House of Mirth

Roth: the dance mix

2009-06-25T15:28:00.002-04:00

It was not quite a year ago that the Los Angeles Times published my interview with Philip Roth. In the course of our conversation, we chatted about the film adaptations of his earlier books, most of which struck the author as pretty dodgy:

Indignation will be the fifth of Roth's novels to be made into a film. I ask what he thought of the earlier adaptations, and he gives high marks to Jack Klugman and Ali MacGraw in Goodbye, Columbus, while ruefully acknowledging the cartoonish tone: "A little vulgarity goes a long way, and they did lay it on pretty heavily." And what about Ernest Lehman's version of Portnoy's Complaint, which brought back Richard Benjamin for a second turn as the author's cinematic proxy? "Unspeakable," Roth declares. "It's a movie about shouting. Jewish shouting." (He proceeds to give a brief, comical example, which strikes me as a specimen of literary history, like Thoreau demonstrating how to peel the bark off a birch tree.)

Clearly his ululating outburst impressed me. Later on, listening to the file, I decided to transform it into a brief dance mix. And now the kind folks at Melville House, always on the alert for booty-shaking literary artifacts, have posted the mix as a playable file or download. Please, check out their post and feast your ears. And feel free to spread this file far and wide. If it catches on, look out for the 15-minute club version, with additional shouting from Bernard Malamud and Isaac Bashevis Singer.

My last post, really, on the Battle of the Bards

2009-05-26T21:35:00.005-04:00

My friend Katy Evans-Bush published a piece in the Guardian a few days ago about the Walcott Affair, in which she quoted my earlier (and jocular) remark about the Nobel laureate chasing his female students around the coffee table. One anonymous reader in the comment thread alluded to my "locker-room inanities." That aside, I figured the whole fuss was over and I would never utter another syllable about it. But now I see that Ruth Padel, who was elected to the post after Walcott withdrew, has herself resigned. According to the Guardian (again):

Padel won the vote nine days ago. But in a statement tonight she said: "I genuinely believe that I did nothing intentional that led to Derek Walcott's withdrawal from the election. I wish he had not pulled out. I did not engage in a smear campaign against him, but, as a result of student concern, I naively--and with hindsight unwisely--passed on to two journalists, whom I believed to be covering the whole election responsibly, information that was already in the public domain."

She said she had acted in "good faith" and would have been "happy to lose to Derek, but I can see that people might interpret my actions otherwise. I wish to do what is best for the university and I understand that opinion there is divided. I therefore resign from the chair of poetry."

In subsequent remarks made earlier today at the Hay Festival, Padel suggested she may have been the victim of a Machiavellian conspiracy. She was meanwhile "trailed by security guards, a measure usually reserved for ex-presidents and pop stars. An event that she chaired this afternoon--a conversation with Emma Darwin, on the latter's latest novel--was monitored by four stewards, a press officer and two guards." I find the Praetorian Guard routine a little weird. What I find even weirder is the idea of a poet having a campaign manager for the Oxford post.

Stalking heads

2009-05-18T10:58:00.007-04:00

Meaning is what we arrive at after the fact--an obsessive glance in the rear-view mirror. Or so I would argue. Jung felt differently, and loved to cite a favorite line from Through the Looking-Glass: "It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards." I am inclined to wonder when I come across two stories like these on the same day. First, from Der Spiegel:

Last July, just minutes after a branch of Madame Tussaud's opened in the German capital, a 41-year-old former policeman leaped over the table at which [Adolf] Hitler was sitting. He shouted "No more war!" and beheaded the doll by twisting its beeswax head from its fiberglass body. The left hand of the figure, worth around $274,000 in total, also broke off.

Police briefly detained the man, known only as Frank L., on suspicion of damaging property and causing injury--he lightly wounded one of the two security guards who tried to stop him--and he was eventually fined $2,423. The ex-policeman said he found it inappropriate to display an exhibit showing the Nazi leader only some 500 meters from Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.

And there's this:

Someone has beheaded a statue of President James Garfield that was installed last week at an Ohio college. Hiram College spokesman Shawn Brown says the vandalism was discovered Friday morning, just a day after the sandstone statue was dedicated on the campus in Hiram, 30 miles southeast of Cleveland. Brown says the college is hoping the head will be recovered so the 95-year-old statue can be restored, but police have no leads in their investigation.

Okay, one is a political statement (a misguided one, in my opinion), and the other sounds like a frat-boy prank (unless it was a principled shot at the Crédit Mobilier scandal). Still, the human brain, if it happens to be mine, struggles to draw some poetic lesson from these distant decapitations. And let's not omit a third example, which took place back in 1969, when Abbey Road was released in the United States. Capitol put up a promotional billboard in Los Angeles, and soon after Paul McCartney's head went missing. I like the photo above for its washed-out quality and Polaroid pigments; I relish the sunlight on the scrubby vegetation and the date in the right margin. If I'm remembering correctly, Macca's head turned up some teenager's bedroom. Garfield's is still missing. Mine, whose innards resemble a perpetually agitated snow globe, is still attached.

Walsh, Auto-Tune

2009-05-15T07:59:00.006-04:00

I thought I had sworn off the whole Walcott mess--and really, I have, aside from this gossipy codicil, which surfaced in the Evening Standard last night. Readers will recall that John Walsh not only campaigned on Ruth Padel's behalf but also dredged up Walcott's record of harassment in the Independent. Now it seems that his relationship with Padel, to whom he referred as "my friend," has been rather more intimate than that. According to the paper: "Rumors have long abounded that Walsh's relationship with Padel has, in the past, been a close one. Readers of Padel's collection The Soho Leopard suggest the devilish lover in fake Armani is none other than the Independent writer himself." Indeed. Here's a specimen of the poem in question, although the identity of the speaker is certainly fluid, and may include the poet herself:

I was never your devoted lover. It was gossip,
That. All wrong, I am the Amur leopard no
One knows about, the thirty-fifth; each eye
An emerald. I'm passing by Quo
Vadis, St Anne's Court and Sunset Strip

On a summer evening trembling--water muscle
Breaking on the knife--
Edge of a dam--with promises of headlong
Encounters that might change a life.

If Walsh is Padel's ex-lover, that doesn't bar him from speaking up on her behalf. But a little more transparency might be welcome--perhaps a heart-shaped dingbat in the margin of his column. Meanwhile, he has backpedaled just a bit from his earlier assault on Walcott. "I'm sorry he's withdrawn," Walsh told the Evening Standard. "I just thought it was worth bringing up that, while he is a brilliant poet, his attitudes towards teaching poetry to young people--with a relationship that was overly close--were wrong. It was a moral rush of blood to the head."

To change the subject, at least for a few minutes: I just read a fascinating Frieze piece by Jace Clayton in defense of Auto-Tune. I'll let the author explain what he's talking about:

The most important piece of musical equipment of the last 10 years is not an instrument or a physical object. It's called Auto-Tune and is used on roughly 90 per cent of all pop songs. It is what's known as a 'plug-in,' a specialized piece of software made to be inserted into other, bigger pieces of audio software. Auto-Tune bends off-key notes into pitch perfection.

Of course I knew about the existence of Auto-Tune, and that it was used even by artists with quasi-perfect pitch (check out this recent dust-up between Billy Joel and the pugnacious Ed Champion, who needled the singer for touching up a performance of the national anthem). But I didn't realize how pervasive it was. And yes, off the top of my head, I would have considered it a crutch--a crude cosmetic for vocal blemishes. Clayton argues that in the hands of its most skilled practitioners, Auto-Tune is simply one more expansion of the palette. The human voice is not at war with this vaguely robotic technology. It's "more like glossy coexistence, a strange new dance of give-and-take," with the performer and the algorithm following each other's lead.

I was immediately reminded of the ancient prejudice against microphones, which were also once regarded as a form of cheating. As Gary Giddins pointed out in the first volume of his massive Bing Crosby biography:

According to an old theatrical shibboleth, an entertainer who could not project to the balcony's last row was not ready for the big time; Jolson exemplified the leather-lunged belter of songs. With the arrival of the microphone--and the instant exit of the preposterous megaphone--a new and more intimate kind of singing for larger audiences was made possible. Technology changed music. Ironically, mechanics led to a more human and honest transaction between singers and their listeners.

For me, the analogy holds until the last sentence. Which is to say that the microphone allowed greater intimacy between the audience and the singer, whose very intake of breath was now part of the performance. Whereas Auto-Tune still strikes me as distancing device, with the performer's humanity appearing in galvanizing glimpses. But Clayton makes the opposite argument:

Rather than novelty or some warped mimetic response to computers, Auto-Tune is a contemporary strategy for intimacy with the digital. As such, it becomes quite humanizing. Auto-Tune operates as a duet between the electronics and the personal. A reconciliation with technology. This development was sparked by a sexagenarian pop star [i.e., Cher] and spread like wildfire across genre, language, and geography. We live in a world saturated by electronics and we're finding ways to make that situation sing.

I would say more, but I can't be hanging around much longer in my striped bathrobe (the blogger's equivalent of a gray flannel suit, and yes, autographed 8X10 glossies are available on request). But if you're following the Auto-Tune debate, you should also check out the smart, quirky Artificating blog. There you can download one of the freakier products discussed in Clayton's article: DJ Champion's "Baako," where a crying baby is fed through the wicked plug-in and sounds like a set of extraterrestrial bagpipes.

Walcott: the last word (from me, anyway)

2009-05-13T08:16:00.006-04:00

Walcott has folded his tent, and this Saturday either Ruth Padel or Arvind Mehrotra will be elected the Oxford professor of poetry. I am grateful that this fuss pointed me toward Hilton Als's 2004 profile of the poet in the New Yorker--a vivid, non-hagiographic piece of work. Als admires Walcott and has some smart things to say about his poetry, especially its protracted lover's quarrel with his birthplace: St. Lucia in the Lesser Antilles. He quotes an early piece from Sea Grapes, in which Walcott's pictorial sense and peculiar music (I love "the house-shadow / where the children played house") are already on display:

Laborie, Choiseul, Vieuxfort, Dennery,
from these sun-bleached villages
where the church bell caves in the sides
of one grey-scurfed shack that is shuttered
with warped boards, with rust,
with crabs crawling under the house-shadow
where the children played house;
a net rotting among cans, the sea-net
of sunlight trolling the shallows
catching nothing all afternoon.

But Als also notes the push-and-pull aspect of Walcott's personality, which made me glad I wasn't on the long drive to Soufrière:

After what seemed like many hours, we passed the tiny town of Anse la Raye and reached the shack where Walcott wanted to stop. The ride had been awkward, full of long silences. When Walcott spoke, he was brusque but never exactly rude: he has a British penchant for distancing through politeness, and for teasing as a means of expressing hurt, anger, and resentment. There is something unforgiving in his person that is reflected in the poems. [Seamus] Heaney writes that what he loves about Walcott's poems is "the writerly fearlessness... the readiness to lift the baton and tune the big orchestra--and there's always just that hint of a possibility that if things get out of hand the baton could turn into a nightstick."

This took me straight back to my personal exposure to the poet. As I already noted on this blog, I signed up for one of his seminars at Columbia in 1983. Back then he talked a great deal about diction, especially in verse drama: he would hand out an example and we would take its rhetorical pulse as it downshifted from top-hatted formality to curt colloquialism and back again. Fascinating stuff (and very germane to Walcott's own work). He jetted down from Boston once a week, a glamorous figure, and since I usually kept my mouth shut in class, I had little direction interaction with him. But one day, he was trying to recall the opening lines of Auden's "In Praise of Limestone." By coincidence I had just been reading that very poem, and was quick to pipe up with the missing words: "If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones, / Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly / Because it dissolves in water." Perhaps I looked pleased at this minor feat of memory. In any case, Walcott glanced at me for a moment and said, "Oh, you're one of those guys who studies the index of first lines at the back of the book." Generous, no? Not to worry, I survived and thrived. And I could have done far worse, to judge from this vignette in the Hilton Als piece, in which Walcott, accompanied by Als and his companion Sigrid, maintains quality control at a St. Lucia restaurant:

We sat down. On the menu there was a dish called "Derek Walcott Acra"--a salt fish cake with Creole sauce served with sweet-potato fries.

"Hello, Mr. Walcott," the waitress said, approaching. She was young and pretty and thin, and was dressed in a skimpy piece of madras cloth. She reminded me of Walcott’s Helen. Walcott turned away from her, mock dismissive.

"I'm not speaking to you, you know," he said.

"Oh! Mr. Walcott! Why?" She seemed legitimately concerned.

"Dodo!" Sigrid said, chuckling, toying with her camera.

"You're rude to me, you know," Walcott said to the young girl, who did not laugh. "You deserve lash! You want lash!"

Walcott pulled the girl over his knee and began to spank her. The girl squealed. Now she was laughing. Her fear had turned to relief.

Walcott let the girl up. "Now you're rude no more, huh?"

"Oh, Dodo!" Sigrid said, laughing, before turning her attention to what she and Walcott could and should not eat, given their diet.

I'll have one Derek Walcott special, please. With shafafa on the side.

ADDENDUM: After posting the above, I was alerted to a 2004 Poetry Daily essay by David Orr, which addresses the broader question of why we forgive some poets their day-to-day sins and apply the bastinado to others who are surely no better. Here's the pungent opening salvo:

In response to the question, "Can a bad man be a good poet?" there are only two things to be said: "Yes" and "obviously." In part, that's because the poetry world sets the bar fairly low for "badness"--when we say a poet was a "bad man," we don't mean that he was a shotgun-toting, baby-kicking monster; we mean that he was unpleasant, disturbed, or a jerk. And considering that poetry's history is thick with unpleasant, disturbed jerks, the question would seem to answer itself.

Still, smart readers continue to bemoan the disgraceful behavior of poets, and to ask how it possibly can be reconciled with their art. In a recent New York Times review of Philip Larkin's Collected Poems, for example, Stephen Metcalf tells us that "poets are expected to be more than first-rate talents" and then asks, "How do we square this with Larkin, with his bitterness, his commitment to masturbatory solitude and his slide into gross political reaction?" In raising this question, Metcalf, a Larkin fan, is simply acceding to critical reality--if you're going to review a Larkin book, you're going to do a lot of sighing over the poet's racial slurs, spiteful quips, and dirty magazines. But why is that? Why do we feel the need to judge a Larkin or a Lowell or a Pound--or at least to judge them morally? What do we mean by "bad," anyway? And why continue to ask a question about poetic morality whose answer--"Yes, obviously"--has been proven over and over and over again, century after century, from Blake to Shelley to Rimbaud to Frost?

I should note that Derek Walcott is not on trial in Orr's article. Look for the usual suspects, cited in the excerpt above: Larkin, Lowell, Pound. Still, Orr's arguments are completely relevant, and he makes an often overlooked point--we're more shocked by the bad behavior of poets whose work has cast over the reader at least an elementary spell of self-identification.

Walcott: the plot thickens

2009-05-11T14:31:00.007-04:00

Last week I posted a few thoughts about the white-hot battle for the Oxford professorship in poetry. In a nutshell, I felt that Derek Walcott's accomplishment as a poet easily qualified him for the gig, despite his unsavory history of hitting on female students. It wasn't as if Oxford were hiring him to teach--the professorship is an honorary position, with a small stipend and few duties beyond a handful of lectures. I think that is still a defensible position. Yet I was also too cavalier about Walcott's skirt-chasing, and Seth Abramson at Suburban Ecstasies took me to task for that. For perhaps the first time in my life, I had become the poster boy for retrograde male chauvinism. There ensued an exchange of views in the comment thread, and rather than endlessly rephrasing, I'll just post some of the salient bits:

JM: As the author of that sick defense (I'll omit the quotation marks around both words), I thought I would put in my two cents here. In the very same blog post you quote, I said that if Walcott had truly blackmailed students into sleeping with him, he should have been kicked to the curb back in the 1980s. What to do about his rotten behavior twenty or thirty years after the fact is a little more complicated. As for admiration turning into intimacy, I wasn't blaming his female students (although I can see why it might have appeared that way). I was speaking more generally about Walcott coveting Robert Lowell's tie, or me coveting Richard Ford's fork. I don't in any way endorse sexual harassment. I consider it a great relief that the fuzzy rules governing such conduct, which allowed Walcott a free pass twenty-five years ago, have gotten much tighter.

SA: I'm glad you mentioned Walcott deserving the employment axe in the 1980s, though in saying "to be fair, he was hardly the only poet to take advantage of his harem of youthful admirers," I'm not sure I see the relevance--it's not about fairness to Walcott, but the students, and every single professor who "took advantage of his harem" needed to be axed, period. If Walcott had been the only one caught, then Walcott should have gone, and that would have been fair. If twenty professors had been caught, then twenty should have been axed, and that would have been fair. Each act would have an inherent fairness not diminished by any failure to root out additional violators.

Had Walcott apologized publicly and amended his behavior, twenty or thirty years might change this story somewhat. But there's been no apology, and no particular reason to think the behavior's been amended, either, so Walcott is (it seems to me) as deserving of censure now as ever--he's done nothing to heal the wounds he caused or to rehabilitate himself.

As for Lowell and Ford, my feeling is that poets are just people--typically more flawed than most, and less giving of themselves than most (because poetry engenders its own sort of egotism), and therefore hardly worthy of any sort of blind admiration. I'm certain I've met several hundred men in my life who are greater men than Walcott, and none of them were famous.

JM: As for my comment about the long, pathetic practice of American poets sleeping with their students--I wasn't trying exonerate Walcott. I was only suggesting that the laxity applied to his case in the 1980s may have stemmed in part from the sense that this was going on all over. (And yes, from the fact that he was a celebrated black poet and likely Nobel laureate.)

If Walcott had apologized or made some public show of contrition, that indeed would have changed matters (somewhat, anyway). Since he didn't--and since he was still making like a lounge lizard as recently as 1998--I should amend my earlier blog post and concede that he's probably not the right guy for the Oxford job. To hire him would send a bad, destructive message. Meanwhile, here's another question: in fifty years, would you rather read the great poetry of an asshole or the capable poetry of a really good person? The answer sticks in my craw. It doesn't persuade me that Walcott should get the Oxford professorship.

Finally, Lowell's tie and Ford's fork. I don't consider poets to be better or less fallible than other people. There are many shining examples of cruel, selfish, and manipulative poets. But we could probably find similar percentages among garbage men and paleontologists. So, no blind admiration, just a human (and humorous) itch to borrow a little magic from your hero. That's why I took Ford's fork (although he's not my hero) and that's why I considered stealing a plum from the tree in front of Keats' house in Hampstead (although it wasn't the original tree).

I have no reason to doubt Abramson's claim that he's up to his neck in great men. I would also suggest that he's confusing different sorts of greatness. We don't admire (or even worship) poets for their strength of character, but for their demonic negotiation of language and experience--which, as Abramson concedes, is often at odds with their scuzzy day-to-day behavior. That said, I did come around to his point of view. In other words, I think that Walcott's history of sexual harassment does make him a less-than-attractive candidate for the professorship.

Meanwhile, according to the Times Online, Walcott's history as a "sex pest" is now being anonymously circulated to potential voters:

The race to win poetry's most prestigious academic post has turned dirty after Oxford academics were anonymously sent a lurid dossier accusing Derek Walcott, the front runner and Nobel laureate, of being a sex pest. The package was circulated last week to staff and graduates eligible to vote in next Saturday's election for the Oxford professorship of poetry, as well as to the offices of Cherwell, a student newspaper.

Straight out of The Human Stain, isn't it? Further down, the Times article includes some extra detail about the anonymous dossier:

About 50-100 electors, including dons and heads of colleges, have been sent the Walcott dossier, posted from London. The only clue to the sender’s identity came in a note with Cherwell’s package. It was signed "Sandra and Jane."

The envelopes contain photocopied pages from an obscure academic work, The Lecherous Professor, which detail Walcott's attempts to lure the Harvard student into bed.

The Daily Mail quotes Hermione Lee, who has been one of Walcott's most prominent supporters (and is also a professor at Oxford). She has a starchy reaction to the poison-pen maneuvering behind the dossier ("an unpleasant way of carrying on") and goes on to reiterate many of the same arguments I initially made. "Should great poets who behave badly be locked away from social interaction?" she asks. "We are acting as purveyors of poetry, not of chastity." Addressing Cherwell, the eminent biographer of Edith Wharton (certainly not chaste) and Philip Roth (even less so) also compared Walcott to some of his randy predecessors: "You might ask yourself as a student body whether you wanted Byron or Shelley as a professor of poetry, neither of whom had personal lives free from criticism."

UPDATE: According to the Guardian, Walcott has withdrawn from the race. "I am disappointed that such low tactics have been used in this election and I do not want to get into a race for a post where it causes embarrassment to those who have chosen to support me for the role or to myself," he told the Evening Standard. "I already have a great many work commitments and while I was happy to be put forward for the post, if it has degenerated into a low and degrading attempt at character assassination, I do not want to be part of it."

"Blumine" and Budweiser

2009-05-07T21:05:00.007-04:00

This morning I cabbed it over to Avery Fisher Hall and attended an open rehearsal by the New York Philharmonic, under the baton of its incoming conductor Alan Gilbert. What a pleasure to stand out in the lobby beforehand, drinking gratis coffee and enjoying the self-selecting company of hundreds of Mahler fiends. When I eased into my tenth-row seat, just a few of the orchestra members were visible: a couple of cellists were practicing bits of the Mahler One. It's strange and touching to see the performers in their street clothes. They seem less heroic, less elevated, more like normal human beings, each of whom happens to be endowed with an extraordinary power: X-Men, X-Women.

Gradually the entire orchestra trickled onstage, followed by the conductor in a black shirt and dark slacks. Without much preamble, Gilbert cued the A-natural drone that begins the symphony--nearly a minute of pure suspension, with the reeds, brass, and flutes passing around one of those two-note cuckoo calls that should sound like nature kitsch but never do. The trumpets played their fanfare offstage, possibly from a room with a soda machine in it (or so I like to imagine), then quietly snuck into their seats. And off we went. Two or three times I thought the string section--which includes the conductor's mother, Yoke Takebe--was shouted down by rest of the ensemble. I heard a single fluffed note during a brass entrance. Otherwise the performance was a treat, imbued with the sort of ardent precision that would have made Mahler faint with pleasure. It certainly put to shame the agreeable shambles he described in an 1894 letter to Arnold Berliner, when he conducted the piece in Weimar:

Performance, after utterly inadequate rehearsal, extremely shoddy. Orchestra retrospectively extremely satisfied with symphony as result of barrel of free beer, also their affections won by my style of conducting. My brother was there--extremely satisfied with demi-failure--myself ditto with semi-success!

I won't go through the performance bar by bar (or beer by beer). I will note Gilbert's supple handling of the third movement, especially that hushed passage smack in the middle, which David Hurwitz (in The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual) calls "one of those Mahlerian oases of peace, made all the more gripping by appearing in such lurid surroundings." That sounds about right. The effect is like emerging into a clearing after a long trudge through the woods, with diffuse sunlight everywhere and no motion of any kind. So beautiful, and so brief--after a couple of minutes, it's back into the rough, with Frère Jacques and a klezmer band ringing in your ears.

After the intermission, the orchestra played "Blumine," an eight-minute-long pastoral that was originally the second movement of the symphony we had just heard. It's Mahler in a mellow mood, with none of the manic alternation that is his greatest virtue and intermittent vice. What I wanted to dwell on, though, is the fact that after struggling for seven years to incorporate this palate-cleanser into the symphony, he dropped it entirely in 1896. At that point "Blumine" vanished. It didn't resurface until 1959, when the manuscript went up for sale at Sotheby's. It was published as a freestanding piece in 1968, and is occasionally, blasphemously inserted back into the symphony by a renegade conductor. The general feeling is that it extended the bucolic vibe of the first movement for too long, and thereby violated the overall trajectory of the symphony. In other words, its exclusion was logical, even inevitable.

Critics (myself included) love to talk about the inevitability of a work of art. For the most part, that is absolute crap. Art is created by fickle, fallible human beings, who may well make the most momentous decisions about their work on a bad hair day. Mahler is a great example, since he was constantly shuffling movements around, thinning and thickening his orchestrations, trying to turn demi-failure into semi-success. Sure, there is such a thing as formal perfection, to which we listeners respond with a kind of cooing satisfaction. But plenty of the biggest thrills--the moments that give you goosebumps and palpitations and the distinct, almost perverse sense that you are peering directly into another person's consciousness--come when the artist tosses logic out the window. "A work of art is never finished, only abandoned," said Paul Valéry (or Edgar Degas or Leonardo Da Vinci, depending on which unreliable website you consult). I'm hoping it was Da Vinci, since he seemed allergic to finishing anything, including a meal. But it's correct in any case. The only inevitability is that sooner or later, the artist will cry uncle and resolve to do better next time.

NBCC Reads: Works in Translation

2009-05-06T21:12:00.004-04:00

The latest installment of NBCC Reads, which is all about works in translation, has now been posted over at Critical Mass. It entailed boiling down about 9,000 words of copy into a dapper post a third of that size--and I admit I like the carpentry involved in such a task. I crammed as many of the responses as I could in there. The rest will appear on Critical Mass as freestanding Long Tail posts, and there are definitely some treats to come. Here's an example (in which very few of the words are mine):

Then there was that Everest of French letters, whose vertiginous heights and winding descents have bested many a translator: Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. Daniel Dyer saw the multi-volume monster as an absolute summit. "I am in my sixties," he said, "and recovering from prostate cancer surgery. I decided it was, well… time. I read 100 pages a day, every day, until I finished the volumes. I think these are the greatest literary works ever written by a human being. I've not read everything, of course--not even everything that's celebrated. But I cannot imagine anything better."

Michael Sims agreed, praising the magic-lantern quality of Proust's imagery and his prodigal, preening cast of characters. "Most of the time," he concedes, "I find the characters maddening--petty, self-absorbed, posturing, judgmental, although of course often hilarious and sometimes tragic. But I don't read for the characters. I read, I think, for the cinematography. Has there ever been such loving attention to the sensualities of the moment? 'It was on the Méséglise way that I first noticed the round shadow that apple trees make on the sunny earth and those silks of impalpable gold which the sunset weaves obliquely under the leaves, and which I saw my father interrupt with his stick without deflecting them.' I quote this almost random selection (from the Lydia Davis translation) as an example of the kind of snapshot imagery that Proust seems to casually exhale without thinking: the glimpse immortalized. So generous is his encyclopedic curiosity, so Olympian his empathy, that even passing shadows have personality."

Please do take a look at the entire omnium gatherum here. And stop by Critical Mass over the next month for the dessert course.

Wright stuff

2009-05-01T10:03:00.007-04:00

My interview with Evan Wright, author of Generation Kill and Hella Nation (not my favorite title, but an excellent and entertaining collection) has been posted over at CJR. We talked about Hunter S. Thompson, the insidious power of televised imagery, and the author's transformative experience on the set of The World's Biggest Gang Bang II. Here's a sample, in which Wright discusses his youthful infatuation with Eldridge Cleaver:

CJR: What else draws you to these voiceless subjects, whom you call "rejectionists" in your introduction?

Wright: Well, here’s a little personal narrative that I didn’t put into the introduction. In a nutshell: when I was thirteen, I was insanely obsessed with Eldridge Cleaver's Soul On Ice. This was in rural Ohio, where I wanted to lead a Black Panther revolution. I ran away, and was sent to a home for troubled kids. That all resolved itself, years ago, but I still have a real affection for people struggling with some ridiculous obsession. I want to be a voice for the voiceless--you know, that noble thing--but I also have a personal affinity for rejectionists.

CJR: One great strength of the book is that you can write about Wingnut and his comical cadre without making fun of them.

Wright: I’m glad that comes across. I’m trying to reject the whole hipster irony culture. You know the idea: you leave New York or Los Angeles (two places where I’ve spent most of my adult life), and then you find idiots in the hinterlands, and show what buffoons they are. I suppose that because I actually am from the hinterlands, I dislike that kind of journalism.

You can read the rest here.

Al is gone

2009-04-29T08:02:00.005-04:00

I'm very sad to say that Al died last night. He was twenty years old, a venerable age for a cat, and had already survived more than one brush with death. His kidney was failing, and over the last few months he had become increasingly gaunt, but he remained a sociable little being to the very end. I do believe he had a soul--a small one, no bigger than an apricot--and that's what I will miss.

I keep thinking of Wislawa Szymborska's "Cat in an Empty Apartment," which I wrote about on this blog once before. The situation in the poem is different: the cat has survived its master (not an appropriate word, given the upper hand many felines have in the household). But the sensation of grief, and of an inexplicable vacancy, feels just right. So I'll quote it again in its entirety:

Die--you can't do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here,
but nothing is the same.
Nothing has been moved,
but there's more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they're new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn't start
at its usual time.
Something doesn't happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet has been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken,
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
Just sleep and wait.

Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

Walcott: the chair, the tie, plus Ford's fork

2009-04-28T09:36:00.004-04:00

Over at the Independent, John Walsh wonders whether Derek Walcott's long history of skirt-chasing should prevent him from assuming the Oxford professorship in poetry. This isn't your average academic gig: the holder has few duties and a measly salary (£6,901, the equivalent of $10,000 and change). But there are some glorious predecessors, including Matthew Arnold--who inaugurated in the chair in 1865--Robert Graves, and W.H. Auden. The other peculiarity is that the professor is elected by Oxford graduates, instead of being selected by the usual conclave of backstabbing colleagues. In his piece, Walsh handicaps the race, which has narrowed to just two candidates:

[Christopher] Ricks steps down next month, and Oxford graduates are lining up like pompom-waving cheerleaders to vote their favourite candidates into his vacated throne: supporting my old friend Ruth Padel will be the biographer Victoria Glendinning, the philosopher AC Grayling, and Sir Jeremy Isaacs. Against her in this two-horse Parnassian gallop is Derek Walcott, the St Lucia-born poet and 1992 Nobel literature laureate. His fans include Marina Warner, Hermione Lee and the Booker prize-winner Alan Hollinghurst.

The chair of the English faculty board, Dr Sally Mapstone, has said: "The two candidates... both have excellent credentials for the post, and each has an outstanding record as an ambassador for the subject. It would be a great privilege to have either of them as Oxford's professor of poetry for the next five years."

Have Walcott's fans all forgotten the shadows of sexual harassment allegations that have swirled around their man over the years? Should one not mention Ms Nicole Niemi, 30 years his junior, who came forward in 1995 to claim that, when she was a creative writing graduate student in the 1980s, Walcott threatened to fail her unless she went to bed with him? When she declined, she alleged that he told her the play she'd written for the course couldn't, in that case, be produced. Years after the event, Ms Niemi was looking for half a million dollars in compensation and punitive damages before the claim was eventually settled.

I briefly studied with Derek Walcott during the early 1980s. Being male, hirsute, and non-blond, I didn't have to worry about him hitting on me, and found him an inspiring teacher. But there were always rumors about his dalliances with female students. To be fair, he was hardly the only poet to take advantage of his harem of youthful admirers. And one acquaintance, who apparently declined his physical advances but still fraternized with the future Nobelist during the off hours, conceded that he had a certain "integrity" even when he was chasing you around the coffee table.

Now, if Walcott truly threatened to fail a student unless she slept with him, he should have been kicked out of the university at once. And the Niemi dispute is not an isolated incident. Still, one hopes that a genius would have eventually learned his lesson. The other problem is that in the long run, poetic accomplishment trumps bad behavior. Also: admiration is always itching to turn into intimacy. Walcott himself, early in his career, had a thing for Robert Lowell's ties, as he recounts in What the Twilight Says:

In his apartment, about to go out somewhere with him, I fix the knot of Cal's tie. He returns the knot to its loose tilt. "Casual elegance," he says, his hands too large to be those of a boulevardier. The correction was technical, one moment's revelation of style. His verse, in that period of two close books, Near the Ocean and For the Union Dead, had the casual symmetry of a jacket draped on a chair, genius in shirtsleeves. He had written about the stiffness that paralyzed his metre, how he found its rigidities unbearable to recite, skipping words when he read in public to contract them like asides. He had learned this from Beat poetry and William Carlos Williams. Still, his free verse was not a tieless metre....

On another occasion, and the reader must not think that I have a fetish about poets' ties, I admired, with casualness, a pale orange-and-brown-figured tie he wore. He took it off and gave it to me. I did not fawn on Lowell the poet. I did not collect bits of his clothing like his valet. Yet he once made a terrible accusation as if I were. "You use people," he told me. It was a night when he was "going off." Darkness hadn't yet come, but the light was dimming. I didn't know, as his older friends knew, how to recognize the spark that meant that, like Hieronymo, he would be mad again.

Regarding the ties, I believe that Walcott doth protest too much. It's not a fetish, just a desire to make off with a tiny splinter of your household god. One of my college professors owned a chocolate-brown suit that had belonged to Wallace Stevens. How he got hold of this item I don't recall, but I often pictured it hanging in his closet, possibly in an archival garment bag. What was it good for? Did the owner put it on when he wrote his own poetry, praying that the tropical wool still retained some juju in its stiff, bronze-decor-colored folds? And finally, a mea culpa: once, having recently read and admired The Sportswriter, I found myself sitting at a restaurant table adjacent to Richard Ford's. When his party left, I leaned over and swiped his fork. I was young, I was tipsy, and yes, I gave the tines a quick wipe with my napkin, then stuck the fork in my jacket pocket. I don't know what that was good for either. Later on, with a strange twinge of guilt, I threw it away.

Straight Outta Albuquerque: J.M.G. Le Clézio at the Y

2009-04-27T10:29:00.005-04:00

My report on J.M.G. Le Clézio's appearance at the 92nd Street Y has been posted over at Words Without Borders. The author was tall, dignified, and self-deprecating. There was no conversation about whether he had been surprised by the Nobel, but his wife, in Le Clézio's telling, knew exactly how to handle the long-distance call: "Someone said, This is so-and-so from the Swedish Academy, and she said to me, This is for you." The excellent interlocutor was Adam Gopnik (small, elated, with a slight Dick Cavett vibe), and here's a sample bit:

Travel seemed to be in his DNA, suggested Gopnik, not merely a matter of circumstance. Le Clézio agreed. His ancestors were from Brittany, which he compared to Ireland: a land whose perennial poverty caused its people to leave "whenever they could." Yet the one constant, no matter where Le Clézio ended up, was the French language. This first love, this loyalty, began during his childhood. "I very much enjoyed going through dictionaries," he recalled. "I still see life through those page, those definitions."

At this point the two writers shared a moment of lexicological bliss (Gopnik indicated a preference for the big illustrated Larousse). Then they moved on to another of Le Clézio’s early infatuations: J.D. Salinger, who Gopnik described as "one of the local gods" at The New Yorker. What the French author loved about Salinger was, in a sense, what he loved about the dictionary: an accumulation of luminous details, and the feeling that "each word is a world by itself." He had particular praise for "A Perfect Day for Bananafish," which he called "one of the best short stories ever written." Albert Camus also got high marks from his fellow Nobel laureate, for his refusal to deliver knee-jerk messages of affirmation.

You can read the rest here.

Mary, Mary

2009-04-21T08:42:00.000-04:00

Lately I've seen a run of bad plays. I don't go to the theater that much, and certainly don't get comp tickets, but it wasn't really the wasted cash that bothered me. It was the suspicion that I was turning into one of those cranky, anhedonic types--I always think of Max von Sydow in Hannah and Her Sisters, eating a tuna sandwich and pouring out his Scandavian scorn upon whatever happened to be on the television. First there was Irena's Vow, a specimen of Holocaust kitsch only halfway redeemed by Tovah Feldshuh's performance in the lead role. (Talk about typecasting: Feldshuh cut her teeth playing Golda Meir, and now she's the first call when you need a resilient Jewish female--although Irena Gut Opdkye, the real-life Pole whose heroics form the basis of the play, was not herself Jewish.) Before we even set foot in the theater, I made a prediction to my companion: there would be a moment where the heroine confronted a Nazi officer and said, "I know there is good in you." When that moment came, she gave a little inward groan, and I just smiled.

Then there was Impressionism, which marked the first appearance of Jeremy Irons on Broadway in 25 years. The last time around, he won a Tony for his role in Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing. If I simultaneously squint and do the multiplication tables in my head, I can just about see how Irons was fooled into thinking that Mark Jacobs' script had a Stoppardian stamp to it. There is a good deal of structural trickery, the actors speak in mild paradoxes, and Jacobs does attempt to monkey with the art-and-life equation. One problem is that the metaphorical lesson he gleans from the Impressionists--that you have to stand way, way back to see the pretty picture, and that goes double for the emotional picture--is completely banal. The other problem is that there is zero chemistry between Irons and his leading lady, the excellent Joan Allen. And compressing this two-act stinker into a single act doesn't help. (I'm being very negative, aren't I? Bring me my tuna sandwich.)

What snapped this losing streak was an imported British production of Friedrich von Schiller's Mary Stuart. The staging--including a search-and-destroy raid by Elizabethan security men that commences while the lights are still up, and a sizzling onstage downpour--is consistently striking. I've never read the original play (surprise), but Peter Oswald's adaptation hits the sweet spot between period flavor and contemporary jazziness: you sense the archaic idiom without getting bogged down in it. And the leading ladies, Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter, are perfectly matched in their passive-aggressive battle for the British throne. Walter's Elizabeth I has the whip hand, of course--she's already queen. So what we get is asymmetrical warfare, with McTeer's Mary Stuart deploying the weaker party's favorite weapons: guilt, guile, morality. The play is perhaps too talky, especially in the first act. One senses the heavy hand of Basil Exposition for the first fifteen minutes, filling in the blanks. But it the end, Mary Stuart does cast its swift, cerebral spell. And there's an additional novelty to the female cut-and-thrust. In an era of rigid patriarchy, these women are contending for absolute power, while the coterie of scheming men, who seem to have taken a management course with Niccolò Machiavelli, scuttle around their feet.

J.G. Ballard departs

2009-04-20T16:14:00.003-04:00

While I wasn't looking, the 78-year-old J.G. Ballard died on Sunday. The BBC obituary quotes his agent to the effect that he been sick "for several years," and notes that Ballard himself, while frequently pigeonholed as a science fiction writer, described his books as "picturing the psychology of the future." I find it telling, and poignant, that although two of Ballard's books (Empire of the Sun and Crash) had been made into high-visibility films, the obituary's headline still calls him a "cult author." Perhaps his penchant for dystopian grime and queasy sexuality (which was surely part of the allure for Crash director David Cronenberg) kept the masses at a suitable distance. So did his cool sensibility, which occasionally tilted toward flat-affect, chrome-plated minimalism.

Still, Ballard strikes me as one of those authors with a distinctive enough vision of the world that his name is ripe for transformation into an adjective. (Whoops: it already happened.) I wrote about his work twice. The first time, I reviewed what must have been an American reissue of The Drowned World. The novel, Ballard's second, first appeared in England in 1962. By then the author had quit his assistant editor gig at Chemistry and Industry, a trade journal whose clinical tone may have crept into his own prose, keeping his sometimes florid surrealism in check. Where that piece I appeared I can no longer recall, but I did like the book's evocation of a drenched and diluvial planet--which, in the age of Katrina and a melting polar ice cap, seems less science-fictional with each passing year.

Later on, in 1989, I reviewed Running Wild for the New York Times. Reading the tiny piece now, I feel slightly embarrassed by my dismissive tone, but I doubt that this particular book will loom very large in the Ballardian (there we go) canon. Here's the piece in its entirety:

Over the last 25 years, the British writer J. G. Ballard has touched a great many stylistic bases, ranging from straight science fiction (The Drowned World) to abrasive experimentalism (Crash) to autobiographical realism (Empire of the Sun). But regardless of genre, Mr. Ballard's books have tended to share certain qualities, including a fascination with electronic media, a taste for black-comic paradox and, most of all, an ability to immerse the reader in different fictional worlds. Running Wild, which is presented as the forensic diaries of Dr. Richard Greville, a psychiatric adviser to the London police, certainly bears the first two of these trademarks. Greville has been asked to investigate the Pangbourne Massacre, a mysterious tragedy in which the 32 adult residents of an exclusive community 30 miles west of London have been murdered, and their 13 children apparently abducted. Who could have carried out such an atrocity? And why? Greville lists the various theories put forth by the authorities, in order of escalating absurdity. He watches hours of videotaped evidence and ponders the community's way of life, one in which "scarcely a minute of the children's lives had not been intelligently planned." Slowly--more slowly, in any case, than most readers--he comes to the conclusion that the assassins were the children themselves. The Pangbourne offspring, he concludes, "were rebelling against... a despotism of kindness. They killed to free themselves from a tyranny of love and care." Really? The assumptions Running Wild is supposed to challenge, such as the fairy-tale version of family happiness, haven't been widely accepted for decades. Nor has Mr. Ballard given himself ample space to compensate for his warmed-over concept: the novel's 104 pages immerse us no deeper than the ankles. Running Wild has its pleasures, but it's J. G. Ballard at his scantiest, his most reduced. What he gives us here is a dream communicated in Morse code.

Finally, I must note the existence of a superb fan site: Ballardian, already cited above. The archives include an excellent and expansive interview with the author. There is a chortling discussion of how one publisher's reader rejected the Crash manuscript with a couple of curt, diagnostic sentences: "This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do not publish." More to the point, Ballard defends even his darkest work as covertly affirmative:

You know, to be a human being is quite a role to play. Each of us wakes up in the morning and we inhabit a very dangerous creature capable of brilliance in many ways, but capable also of huge self-destructive episodes. And we live with this dangerous creature every minute we're awake. Something like The Atrocity Exhibition sums up my fiction: the attempt by a rather wounded character--in this case, a psychiatrist having a nervous breakdown; there are similar figures throughout the rest of my fiction--to make something positive out of the chaos that surrounds him, to create some sort of positive mythology that can sustain one's confidence in the world. Even something like Kingdom Come is affirmative, where I show a clear and present danger being dealt with, and one of the key figures responsible realizing the error of his ways. So in that respect, I agree with you completely: my fiction is affirmative.

"A sober, concrete, and symmetrical city"

2009-04-20T13:57:00.003-04:00

Last week, in a minor fit of completism, I ordered The Cambridge Companion to Primo Levi. No doubt I'll find some edifying things in the book, along with a certain amount of scholarly desiccation. Thumbing through it the other day, I came across this quote from a 1976 panel discussion in Switzerland, where Levi talked about his attachment to Turin and the surrounding Piedmont:

My bond to my "little homeland" [piccola patria] is very strong. I came into the world in Turin, my forebears were all Piedmontese; I found my vocation in Turin, I studied there, I've always lived there, I've worked, had a family, written and published all my books there, with a publisher deeply rooted in the local soil, for all its international renown. I love the city, its dialect, its streets, its pavements, its avenues, the hill and the mountains that surround it, which I climbed as a boy, I like the rural and hill-dweller roots of its people, the conscientiousness of its workers, the flair of its artisans, the rigor of its technicians.... My way of writing is influenced for certain in no small degree by my chemical profession but also in part by having been formed in a sober, concrete, and symmetrical city, a technical city where I have carved out my own niche.

Living as he did in the same apartment where he was born (and where he would later die), Levi was unusually entrenched in his native soil. I visited Turin just once, when I was researching my abortive biography of Levi. It was February, the skies were overcast, the trees dripped and a thick fog alternately hid and revealed bits of the surrounding hills. I found Turin beautiful, but it had the introverted appeal of a Northern European city. Since it kept raining, and since both my wife and myself were nursing colds, we spent much of the time in the low-end hotel near the railroad station, watching snowy RAI broadcasts on television. But I did meet with Levi's son, Renzo, who told me in the kindest possible way that his family was opposed to the prying efforts of biographers like myself. Now I can see that it was much, much too soon: the author had died, an almost certain suicide, less than two years before. The family was still absorbing the shock, and closing ranks at the mere thought of an outsider airing its none-too-dirty laundry. So I halted my research. Yet my memory of Levi's symmetrical city, where everything seemed to be gray or black or the soft green of oxidized metal, remains vivid.

Their glittering eyes are gay

2009-04-13T16:52:00.002-04:00

My days as an Amazon pundit are pretty much behind me, but I couldn't resist wading in when I heard about the company's new anti-gay algorithm. That's right, it seems that hundreds of books by (mostly) gay authors have been stripped of their sales rankings and excluded, in some cases, from product searches. I can hardly imagine somebody at Amazon dreaming up this retail pogrom, and assume it was either a botched implementation of a different initiative or some hacker's idea of a great joke. In either case, the company has some explaining to do. Here's a bit from my post over on the Propeller blog:

A cursory trawl of the Amazon site reveals a crazy quilt of exclusionary bloopers. John Fox's The Boys on the Rocks, a gay coming-of-age story that is not remotely pornographic, with a cover endorsement by the straight-as-an-arrow Richard Price, has no sales ranking. Meanwhile, something called Slave Boy, whose surfeit of graphic detail has caused even the publisher to issue a consumer alert, is still ranked (at a very decent 3,296, by the way).

As noted by the Jacket Copy blog at the Los Angeles Times, Paul Monette's Becoming a Man, which won the 1992 National Book Award, has been bumped to the back of the bus. So has Radclyffe Hall's 1928 classic The Well of Loneliness. Now, the sexual content in Hall's novel, which occasioned a public scandal and lengthy court battle before it could be passed through U.S. Customs, is limited to seven words: "and that night, they were not divided." Something tells me that Lights, Camera, Sex!, by porn star Christy Canyon, has a much higher smut ratio. Shouldn't this fall under the proud, saucy banner of "adult" content? Yet it retains its sales ranking, possibly because the star of I Like To Be Watched settled down into a healthy monogamous relationship at the end of the book.

You can read the whole thing, which includes a misty-eyed glimpse down Memory Lane to my own tenure at the company, here.

The Beatles finally go digital!

2009-04-07T10:51:00.007-04:00

After years of grumbling and repeated false alarms, EMI has finally announced that the full Beatles catalog will be released in spanking-new, digitally remastered versions on September 9, 2009. Folks, let's go straight to the press release:

Apple Corps Ltd. and EMI Music are delighted to announce the release of the original Beatles catalogue, which has been digitally re-mastered for the first time, for worldwide CD release on Wednesday, September 9, 2009 (9-9-09), the same date as the release of the widely anticipated "The Beatles: Rock Band" video game. Each of the CDs is packaged with replicated original UK album art, including expanded booklets containing original and newly written liner notes and rare photos. For a limited period, each CD will also be embedded with a brief documentary film about the album. On the same date, two new Beatles boxed CD collections will also be released.

The albums have been re-mastered by a dedicated team of engineers at EMI's Abbey Road Studios in London over a four year period utilising state of the art recording technology alongside vintage studio equipment, carefully maintaining the authenticity and integrity of the original analogue recordings. The result of this painstaking process is the highest fidelity the catalogue has seen since its original release.

The collection comprises all 12 Beatles albums in stereo, with track listings and artwork as originally released in the UK, and Magical Mystery Tour, which became part of The Beatles' core catalogue when the CDs were first released in 1987. In addition, the collections Past Masters Vol. I and II are now combined as one title, for a total of 14 titles over 16 discs. This will mark the first time that the first four Beatles albums will be available in stereo in their entirety on compact disc. These 14 albums, along with a DVD collection of the documentaries, will also be available for purchase together in a stereo boxed set.

Within each CD's new packaging, booklets include detailed historical notes along with informative recording notes. With the exception of the Past Masters set, newly produced mini-documentaries on the making of each album, directed by Bob Smeaton, are included as QuickTime files on each album. The documentaries contain archival footage, rare photographs and never-before-heard studio chat from The Beatles, offering a unique and very personal insight into the studio atmosphere.

It seems like only yesterday that Allan Kozinn was griping about EMI's intransigence, and suggesting that DIY product from Dr. Ebbetts or Purple Chick would have to satisfy our longings for the conceivable future. Now comes this delightful cornucopia, which will siphon a great many dollars from my pocket and put my old 1987 CDs into permanent storage. Just for the record, I will not be buying the additional box of mono mixes, described by EMI as "for collectors only." A second codicil: I am ecstatic to see these remasters under any circumstances, but very faintly indignant that they have been timed to coincide with the release of the "Beatles: Rock Band" video game. Why not just skip this asinine (and, I'm sure, enormously lucrative) merchandising gimmick, declare a bank holiday on September 9, and be done with it?

A few additional details. EMI has supplied some information about the mastering process itself (I assume this exists on the official Beatles site, but I found on Steve Marinucci's Fab-intensive Examiner blog). Good to know they're blowing dust off the tape heads between each song. Even more interesting is the discussion of audio restoration and noise reduction:

Transferring was a lengthy procedure done a track at a time. Although EMI tape does not suffer the oxide loss associated with some later analogue tapes, there was nevertheless a slight build up of dust, which was removed from the tape machine heads between each title.

From the onset, considerable thought was given to what audio restorative processes were going to be allowed. It was agreed that electrical clicks, microphone vocal pops, excessive sibilance and bad edits should be improved where possible, so long as it didn't impact on the original integrity of the songs.

In addition, de-noising technology, which is often associated with remastering, was to be used, but subtly and sparingly. Eventually, less than five of the 525 minutes of Beatles music was subjected to this process. Finally, as is common with today’s music, overall limiting--to increase the volume level of the CD--has been used, but on the stereo versions only. However, it was unanimously agreed that because of the importance of The Beatles' music, limiting would be used moderately, so as to retain the original dynamics of the recordings.

My hackles rose (quite a sight, by the way) at the part about microphone vocal pops. For the uninitiated, non-geek visitors to HOM: when a singer records in a studio, a thin sheet of nylon mesh is positioned in front of the microphone. This prevents plosive consonants like "P" and "B" from overloading the recording and causing distortion. Back in the glory days at EMI, the Beatles actually used a more substantial variety of screen: a curved rectangle of metallic mesh that was snapped right onto the microphone. And they mostly worked. That's why the "P" in "Sergeant Pepper" doesn't sound like a champagne cork exploding next to your ear. Now, I know the engineers supervising these remasters have the right, reverent attitude toward their source material. But the idea of muffling vocal pops and sibilance does raise some interesting questions about how much tinkering is permissible. Will the sharp intake of breath in "Girl" lose any of its agonized languor? I hope not.

Finally: many fans will assume that this great leap forward will also open to the door to track-by-track sales of Beatles music at online stores. Apparently that's not the case. According to this piece by Robert Andrews at paidContent.org, the longstanding wrangles between EMI and the surviving Beatles about online sales have not yet been resolved. The issue seems to be, uh, money. Andrews does speculate about which format will eventually give Beatles fans the most bang for their buck when online distribution does get underway. In the end, however, this quibbling over compression formats is getting less relevant by the minute. The bad news for the Beatles--and for every other recording artist--is that once the remasters go on sale, FLAC versions will immediately pop up on torrent sites around the globe. Me, I want the fancy package and the legit discs, but I'm a little old-fashioned that way. Meanwhile, lossy formats like MP3 and AAC work just fine for anybody born after, say, 1987. There's no turning back the clock:

But the Rock Band project is clearly about more than just the game, and the harmony that broke out between EMI, Apple Corps and new game partner Harmonix for the game will have had an interesting side-effect. Producer Giles Martin, son of Beatles producer Sir George, had said the game will adhere to his father's original mixes. Tidied up with today's audio editing software for the game and now the CD reissue, they may also sound good enough to take advantage of modern, digital sound systems. Distributed online, however, the new high fidelity would be all lost as MP3 or AAC and would depend on high-quality FLAC files, still used only by audiophiles.

Scofield's good news

2009-04-06T08:22:00.005-04:00

When four guys pull into town to play New Orleans-style funk, and one of them is ex-Meters bassist George Porter Jr., the bar is set very high. And during John Scofield's show last night at B.B. King's, I was initially disappointed by drummer Ricky Fataar's more relaxed groove. This is unfair: the guy is not Ziggy Modeliste. (Nor was Ziggy Modeliste a member of both the Beach Boys and the Rutles.) More to the point, Scofield isn't after a jazzier version of "Look-Ka Py Py"--his new recording, Piety Street, is an exploration of the gospel repertory, with a big dash of R&B and second-line levitation. John Cleary, a mainstay of Bonnie Raitt's band, handled most of the vocals, with a couple of contributions from the eternally young (he's 62) Porter. On organ and piano, Cleary also provided a solid foundation for the star of the night, the faintly professorial Scofield, who powered his way through "Walk With Me," "Ninety Nine And A Half Won't Do," "His Eye Is On The Sparrow," and a strutting "Something's Got A Hold On Me."

There were a couple of deviations from the gospel theme, most notably Hank Williams' "The Angel of Death," which the leader pronounced "the scariest song I've ever heard." It wasn't all that scary, to be honest, and it also seemed outside Cleary's comfort zone as a vocalist. But Scofield played an eloquent intro and some stabbing fills throughout, and was at the top of his game all evening. Most of his statements began with the blues, then branched out into trickier harmonic territory. Despite his level of drop-dead proficiency (which would probably give Leo Nocentelli nightmares), he never appeared to be phoning it in: the fireworks were genuine. And the crowd responded. The dance floor in front of the stage was packed with bobbing heads and swaying bodies, and even the hipster directly in front of me, with his shaved head and ironically clunky glasses, took off his jacket at one point and began some mild testifying. Can any performer ask for more?

Guardian, Gaye

2009-04-02T11:25:00.005-04:00

A little bit of April Fools' mirth can go a long, long way. Still, I was tickled by the Guardian's bogus announcement of yet another technological watershed: "Consolidating its position at the cutting edge of new media technology, the Guardian today announces that it will become the first newspaper in the world to be published exclusively via Twitter, the sensationally popular social networking service that has transformed online communication." The piece includes just enough blather about democratization to sound legit, if you happened to be glancing at it on the treadmill. But the antic spirit soon rears its head again:

"[Celebrated Guardian editor] CP Scott would have warmly endorsed this--his well-known observation 'Comment is free but facts are sacred' is only 36 characters long," a spokesman said in a tweet that was itself only 135 characters long.

A mammoth project is also under way to rewrite the whole of the newspaper's archive, stretching back to 1821, in the form of tweets. Major stories already completed include "1832 Reform Act gives voting rights to one in five adult males yay!!!"; "OMG Hitler invades Poland, allies declare war see tinyurl.com/b5x6e for more"; and "JFK assassin8d @ Dallas, def. heard second gunshot from grassy knoll WTF?"

Sigh. I set up a Twitter account myself the other day. I had no followers--isn't that the saddest statement you've ever heard?--and contented myself with a few brief bulletins about my mood, bathrobe, impending shave and shower, etc.

Elsewhere, Obit has posted a solid piece by Gigi Anders about the late, great Marvin Gaye, 25 years to the day after he was shot through the heart by his own father. She recounts his ascent at Motown--where he functioned as a kind of crown prince, having married Berry Gordy's sister, Anna--and his druggy, depressing splashdown in the early 1980s. Gaye did enjoy an interval of glory before the end. "Sexual Healing," which united the singer's erotic vocalise with some churchy harmonies, put him back on the charts. And when I saw him on his final tour, on July 9, 1983, he seemed to be relishing his return to the stage. Granted, he was performing at the Spectrum in Philadelphia, a vast steel-and-concrete shed with ringing, wretched acoustics. (The opening act, Ashford & Simpson, sounded like they were performing in an oil drum.) But his voice was in excellent shape, he obligingly dropped his drawers to moon the audience during "Sexual Healing," and when he pulled up a stool to sing a couple of hushed ballads, even that aircraft hangar of a venue took on a sweet intimacy. Anders includes a suave video of Gaye singing "What's Going On." I'll opt for this sweatier item from the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1980, with the singer pleading, crooning, shouting, and wheedling his way through "Let's Get It On." It doesn't get any better than this. Extra points for the Cholly-Atkins-style choreography by the background singers:

Biss, Bob

2009-03-31T17:46:00.008-04:00

There is an assumption that essayists must be introverts. It probably starts with Montaigne, who retired from public life and more or less pulled up the drawbridge in order to write his fat volume of essays. He went so far as to have a navel-gazing mission statement inscribed on the walls of his study: "In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michael de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life, now more than half run out." Still, there is an equal and opposite tradition of the essayist as fact finder. The late David Foster Wallace, whose sprawling novels always beat with an essayistic heart, noted that practitioners of the genre "watch over other humans sort of the way gapers slow down for car wrecks: they covet a vision of themselves as witnesses."

In any case, these thoughts were occasioned by a paragraph I came across last night in Eula Biss's Notes from No Man's Land. Her topic, often, is race--still a thorn in the side of America's collective consciousness, even with Barack Obama securely lodged in the Oval Office. Yet her approach is highly varied, mingling the personal and historical as if to insist that only an amnesiac would do otherwise. And her research does bear some amazing fruits. "Relations," for example, is about dolls--black ones and white ones. Biss discusses her own girlish pastimes with the doll she named, in an engagingly no-frills style, Black Doll. Inevitably she grapples with Barbie and her multi-hued entourage, and it was the sheer, comic compression of these sentences that caught my eye:

In 1959, Mattel introduced a doll that was, unlike most dolls marketed for children, not a baby doll. This doll had breasts and makeup and was modeled after a doll sold in Germany as a gag gift for grown men. The man who designed the American version of the doll, a man who had formerly designed Sparrow and Hawk missiles for the Pentagon and was briefly married to Zsa Zsa Gabor, was charged with making the new Barbie look less like a "German street walker," which he attempted in part by filing off her nipples.

I doubt that Biss accumulated those facts in some dusty archive at the International Center for Barbie Studies. If she did, bravo. But what really impresses me is the way they're deployed--at a brisk clip we get the transition from baby to miniature bombshell, which seems weirdly appropriate given the designer's resume. (So does his brief union with Zsa Zsa Gabor, whose hourglass figure may be lingering in the background.) That leaves the filed-off nipples, at which point the comedy is terminated and Barbie becomes, well, respectable. Perhaps Biss can be persuaded to add an envoi about the transformation of the Obama girls into Beanie Babies.

On another note (but give me time, maybe I can come up with a Barbie connection), I'm hugely thrilled at the prospect of the new Bob Dylan CD, Together Through Life. With his gambler's mustache and cowboy wardrobe, he seems to be on a roll, serenely unconcerned with fame (he's had it spades), wealth (ditto), or the overwhelming shadow of his own creative past. The disc doesn't come out until April 28 (and yes, I already pre-ordered the deluxe edition with a bonus CD, a bonus DVD, collectible poster, sticker, and what is rumored to be an actual lock of Dylan's hair). Meanwhile, the label threw a listening party for a select group of lucky ducks, Alex Ross and Ann Powers among them. On the strength of single spin, they both gave the Bard of Hibbing high marks. Said Ross: "To my ears it was no letdown after Dylan's recent trilogy of new material--Time Out of Mind, Love & Theft, and Modern Times." Added Powers: "Bob Dylan can do whatever the bejeezus he wants."

Dylan himself chimes in via an interview on his official website. At one point the interviewer suggests that Together Through Life has an old-fashioned immediacy associated with early Sun or Chess recordings:

Flanagan: You like that sound?

Dylan: Oh yeah, very much so... the old Chess records, the Sun records... I think that's my favorite sound for a record.

Flanagan: What do you like about that sound?

Dylan: I like the mood of those records--the intensity. The sound is uncluttered. There's power and suspense. The whole vibration feels like it could be coming from inside your mind. It's alive. It's right there. Kind of sticks in your head like a toothache.

If you absolutely must experience that toothache prior to April 28--and I'm afraid I fit into that category--you can purchase the first cut, "Beyond Here Lies Nothin'," as a single. It is, as Powers notes, "a celebration of the Latin influence that also shaped early rock," with a percussive swagger and Dave Hidalgo's norteño-flavored accordion (evidently a sonic trademark throughout). The lyrics lean toward the generic, but what the hell--this is intensely atmospheric music, with a period flavor you can't quite identify and Dylan's grizzled voice alternately parting the fog and darting back into its recesses. I can't wait to hear the rest of it.

Random task

2009-03-30T10:36:00.004-04:00

While I was tracking down that J.F. Powers photo in my previous post, I came across this image, also in the Life archives. In the context of today's self-immolating publishing industry, it seems not only anachronistic but extraterrestrial: the man in the overcoat is a Random House talent scout. That's right, a roving operative with a sharp eye for the sleek sentence, the pungent predicate. "This kid is something," you can almost hear him saying, addressing his words into one of those old-fashioned crank-driven telephones, or maybe jotting them down on the back of an envelope as he hurries over to the Western Union branch. And what about the hot prospect standing on the stairs? She turns out to be Brenda Ueland--journalist, feminist, bohemian (one of her numerous lovers, an anarchist named Raoul Hendricson, left her for Isadora Duncan), and an exercise fanatic who set at least one international swimming record when she was in her eighties. If somebody can supply some accurate dialogue here, I'll be extremely grateful.

A book for animals

2009-03-27T09:26:00.004-04:00

Books tend to collect in what Max Reger famously called the smallest room in the house. Yesterday morning there were three, daintily stacked behind the door: The Hero and the Blues, The Deaths of Louis XVI: Regicide and the French Political Imagination (you'll have to ask Nina about that one), and Prince of Darkness and Other Stories. The latter is a favorite of mine, by J.F. Powers, and during the afternoon I rescued it from its purgatory and reread "The Old Bird, A Love Story." With the economy still drooping, I was struck by one paragraph in particular. The protagonist, an aging businessman who has lost his job, is offered a lowly gig in the shipping room of a department store. Powers nails his response--the flicker of pride, the rapid surrender--to perfection:

For an instant Mr. Newman succeeded in making it plain that he, like any man of his business experience, was meant for better things. A moment later, in an interesting ceremony which took place in his heart, Mr. Newman surrendered his well-loved white collar. He knew that Mr. Shanahan, with that dark vision peculiar to personnel men, had witnessed the whole thing.

Powers knew exactly what he was talking about, having held down a succession of small-potatoes jobs: "He worked as a salesman for Fidelity Insurance, a sales clerk at Marshall Field’s, a chauffeur for a wealthy investor touring the South, an editor for the Chicago Historical Records Survey, and a clerk at Brentano’s bookstore--where he used the shelves to complete his education and to force his favorites on the customers." (The quote is from Joseph Bottum's excellent piece in First Things. There, too, you can find Powers's exasperated response when Morte D'Urban was categorized as a book for Catholics: "Would you say that The Wind in the Willows is a book for animals?") But in the photo here, dredged up from the fascinating Life archives, the youthful, pipe-smoking author seems to be in excellent form, far from the madding crowd at Marshall Field's. There is snow on the ground, a book under his arm, a mild halo of Midwestern light around his head. Those interesting ceremonials of surrender, the ones in the heart, had yet to take place.

Elevator music

2009-03-25T19:03:00.006-04:00

Strange. I was just in the elevator, having made a thrilling trip to the ATM and supermarket, when I heard something familiar playing on the recessed speakers. There is always music in the elevator, and the volume is always turned down to the ghostly edge of audibility. You don't hear it--you sense it through your pores. Still, I swore they were playing Sibelius's "Valse Triste." To make sure, I hit the Open Door button and held it until the alarm bell went off. Yep, it was the Sibelius. I had never heard this lovely, wistful fragment (I think of it as a 45 RPM single with a big hole in the middle) before March 2, when I attended a concert at the refurbished Alice Tully Hall. Paavo Jarvi led the Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, and the bulk of the program was Beethoven: Symphony No. 1 and Symphony No. 3. Jarvi is a small, highly energetic figure. At some moments he seemed almost stiff, with a carriage not unlike a toy soldier. Then he would erupt into ferocious body language, including a great deal of micro-managerial action with the left hand.

I enjoyed the Beethoven--it was swift, vigorous, non-reverential. In his review, Allan Kozinn beat up on the hall's retooled acoustics, which he found too dry. It's true that the opening salvo of the Eroica just vanished into thin air, with no reverberation. But what you lose in grandeur, you gain in intimacy. In any case, once the program was over, Jarvi returned to the podium for a performance of "Valse Triste." I didn't know what it was. I did know that it was beautiful, and that I had never heard a symphony orchestra play that quietly before. It was almost like being in the elevator. The entire audience leaned forward in its seats. Now, as I would subsequently discover, some critics have taken Jarvi to task for this extravagance. In August 2007, James Oestreich gave him a thorough scolding:

An occasional showiness on Mr. Jarvi’s part came to the fore not, oddly, in a gaudy moment but in a quiet one. In an otherwise lovely encore, Sibelius’s “Valse Triste,” he reduced a string passage to a pianissimo on the very edge of audibility. (Pianissimos of any kind had not been prominent in the Beethoven.)

This brings up an interesting point. To my vulgar ear, Jarvi's tamped-down dynamics sounded wonderfully expressive, not showy. Of course I've never seen the score and have no idea what Sibelius called for. But I'm not a strict constructionist and assume that even the most manically exact composers (Mahler is a classic example) will elicit a range of interpretations. Speaking of which, I downloaded a version of "Valse Triste" the moment I figured out what it was. As it happened, the performance by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra was conducted by Neeme Jarvi, the father of Paavo. And you certainly couldn't accuse the elder Jarvi of dabbling in sound-of-silence gimmickry. Compared to his son's delicate reading, this one sounds more like falling down a flight of stairs. Still pretty, though.

PS After I wrote the preceding, I came across this clip of Jarvi leading the same orchestra through "Valse Triste" in 2006. At the 1:30 mark he dials down the ensemble to near silence, and thirty seconds later, he and the orchestra appear to be posing for a still photograph. The clip has been viewed 68,120 times, which suggests that I'm a little late to the party on this one:

CJR: Denby versus snark

2009-01-21T09:23:00.006-05:00

Over at CJR, we've just unveiled Page Views, a Web-only expansion of the books coverage in the magazine. To kick things off, I interviewed David Denby about Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. The tut-tutting subtitle says it all, but Denby does have a more nuanced view of his subject, and even includes a mea culpa moment: his chortling riff on Ben Stiller's face, which strikes me as less snarky than Arcimboldo-like in its ingenuity. (Owen Wilson threatened to beat Denby up after the original piece ran.) Here's a sample exchange:

Marcus: Were you returning fire in any sense?

Denby: There was no personal motive. I mean, I’ve been snarked like everybody else, but no more than other people. I just kept seeing the same kind of formulation in all sorts of places, including The New York Times. I sensed that Gresham’s Law was beginning to operate: because everyone wants to be funny in this country--which is actually very hard--the bad stuff was driving out the good stuff. And there’s going to be more and more of this, particularly because everyone in journalism is anxious. Older journalists are terrified of being left out of it, of not seeming hip, while the younger ones are battering at the gates trying to get in.

Marcus: You write that one of the optimum cultural conditions for snark occurs when “a dying class of the powerful, or would-be powerful, struggles to keep the barbarians from entering the hallowed halls.” Are traditional journalists such an embattled class?

Denby: I think so. I just feel this tremendous collective anxiety among established journalists that somehow they’ll be left out. There will be a game of musical chairs and they’re not going to get a chair. So one way of seeming to embrace new media, one way of staying in the game, is to get snippy and sarcastic and snarky. They’re certainly not encouraged to be more analytic, more intelligent. I adore Josh Marshall--he’s the best thing to come along in years. But for every one like him, there are five who are just fucking around, trying to grab a little piece of our attention.

You can read the rest here. And please do keep on eye on Page Views, where we'll be posting new reviews, interviews, and reportage at least once a week.

Slip it to me, Bert

2008-12-17T15:42:00.005-05:00

As I noted in a recent post, Paul McCartney is still on the revisionist warpath. First he asserted his cred as a sonic pioneer (apparently choosing to ignore John Lennon's sardonic definition of avant-garde as "French for bullshit," which Lennon also ignored when it came time to make his own musique concrète mudpies). Now he claims to have been the first of the Fabs to take a stand against the Vietnam war, egged on by a visit with Bertrand Russell. In an interview with Prospect magazine (excerpted here in the Telegraph) he recalls the galvanizing effect of his conversation with the 92-year-old philosopher and peace advocate: "He was fabulous. He told me about the Vietnam war--most of us didn't know about it, it wasn't yet in the papers--and also that it was a very bad war. I remember going back to the studio either that evening or the next day and telling the guys, particularly John, about this meeting and saying what a bad war this was."

What is poignant here is Macca's need, more than forty years after the fact, to demonstrate he was no mere camp follower. Surely he must understand that he's got nothing to prove? Perhaps not. As a friend said to me the other day: "I've got plenty of grievances from last week, but I've got millions of grievances from back when I was in my twenties." The first cut--or, let's say, the first thousand cuts--may well be the deepest after all. In any case, McCartney's close encounter with the kingpin of analytic philosophy is not really news. He discussed it in Many Years From Now (1996), in very similar terms but with an extra dash of detail:

Bertrand Russell lived in Chelsea in one of those little terrace houses, I think it was Flood Street. He had the archetypal American assistant who seemed always to be at everyone's door that you wanted to meet.

I sat round waiting, then went in and had a great little talk with him. Nothing earth-shattering. He just clued me in to the fact that Vietnam was a very bad war, it was an imperialist war and American vested interests were really all it was all about. It was a bad war and we should be against it. That was all I needed. It was pretty good from the mouth of the great philosopher: "Slip it to me, Bert."

I reported back to John, "I met this Bertrand Russell guy, John," and I did all the big rap about the Vietnam war and stuff, and John really came in on it all. And then he did How I Won the War.

It can't be an easy task to settle psychic accounts with your dear friend, ferocious rival, and eternal (in every sense of the word) big brother. We can forgive the petulance in deference to the real pain behind it. On the other hand, Macca should stop strafing the Dalai Lama for eating an occasional hamburger. The guy needs his protein.