The Spiral Staircase

Poetry in Motion

This is my favorite subway poem in a long time. 

 

VOYAGER 

I have become an orchid

washed in on the salt white beach.

Memory,

what can I make of it now

that might please you --

this life, already wasted

and still strewn with

miracles.

 

-Mary Ruefle

Ethan Iverson Solo Recital

My husband is my role model for self-discipline in the arts. Every day he gets up early and goes off to practice, while I lay in bed malingering. 

I'm looking forward to hearing the fruits of his labors at his solo recital in the Abby Whiteside concert series.

Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall

Wednesday, February 27, 8PM.

Party to follow in Brooklyn.

He'll be playing modernist classical music by Louise Talma and Stravinsky as well as jazz standards and improvisations. It should be a good one! You can buy tickets here. 

The Best Essay Nobody's Heard Of

We're done! It's been a long road, but Mom and I finally finished our co-written account of our lives and kidney transplant surgeries, tentatively titled Ask Me Why I Have Three Kidneys: A Mother-Daughter Memoir. When I get depressed about how hard it is to sell a book, I just remind myself that the best personal essay I've ever read had to be self-published.

Ethan just bought this for $180. It's signed by the author, who printed a run of a thousand copies. Thirty-two excruciating pages.

Like our memoir, A Guide For the Undehemorrhoided has an activist slant. Mom wants to spread the word about the damage lithium does to the kidneys; Willeford wanted to prevent other men from suffering as he had: 

I will make this statement at once and at least once: if a man is past thirty, it is not worth his while to have a hemorrhoidectomy. I say this flatly and categorically, because there are not, simply, enough good years remaining to any man past thirty to make the pain of this operation worth it. Moreover, any young man under thirty, especially young men who have relatively dim futures anyway, should realistically and judiciously examine his post-operative prospects before submitting his ass to the proctologist's knife.

You can read the first page here. To read the rest you will have to buy your own copy (There's one on Amazon now for only $49!) - or maybe, if you ask really nicely, we'll let you borrow ours. 

Thomas Adès's Tempest

Tempests for everyone! Menacing gray clouds surround my apartment, located just outside the "C Zone" of hurricane evacuation. I'd better finish blogging while there's still wireless.

Adès's glorious opera still has me in its clutches. Before attending Saturday night's performance at the Met, I spent the afternoon rereading the Shakespeare play. This was a good idea. I had forgotten just how strange and self-referential this play is.

A shipwreck strands a pack of Italian noblemen on a magical island ruled by the wizard Prospero. The only other humans on the island are his daughter Miranda and his slave Caliban, son of the indigenous island witch. We learn in an Act 1 monologue that Prospero is really the rightful Duke of Milan and has orchestrated this entire hurricane to seize back power from his usurping brother. He also manages to marry off Miranda to the prince of Naples. The legwork gets done by a fairy named Ariel whom Prospero holds in a kind of indentured servitude. At the end, Ariel is freed, the dukedom is restored, and the island (presumably) reverts back to its natural state, lorded over by a lonely Caliban. 

Compared to the usual mad dash of Shakespeare's comedies, this plotting is oddly flat. The romance seems pre-ordained and all the villains' scheming is doomed from the outset. I was amazed, rereading it, at how little actually happens. Yet never once are we bored, just as we are never bored in our dreams. 

This is late Shakespeare. The Tempest is thought to be the last play he wrote as a solo author. It has pride of place in the First Folio, where it is first of all the comedies and therefore the first play in the book. 

It's obvious that there's more going on than meets the eye. I think that in this play more than any other, Shakespeare lifts up the hood so we can look at the engine. It's no wonder Thomas Adès, who delights in the metatextual, chose to take it on. 

Costume sketch of Caliban from Met production

This Caliban speech is famous, and I think you can read it as a summary of the whole play, of the experience of an audience member in a theater:

Be not afear'd; the isle is full of noises,
Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears; and sometime voices,
That, if I then had wak'd after a long sleep,
Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming,
The clouds methought would open, and show riches
Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak'd,
I cried to dream again.

Adès really stretches out on this gorgeous aria. Alan Oke sounded great here - it felt like he saved up his voice for moments like this. Maybe he felt the same frisson I did, singing on the island of Manhattan on the eve of Frankenstorm. It was one of the most riveting moments of the opera.

Here's Meredith Oakes's lyrics:

Friends don't fear
The island's full of noises
Sounds and voices
It's the spirits

Sometimes they come
After I've slept
And hum me
Back to sleep
With a twangng
And a sweetness
Like playing
A thousand instruments

Then I dream
I'm seeing heaven
It's as if
The clouds had opened

I see riches
Raining from them
Then I wake
And cry to dream again

Typing it, I think of the text to a great picture book, something like Where the Wild Things Are. Oakes is spare, vivid, and unpretentious. She leaves room for Adès to add the color. 

Post-colonialist scholars have had a field day with the tale of savage Caliban subdued by a white wizard. Anyone who attended Brown University when I did got an earful. I remember a certain discussion section of Aimé Césaire's Une tempête that brought me to tears. Caliban is to the colonized what Shylock is to the Jews.

In the X-Men, Caliban was a kind, misunderstood albino who lived in the sewer system. He kidnapped Kitty Pryde but did not hurt her.

One of Oakes's and Adès's smart moves was to place Caliban more center stage. They have also limited Prospero's power, so that Miranda and Ferdinand fall in love against his wishes rather than in accordance with his master plan. Reigning in Prospero gives the plot more ebb and flow. It also marks the opera as a post-modern one. We don't live anymore in the age of the author/wizard. 

Here's the early speech in which Caliban protests against the injustice of his slavery. He reminds Prospero that Caliban was once the host. Hospitality perverted is one of the great ancient sins. I can't read this speech without thinking of Thanksgiving turkeys and smallpox blankets:

• This island's mine, by Sycorax my mother, 
  Which thou takest from me. When thou camest first, 
  Thou strokedst me and madest much of me, wouldst give me 
  Water with berries in't, and teach me how 
  To name the bigger light, and how the less, 
  That burn by day and night: and then I loved thee 
  And show'd thee all the qualities o' the isle, 
  The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile: 
  Cursed be I that did so! All the charms 
  Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you! 
  For I am all the subjects that you have, 
  Which first was mine own king: and here you sty me 
  In this hard rock, whiles you do keep from me 
  The rest o' the island.

Meredith Oakes renders this as:

The island's mine, by Sycorax my mother

When I first found you, you were weak
Crouched in a rock, your child in your cloak

I came to save you
I was your friend
Nor were you ever
Unkind to me then
You scorn me and you strike me
You say you do not like me
I showed you all the island
The fertile and the barren
All I had you were given
But now you have forgotten

Multisyllabic and imperfect rhymes give Oakes's lyrics an exuberant, comic feel. Rhymes like this are admired in hip hop ("I made the change from a common thief/ To up close and personal with Robin Leach.") Of course this kind of thing is going to bring scorn from the critics. Tommasini says he finds the rhymes "numbing," and Mike Silverman of the AP cites as "doggerel" the line "You scorn me and you strike me, you say you do not like me." There will always be players and player haters.

"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful" - Biggie Smalls

We keep going back to Shakespeare because of his polyphony. He was the master and the slave. Virginia Woolf called his mind "incandescent" because he could encompass both male and female subjectivities. Every voice rings true.

If there was one thing missing for me in the opera, it was the persuasiveness of the individual voices. The orchestra sounded like they were having a great time under Adès's sexy baton, but I couldn't always hear the singers above them. My favorite performance came from tenor William Burden as the King of Naples. His sweet, melancholy tone pushed every note through to the balcony.

I hadn't heard the music before, and as I listen to the CD now I hear new layers. In performance I couldn't stand the screeching Ariel. The role for coloratura soprano is almost sadistic in its virtuosity, and, while I admired Adès's invention and Audrey Luna's range, every time she took the stage I winced. Some of this may have been the production design, which had her looking and dancing like an extra from the Cirque du Soleil. 

Alex Ross has recapped the critical panning of Lepage's Ring Cycle design here. His Tempest design has been equally controversial, placing the opera within a broken-down La Scala with Prospero as its director. My date pronounced it "brilliant and Brechtian" but I thought it felt too straight, almost didactic. Maybe it's time to stop letting Lepage near all this great music.

One exception was when Miranda and Ferdinand, united, walked off into an ocean of light. The effect was exquisite and surreal, like an old movie projected on the wall of a dance club. 

Adès and Oakes boldly take the epilogue away from Prospero and give the last word to Caliban. Alone on the island, he wonders:

Who was here?
Have they disappeared?
Were there others?
Were we brothers?
Did we feast?
And give gifts?
Were there fires
And ships?
They were human seeming
I was dreaming

In the gleam of the sand

Caliban

In the hiss of the spray
In the deep of the bay

In the gulf in the swell
Caliban

The entire third act was great,but this was the best tune of them all, echoed eerily by an offstage Ariel, in the only singing she did all night that I liked. I got tears in my eyes. The moment was so beautiful that it made me realize what I had been missing throughout the rest of the opera.

Melody! A good, hummable tune like the kind you get with Mozart or Puccini. This was tricky of Adès, giving me what I wanted just as the dream ended. The bittersweet finish keeps going on and on.  

Shakespeare's original epilogue is one of the all-time great endings, right up there with Life of Pi and The Magic Mountain in terms of epilogues that make you want to reread the entire work. Prospero, having renounced his magic, steps out from the proscenium to beg for our applause and for continued life in our collective hearts:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
Which is most faint: now, 'tis true,
I must be here confined by you,
Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
Since I have my dukedom got,
And pardone'd the deceiver, dwell
In this bare island by your spell;
But release me from my bands
With the help of your good hands:
Gentle breath of yours my sails
Must fill or else my project fails,
Which was to please. Now I want
Spirits to enforce, Art to enchant;
And my ending is despair,
Unless I be relieved by prayer,
Which pierces so, that it assaults
Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
  As you from crimes would pardon'd be,
  Let your indulgence set me free.

I was telling my friend Kitty about this speech yesterday when she stopped by for a pre-hurricane cocktail. She reminded me of another great epilogue, from the stage play of Peter Pan. Clap if you believe!

Angriest Sentence Ever?

This season's Threepenny Review is a great read, especially for fans of Berlin.

Wendy Lesser walks us through the Alte Nationalgalerie installation of Gerhard Richter's October 18, 1977. This cycle of fifteen monochromatic paintings is named for the day on which three members of an imprisoned left-wing terrorist group were found dead in their jail cells. 

It's hard to write about objects, and I always admire writers who can do it. Wendy lets the paintings be, in all their German ambiguity.

Paired with this is an insane essay from 1930 called The Season by Gottfried Benn. The Season is probably the angriest thing I've ever read. It reminds me of what Ian Frazier wrote about Veronica Geng, "Her writing was the purest satire, in the sense that its preferred outcome would be for its object to fall down dead."

Here is a single sentence, on the topic of college professors:

There he stands, the narrow little man- and animal-head, thinking, whiffling, woolgathering- it doesn't occur to anyone that the medieval luminaries were no members of learned societes, no massed ranks of professors, no suppliers of factory secrets, actually no scientists at all, but unpaid daimons: "rather sleep on oxhides than on dignity and respect," while all this here, fully a hundred years from the last echt intellectual breakthrough, pampered by a century of liberalism and ease; with instruments, formulas, textbooks that it has inherited or purchased, following recipes that it carries on gurgitating and regurgitating, its casuistical underpinning vital at most for an exam candidate, inflated into a philosophy of life, swilled with the help of press and photographers into the color magazines and soigne' evening classes to persuade a wider public ("tomorrow a ventriloquist, the day after the tomato gospel") of its relevance; a bureaucracy of research scientists assorted by paygrade, an international civilization guild with full pension rights, that could perfectly well be replaced en bloc by an equal number of grad students and an equal number of hemorrhoids.

(translated by Michael Hofman)

 

Make Extra for the Bandits

Here I am with my favorite writer, Daniel Pinkwater, after a delicious lunch at the Eveready Diner in Hyde Park. The French apple pie was particularly good. They say that if you meet the Buddha on the road you should kill him, but I did not kill Daniel Pinkwater because I want him to write more books. His latest, Bushman Lives, is being serialized here.

Ethan and I both had our moral compasses set to Pinkwater at an early age. My favorite was the picture book The Big Orange Splot. Ethan's was the novel Alan Mendelsohn, the Boy from Mars, available in 5 Novels, a great omnibus that also includes Slaves of Spiegel. Here's some vintage Pinkwater from the latter:

The reason the Magic Moscow is an interesting place is that everybody in Hoboken comes in there at least once a week. There are some very weird people in Hoboken. In fact, most of the people in Hoboken are weird in some way or other. For example, today someone finally ordered a Day of Wrath. Steve has been waiting for this for six months. The Day of Wrath is a special sundae.

Some of Steve's other specials include the Moron's Delight and the Nuclear Meltdown. To give an idea of what they're like, the Moron's Delight is served in a shoebox lined with plastic. The Nuclear Meltdown is served in one of those cardboard buckets, the kind you get chicken from the colonel in. The Day of Wrath is served in a knapsack.

This guy came in and ordered one. Steve has had signs up all over the place advertising the Day of Wrath for months. Nobody has shown any interest. Even our Moron's Delight and Nuclear Meltdown customers have shown no interest in it. It costs fourteen ninety-five.

The guy was nothing special - just a regular middle-class guy in a leisure suit, overweight like a lot of our customers. He walked in, read the signs taped to our walls, and ordered a Day of Wrath, the same way anyone would ask for an ice-cream cone.

Steve went right to work, making up the Day of Wrath. It has a whole eggplant, two slabs of whole wheat pizza dough, all sixteen flavors of ice cream, fresh figs, pistachio nuts, a lobster, and assorted garden vegetables and fruit. The whole thing goes into a freshly laundered regulation army knapsack, and Steve shoves it into the microwave oven. Two minutes later, out it comes, piping hot. Steve put on a certain record of music by Franz Liszt, and served it to the customer.

"This is for a real gourmet," Steve said.

The last time Ethan came to the boxing gym, he sat on the ring apron reading 5 Novels, which has a picture of Pinkwater's beatific mug on the cover. Two different boys came up to Ethan and asked if that was him on the cover. At the time I thought this was racial profiling, but the kids were right. It is kind of eerie how much they look alike.

My husband's chunky black glasses are mass-produced plastic and have two silver dots in the corners of the frames. Daniel's chunky black glasses are handmade wood from a mysterious man in China and have three silver dots in the corners of the frames. It was kind of like a two-star general meeting a three-star general.

I loved Jill Pinkwater! She's illustrated many of her husband's books, and it's clear that their unity is one thing that's kept the transmissions so pure over the years.

Ethan and I had big plans to tape an interview wth the Pinkwaters about their art and life, but things turned out differently. Daniel seemed creeped out by our fandom and uninterested in getting the usual star author treatment. Instead I imbibed another kind of lesson from him, something about pleasing myself and not letting the bastards get me down. He also said I need to be more prolific: In the words of his father, "Make extra for the bandits."

I don't even want to write too much about it. As Pearl's mother tells her in The Scarlet Letter, "We must not always talk in the market-place of what happens to us in the forest."

RIP Ray Bradbury

(AP)

He was my first favorite writer.  I read and reread Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man, Something Wicked This Way Comes, and Death Is a Lonely Business.  I didn't like his most famous stuff as much, the stuff about other planets and burning books.  I liked the stuff about creepy things that happen in small towns, the rhapsodic descriptions of summer afternoons, the Norman-Rockwell-meets-Aleister-Crowley vibe. As I got older I turned away from him because of something reactionary in the politics and purple in the prose, but I'm not sure I ever loved any other author quite as much as I loved Ray Bradbury when I was twelve.

Never Bet on an Eggplant

If it were possible to love my husband more, I would after reading his analysis of the Pinkwater-multiple-choice mishegas.

Daniel Pinkwater is my main model for children's writing.  He is mysterious, funny, and never condescending, and the day he blurbed my novel Iris, Messenger was the best news I ever got as a writer.

When I was a kid I had this paraphrased quote from The Big Orange Splot taped to my bedroom door: "My room is me and I am it.  It is where I like to be and it looks like all my dreams."

Invoking Shiva

There's still time to get a ticket to see the astonishing Nrityagram at the Joyce.  The opening night was smashing, from the serpentine rhythms of the live drumming to the jingle of the anklets to the flashing eyes of Surupa Sen.  This program featured a guest turn by two Sri Lankan women dancing in the Kandyan tradition, which provided an interesting angular counterpoint to the lush curves of Nrityagram's Odissi. 

Surupa Sen

Everyone I spoke to after the show was awestruck.  I can't remember the last time I saw something this purely enjoyable.

NYT's Alistair Macaulay kvells over his trip to the dancers' utopian compound outside of Bangalore.

From the program notes...

Attributed to Ravana, Sri Lanka's great warrior king, who was a devotee of Shiva, the god of dance and destruction.

Shiva!
From the forest
of your matted locks
descends
the celestial river Ganga.

A mighty serpent
garlands you lovingly,
the glittering gem
in his magical hood
radiates brilliance,
that annoints the faces
of the four-directions
with a delicate hue.

Adorned
only by the sky,
a new-born moon jewels your locks
and your forehead smoulders
with the fire of your third eye.

Your ceaseless drum song
pervades the universe,
as you dance
your fearsome Tandava.

Perfect consort to Himalya's daughter,
you are the ever-compassionate
destroyer of evil.

Opening your third eye
you burnt to ashes
the God of Love
The five-arrowed Kamadeva,
disrupter of your meditation.

You are the Universe.
Equanimous.
Invincible.
Eternal.

On you
I meditate.

Dance
on the funeral pyres
in my heart
and release me
from this universe.

Singing and Punching

I'm getting excited about the Olympics.  This is the first year that women's boxing will be represented, the culmination of a long fight for gender equity in this most masculine of games.  I'm very happy for the US women who will be able to represent us in the ring and am thrilled to be heading to Spokane, Washington in a week to cover the trials for the HuffPost. 

PHOTO: Sue Jaye Johnson for the New York Times, from her beautiful photo essay

Twenty-four women will fight in a double-elimination tourney for three slots, representing the three Olympic weight classes of 112, 132, and 165 lbs.  The venue has a great roundup of press coverage on the various contenders here.

Next Friday the Greene Space collaborates with WNYC to offer a discussion on women's boxing hosted by Rosie Perez and featuring Alicia "Slick" Ashley, one of the best women pros I've ever seen, who trains out of Gleason's Gym.

In other news, the sublime soprano Judith Berkson, whom I wrote about here, is teaching free group voice lessons on Monday nights at Barbes.  Yes, that's right, free!  There are two more Mondays left to take advantage of Judith's class, which she offers as part of the Six Points Fellowship she's received to write an opera about Viennese cantor Salomon Sulzer.  Barbes Brooklyn, Mondays 5-6:30PM: breath exercises, scales, harmonizing, and general inspiration.  I leave these classes breathing and thinking more deeply.