How To Say It

I have been working for the last two weeks on a longer-than-usual piece. It may or not make it to my blog, but for now working on it is a reasonable excuse for not posting anything here. It’s been hard work.

In the meantime, I have come across a couple of things about expressing ourselves in words that speak to me, though I think to different parts of my brain.

One is from songwriter Lucinda Williams, about whom I confess I’d know nothing had not Garrison Keillor included this in his January 26 Writer’s Almanac: “Above all, the listener should be able to understand the poem or the song, not be forced to unravel a complicated, self-indulgent puzzle. Offer your art up to the whole world, not just an elite few.”

The other is from columnist Marc Munroe Dion of the Fall River (Mass.) HeraldNews, reprinted in this morning’s Plain Dealer. Dion laments the poor state of oratory (including what the headline writer dubs as “Obamatory”), stating that today “we as a people would slaughter any attempt at the great phrase.” After giving examples, Dion writes:

“We know everything. We are beyond the noble word, below the soaring phrase, proud in our cynicism, more receptive to sarcasm than to prayer. You can’t fool us, and to prove it, we rip and tear at every utterance until it is shown to be a hallow trick. Those speaking to us no longer even seek to inspire, because we laugh at inspiration. The stand-up comic suits our mood more than the prayerful leader.”

How is a writer to write (or a speaker to speak, or a singer to sing) to a public such as ours? Somewhere between simply so everyone can get it and nobly so someone might be moved, I guess.

Can't Do It All?

Encouraging insights from writer A.G. Harmon, who teaches at the Catholic University of America (but with apologies to my friends for his male-only pronouns)...

“It is liberating, in fact–-to know what we are, to know both our capabilities and our incapabilities. Freedom is understanding what one can do so that one can go about doing it. It is not being trapped with the cage of anxiety that tells us we can do everything. Lucky is the man, said Walker Percy in The Last Gentleman, who does not secretly believe that every possibility is open to him.

“This can seem somewhat hard and defeating news to the young soul who wants to believe that the world is his oyster, and that he can be anything that he wants to be, as the current meme goes. But the longer, mature view holds that understanding what shape you have taken–-accepting your gifts and abilities, but also your inabilities and weaknesses–-allows for the potential, if not the guarantee, of progress (we are free to reject what we see, after all).

“Movement, action, become possible when a clear view of potential is fathomed. That can come only by an honest assessment of what form we have taken (or more precisely, for the person of faith, have been given). Instead of straining in frustration for the impossible, we can then move forward within a profile that shines with the sun of a genuine authenticity.” (Image, Fall 2012, p. 72)

Thanks, A. G.–I needed that today. It lets me move my current writing project forward.

Wandering, Lost in Music

Among the many who were working out at “The J” Friday morning, I was surely the only one listening to Dvorak’s 8th Symphony. How I love that work! I think there should be a law somewhere that every time Dvorak’s 9th (“New World”) is played, the 8th must be played as well. It well deserves an equal hearing.

Last week we ordered a CD of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical, Cats. My wife and I and our daughters share a long and happy history with Webber’s marvelous music and dance interpretations of T.S. Eliot’s poems. When we received a Barnes and Noble gift card for Christmas we decided it was time to retire our cassette tape of the original cast performance. Cats is a joyous celebration of unique individuality and community cohesion, and even has a simple and important story line (which people often miss). I listened to the CD Friday night, and smiled and smiled and smiled. Lots of good Memory there. Thanks, all you Jellicle Cats!

Wednesday afternoon I attended the first in a four-week series of presentations about three composers and one composition. Donald Rosenberg, a Plain Dealer classical music critic, is lecturing about about and playing examples from Wagner, Verdi, Britten, and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It’s part of CWRU’s Laura and Alvin Seigal Lifelong Learning Program (that is, it’s for senior citizens). I’ve never been a real Wagner fan, in part because I’ve never gotten into opera as deeply as I’ve gotten into other musical forms. But I learned quite a bit about him and enjoyed the musical samples I heard. How long would it take me to listen to all of his operas should I decide it’s something I want to do?

(A sidebar: I felt younger than most in that crowd; I know it’s a fool’s feeling, but it’s a good one. I was embarrassed by our impatience when the sound system didn’t work just right at the start. You’d have thought we were a room of starving people fighting for the last crust of bread on earth. Do we have to get so demanding just because we get old?)

Finally, Saturday morning I tutored a fifth grade boy who had read a story in school about a Tsar and a Firebird. He had a worksheet he was supposed to fill out, and I was trying to help him without having read the story itself. Sadly, he didn’t know what a “Tsar” was, where the story had taken place, or what a Firebird is/was. I wished I could have pulled out a recording of Stravinsky’s ballet, played it for him, and said, “Now that’s a Firebird!

It’s great to have time to wander the halls of music.

Call and No Response

Determined to be a “more engaged” citizen, two days after the election I sent an email about a couple of concerns to President Obama, and copied it to Ohio’s Senator Brown and our district’s Representative Fudge, hoping they might help him.

In a few days, “Sen. Brown” replied with a note that clearly misunderstood what I wrote about, and “Rep. Fudge” sent me a stock reply about how hard she is working for me, etc. “Pres. Obama” finally sent me an automated reply after Christmas, also letting me know how hard he is working for me, and offering links to help me understand what he hopes to accomplish in his second term.

I know nothing at all about their take on the concerns I expressed.

Are Republican office holders better than Democrats at answering constituent's letters?

My Plan for Shrinking Government

Been thinking a lot about the “solution” to the Fiscal Cliff fiasco that Washington finally hammered out. It’s a solution nobody likes much, and apparently it doesn’t solve the issues it was supposed to solve anyway. Mostly it is one more sign that our government is pretty dysfunctional.

I wrote a whole “rant” about what’s wrong with Washington, but I will spare you the burden even of skimming it. You’ve heard it all elsewhere. So here’s what I am thinking about, which surely you will hear here first:

It’s hard to remember that people in the public eye are people pretty much just like you and me. They only have 24 hours in each day, and should sleep for at least 8 of them. In those waking hours they tend to do the kinds of things you and I do...good, bad, and in between. They may be surrounded by all kinds of advisors and p.r. experts and spinmeisters, but at the end of their days they have to sleep with what they have said and done. And, because they are public people, we have to sleep with that, too.

But people can learn to be better people by getting in touch with who they are and knowing what it is to be members of the human race. People, even hardened, cynical, crafty political people, can strive to become more like Abraham Lincoln, of whom Doris Kearns Goodwin, author of Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln, recently said: “[Lincoln's] political genius was rooted in his remarkable array of emotional strengths, which enabled him to form friendships with rivals who had previously disdained him, to put past grudges aside, to assume responsibility for the failure of subordinates, to share credit with ease and to learn from mistakes.”

The things Goodwin claims Lincoln was good at do reveal a “remarkable array of emotional strength.” Convinced that what our political leaders most need is emotional health, I believe “we, the people” should recruit, assign, and pay for a therapist/psychologist/pastoral counselor for each person we send to Washington. It would be healthy for them–and for us.

Friends, let’s shrink this government.

A Wonderful World in Des Moines

Bill Bryson’s The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid (2006) is a memoir of his growing up in Des Moines, Iowa, in the 1950‘s. Bryson was born in 1951, the year I celebrated my eighth birthday.

1951 was also the year my family moved from Des Moines to a small town 80 miles northeast of it. But we often returned to Iowa’s urban center to visit friends and family and so that my mom could shop at Younkers, which Bryson calls “the great ocean liner of a department store.” My earliest memories of Younkers are of long forced marches, punctuated by rides on its magnificent escalators and in its elegant elevators. In later years I appreciated its large selection of classical LP records.

Bryson and I lived very different childhoods, not because I moved from Des Moines in my third grade, but because we are wired very differently. I never imagined myself as a “Thunderbolt Kid” capable of vaporizing unappealing people into pools of liquid, though there were times I would like to have been that wickedly powerful. And I was for too modest to have collaborated with any of my friends in discovering that peeing on Lincoln Logs turns them white. Our differences are one of the reasons he’s a very famous writer and I only wish I were.

We were both paperboys–he of the afternoon Des Moines Tribune, and I of the morning Des Moines Register. Bill Bryson, Sr. was actually a sports reporter for the Register (his son says a very good one), and his mother wrote a column about domestic (i.e., women’s) matters. So Bill, Jr. was not confined to standing outside looking in at the Register and Tribune’s whirling printing presses as were most of us; he could actually go inside and hear their hum and smell their ink. We share memories of the huge globe that graced the building’s lobby. We also share memories of the newspaper boy’s life on the streets as we tried to collect the weekly fees people owed for our faithfully delivering the presses’ output to their doors. And we share grief now for the forking over of local ownership of papers like the Register to national corporations, for their decline, and for their impending demise.

Many details in Bryson’s memoir rang bells for me, though I’d like to know how he missed Triplet’s Toy Town, surely Des Moines’ most fascinating store. I excuse him for missing Russell’s Jewelers, owned by an uncle and aunt of mine; his father may have known about it because it produced trophies for schools and teams all over Iowa. I am not at all surprised he overlooked the Iowa Farm Bureau Building where my dad worked. You can’t know everything’s history, even if you are Bill Bryson.

He does recognize, mostly in retrospect, that the world beyond his Kid’s World was far from perfect. But the larger world’s faults and failures barely touched childhood as he traversed it, and the joys of his memoir is that he focuses on what being a kid in the middle of 1950’s Iowa was like for him.

In “The Thunderbolt Kid’s” final pages Bryson muses upon what has been lost since that decade. Among the greatest losses is the forced sterilization of urban experience by the Walmart-ing and Macy-ing and Starbuck-ing of our society. The bland and mindless uniformity of commercial enterprise as experienced by most middle class Americans means only the very poor and the very rich experience uniqueness when they shop for and try to buy things. A Des Moines Target looks like a Cedar Rapids Target, feels like a Chicago Target, sucks like a New York Target. And the centers of many cities (other than a select few) look like the aftermath of The Plague.

Which bring me to the point of this New Year’s Eve posting. Bryson writes that, “during a tragically misguided housecleaning exercise” in 1978, his parents threw out all the “stuff” remaining in his bedroom. He then reflects on how mass retailing, banking, media, etc. render our lives today uniform and bland (the words in [brackets] are mine):

“[Getting rid of ‘stuff’] is the way of the world, of course. Possessions get discarded. Life moves on. But I often think what a shame it is that we didn’t keep the things that made us different and special and attractive in the fifties. Imagine those palatial downtown movie theaters with their vast screens and Egyptian decor, but thrillingly enlivened with Dolby sound and slick computer graphics. Now that would be magic. Imagine having all of public life–offices, stores, restaurants, entertainments–conveniently clustered in the heart of the city and experiencing fresh air and daylight each time you moved from one to another. Imagine having a cafeteria [Bishop’s] with atomic toilets [you have the read the book to get that reference], a celebrated tea room [in Younker’s] that gave away gifts to young customers, a clothing store [Frankel’s] with a grand staircase and a mezzanine, a Kiddie Corral [in Dahl’s Supermarkets] where you could read comics to your heart’s content. Imagine having a city full of things that no other city had.

“What a wonderful world it would be. What a wonderful world it was. We won’t see its like again, I’m afraid.”

Touched with regret

for wondrous worlds

we will not see again,

but expecting

(against all odds)

new worlds to be seen...

Happy New Year.

Nativity's Pledge and Pleasure

“To a guilty world you (God) have pledged yourself,

not out of duty,

but because such was your pleasure.”

Those words (in English translation) are attributed to Jacopone da Todi, a 13th Century Franciscan friar and poet. They are from his Lauda Per Nativita Del Signore (“Hymn of Praise for the Birth of the Lord,” often referred to as the “Laud to the Nativity”), which was set to music by the 20th-century Italian composer, Ottorino Respighi, the only composer whom I know to have done so.

(Readers interested in my experience with and views regarding Respighi’s setting of the Laud will find them at the end of this post.) 

Jacopone tells and expands upon the story of Jesus’ birth by juxtaposing the glorious heavenly announcement with the abject poverty of the shepherds and of the Holy Family and Mary’s humble obedience. He well understands Luke’s perspective and interests. The lines quoted above appear late in the poem, after the shepherds have left and while Mary is pondering what has happened. They are spoken (in Respighi’s setting, they are sung) in the middle of the angelic chorus’s exuberant singing of the biblical texts praising God. I hear it as Jacopone’s understanding of the reason for the sung praises, and as his invitation to trust God with all we are and have:

We can say “Merry Christmas” (or as our British cousins prefer, “Happy Christmas”) and the like because God acted for us out of the shear pleasure of doing so. I confess I do not fathom the pleasure God derives from being committed to this world, despite my theological education, etc. And there is much to ponder in the charge that “the world” is guilty, a far greater problem than any individual’s particular sins, etc. Most likely I will never fully comprehend either God’s pleasure or universal culpability.

But despite all that, I can and do wish you and this broken world a Merry Christmas, and all the joys and pleasures of this season, because...

“To a guilty world you (God) have pledged yourself,

not out of duty,

but because such was your pleasure.”

(More about the music and me:)

Also often attributed to Jacopone is the Stabat Mater Dolorosa [“The Sorrowing Mother Stood”], which depicts Mary’s anguish at the foot of Jesus’ cross. It has been the subject of musical settings by many composers.

Perhaps the reason only Respighi (to my knowledge) has set the Laud to the Nativity to music is that his work captures the mood of Jacopone’s retelling and expansion of Luke’s birth narrative so perfectly that it is hard to imagine improving on it. The poet’s ability to convey both the poverty and the joy of the Holy Family and of the shepherds is convincingly re-conveyed by Respighi. A palpable sense of awe and wonder inhabits the entire 20-minutes-plus of the piece, and invites the listener into quiet contemplation of the holy birth. It may be the most authentic expression of “the true meaning the true story” of the birth of Jesus that I know.

Nearly 40 years ago I was a member of The Southern Maryland Choral Society, a community chorus conducted by Sandy Willetts. Sandy programmed Respighi’s Laud to the Nativity for our Christmas concert. As if singing that were not enough, we also performed Bach’s Magnificat at the same concert, so our work was cut out for us amateurs. They were each far beyond our obvious reach, but Sandy was an incredible conductor, and we pulled them off, and I like to think quite respectably. (Actually, the two are a beautiful programmatic pair.)

In any case, it was then that I bought an LP recording, which I recall had to be special ordered from England. It’s on the Argo label and is by the Argo Chamber Orchestra and the London Chamber Choir, directed by Laszlo Heltay, and sung in Italian. I cannot guess how many times I’ve played it, and it sounds like it.

After years of thinking I should get a new recording, last week I downloaded an old (1961, maybe) but recently (2010) re-released recording of the Laud by the Roger Wagner Chorale and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. it is directed by Alfred Wallenstein, is in English, and got good reviews on Amazon. And although I think think it is very nice, there is something about the old LP I’ve lived with for so long that I miss. There’s a purity to Heltay’s interpretation that I can hear through the scratches and hum that seems to elude Wallenstein. Maybe I will get used to it, but maybe I don’t want to.

In any case, if you love music Respighi’s Laud to the Nativity is well worth knowing. I’d appreciate any further information you have on any of this...including where I might find a new recording of Laszlo Heltay’s performance.