FAILING AT A HIGHER LEVEL

posted by James Reel

    Drew McManus of Adaptistration has begun issuing his annual evaluation of orchestra Web sites, and there’s news good and bad for the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. Drew ranks the TSO’s site as 49 out of 84, up 12 positions from last year, but the site’s overall grade remains solidly F. See the list and Drew’s introductory comments here. He’ll be offering further information as the week progresses; watch this space.
    My report of last year’s ranking spread across several posts, including comments back and forth between Drew and a former TSO employee. If you’re into research, you can read those posts here, here, here and here.

WILL TOO POWERLESS

posted by James Reel

    In my post about the English consortium questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, I overlooked the main implication of this set of questions: “The 287-strong Shakespeare Authorship Coalition says it is not possible that the bard's plays—with their emphasis on law—could have been penned by a 16th century commoner raised in an illiterate household.
    “It asks why most of his plays are set among the upper classes, and why Stratford-upon-Avon is never referred to in any of his plays.”
    This tells us everything we need to know—not about Shakespeare, but about his doubters. It’s all about class! A poorly educated commoner (actually, we know nothing about Shakespeare’s education) couldn’t possibly be a literary genius, could he? Perhaps if the English could ever shake off their class consciousness, they would someday be able to make worthwhile inquiries.

SHAKING THEIR SPEAR

posted by James Reel

    There’s long been controversy over the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays, and now the 287-member Shakespeare Authorship Coalition has signed a "declaration of reasonable doubt," hoping it will spur responsible scholarly research into the subject.
    Well, there has already been responsible scholarly research, which has led to almost as many conclusions as there are researchers. I have no opinion on the matter, but I do think the coalition is challenging Shakespeare’s authorship with questions that betray a severe lack of imagination.
    According to this BBC report, “The group says there are no records of Shakespeare being paid for his work.” Well, there are no records of a lot of people being born during that period, but they did indeed exist, as we know from other evidence. Records from before the Industrial Revolution are notoriously incomplete and unreliable, and the biographies of many figures, notable in their day, are almost impossible to trace. One might as well question the authorship of John Dowland’s songs and lute pieces, for the scarcity of documentation of his career.
    Another of the group’s points: “His will … contains none of his famous turns of phrase and it does not mention any books, plays or poems.” His will was a legal document, not a work of literature; besides which, how many writers’ wills do mention their books, plays or poems?
    Furthermore: “The 287-strong Shakespeare Authorship Coalition says it is not possible that the bard's plays—with their emphasis on law—could have been penned by a 16th century commoner raised in an illiterate household.
    “It asks why most of his plays are set among the upper classes, and why Stratford-upon-Avon is never referred to in any of his plays.
    “‘How did he become so familiar with all things Italian so that even obscure details in these plays are accurate?’ the group adds.”
    These are exceptionally foolish questions. Can an individual not rise above his or her origins? I grew up in a trailer behind a motel in Yuma, Arizona, and nobody in my family had ever gone to college (aside from a grandfather with two years of pharmacy school). I am not still stuck in that life, and neither is anybody else with any intelligence, ambition or determination. Why didn’t Shakespeare write what he knew and set his plays in his hometown? Because, as such actors in the group as Derek Jacobi and Mark Rylance should well know, the audiences in Shakespeare’s London had no interest in slice-of-life, lower-class drama. They wanted exactly what Shakespeare wrote: history plays, high tragedy with great people falling far and hard, comedies of disguise, romances. How many writers today truly limit themselves to their own experiences?
    And how did Shakespeare “become so familiar with all things Italian so that even obscure details in these plays are accurate?” As scholars have shown for decades, he borrowed heavily from other plays and printed sources. It’s called research. Sometimes it’s even called plagiarism.
    Perhaps some or all of Shakespeare’s plays were not written by Shakespeare, but the inquiry should be conducted by people with greater insight into human character than has been displayed by this coalition.

CHERRIES AND ROSES

posted by James Reel

    I saw two very good productions last weekend, and you can see them, too, if you hie thee to the theater in time. One was the Rogue Theatre’s version of The Cherry Orchard:

    The question that drives the action of Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard will resonate with Tucsonans: Should a cash-strapped family sell its land to a profit-driven developer?
    Yet that question isn't what the play is really about. The Cherry Orchard is a snapshot of Russian society in disintegration, a story of well-meaning fools who can't manage change; as we now know, not even the reformers would handle it with any decency or competence.
    That this 1903 play—Chekhov's last—can strike a chord with contemporary audiences despite being tied specifically to its original time and place proves that it's a classic, not just a relic. The Rogue Theatre is giving it a production worthy of a classic, with an exceptional cast and intelligent direction.

    If it's hard to get the tone right in Chekhov, settling on an approach to Frank Gilroy's The Subject Was Roses is as daunting as deciding between paper and plastic.
    Gilroy won the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for this work about a dysfunctional family, and so it must be a Serious Play. Yet much of it can be read as comic. The trouble is that the characters don't usually realize that they're being funny, and so the audience--to say nothing of the actors--constantly has to wonder: Is it OK to laugh at that?
    Live Theatre Workshop usually emphasizes the humor, and even the campiness, in its chosen material, and indeed, its production of The Subject Was Roses reliably draws titters from the audience. Yet the actors and director Chuck Rankin never strain for laughs; they refuse to undercut the bitterness and anger behind most of the lines.

BOOKISH EXHIBITIONISM

posted by James Reel

    When I'm too busy or too lazy to do any original blogging, it's time to dig around in the archive of a literary e-zine for which I used to write and recycle some essay that's not too dated. Here's one for you:

Show Me The Books!

        Admit it. When you visit someone for the first time, you contrive, as soon as possible, to examine your host's library. However genuine your interest may be, book-browsing seems so intellectual; it's much more impressive than coming up with some vacuous comment about the decor. But it also reduces you to the status of a peeping tom. You're really just sneaking a peek at someone else's soul.
I do it all the time. It's gratifying to find that my friends are interested in some of the same novels I am. It's intriguing to discover what other specific books and general subjects fascinate them -- perhaps they'll fascinate me, too, or else they'll be sure signs that I've fallen in with a drudge or a lunatic. And it's frightening to realize that every house in America holds those same black-and-blue-bound 1970s book club editions of Fitzgerald and Hemingway.
It's also amusing to detect, through someone's library, some quirk of character that would otherwise remain hidden. So, this upstanding attorney turns out to be an A.A. Milne freak. So, this guy who's always talking about Charles Simic hasn't read any of Simic's collections since Dismantling the Silence. So, this other guy who's always posing as a right-wing, gun-hoarding redneck collects biographies of classical musicians. So, this woman who's stuck on Milan Kundera hasn't bothered to look into anything earlier than The Unbearable Lightness of Being. So, this fellow who once mentioned that A Confederacy of Dunces is his favorite novel was understating the case -- he owns a copy of every single edition.
Of course, our selection of front-room books reveals our conceits, too. In many households, the encyclopedia and the big coffee-table books are for display only, unread volumes designed to give a room a more intellectual air . These are merely peacock pages; the real items of interest in such homes are on the bedside table, or in a rack next to the toilet.
Few things frustrate me more than going to a house and not being able to find the books. One friend I know to be an avid reader doesn't keep a single book on the ground floor of his home. Only after I'd visited a few times did he consent to lead me upstairs into a room containing a modest shelving unit, which could not possibly constitute his entire library. He majored in English, for god's sake. He quotes the Romantic poets from memory . Where the hell are all the books? What is he trying to hide?
It's an affront, friends concealing their books from me. How am I supposed to understand these people if I can't peruse their libraries? Don't they trust me? Aren't we as close as I thought? What else are they not telling me?
Wait -- I can't take it so personally. Surely everyone keeps at least a few books private.
My wife and I, for example, used to divide our books into two groups. The nice hardcover editions we kept out in public areas; the crappy-looking paperbacks we hid away. I gradually replaced the mass-market paperbacks with more presentable versions, so now the distribution follows better logic. Shelved in the room where we first receive guests are the history and American lit, simply because they happen to fill those bookcases without having to spill into other areas. Books on art, music, anthropology and a few other subjects, as well as oversized tomes, go into the living room, where most guests eventually gather. Everything else -- mainly non-American lit and volumes on science, travel, gardening, hiking, whatever -- gets stored in the shelf-lined room we grandly refer to as the Library (which also holds all the CDs and LPs).
A tour of three rooms would give any visitor a nearly complete view of our bookish interests.
Except for those items we squirrel away elsewhere. Some are merely tattered professional journals, like the thrilling Rhetoric Society Quarterly, that really don't need to be underfoot; some are textbooks my wife uses, or used to use, in her teaching. But then there's the French-language edition of the Madonna Sex book, which my wife's daughter gave us as a joke a few years ago. We slide it onto a lower shelf in our bedroom not because of the content, which is hardly even risqué by soft porn standards, but because of the book's format: The oversized, spiral-bound metal covers just don't fit in any sort of upright position, unlike Madonna herself.
Which now reminds me of the demurely illustrated sex manual I received for review purposes from a publicist, brought home and hid under the bed, where it will be convenient if consultation ever becomes necessary (luckily, it is carefully indexed). At least I tell myself I keep it under the bed for ready access. The truth is that I put it there so it won't fall under the gaze of our housecleaners, even though they don't vacuum under the furniture and, even if they did, they certainly would not be shocked to encounter a sex manual anywhere in the house.
It's a question not of shame, but of shielding some small part of life, however innocuous, from public scrutiny. A bookshelf is more revealing than a delicate negligee, for the garment teases at laying bare nothing more than flesh. The bookshelf lays bare our minds -- our preoccupations, our aspirations, our guilty pleasures. For the sake of privacy, and sanity, everyone should stash at least one book under the bed.

HEARING AID

posted by James Reel

    We radio announcers can listen to ourselves any number of ways. Of course, there’s the old hand-cupped-to-the-ear technique made famous by Gary Owen (an actual DJ at the time) on Laugh-In back in the late 1960s. But we also have many technological options. Here in the KUAT-FM control room, I can punch one button and hear the signal from off the air, just like you do. Punch another button, and I can hear what I do in pristine mono, something I never do. Another button allows me to hear myself in “audition” mode, my voice coming back to me through my headphones without ever sullying the airwaves. The bottom button in that particular row engages the “program” monitor, which lets me hear everything that’s coming out of the control board before it goes to the equipment that sends it out over the air.
    You are no doubt captivated by this information, so here’s more. Several months ago, when our engineers installed some digital transmission equipment, there was suddenly a delay between what we do here in real time in the studio and what you hear on your radio at home. (There are good technical reasons for this; it wasn’t a mistake.) Initially, the delay was about 11 seconds, but now it’s down to just one second or less. Even so, that’s enough to create an echo when I listen to the air monitor, meaning that it’s unlistenable when I’m talking. So for many months now, we’ve been listening to everything on the program monitor, the one that eavesdrops on the signal before it goes out to the transmitter. And that means that we don’t hear problems that you hear, like our own transmitter being off the air. You’d think that when we occasionally glance at the computer screen that shows those readings that so fascinate the FCC—plate voltage, current and power output—that we’d notice if everything looked dead, but no. When the transmitter goes off without being turned off by a human being (for instance, when it’s struck by lightning, or loses juice from the electric company), the computer keeps displaying the last readings it got rather than zeroing out.
    So, as you may have guessed, I have no idea what’s going on.
    A few days ago, the engineers installed what looks like the flashing light you used to see on police vehicles, back when the light was a single dome rather than a bar across the top. There’s a big sign next to it that says “CHECK AIR MONITOR.” No doubt this would be a fine alert  … if it hadn’t been installed behind us, out of our range of vision. Let’s just hope it puts on a light show that we can’t miss, even with our backs turned.