Backland

Three words

Why do we use three very different words, all with Latin roots, for the same thing—reincarnation, transmigration, metempsychosis? Perhaps we used to use one word, but it died and came back as another, and another . . .

Fifty degrees

It’s not supposed to go up to fifty
degrees in mid-January. We’re not
supposed to get warm windless days like these,
days when a visit to the dentist becomes
a run through sunny streets or a walk with
the dog becomes an exploration of
the lakeshore. We shouldn’t be eating lunch
on a park bench or seeing a full moon through
unclouded breaths. We should be skating and
skiing instead, slipping on ice and getting
our cheeks numb. What good are those expensive
gloves now? We came back from a desert vacation
only to find that we didn’t really
need to escape the cold. But soon the snow
will rush in and the temperature will
drop to single digits. The basement floor
will be too cold to touch and the pipes will
freeze. The dog will beg to go back after
only a block. And this balmy day will
be forgotten, like warmth usually is.

The signs of spring

It has been too cool and wet to do much gardening. The abundance of birdsong bewilders me. Spring is unsettling--the leaves are so small, the flowers are barely open, the grass is dark but the lawn patchy. Sparrows are in the gutters, but I can't see what they're doing there.

The other morning a coyote wandered up and down the railroad tracks behind our house. Unlike the majestic, wolfish one I saw in Palos Forest a year ago, this one's fur was short; it looked mean. Was it lost or hunting for something? I wanted it to find some goose eggs--there are too many geese in the neighborhood--but that seemed unlikely there.

As I pluck the weeds, the wind scatters them over the sidewalk. Their roots seem old, firmly established; the leaves just snap off when I pull. One bulb I planted last fall has produced such an ungainly lily that I'm not so sure I'm ready for it to bloom. I want to pull it too, but that would be criminal.

A mouse got into the basement. I keep lowering the thermostat. The matzo is diminishing. Soccer games have begun. The signs of spring are inescapable. Where will it all end?

The possibilities are limitless.

Punch

I recently read the whole of David Wondrich's new book, Punch: The Delights (and Dangers) of the Flowing Bowl, and reread quite a bit of it to boot. As a consequence I have been serving punch at some of my poker games. I can't provide a succinct summary of the book, which includes colorful history, recipes, personal anecdotes, tips, jokes, and ingenious wordplay galore; suffice it to say that it evokes a bygone era and instructs us in how to bring it closer to the present day. Food and drink should be prepared and enjoyed with a consciousness of its history, and this book does for the history of distilled alcoholic beverages what Ned Sublette's Cuba and Its Music did for the history of the drum--makes it come alive by focusing on a specific and rather wild instance of its use. Nobody can evoke the taste of liquor like Dave (I use his first name because he's an old friend). Here's his evocation of how rum used to taste:

"Hogo" was a term of art in the rum trade since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century, when John Oldmixon used it in his history of the Americas. Deriving from the term for the "high taste" of rotting meat, it could certainly be used pejoratively. But just as one cultivated the haut goût in pheasants and other game birds by hanging them for days before cooking them, so the hogo in rum came to be appreciated and even, to a degree, encouraged.

Rarely, though, by modern rum-makers. There are exceptions: Brazilian cachaça and the rhum agricoles of Martinique display its characteristic sulfurous "twang" in spades (as does, for that matter, Batavia arrack). But most rum-makers from Britain's former Caribbean colonies have learned to suppress it. That's a shame, since their rums grew up with Punch and were formerly precisely the kind Punch demands. Something that can heave itself up to its feet; shake off all those layers of citrus, spice, and the "element"; and say in a strong, firm voice, "Damn right, I am somebody." Rum.

Sourdough bread

This is how I make my most basic and old-fashioned bread. I bake two to four loaves of it a month.

To make the sourdough starter, mix three tablespoons of flour (rye or wheat) with two tablespoons of water. Cover it loosely, leave it in a warm place, and feed it twice a day with the same amount of flour and water. After the first day, throw out half the mixture before each feeding. The mixture should turn frothy after a day or two. It’s probably best to start with whole grain flour, but after a day you can switch to refined flour; however, avoid bleached flour. If it’s too sour, use more refined flour; if it doesn’t rise enough, use more whole grain--especially rye.

To make the dough, mix three heaping cups of King Arthur organic white bread flour (all-purpose flour doesn't work nearly as well) with one or two heaping tablespoons of wheat germ (raw is best), any amount up to an even cup and a half of wheat bran (optional), a teaspoon and a half or two of salt, about a quarter to a half cup of sourdough starter, and a cup and a half of warm water (less if you have a lot of starter and not much bran, more if you’re adding a lot of wheat bran). Mix this well by hand but don’t knead it: it should, ideally, be just a bit too sticky to knead. If it’s too dry, add more water; if it’s too sticky to handle, add more flour. Put it into a buttered bowl, cover with plastic wrap, and let sit for quite a while--I usually let it alone for eighteen hours, but that may not be necessary. Depending on the strength of the culture, the temperature of the room, the amount of bran, etc, it might turn somewhat spongy and rise a lot, or it might just sit there and not rise much at all. Avoid putting it in too warm a place--it’ll rise too fast and you’ll get a flat, sour loaf. If it seems to be rising too much--well over double its original size--go to the next step right away, or else you’ll get a rather sour and flat loaf.

Sprinkle about three tablespoons flour, bran, and/or seeds on a cheesecloth or dishtowel and place the dough on it. Using the cloth, fold the dough in half, then pick it up with your hands and form it gently into a large ball with the seam on the bottom and put it back on the cloth, making sure to place it on a well-floured or -seeded spot. Let that rest in a bowl for another two hours or more.

Put a covered pot (I use a clay one) into an oven and warm it to 425˚. Put the bread in by lifting the whole cloth with the bread in it out of the bowl, placing a hand under it, unfolding the cloth, and turning it gently upside-down into the pot. Bake covered for thirty minutes; by this time the bread should have risen substantially. Then uncover the pot and bake for another twenty-five minutes or so until you’ve developed a golden brown crust. Cool for thirty minutes before serving.

If you use the full amount of wheat germ and bran, you’re entitled to call this a whole wheat sourdough loaf; but it’s best to keep in mind that whole wheat, like pure white flour, is a relatively recent invention--traditional milling methods always sifted out a large proportion of the bran, but retained most of the germ.

Chester Brown

When we describe a character in a novel or film as “comic-book,” we don’t mean that he’s funny (as in the daily comics), or superhuman (as in classic comic books of the 1960s), or has well-defined muscles or speaks in hard-boiled prose or wants to save/destroy the world. No, we mean that he’s two-dimensional, as all comic-book characters quite literally are. And for me, that has always been one of the limitations of so-called graphic novels (a shameful misnomer since so many of the works that fall under this rubric are not novels but instead artistic renderings of true stories): too many of the characters in these books simply don’t seem very real. I recently read four graphic novels--Chris Ware’s Acme Novelty Library #20: Lint, Daniel Clowes’s Ice Haven, Jason’s I Killed Adolf Hitler, and Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, and only Louis Riel came truly alive for me. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the others--Lint, especially, was marvellously rich.

I’ve been reading Chester Brown’s comics for about twenty years now (his first “graphic novel,” Ed the Happy Clown, was published in 1989, and I first read it shortly thereafter, returning to it many times), and he's far-and-away my favorite comic-book artist. Ware, Jason, and Clowes all limit themselves to “types” in some sense; Brown avoids them. Ed the Happy Clown is, in part, the story of a boy whose penis is actually Ronald Reagan’s head. If this sounds grotesque and scatalogical, sophomoric and perverse, it is. But it’s also strangely moving, deeply upsetting, laugh-out-loud funny, and rich in theme and character. Brown’s later work is a bit more adult, and while that’s not necessarily a good thing, it’s no less satisfying. The autobiographical I Never Liked You (whose original title was Fuck) is one of the most exquisite and touching evocations of adolescence I’ve ever come across, and Louis Riel is a true historical epic about a somewhat reluctant revolutionary that, through artful elisions and a rather strict format, becomes both a gripping political history and a kind of fable, full of rich, believable characters.

Brown has also drawn the gospel according to Mark and part of Matthew as well, but those haven’t been published in book form and I haven’t read them yet. His next book, Paying for It, an autobiographical look at prostitutes and johns, will be published in May.

Recent tracks I've been enjoying

1. Highway Rider wasn't as good as Mehldau's previous collaboration with Jon Brion, Largo, but it had its moments. Warning: this file is huge.

Brad Mehldau - Into the City

2. I usually don't have much use for Bill Frisell--he's too restrained and pastoral for my taste--but this track really caught my fancy. It reminds me of an Athens, Georgia band of the 1980s called Love Tractor.

Bill Frisell - Better Than a Machine (For Vic Chesnutt)

3. I haven't heard her 2010 trilogy yet, but the first single is good. I also liked her guest vocal on Royskopp's "Girl and the Robot" in 2009. Do all Swedish singers sound this cold?

Robyn - Dancing on My Own

4. Jamey Johnson's extremely long opus The Guitar Song is, unfortunately, completely boring except for a few covers. Here he takes a mediocre Hank Cochran hit and makes it ring true.

Jamey Johnson - Set 'Em Up Joe

5. Joost Buis's Zoomin is probably my favorite release of 2010, and certainly the most Ellingtonian.

Joost Buis & Astronotes - Biefstuk

 

Songs of my birth year

Baden Powell - Samba Triste

McCoy Tyner - For Heaven's Sake

Elton Anderson - (Sorry) I'm Gonna Have to Pass

Ray Conniff - Caravan

Wanda Jackson - Memory Mountain

Perry Como - My Coloring Book

Bobby Hutcherson - Mirrors

Andrew Hill - Pumpkin

These are all amazing songs, but there were plenty of others that year: Inez Foxx's "Mockingbird," Irma Thomas's "Somebody Told You," Jack Nitzsche's "Rumble," Jorge Ben's "Por causa de você, menina," the Mongo Santamaria Orchestra's "Oye este guaguanco," Bob Dylan's "Seven Curses," Jimmy Reed's "Shame, Shame, Shame," Kai Winding's "Comin' Home Baby," Ray Charles's "You Are My Sunshine," Stan Getz and João Gilberto's "Girl from Ipanema," Pasty Cline's "Faded Love," Grant Green's "Idle Moments," Willie Nelson's "Permanently Lonely," Mississippi John Hurt's "Weeping and Wailing," George Jones's "I Saw Me," Astrud Gilberto's "Agua de beber," Andy Williams's "Can't Get Used to Losing You," Elvis Presley's "Bossa Nova Baby," Ben Colder's "Hello Walls No. 2," Skeeter Davis's "The End of the World," Thelonious Monk's "Tea for Two," Bo Diddley's "Bo's Bounce," Odette Lara's "Só por amor," and one of my favorite albums of all time, Sonny Rollins and Coleman Hawkins's Sonny Meets Hawk . . .

Prelude 3

Here is another prelude I wrote for you to play (if you play piano).

The exquisite interplay of piano and guitar

Lennie Tristano, piano; Billy Bauer, guitar:

Lennie Tristano Trio - Out on a Limb (1946)

Allen Toussaint, piano; Leo Nocentelli, guitar:

Lee Dorsey - Little Ba-By (1969)

Luis Lili Martinez, piano; Arsenio Rodriguez, tres:

Arsenio Rodriguez y su conjunto - La vida es un sueño (1948)

Ginger ale

Boil half a cup of chopped ginger (no need to peel it) with three-quarters cup of raw sugar and a slice of lemon peel in a cup of water for twenty minutes. Strain, cool, and add the juice of half a lemon. Take a cold two-liter bottle of seltzer and pour a little out, then pour the ginger-sugar-water in.

This recipe gives a nice homemade flavor to the many cocktails that call for ginger ale. There’s rye and ginger; Mamie Taylor (scotch, half a lime); Mamie’s Sister (gin, a whole lime); Susie Taylor (light rum, half a lime); and about a hundred other variations (for an excellent list, go to CocktailDB and put “ginger ale” in the “included ingredient” blank).

English hot toddy

Mix two ounces of dark rum, half a teaspoon of raw sugar, and an ounce and a half of boiling hot darjeeling tea. There’s no need to add fruit or spice.

Toddies were the original cocktail, long before cocktails were invented; for this one I simply substituted tea for water and adjusted the proportions to favor the liquor. It's terrific for cheering one up on a cold and gloomy morning.

Breaking the ice

It’s not easy to break ice with ice, but my boy Jacky showed us how it could be done: stand on a bridge with a chunk as big as your head and drop it onto the lagoon near the bank. It must have been his twentieth attempt--the other, smaller chunks just skittered away--and it was a glorious shattering. There’s ice everywhere today--on the sidewalks, roads, trees, bushes; clinging to the tennis ball after I throw it for the dog to chase, persisting on my windshield no matter how hard I scrape, hanging from the porch roof in spikes. But ice is best when it breaks.

If a shark is bleeding

If a shark is bleeding
she attracts other sharks.

If you want to hear the sirens
let a woman whisper "Come."

If the octopus lived in a tree
what creatures would she snare?

It's best to blame shipwrecks
on the bloodstained fish.

How to roast a turkey

Buy a small free-range turkey (ten to twelve pounds), either fresh or frozen. If frozen, defrost in the refrigerator for 48 hours or more. Rub the inside with a cut lemon, then sprinkle liberally, both inside and out, with salt and pepper. Stuff with your favorite stuffing. Brush liberally with melted butter. Roast, breast down, in a 325˚ oven. After twenty minutes or so, turn to one side and rub well with a stick of butter. After another twenty minutes or so, turn to the other side and rub well again. After yet another twenty minutes or so, turn breast-side up and rub well once more. Keep rubbing with that stick of butter every fifteen minutes or so. When a meat thermometer stuck into the center of the thigh reads 175˚, your turkey is ready to eat (usually after about two-and-a-half hours of roasting). Don’t overcook, or else the breast meat may be dry. If the bird is truly a free-range turkey, with access to the outdoors, it’s OK if the meat’s a little pink.

Film music, warped

Brad Mehldau Trio - Smile (2004)

Composed by Charlie Chaplin for his film Modern Times:

 

Sid Laverents - Nola (1970)

Felix Arndt's 1915 novelty song, here rendered even more noveltyish for the jawdropping short film Multiple Sidosis.

 

Jane Birkin - Quoi (1995)

Birkin sang some of this song, written by her ex-husband Serge Gainsbourg, in Alain Resnais's 1997 lip-sync musical On connait la chanson, one of my favorite films. The clip is at 4:27. This is the only moment in the entire film in which an actor lip-syncs to her own voice. 

Conesville, Iowa

I lived in Iowa City from 1986 to 1988, and Conesville, which is nearby, remains quite vivid in my mind.

In the very heart of the town was an enormous grain silo, surrounded by mud, grass, and junk. The main streets were on either side of the silo. The houses were nondescript but many of them had elaborate Christmas decorations year-round, like electrically lit plastic Santas and elves. There was a strong Mexican presence, though by no means a majority. I remember visiting a quilting fair (or something similar) in the high school. I also remember going into a bar and watching some folks play whist. When I asked how it was played, I was told, "Well, the highest card is an ace, see, and then comes the king, and then the queen, and then the jack . . ."

Memories being what they are, Conesville may differ markedly from my recollection. But the satellite image of it below confirms it, as does the population (according to the 2000 census): 424.

View Larger Map

Remote things

                                     . . . we can behold
     Remote things well, for so much light does He
Who rules supreme still grant us; but we are foiled
     When things draw near us, and our intelligence
     Is useless when they are present. . . .

Dante, Inferno (translated by Robert Pinsky)

Recent tracks I relish

Yeah, I'm getting old. All the new music I listen to is made by people 35 or older.

1. I've never heard anything quite like this:

Sufjan Stevens - Too Much (from The Age of Adz)

2. The vulnerability of the man dancing with the one he loves:

LCD Soundsystem - I Can Change (from This Is Happening)

3. An homage to Moby? I hope not:

The Bad Plus - Never Stop (from Never Stop)

4. The only truly great song from an overrated (and overdue) album:

Big Boi - The Train Pt. 2 (Sir Lucious Left Foot Saves The Day) (from Sir Lucious Left Foot . . . Son of Chico Dusty)

5. Ditto, except for the stuff that has already been released:

Bob Dylan - Tomorrow Is a Long Time (from The Witmark Demos 1962-1964)

6. On a quiet, controlled, spooky album of soundtrack music for solo guitar, there's one track of letting go and catching fire:

Marc Ribot - Bateau (from Silent Movies)

"Au cimitière"

To ready yourself for Hallowe'en, I suggest listening to Brigitte Balleys's bewitching rendition of Hector Berlioz's graveyard lament (composed in 1841, orchestrated in 1856):

Berlioz - Nuits d’été - Au cimitière (op. 7 no. 5)

Behind Balley is the Orchestre des Champs Élysées, under Philippe Herreweghe. The words can be found here.

A maxim for representational artists, writers, and filmmakers

The degree of one's humility should be directly proportional to the enormity of one's subject.

The Holocaust, for example, is best approached as humbly as possible, in order to avoid hubris; a meal with a friend, on the other hand, is best approached daringly and ambitiously, to avoid commonplaceness.

Four letters about writing

. . . which I wrote in the days before e-mail. Two names have been changed.

Dear Billy,
    Have you ever lost your voice? I have an infection of the throat that has caused me to cancel social engagements to avoid hurting my voice. No phone calls, no talking to the cat, no casual conversations on the street . . . But isn’t voicelessness a natural condition among educated people? In writing workshops students are taught to find and then cultivate an “authentic” voice. What could be less authentic than such a practice? Over the course of our education, we are taught to write five-paragraph themes, personal letters, fairy tales, detailed descriptions of events, things, and places, reminiscences of our summer vacations, lists of things to buy, persuasive arguments, book reviews, and class notes, each of which requires a different voice. And then they expect us to come up with an “authentic” voice after all this? There is no such thing. We are all voiceless.
    I imagine you have some thoughts on all this, being a professional ventriloquist yourself. (I hope my metaphor for as-told-to autobiography doesn’t offend you.) Is it easier finding an authentic voice as an as-told-to oral historian than as a writer? Has it ever occurred to you to write someone’s autobiography in the order of the telling rather than in the order of his life? Ask somebody to start telling you stories and write them down; chronology will be thrown to the winds. On a blind date one normally talks about the recent past first, then gradually delves into the distant past. The events one relates first are the superficial ones; as acquaintance deepens, the more apocalyptic events surface. Why shouldn’t this be the way books are written too, rather than beginning with the event that changes one’s life, or worse, beginning with one’s birth, an event that one cannot remember?
    As usual, my life reads like a very contrived first novel that will never be published. I read somewhere that there are about fourteen million aspiring novelists in the U.S. Maybe the internet is a good thing because it’ll suck up some of the energy that would otherwise go into writing bad novels. Do you think the fact that fewer people are reading books is a good or bad thing? It might be good: fewer people might then write books. Even better, writing workshops might shrivel up for lack of applicants. Maybe only the books that people really care about will start to sell, since only serious readers will be left. Because the readership will be less fickle, book prices will quadruple, thereby insuring that publishers will be more willing to take chances on unknown writers. Therefore I say to the electronic media, More power to you!
    Your prompt reply will be most appreciated (said Yuval in an authentic voice).

*

Dear Billy,
    I received your affirmation of conventional views of writing with mingled joy and disappointment. The joy came from the receipt, and from your finely-crafted prose; the disappointment from my feeling that you simply affirm established “truths” about writing without questioning them.
    You claim that each of us has an authentic writing voice, which can vary like a spoken voice. I think the proper comparison here is to handwriting, which is as physical as the vocal cords; each of us has an authentic handwriting, which can vary a great deal, but yet which can still be identified. But once one takes away the physical manifestation of our writing and encases it in type, all writing becomes anonymous. By imposing our “authentic voice” on this anonymous writing, we label it as ours, we claim possession of it, we become authors. Authorship is constructed, not intrinsic. Many writers—Keats comes to mind—have viewed authorship as a quasi-mystical channeling of a divine force; others—e.g. whoever writes the back of cereal boxes—view writing as a task motivated only by capital. In many pre-modern and non-Western societies, the quality of art and writing was judged by how faithfully it resembled certain models; originality was considered a fault, not a virtue. In fact, with enough study, almost anyone of intelligence could produce passable imitations of Proust, Joyce, Kafka, Hemingway, and Melville (provided one limited oneself to a specific work). Children are taught the five-paragraph theme form, and for many of them, that is the only writing they have ever done. Is this their authentic voice, then? Do they subsequently discover their authentic voice, or do they invent it? Is there really any difference? And once it is discovered/invented, what is to stop them from changing it radically? If one did not know that Melville was the author of Moby Dick, Pierre, The Confidence Man, and Battle-Pieces, is there anything in the works themselves to conclusively point to one author for all four of them? Each is written in an entirely different voice. An author is defined by his voice; the voice is defined by the work; therefore the author is defined by the work. Without knowing biographical details, and without attribution, each of those Melville works would define substantially different authors, about whose lives conjectures would vary widely.
    Your notes on finding George’s voice simply reaffirm these thoughts: you are constructing a voice particular to this book. Doubtless George’s previous autobiographical work, written with a different coauthor, is in a different voice; and doubtless were he to actually set pen to paper and compose a memoir himself, it would differ substantially from yours. Then consider the possibility that he might want to write fiction, rather than a memoir; or poetry; or pop song lyrics, or legal treatises. You define George’s voice in your joint text as consisting of words which he could have possibly said. But there is nothing that he could not have possibly said. Had he learned French and subsequently gone mad, he could have possibly said, “Je ne suis pas mort; je monterai un cheval blanc; et à la fin, vous me trouverez trés loin d’ici.” Aren’t you, in fact, constructing a written voice for George, one which cannot claim authenticity? Isn’t your construction entirely dependent on how you want George to sound to your readers? Why not admit that, instead of calling it “finding George’s voice”? Is he incapable of finding his own voice?
    I’m sorry if this letter is too earnest, testy, and argumentative. You know me. My next letter will be nothing but bad jokes . . .

*

Dear Billy,
    I’ve come to the conclusion (if one can really come to a conclusion—it sounds so utterly final) that the only true written literature consists not in novels, not in poems, not in short stories, but in letters. Give me enough letters and I will have no need of anything more. All other literature suffers from a peculiar lack—that of an addressee. Have you ever read a book written specifically for you? Who are books written for? Are they letters to oneself? If so, they would read, “Dear Me, dear me”—and many of them do. Are they letters to the world? If we subtract books addressed to oneself and books addressed to the world, we are still left with the large majority of books, whose addressees are unknown—or perhaps consist of certain groups of amateurs, such as sci-fi buffs, Civil War buffs, mystery buffs, future professors of English. None of this is specific enough for me. I want my reading to address myself, impinge upon me on purpose rather than by accident. Reading a book that someone has published for anyone to pick up is like getting junk mail. Who does this author think he is, writing me in such a fashion? one thinks. How did literature arise? Does it make sense to write a book? Pre-literary communication, I assume, must have all been directed. Who came up with the idea of writing an unaddressed communiqué? I suppose first there were chronicles—the idea of saving some heroic remembrance for posterity must be ingrained in all humans—followed shortly by the words of gods. Such documentation strikes me as quite legitimate. But a novel? How did the documentation of oral history get transmuted into such a peculiar thing? Stories are social acts, and impart a peculiar kind of knowledge we have long ago lost sight of. This is narrative knowledge, and is not information; it cannot be boiled down to a short statement. This kind of knowledge is best imparted orally, to a small group sitting around a campfire, or in a friend’s living room, perhaps, around a fireplace. I leave that to the storytellers. The novel departs from all that—it is a non-social communication, a shot in the dark. I can’t read the damn things anymore. What has this country come to, Billy? I would estimate that 20% of the populace consider themselves writers. All this writing—where does it go? Perhaps it’s useful to compare novels to birdsongs—they establish a certain territory—they are fenceposts for the property of the mind. Thankfully, letters sail over those fenceposts indiscriminately. You and I both partake in this free-floating disease, this aspiration to write, which is really an aspiration to publish (even if that publication succeed our demise), and I’m certain that if either of us ever does publish anything, it will be of much more literary worth than the stuff that’s in our letters. So what? Those published pieces will be barren in comparison. All the emotion, all the urgency, will have been drained from them. Literature departs from us like a package placed at an anonymous doorstep. We think we know what that package contains—a bomb, perhaps, or a baby—but we have no idea when and whether it will be opened—and if it is opened, whether the bomb will explode, whether the baby will live. And if it explodes, will the bomb harm the right people? And if it lives, will the baby bring joy to idiots or savants, misers or paupers? Letters reach those who deserve them. You deserve mine, Billy. Take that as retribution or reward according to your estimation of your desserts—and of my letters.

*

Dear Billy,
    I’d rather not hear that your letters were “too ordinary to send.” First, that seems improbable, even from your point of view; second, letters are by nature quite extraordinary, especially the ones I receive, since they arrive so seldom. Reading a letter is never an ordinary event; the event imparts something out of the ordinary to the letter itself.
    I must defend my position on correspondence. You wrote, “All flirtation imparts counsel.” How can a novel be flirtatious? Doesn’t flirtation imply a person with whom one flirts? One can’t very well flirt with a thousand people at once. That would be entertainment, not flirtation. Let’s put it another way. In telling a story, the teller can observe the reactions of the audience; the same is true for an actor on stage. Letters are always written with the expectation of reciprocation. But novels are written in a vacuum. One is advised when writing fiction to ignore any possible audience, to write for oneself alone. Indeed, John Stuart Mill once stated that true poetry is comparable to monologue. This has been an essential part of literary discourse since the late eighteenth century. I ask you, does it make any sense to publish something that is written for oneself alone? Is there any reason why a reader should be put in the position of an eavesdropper on an internal monologue? Perhaps, as you put it, “I’ve driven off the road into the bushes.” The road, in this case, is modernism (broadly defined to include the last two hundred years); the premodern bushes I now inhabit are quite accommodating.
    You hesitate to follow me when I head somewhere strange. That’s OK—I hardly need followers. As Neil Young put it in an interview with Greil Marcus, “I know that the sacrifice of success breeds longevity. That’s an axiom. Being willing to give up success in the short run ensures a long run.” Some ideas of mine work, some don’t. Whether they work or not, I’d rather test out new ones than stick with the old. Right now I’m interested in how writing is directed, how it functions as writing. I’m trying to understand how fiction works, how it can exist, how it can be defended. I’ve come to the point at which I have a very hard time getting past page two or three of any fictional work I pick up (unless it’s an epistolary novel). Too many problems present themselves to me. For convenience, let’s use Moby Dick, frequently called the greatest novel in the English language, as an example. “Call me Ishmael.” This presents the problem up-front: I have been issued an imperative, one that the author knows I will never obey, not only because I have no reason to call the narrator of the novel “Ishmael,” but because the author’s name is not Ishmael. All right, let’s forget about the latter, and pretend that an actor is on stage, directing us to call him Ishmael. Does the audience then respond, “Hi, Ishmael!”? Or does it sit in silence, as we do when confronted with these words? What kind of language is this, where a clear imperative is utterly ignored, with the implicit consent of he who issued it? If I wrote you a letter that told you to “Call me Ishmael,” you would either respond, “Dear Ishmael,” or, Bartleby-like, “I’d prefer not to.” But here we somehow take it for granted. Now I realize that this imperative says more than that—it says, in essence, “My name may not be Ishmael, but for the purposes of this narrative, I’d prefer you to know me as Ishmael.” Melville cleverly begins his fiction with an admission by the narrator that he is not entirely trustworthy. The second sentence reads, “Some years ago—never mind how long precisely—having little or no money in my purse, and nothing particular to interest me on shore, I thought I would sail about a little and see the watery part of the world.” That “never mind how long precisely” again admits the untrustworthiness of the narrator. So we are facing a fiction within a fiction, a tall tale told by a narrator who does not exist. The key thing is that this distancing strategy is necessary if we are to swallow this whale of a tale whole. It is a variant of “This is a story my father told me, and it was told to him by his father.” The novel no longer claims to be representative of reality—it becomes simply a story.
    But something peculiar happens halfway through (and not only there, but in the prefatory material as well): this story, which has been presented to us as pure fiction, begins to require reams of documentation. Melville gives us hundreds of pages of facts—interpreted facts, but still facts. Why? What has happened here? When a traditional storyteller tells his tales which he has heard from his father who has in turn heard it from his father, no facts are necessary, we have left behind the factual world and exist in the realm of pure story. But the novel, at least after Balzac, requires the influx of information, requires provability. What is the point of the profusion of detail in the novel? To enhance the illusion of reality. But what is the point of that illusion? Why should we be deceived? And how do we allow ourselves to be deceived by realistic descriptions when we have not allowed ourselves to be deceived by “Call me Ishmael”? In my last letter, I argued that the very existence of novels made no sense; now I support that argument by saying that the way novels are written and presented makes no sense. There is nothing more futile than the imitation of the real, as Plato pointed out in The Republic. Pure fiction (as in the folk tale), pure communication (as in letters), pure documentation—all these things I can understand. But the novel—this unholy mixture—baffles me.

I no longer write letters. I write novels.

Éclat

Pierre Boulez - Éclat

This mp3 file is taken from a 1979 Candide LP and is performed by the Orchestra of Our Time under Joel Thome.

Here's an excerpt from the liner notes to the LP.

Éclat was composed while Boulez was travelling in 1964. Composed but not completed, for Boulez has said that he intends to add to it [eventually, he did--it is now part of a work entitled Éclat/Multiples]. . . .

The definition of éclat is given in Cassel's New French Dictionary as "burst, sudden bursting: crash, clap, peal, sudden uproar; shiver . . ." and continues with a long list of meanings that includes "brightness, glare, glitter" and a great many other things, from which I cannot resist quoting "un éclat de pierre," which is translated as "a fragment of stone." As we have seen, the "Éclat de Pierre Boulez" is indeed a fragment: and "stone," in the special sense of "precious stone," applies no less aptly to its magical, sensuous succession of jewel-like, jingling, sparkling, flashing sounds. . . .

The work is scored for fifteen performers--piano, celesta, harp, glockenspiel, vibraphone, mandolin, guitar, cimbalom, tubular bells, flute in G, cor anglais, trumpet, trombone, viola, cello. . . .

It starts with a piano cadenza, written out, and ends with another fully written out, jerkily rhythmical concerted quick section, in effect a kind of terse "grand finale," if the term is not too incongruous, in which the six wind and bowed instruments re-enter for the first time since the single pppp chord with which they fill the silence between the pianist's first two entries in the opening cadenza.

The whole middle part, by far the longest, is a kind of free fantasy for the remaining instruments (including the piano), and is to some extent improvisatory. In some parts the note-heads are given, but no duration, and alternative dynamics are indicated. The players follow the conductor's instructions as to which of several possible readings to choose or extemporize on arriving at any given point. Boulez has indeed described the work as in this sense "a conductor's concerto, because the musicians are used like the keys of an instrument."

Another version of the same piece, conducted by the composer, can be found below, but it should really stop after 9:20; the last half-minute of this "video" is the beginning of Multiples.

 

A hunger/fasting routine

This is a follow up to my previous post on the health benefits of hunger and fasting.

First, don't snack. Eat your breakfast, lunch, and dinner, fill yourself, and then don't eat until the next meal.

Then, skip an average of two meals a week. Don't skip dinner--that's a family meal; and leave either Saturday or Sunday as a day to eat whatever and whenever you want. That leaves twelve other meals to choose from. Schedule yourself so that some weeks you skip no meals at all and others you skip four or more. Occasionally, skip two meals on the same day.

I eat a little bit more during the meals before and after the ones I skip. It makes things easier, but I don't know if it's a good idea.

I do some additional fasting on Jewish fast days and during the Days of Awe (I recently skipped seven meals two weeks in a row, which wasn't as hard as I'd thought it would be), and for two months a year I refrain from fasting. Intermittent fasting keeps me feeling healthy, if a bit out-of-balance at times; it helps keep my weight low; and it gives me a lot more energy (not to mention spare time). It requires a lot of self-control, though--sometimes I'll cheat with a glass of milk, a tortilla chip or two, or a couple squares of chocolate (for the caffeine). See my previous post for other health benefits; there's also plenty of good information (and more challenging routines) on the web (just search for "intermittent fasting").

Sweet potatoes with cranberries and walnuts

Rub oil on some unpeeled, uncut sweet potatoes and bake them for an hour or more until a fork goes through them easily. Shortly before they’re done, put a covered pot of cranberries with a little water over medium heat; after boiling for a few minutes, the berries will all burst. Turn off the flame and add enough maple syrup to the berries so that they’re no longer bitter. When the potatoes are done, chop them roughly and add butter, salt, and pepper; then spoon some or all of the cranberry sauce over them and add some walnuts. Mix well and serve hot.

How to eat: relearning the lost principles of food

How to eat was mankind's major concern for millennia. And over those millennia, we developed certain techniques to make this process easier. We bred domestic animals so that we had ready supplies of milk, eggs, and meat. We planted grains, squashes, and beans and bred them so that they'd be easy to harvest and prepare. We milled, sifted, and cultured grains to make them easier to digest. We learned about plants that could cure ills and others that could cause them if not prepared properly. It took a long time, but our knowledge of how to eat kept getting richer and richer. This knowledge was interrupted, of course, by fads and superstitions. But the core principles, evolved over untold generations, remained.

But since the Industrial Revolution, we are eating in ways that were never possible before. We can spend weeks, even years, without being seriously hungry. Only some of our food is perishable. We eat a multiple of fats, starches, sugars, and other compounds that didn't even exist until recently. We eat foods packaged in plastic. We eat frozen food in the summertime and fresh fruit in the dead of winter.

We live in a world of plenty--indeed, of overabundance. And because of this, we have forgotten how to eat. We live longer, due to advances in medicine and safety, but we are overweight, overstressed, and preoccupied by a myriad of things that have nothing to do with what was once our major concern. We have forgotten how to mill and soak grains, pickle vegetables, smoke meat, preserve fruits, and all the other processes we developed over centuries to make our foods less perishable and more nutritious. We have forgotten how to live with hunger and how to subsist on a limited diet, skills that are no longer strictly necessary but are almost undoubtedly beneficial to our health. We have forgotten the joys (and stresses) of raising, harvesting, and cooking our own food--and of going to the market to buy what our neighbors have raised, harvested, and cooked, talking to them about it all the while.

But most of all, we have forgotten the principle of irregularity. Nature designed us as irregular eaters. We have had to cope with irregular seasons, bad weather, bad harvests, drought, famine. Times of plenty alternated with times of need. There were times when no meat was available and others when all one ate was meat, and the same could be said of almost any other food group. (Our exercise was irregular too--nobody ever ran three miles a day at a steady pace before our time.) And our bodies were designed not only to withstand this irregularity--like other animals, we were given the ability to convert excess fats, proteins, and carbohydrates into whatever our cells needed--but to thrive on it.

How, then, can we relearn what we have forgotten over the past hundred-and-fifty years? How can we relearn to eat the way nature intended us to?

This is not a simple task, and I won't pretend that I have mastered it. But here are a few things you can do.

- Eat irregularly. Don't eat the same thing all the time. Vary your meals. Keep your body off-balance and your taste buds interested. (At the same time, don't indulge in exoticism. Eat close to home.)

- Feast. And don't snack. Eat large communal meals most of the time. Savor your food.

- Go hungry sometimes: fast intermittently and irregularly. You'll be amazed at the energy change.

- Exercise irregularly. If exercising is boring, change the way you exercise. And whether you run, swim, bicycle, or lift weights, don't do it at a steady pace. Go as fast as you can sometimes and leisurely other times.

- Try growing and raising some of your own food.

- Go to the farmer's market as often as possible and talk to the farmers about the things you buy there.

- Eat responsibly. Avoid factory-farmed meats, eggs, and dairy. Eat seafood only if it's sustainably grown or wild caught and not in danger of overfishing. Buy locally grown produce and avoid pesticides.

- The grains and legumes we eat were introduced to the world relatively recently. It's better if you soak or sprout them before cooking to break down indigestible and even harmful compounds and maximize their nutritional benefits. But don't get too hung up on this stuff--a slice or two of angel food cake won't do you any permanent harm.

- Eat fruits and vegetables seasonally, according to what's available; pickle or dry in times of plenty.

- Eat refined starches and sugars in moderation. Our contemporary diet features far more of these than any traditional diet ever has.

- Ignore myths about cholesterol, saturated fats, and other totally natural foods that are supposed to be bad for you. Human beings are tremendously resilient. You can live a perfectly healthy life eating plenty of saturated fats, like the people of the Caucasus mountains, or next to none at all, like the Japanese. On the other hand, it might be wise to avoid non-traditional fats, including the denatured vegetable fats that people use for deep frying.

- If you eat dairy, raw milk from a clean and reputable source is a good thing. In addition, cultured dairy products are generally healthy and tasty.

- Try to avoid foods that nobody who lived 200 years ago would recognize. Foods less than 200 years old (soy milk, baking soda, white rice) are less nutritious than their traditional counterparts (real milk, yeast cultures, brown rice). Substitute perishable food for non-perishable food.

- Study traditional diets and methods of food preparation and see what you can learn from centuries of accumulated wisdom.

- The more ancient a food, the better. Nuts and berries, wild game, and some tubers and fruits have remained unaffected by civilization. Try to fit these into your diet on occasion.

- Eat probiotically. Foods rich in bacterial cultures--sourdough, vegetables pickled without vinegar, undistilled vinegar, raw milk, yogurts, cheeses, bacterially cured meats--can be hard to find or strange to make, but are worth the effort.

- Remember that most Europeans in the middle ages drank wine and avoided water. Wine, beer, and other mildly alcoholic beverages are probably good for you.

- Many mild illnesses have herbal or food-based cures. Learn them. For example, take a couple teaspoons of anise seed to combat indigestion.

- Make exceptions to every rule.

This post has been influenced by the following books. Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma is a fascinating investigation of the way we eat. Sally Fallon's Nourishing Traditions is terrific for detailing traditional methods of making nutritious food, but it is full of needlessly alarming warnings against perfectly harmless stuff, her recipes can be a bit more complex than necessary, and her advocacy of animal fat is a bit extreme. Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint advocates a return to pre-civilized habits of eating and exercise in a rather knowledgeable and fun way, but doesn't acknowledge the fact that we have indeed evolved in the last 10,000 years. Reay Tannahill's Food in History is a fantastic way to begin to learn the history of food.

The best way to roast a chicken

Buy one from your farmer’s market. Cut off the wings, then the legs, then the breast from the back. (Freeze the back and neck and use them later for stock.) Sprinkle all parts with lots of salt and pepper and some dried herbs. Bake the chicken wings, legs, and breast skin side up in a pan (without a rack) at 500˚ for ten minutes, then turn the heat down to 425˚; ten minutes later, add the liver, heart, and gizzard. The chicken is ready when the skin is brown and crisp. Be careful not to overcook—it’s OK if the juices are a little pink (I cook a three-pound chicken for a total of thirty-five minutes).

This is the only way I know to cook chicken so that the breast meat is as juicy as the dark meat. If you don’t cut the chicken up first, or if you cook it at a lower temperature, it takes longer to cook, and the breast meat gets dry.

Why I am no longer a vegetarian

When I was seventeen and faced with nasty conflicts between my parents, often involving my brother and myself, I would take long walks. I would usually go up to the top of a hill where I could look out over a barbed-wire fence on some meadows with a few trees. There I would commune silently with God, whom I imagined lived by the willow-thronged creek sequestered in the distant valley. But on occasion I would wander further afield. On one particularly fraught evening I went up Smith Road towards Moore's Pike and told my troubles to a group of surprisingly attentive cows. In return, I made them a promise: I would never eat one of them again.

It was far easier for me to keep kosher after that. My family had never bothered about keeping kosher, and getting kosher meat in a non-kosher family at the age of seventeen would have been a struggle. So I just stopped eating meat altogether. I kept my real reasons to myself--if anyone asked, I just said I felt sorry for the poor animals.

But in 2008, after reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, I realized that if we didn't eat cows, there would hardly be any, and the same went for sheep, chickens, and turkeys. As Pollan puts it, "Most domesticated animals can't survive in the wild; in fact, without us eating them they wouldn't exist at all!" Not only the existence of the cows I talked to, but their happiness, their comfort, also depended on my eating them. To quote Pollan once again, "At least for the domestic animal . . . the good life, if we can call it that, simply doesn't exist, cannot be achieved, apart from humans--apart from our farms and therefore from our meat eating. . . . Domestication took place when a handful of especially opportunistic species discovered, through Darwinian trial and error, that they were more likely to survive and prosper in an alliance with humans than on their own."

That said, I did not want to eat any animals from factory farms. When I eat out, I am still a vegetarian, unless I come across meat on the menu that I know was raised in a humane way (for example, bison  or goat, since these animals are almost always raised humanely, or beef or chicken sourced from a local farm, or meat labeled organic). When I cook, though, I cook a lot of meat, which I buy from local farmers, either at a farmer's market or through Bruno's Organics, an Indiana company that delivers locally grown meat to Chicago.

As for keeping kosher, that's no longer so important to me. The injunction against boiling a calf in its mothers milk does not imply, to me, that you shouldn't eat chicken with butter. What gets more difficult is the commandment not to eat the blood with the flesh (Leviticus 17:10-14). One should slaughter an animal so that most of its blood runs out--traditionally with a fast and virtuoso slit of its neck. This made a lot of sense in the ancient world: bloody meat will go bad far more quickly than meat without blood, and this method of slaughter is widely recognized as humane. Is this rule now as irrelevant and anachronistic as the rule against wearing clothing from a mixture of two kinds of material (Leviticus 19:19)? I don't know. Kosher meat is invariably far too salty for my taste, and it's not easy to obtain meat that's both organic and kosher. Yet Michael Lesy's The Forbidden Zone, an excellent investigation of the American way of death, convinced me that kosher slaughtering was far less painful than the alternatives.

So next time I buy meat directly from the farmer, I think I'll ask them about their slaughtering practices. Perhaps it will relieve my conscience to some degree. Or perhaps it will have the opposite effect.

Prelude 12

This one was influenced, perhaps too strongly, by Pierre Boulez's Notations.

Read, read on

To celebrate having finished writing the second draft of my novel The Birdwatchers I here post a song about a bird and reading:

The Books - An Owl with Knees (2005)

Here are the lyrics:

Eat rye straw
Leave, withdraw
Drink ink tea
Stay with me 

Fame stay shy
By way of why
Wait, lie low
Old ones' odd odes 

Read. Read on
Read, read on
Breathe, be calm
You're gone, gone on 

It's strange to see how time agrees to slow down for owls with knees.

Ballet Russe cocktail

I’ve adapted this exquisite yet simple recipe from The Stork Club Bar Book, originally published in 1934. (Order it here.)

Mix two ounces of vodka, a tablespoon of crème de cassis, and a scant teaspoon of fresh lime juice; shake with lots of ice, and strain into a small cocktail glass.

In the prewar era, vodka was hardly the most common ingredient in a cocktail (of the 1500 recipes in Trader Vic's 1947 Bartender's Guide, four are for vodka cocktails), and there was a whiff of the exotic about it. That's why the appellations of vodka cocktails often connoted Russia--Moscow mule, Alexander the Great, czarina, tovarich, soviet, etc.

Syrinx

I took many flute lessons as a teenager, and always enjoyed them. Of all the pieces I learned, the one I liked the most was Debussy's "Syrinx" (composed in 1913). To my ears now, it carries a whiff of the same kind of kitschy exoticism one finds in a lot of early-twentieth-century compositions, but a vague exoticism, with a tinge of the far east and a tinge of the near--a mix of the Greek panpipes with the Chinese pipa. Thirty years ago, though, it suggested to me nothing but pure modernism--it was delightfully bizarre.

This superb rendition was sent me by Scott Gaul in 2007, and I treasure it. I believe it was recorded in the late 1940s or early '50s.

Martin Ruderman - Syrinx (Claude Debussy)

Mustard, gasoline, and TNT

Three turn-of-the-century drummer-driven American numbers about hazardous substances.

Latin Playboys - Mustard (1999)

Spoon - 30 Gallon Tank (1998)

Tortoise - TNT (1998)

Enough snakes

We should send enough snakes to the moon
to fill in all its holes.

Or should we use those holes
for a long, slow game of golf?

Anyway, we should fill them in somehow
before light leaks through to the dark side.

The Third Lamentation

On Tisha b'Av, which begins tonight, we read the Book of Lamentations. Here is my own pentameter translation of the third.

I am the man who saw pain by the rod of his anger:
I am the one he marched through darkness, no light:
Only against me would he turn his hand all day.

He wasted my flesh and my skin, he broke my bones;
He built a yoke around my head to tire me.
In dark places he sat me, as one long since dead.

He fenced me in, he trapped me, oppressed me with chains;
Though I'd scream and shout, he shut out my prayers.
He barred my way with thick blocks of stone.

He was a bear in waiting, a lion in hiding;
He made me rebel, then broke me, to waste me away.
He bent his bow, aiming the arrows at me;

They pierced my loins, the children of his quiver.
I became everyone's joke, their sport all day.
He filled me with bile, made me drunk with bitterness.

He broke my teeth with gravel, fed me ashes:
Peace abandoned my soul, I forgot all goodness:
I now say, Lost is my strength and my hope from the Lord.

Remembering my anguish and pain is venom and gall:
Remembering again--it makes my soul sink.
This I will tell my heart so it may hope:

The Lord's grace is not over, his love has no end,
Renewed every morning, his faithfulness is great.
My lot is the Lord, says my soul, so in him I will hope.

The Lord is good to the patient soul that seeks him;
It's good in silence to wait for the Lord's salvation:
It's good for a man to bear the yoke in his youth;

To sit alone in the silence he has received,
To put his lips to the dust--perhaps there is hope!--
To offer his cheek to him who strikes, to be shamed:

Because the Lord will not forsake him forever;
For though he may harm, he pities with all his kindness;
For he may distress and hurt men, but not from his heart.

To crush beneath his feet all the earth's captives,
To bend a man's rights in the face of the Most High,
To twist a man's plea--does the Lord not see these things?

Who claims there is something the Lord has not commanded?
That from his mouth came not both the bad and the good?
How can man, living boldly in sin, complain?

Let's trace and explore our ways and turn back to the Lord:
Lift up our hearts and our hands to God in heaven:
We sinned and rebelled, and you did not forgive.

Wrapped in anger you chased us, killed us, spared none,
Wrapped in a cloud through which no prayer can pass,
You placed us, nothing but waste, in the midst of the nations.

All our enemies opened their mouths against us;
Fear and a pit were our downfall and our ruin.
Streams flow from my eyes for my people's daughter:

My eyes pour down without respite, without end,
Until the Lord looks down from heaven and sees
My eyes abusing my soul for my city's daughters.

They hunted me like a bird, my causeless enemies,
They held my life in a pit, and threw stones at me.
Water flowed over my head: I said, I am lost.

I called your name, O Lord, from the depths of the pit;
You heard me: Don't close your ears to my cry of help!
You neared me the day I called you--you told me, Fear not.

You pleaded, Lord, the plea of my soul, you saved my life,
You saw, Lord, how justice is twisted--now judge my case.
You saw all their frenzy, all their plots against me;

You heard the shamefulness, Lord, of their thoughts of me
From the lips of those who slandered me all day,
Sitting or standing--look: I am their target.

Repay them, O Lord, for what their hands have done,
Give them sadness of heart, your curse place on them.
Destroy them in anger from under the heavens of the Lord.

Some thoughts on color

The leaves of the Japanese maple in the Japanese garden in Jackson Park are the color of the very heart of a fire. The white mulberries in the park are sweeter than the black ones, but also pack less flavor, just like white and yellow corn. Are all white fruits sweeter and milder than their colorful counterparts? I prefer the latter. What would Preston Sturges' Hail, the Conquering Hero, which I saw Friday night, be like if it had been shot in red, white, and blue rather than black and white? Would that have lent it more bite and cut down its sentimentality? At least half the appeal of William Eggleston's best photos lies in the saturation of the color--compare his dye imbibition prints to his chromogenic prints. This renders the images less real--or, perhaps, hyperreal. The same can be said for the color films of Douglas Sirk and Nicholas Ray--not to mention David Lynch and Sofia Coppola. The Japanese maple is super-saturated too, at least in the sun. It's bursting with flavor.

Glenn Gould's "worst Bach recording"

Perhaps only Glenn Gould was audacious enough to rush through Bach's exquisite fifth partita in under ten minutes. But what an exciting and sublime ten minutes, so full of joy and compassion! Recorded in 1957, this was the first partita he recorded, but he hated the recording. He commented in 1968, "It was absolutely my favorite Bach partita. So favorite that I played it on virtually every program. When I would first play in Leningrad, that would be the feature work of the first half of the program, ditto in Moscow, et cetera. When I came back from that tour I decided to record it, and it was, I swear, the worst Bach recording that I've ever made. It was also the most pianistic. It was perhaps the one that the connoisseur of the piano would like best; it's the one that I like least, because it's least Bach, it's least me (vis-a-vis Bach in any case). it's full of all sorts of dynamic hang-ups; it's full of crescendi and diminuendi that have no part in the structure, in the skeleton of that music, and defy one to portray the skeleton adequately." Gould apparently disdained the fire and passion, the impetuosity, with which he imbued this recording.

Listen and decide for yourself:

Glenn Gould - Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829. I. Praeambulum

Glenn Gould - Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829. II. Allemande

Glenn Gould - Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829. III. Corrente

Glenn Gould - Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829. IV. Sarabande

Glenn Gould - Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829. V. Tempo di Minuetta

Glenn Gould - Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829. VI. Passepied

Glenn Gould - Partita No. 5 in G major, BWV 829. VII. Gigue

Please Give

Friday night Karen and I went to see a disarmingly slight but quite charming movie called Please Give. I appreciated the quirkiness of its characters, the comedy of its situations; I didn't appreciate its resemblance to television--a series of short scenes, intertwined plots, no sensuality in the cinematography, no probing into a character's depth. Critics have compared it to Woody Allen's early movies, but those had more bite; and to Eric Rohmer's movies, but those had more passion.

The central conundrum of the movie is the impulse to be charitable, and its implicit message is that charity to strangers never works but charity to loved ones is what really matters. That may sound trite, but not as trite as the end of the movie, which implies that spoiling an already spoiled brat even more with an expensive yet casual gift will heal all rifts. But the movie is also about death, which is here painless and convenient; adultery, which is here equally painless and convenient; and, as an aside, the love of nature, which is here unnatural and inconvenient. It's also about making money, though, and what it says about that subject is more nuanced.

The dark side of Netherland

Few recent novels appear to have been praised as highly as Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. It won the PEN/Faulkner award; the New York Times called it “stunning” and one of the best books of the year; James Wood, in The New Yorker, called it “exquisitely written” and said it showed “deep human wisdom” (as opposed to animal wisdom? I wonder); the Times Book Review said it “had more life inside it than ten very good novels”; and, hell, even Barack Obama liked it, calling it “a wonderful book.” It has probably sold some 300,000 copies so far.

So I read it. The writing is indeed exquisite. The protagonist, Hans van den Broek, is a drip, but at least he is preoccupied with a compelling antagonist, a Trinidadian con man named Chuck Ramkissoon. Hans occupies the Nick Carroway position, while Chuck is rather transparently a Great Gatsby of sorts. And I thought it rather clever of O’Neill to switch Gatsby’s meditation on class to a meditation on race and origin.

In addition, one of the things that has made this novel so compelling to readers is its pitch-perfect evocation of post-9/11 New York. The book ranges all over the five boroughs, from a cricket field in Staten Island to Floyd Bennett Field in Brooklyn, from Manhattan’s Chelsea Hotel to the haunts of taxi drivers in Queens. One of the most delightful things about Netherland is wondering where in New York you’ll end up next--and whom you’ll meet there.

But when it comes to the larger picture, unfortunately, O’Neill has nothing fresh to say. Ramkissoon is a man of constant action, big dreams, brilliant talk--everything Hans clearly wishes he was himself but has long ago given up hope of ever being. Hans is a millionaire stock trader cursed with a pathological passiveness, acquiescing to every suggestion, hopelessly in love with his cold-hearted wife and, when she spurns him for no good reason that he can find (though the reader can easily supply one: Hans is--though he never realizes it, not even at his most self-critical--a terrible bore), he becomes suddenly taken with anyone with darker skin than himself. (Spoiler alert: stop reading this post if you plan to read the book.) And it’s not just the oh-so-mysterious Chuck--in the only sex scene in the entire book Hans hooks up with a black woman who asks him to whip her. And he does! (Like I said, he pathologically acquiesces to every suggestion.) Chuck, of course, turns out to be a bad guy, a gangster, though the reader realizes this far before Hans does, and also realizes that he’s not really any worse than Hans himself, though Hans will never come to that conclusion--millionaires who whip black women and gangsters who beat up small-time businessmen are apparently not equivalents in his world. Hans’s cluelessness about all this made me want to throw the book across the room--in one scene he comes across concrete evidence of Chuck’s thuggish ways and it takes him two pages to comprehend what he has seen (I comprehended it immediately and was appalled by Hans’s--and O’Neill’s--need to explicate it).

But this is nothing compared to the author’s grotesque insistence on Chuck’s inner jungle-like nature. After Hans discovers what Chuck is capable of, he breaks off all contact, but Chuck reappears only to deliver a monologue that goes on for pages about his youth in Trinidad’s jungles, replete with dangerous snakes and Shango-Baptist feasts. The apparently charming, ambitious, clever black man turns out to be, well, a jungle bunny, if you don’t mind my not mincing words. This allows Hans the blessed opportunity to renounce his black envy (though, of course, never explicitly), leave New York, reunite with his wife and child, and return to the far more comfortable and less mysterious land of London, at last happy and comfortable in his lily-white skin.

I should add here that part of my distaste is probably due to my occupying a similar position to Hans’s once upon a time. When I lived in Brooklyn I, as a volunteer for an AIDS organization, befriended a blind and dying Trinidadian Yoruba-Baptist preacher named Lionel, who, over the course of eighteen months or so, took me to a half-dozen of his wild feasts, in which colorfully dressed Trinidadian Brooklynites became possessed by African orishas, poured strange libations in the corners of rooms, walked into the freezing waters of the Atlantic Ocean so that trays of brightly colored cakes could float out to the horizon, and so on. Joseph O’Neill has, apparently, never been to one of these feasts himself, since he has Chuck say, “The Baptist Church is this Trinidad brew of Christian and African traditions--you’ll see them in Brooklyn on a Sunday, wearing white and ringing bells and trumpeting the spirit.” Wearing white? Ringing bells? Trumpeting the spirit? How about men dancing with a bottle of rum in one hand and a machete in the other, possessed by malevolent spirits, and having to be wrestled to the ground so that they don’t hurt anyone? How about half-naked girls dancing on all fours to the beat of polyrhythmic drumming at three in the morning in a hot candle-lit Brooklyn basement? Of course, all this fascinated me, but I knew better than to pretend that Lionel--or any of his bizarre male lovers or gossippy female friends--symbolized my dark side. O’Neill may count himself in good company--after all, he’s following in the footsteps of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville--but one would hope that black people symbolizing the dark side of white people would be, by the twenty-first century, a thing of the past.

(And perhaps it’s better not to dwell on Joseph O’Neill’s treatment of Jews. The only Jewish character, Abelsky, is easily the most loathsome creature in the book, a caricature of the sweaty, swarthy, money-grubbing, fat, ignorant Jew; O’Neill also takes pleasure in poking fun at kosher certification, and the word Jew appears to signify “money-loving” in the few places it appears.)

My skin crawled when I read this book. Why didn’t Michiko Kakutani’s or Barack Obama’s or James Wood’s? At least Zadie Smith condemned the book for its shilly-shallying ways. Her review, written for the New York Review of Books, is here.

Prelude 14

Here is yet another prelude I composed. This one is really rather difficult.

A last waltz

During 1837, '38, and '39, Robert Schumann composed over a hundred pieces for piano, ranging from brief, lyrical fragments to multi-movement sonatas and fantasies. (This output, while considerable, was dwarfed by what he did the following year, during which he composed close to 150 songs.) The Davidsbündlertänze (Dances of the Bond of David), composed in 1837, consists of eighteen character pieces, most of them ascribed to one or both of two characters Schumann invented, Florestan and Eusebius, who conduct a kind of dialogue over the course of the suite. A whole world is contained in the thirty-five minutes of this work, a world Schumann wrote about at some length. The Davidsbund, which Schumann invented, was an alliance whose motto was "Act, yet do not organize in provincial fashion, but rather dare to be quite untidy and chaotic"; the alliance was between two opposites. Florestan's pieces are mostly capricious, loud, and lively, with tempo markings like "Ungeduldig" (impatient), "Frisch" (fresh), and "Etwas hahnbüchen" (a little impetuously); Schumann calls him the "romantic idealist, one of those rare musical persons who have long since foreseen all that is to come, is novel and is extraordinary." Eusebius's pieces, by contrast, are largely quiet, lyrical, and gnomic, with tempo markings like "Innig" (intimate), "Nicht schnell mit äußerst starker Empfindung" (not very fast and with very strong feeling), and "Einfach" (simple); Schumann describes him as "equally enraptured and insouciant, enjoys things more seldom but then more slowly and longer; thus also his performance on the pianoforte is more thoughtful but also more tender and mechanically polished than that of Florestan." The sixteenth piece flows into the seventeenth, and together they present an almost heated conversation between the two; the end sounds like the end of the suite. But then, Schumann writes, "Quite redundantly Eusebius added the following; but great happiness shone in his eyes the while." Clearly, Eusebius had the last word with this almost anomalous but very sweet and simple waltz--a compelling conclusion to a suite Schumann described as "dances of death, Saint Vitus's dances, dances of goblins and of graces."

Robert Schumann - Davidsbündlertänze for piano, Op. 6, No. 18 (Nicht schnell); Wilhelm Kempff, piano

A note on the performance: the melodic line is written, at least at the outset, with rests between every two notes, which are elided by Kempff's overuse of the pedal here. I have not heard any performances of this piece that actually observe the rests, which, in my opinion, would render the piece somewhat less lyrical and more whimsical.

Prelude 2

Here is another piano piece I composed a few years ago.

Always happy

People were always happy to see you
since then they could talk about you behind your back.

Now you have no wine, women, or songs left.
So why do you still hurt?

Even if you're the only one remaining,
you can still lie to yourself.

German piano gems

Johann Sebastian Bach - Prelude No. 10 in E Minor BWV 855 (1722; Glenn Gould)

Robert Schumann - Freundliche Landschaft, Op. 82 No. 5 (1849; Wilhelm Kempff)

Ludwig Van Beethoven - Piano Sonata in A-flat, Op. 110, Second Movement (1822; Vladimir Feltsman)

Johannes Brahms - Intermezzo in B minor, Op. 119 No. 1 (1893; Radu Lupu)

Paul Hindemith - Klavierstück (1929; Siegfried Mauser)

Karlheinz Stockhausen - Klavierstück V (1955; David Tudor)

The dollar-bill game

I love games. I play poker online and with friends; I play Settlers of Catan with my family; I play baseball and soccer with my son and Rummikub with my daughter; I used to play Scrabble and rummy 500 all the time. I often view my entire life as a game.

One of the games I like best is a math game you can play in your head with a dollar bill. I made it up a few years ago, but it still challenges me on occasion. Here’s how you play.

Take the eight-digit number on the bill and put an imaginary equals sign between the second and third digit. The first two digits are now a number between 0 and 99. The object is to make the last six digits equal to that number using plus, minus, times, and divided-by signs, along with parentheses. These last six digits cannot be combined with each other to make two-digit numbers, nor can they be reordered.

Once you’ve succeeded in making this equation work, put the equals sign between the sixth and seventh digit and do the same thing, the last two digits representing a two-digit number.

For example, in my pocket are five bills with the following sequences:

a) 4 8 7 8 9 2 6 0 

b) 3 6 8 0 3 1 4 1 

c) 0 3 0 9 7 2 8 5

d) 7 6 7 4 9 8 3 2

e) 3 9 4 4 0 2 3 4

Solutions are:

a) 48 = (7 + 8 – 9 + 2) * (6 + 0)
    4 + 8 + (7 + 8 + 9) * 2 = 60

b) 36 = (8 + 0) * (3 + 1) + 4 * 1
    –3 + 6 * 8 + 0 – 3 – 1 = 41

c) 03 = 0 * 9 * 7 * 2 + 8 – 5
    unsolvable

d) 76 = 7 – 4 + 9 * 8 + 3 – 2
    –7 – 6 + 7 * 4 + 9 + 8 = 32

e) 39 =  4 * 4 * (0 + 2) + 3 + 4
    (–3 + [9 – 4] * 4) * (0 + 2) = 34

The last half of the last bill was difficult for me, but it only took me two or three minutes. I still occasionally find a bill that will take me ten minutes to solve, and it feels like a real triumph when I do.

We pan for gold

We pan for gold in cornfields
and dig for diamonds in junkyards.

Only at midnight can a CD
produce an ancient sound.

From the depths of Loch Ness, the monster
sings love songs to the birds.

Watermelon smiles when it's cut
and chuckles when it's bitten.

Lies taste better with
a sprinkling of conviction.

Songs from American motels

Mark Chesnutt - Things to Do in Wichita (2008)

Herbie Hancock with Corinne Bailey Rae - River (2007)

Yo La Tengo - I Feel Like Going Home (2006)

A day of minor defeats

A VW Jetta rather noisily crushed my right front turning light in the parking lot of the Paul Douglas Forest Preserve Saturday at noon. The driver, a college freshman named Chris, somehow missed seeing my bright red Honda coming toward him when he backed out of his spot, feeling good from just having won a game of flag football (he played defensive end). One might say that his car (actually, his girlfriend's) tackled mine, but that would be stretching a metaphor too far.

After exchanging information and getting a police report from the park policeman, which took, all told, forty-five minutes, my binoculars and I went off for a hike, rather out of the mood for it by this point. The great blue herons were roosting on poles high above the marsh as usual, occasionally swooping down like pterodactyls; red-winged blackbirds gamboled among low bare branches. I watched a vulture for a while, flying with magnificent grace in large circles close to the ground, its red head bright above its dull black body. Two sandhill cranes--the first I've seen in Illinois--were walking happily together wearing their little red caps, occasionally emitting their gargling cry, even louder than the geese.

The preserve is quite vast, crisscrossed with deer trails, but without any hiking trails at all; you have to bushwhack across the swamps and creeks. Dense forest alternates with marshland, but the majority of the land is brush and rolling meadows, and most of the trees are crabapple (though there are some delicious wild apple trees too). For some reason several of the trees near the rookery had been cut down and ground up--I'm not sure why or what the plan is. The playing fields are all near the parking lot, and I can't imagine anyone trying to convert the ground where the crushed trees lay to playing fields, as it's simply too marshy.

I rediscovered the spot where at some point an earthen bridge had been built over the creek that otherwise renders inaccessible the eastern two-thirds of the preserve, but I didn't spend much time exploring. I drove back home and fried an onion, a zucchini, garlic, leftover baked sweet potato, and cashews, and grated some havarti dill over it all. I felt like having a cocktail--I had a blackthorne in the fridge left over from a poker game--but I didn't. 

Catherine and her kids, Celia (seven) and Zavier (eleven), stopped by on their bikes, and Jacky (my son, eight) and I joined them on ours with Maybe (our dog) running alongside me. We cycled down the Midway past the ice rink and played a tough game of soccer for half an hour, Zavier and Catherine beating the three of us five to four. We tried playing baseball with a tennis ball, but Maybe kept catching it and not letting us have it back, and even after we tied her up, the enthusiasm was gone. We cycled back and had hot chocolate.

Karen (my wife) is laid up with a broken leg, and Catherine went upstairs to chat with her for a while; I made dinner (baked sweet potatoes and a stew of ground beef, onions, red peppers, tomatoes, and cumin). At 8:30 we were to spend an hour without electricity (some environmental group had been promoting this silly scheme), so we unpacked and filled our oil lamps; then Catherine and her family came by bearing pastries. We served champagne--the real stuff, not the sparkling wine I usually get--lit lamps and candles, turned out the lights, and played Settlers of Catan (the kids played Life). Jeff (Catherine's husband) won handily, though it was his first time playing.

It was after 10:30 by the time I finally put Jacky to bed; Thalia, my daughter, was out of town with friends, but called to say goodnight at 11:00. Karen, trying to stop Maybe from breaking our dessert plates, had shattered one of her precious crystal champagne glasses; I cleaned up the rest of the mess. It had been a day of minor defeats. But at least I had played the games.

Fantasia

What I enjoy most about classical music is its unpredictability. Some people like it for its relative calm; others for its elevated spirit, its quest after the sublime; others for its depths of emotion; others for its intellectual demands. While all those are important to me too, I find listening to a truly rich piece of classical music like reading a good story--I don't know where it's going to take me next, and each place it takes me is new, fresh, unexpected. Yet a good classical piece is not simply a series of disorientations--it all makes sense in retrospect, and one can listen to it again and again with the same pleasure, just as one can read a story again and again to figure out how it all works. And each time one does, the emotions it triggers return, though shaded differently by one's knowledge of what's to come.

This piece tells a continually surprising and moving story with a simplicity and innocence that only heightens its richness. Listen to it in the foreground, not the background, and perhaps you'll see what I mean.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - Fantasia in c minor, K475 (1785), Ivan Moravec, piano

Ridin' the blues

Louisiana Red - Ride On, Red, Ride On (1962)

Lightnin' Hopkins - Give Me Central 209 (1951)

Wilson Pickett - Mustang Sally (1966)