to the more imaginataive work of the likes of Artur Nikisch and Hans von Bülow, and Brits have never recovered from Richter’s malign influence. (They lionize exceptions like John Barbirolli and Simon Rattle because they’re English, not because they’re interesting.) Norman Lebrecht, in his book The Maestro Myth, traces the schism back to Mendelssohn versus Wagner. Mendelssohn insisted on fast, metronomic performances from the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, decrying the interference of “interpretation” (although playing metronomically and dully is itself a sort of interpretation). Wagner as a conductor was much freer, with elastic phrasing and a willingness to highlight exactly those inner voices that A.C. Douglas argues should not be highlighted in Wagner’s own music.
    The fact is that most, though certainly not all, composers working since the beginning of the Baroque era have expected performers to bring their own interpretation to the music, within reason. Italian performers were especially free with the score in the first half of the 18th century, which irritated German conservatives like Leopold Mozart to no end. Beethoven, who in the 1980s was victimized by sleepwalkers like Roger Norrington who believed it was necessary only to set an orchestra to Beethoven’s metronome markings and then go on autopilot, apparently conducted his music wildly, in a way that baffled the insufficiently prepared musicians who were just trying to follow the score. Brahms clearly preferred the individualistic (within reason) performances of his symphonies under von Bülow to those of dullards like Richter. In the mid 20th century, John Cage and other aleatoric composers left almost everything up to a roll of the dice and on-the-spot decisions by performers, but that’s an extreme case.
    Recently, for an article I was writing on William Bolcom’s rags for string quartet, I asked the composer about his tempo preferences; he declared that each musician must find a tempo that seems right and corresponds somehow to his or her own inner pulse. Bolcom also discussed how he had to be sensitive to voicings in translating his piano rags to the string quartet medium. Yes, he wants those voices to be heard clearly.
    Obviously, what Davidson calls “atmospheric murk” is not something a composer would believe to be in his or her best interest. Davidson is merely making excuses for laziness and sloppiness. And if laziness and sloppiness are all we can demand from today’s professional musicians, who needs those musicians? And who needs cotton-eared critics like Justin Davidson?

THE BURDEN OF CELEBRITY

posted by James Reel

    Last night my wife and I attended a benefit dinner involving Stephanie Zimbalist and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., following their appearance in Chamber Music Plus Southwest’s Mesmeric Mozart. We’d met Stephanie last year at a much more intimate dinner and got to know her as well as you can know anyone after two or three hours. Both she and her father are remarkably unpretentious, patient, “normal” people in every positive sense of that word. I’ve met several actors and interviewed a great many musicians, and I must say that most of them have been much like the Zimbalists: gracious, easygoing people who happen to have parleyed their talent into solid careers. In fact, I’ve taken an instant dislike to only three world-famous musicians. The late guitarist Narciso Yepes struck me as, yes, narcissistic and arrogant, yet that hasn’t diminished my admiration of his recordingds. The other two are pianists who are still alive and whom I may encounter again, so they shall remain unnamed here. Otherwise, self-regard is a character flaw I find among very few performers anymore, save for a few opera singers who are just a bit too full of themselves but otherwise inoffensive. (Youngish movie stars like Tom Cruise are another matter.)
    What I find remarkable is how these people maintain their equanimity under difficult public circumstances. The Zimbalists, for example, were exhausted last night. Even though they’d had the luxury of reading from scripts, as is customary at Chamber Music Plus events, they’d put a lot into their performances, far more than some more celebrated thespians have. On top of that, Efrem, who still cuts an elegant figure, is well into his 80s and suffers from a bad knee that really should be replaced. Yet he and his daughter remained gracious throughout the long meet-and-greet dinner. Eventually my wife took pity on them, wrested them away from their fans and steered them to a table where they could finally sit down, eat and relax a bit. “I’d forgotten how hard these things can be,” Stephanie said.
    I imagine the work of shmoozing doesn’t stop at these organized gatherings. Just walking down the street or going to a private restaurant is surely a trial if you’re a celebrity with a recognizable face. Perfectly nice people come up to say hello and chat about how much they enjoyed the celebrity’s work in something that happened decades before. (Last night, people were chatting up Efrem Zimbalist about 77 Sunset Strip, which was canceled 40 years ago.) They want only a minute of the celebrity’s time, but when one fan leaves another comes up, then another. No wonder so many movie actors snub the public; they just can’t take the onslaught of well-meaning people. (Then there are the stalkers; Stephanie had one of her own, who was ultimately jailed for a couple of years.) Even I, a person who has just barely set one toe past the threshold of public recognition in a not very large market, can hardly make it across a theater lobby without being buttonholed by a series of very nice people who want to say something about KUAT or some review I wrote for the Weekly or a magazine article that was just published but I can’t recall clearly because I wrote it a couple of months before. Making nice with the public is part of being a public figure, but I can imagine how fatiguing it must be for celebrities, and I admire people like the Zimbalists for their pleasance and fortitude even more than for their actual work.