Category Archives: Portfolio

Melodious

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(First off: I’m going to be making some big claims here. I don’t have documentation. These are just the ramblings of a bedridden 60-year-old man. Perhaps if I had grad students to send out in search of footnotes things would be different. But I don’t. Everyone clear? OK. Play ball!)

I’ve been thinking a lot lately of the relationship between music, language, and memory.

These things are all intertwined. Consider Socrates’ objections to books.

“The story goes that Thamus said much to Theuth, both for and against each art, which it would take too long to repeat. But when they came to writing, Theuth said: “O King, here is something that, once learned, will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memory; I have discovered a potion for memory and for wisdom.” Thamus, however, replied: “O most expert Theuth, one man can give birth to the elements of an art, but only another can judge how they can benefit or harm those who will use them. And now, since you are the father of writing, your affection for it has made you describe its effects as the opposite of what they really are. In fact, it will introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external and depends on signs that belong to others, instead of trying to remember from the inside, completely on their own. You have not discovered a potion for remembering, but for reminding; you provide your students with the appearance of wisdom, not with its reality. Your invention will enable them to hear many things without being properly taught, and they will imagine that they have come to know much while for the most part they will know nothing. And they will be difficult to get along with, since they will merely appear to be wise instead of really being so.” (Phaedrus, Pp. 551-552 in Compete Works, edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis IN: Hackett.)

Socrates (or Plato) is on to something here. To use contemporary phrasing, writing is a way to outsource memory. And this applies to all media. Illich talked about how he was of the generation that moved from in-person, unamplified speaking and musical performance, to not only amplification, but recording. Someone could have the voice of Churchill, or Caruso, in their library, in addition to their books.

Our time has taken this yet further. I am in my bed after a stroke. My room, while comfortable enough, has very few things of mine. But through my iPad tablet, I have access to my Kindle library (and others), my Spotify music (and others), my Paramount+ videos (and others).

Which is how this all started. Paramount+ has (or had) a series on the making of the movie The Godfather I enjoy a great deal, The Offer. Being recent, and their own production, I assumed it would be available for years. I outsourced my memory Paramount.

Then, one day, Paramount took it away. I don’t know when. I just know I went to Paramount+ and The Offer wasn’t there anymore. In the implicit contract between Paramount and myself to be my memory, Paramount proved to be an unreliable partner. So I have canceled my subscription.

I now have my own copy of The Offer, technically pirated. Which goes to show how piracy is an archival project. But it reminded me of why I buy so many of my books, at great cost, and don’t use the library as often as I might. When I was a boy in California I used libraries a great deal. Then along came Howard Jarvis and Proposition 13. Libraries largely lost their funding. I could no longer trust libraries to have the books I wanted. So I hung out at used bookstores the way others would lurk at pool halls. (To use Joseph Epstein’s image.) My bookshelves began a lifetime of groaning.

But roll back to Socrates, above. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were epic poems. How did Homer remember them, at such length? Or the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Vedas, the Icelandic sagas, or any other oral work of great length?

Why, they were sung, of course.

What were Homer’s melodies? I really wish I knew. But here is someone’s version of Gilgamesh.

Here is the Hurrian Hymn #6, the oldest song where we have both the lyrics and what we believe are the original notes:

Pound talks about how great poetry should not stray too far from the dance. But this, too, implies melody.

Music. Memory. How many of us have songs we remember and recognize as soon as the first chord plays? What else is Name That Tune but a memory game? How many songs do we remember from the crib?

This came up through an internet meme (of all things):

The point, that women need to know (or at least, greatly want to know) when the blood will come is a strong reason for inventing a calendar. So is the snow. Or the baby. Or the migratory birds, or animals.

Does it make sense such a calendar would be sung?

How did h. sap. come up with music in the first place? What music touches us most deeply?

A woman needing to calm a baby, and so a lullaby.

A man seeing his partner die in childbirth, and so a dirge.

A group wanting to express joy, and so the dance.

Music evokes memory. Language evokes memory. Writing evokes memory. Recording evokes memory.

It’s a long march from the general (birth/death) to the specific (your favorite singer, doing your favorite song, during your favorite performance).

I currently believe language evolved to fill in that specificity. To increase the bandwidth. How do you keep that baby alive? Where do we go to follow the beasts and sun? Which mushrooms do we avoid?

Maybe this is all rehashed Jean Auel. I’ve never read her, so cannot say.

But I still think it’s all been to remember more and more, in greater detail, across generations.

Beginnagin

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(NB: This was written in 2009.)

Let me tell you a tale.

It was my senior year in college, and I was in the living room of the cool multi-room “apartment” some friends had in one of the dorms. (That would be Doug Frankenfeld, David Bloom, Dan Nimmo, & Andrew Chittick, all living in Harwood Court.)

Anyway, Andrew had a subscription to The Economist, and I was flipping through it one day.

I read a book review of a selection of James Joyce’s papers. It had been edited by an Irish don at the University of Cork whom the Economist described with delicious hauteur as, “undistinguished even in Irish academic circles.” Seems when Joyce had died during WWII, somehow his papers wandered back to the Irish National Library in Dublin, where they were promptly put under seal at his behest for 50 years.

That wasn’t the fun part, though. The fun part was, said Irish don thought Joyce’s papers should be put under seal for an additional 50 years, because he felt their publication would be, “irreparably damaging to the body of modern literary criticism.”

That got me to wondering. What on earth would be that damaging? That Joyce, Pound, Eliot, et al. were all sleeping with each others’ wives? Nah — we already knew that. That they were plagiarizing from each other? Nah — that’s known, too.

About the only thing I could think of was a letter that said something along the lines of:

Dear Ezra: Can ye believe they’re buying this bullshit? I write a complete piece of crap, slap the title Ulysses on it, and they’re hailing it as a “masterpiece of the 20th Century.” Balls! Just shows that literary critics will never admit they don’t understand something, no matter how incoherently you write it. Put in just enough erudition to tease them, and they’ll go hunting for the “real meaning” of a thing for decades. Tell you what — I’m going to spend the next ten years working on something I’ll call Work in Progress, and then publish it under some relatively innocuous title… Finnegans Wake, or some similar twaddle. I’ll try to type it myself, blind as a bat though I may be, and get my illiterate secretary — have you met him? Beckett? — to put it in manuscript form. The bastards will never admit they don’t understand a word. Love and kisses, Jimmy

OK, fast forward to 2005 or so. Twenty years later.

I’m between contracts at The Client, and on a 100-day break. I think to myself, “Self… It’s been a long time since I saw anything about the Joyce papers. Shouldn’t they be out by now? Or shouldn’t there have been a decision to lock them up again?”

Such is the world we live in today that I went online to the National Library of Ireland. I couldn’t find the book. I went to the library of University College Cork, Ireland. I couldn’t find the book. I couldn’t find any relevant mention online of the Joyce papers, and the attendant foofaraw.

Hm. What was the name of that Irish don? Only one way to find out…

So I trundled on down to the University of Washington library, where they have a bound set of The Economist on the shelf. I start pulling down the most appropriate years. Turns out The Economist ran semi-annual indexes back then, so I look in them for listings of reviews of books about James Joyce.

Nothing.

Now I’m getting angry. Feeble though my memory may be, I know it’s not that bad. I know I read that piece.

I start leafing through every individual issue, looking at the book review sections.

I found it.

March 30, 1985.

The review ends, “The publication date — the Monday after this issue of The Economist is published — seems entirely appropriate.”

Bastards. They nailed me. It was an April Fool’s joke. Not as good, perhaps, as George Plimpton’s “The Curious Case of Sidd Finch” (which, curiously enough, was published at the same time — April, 1985), but… damn.

They nailed me.

I tell you this story for two reasons:

  • It was a great hoax, and deserves more coverage than it has received.
  • When I find out I’m wrong, even when I’ve been telling something as an amusing anecdote for twenty years — if I find out, I’ll say so. I’ll also be quite diligent in finding the facts, sooner or later.

The piece was written anonymously — and a hat tip to you, anonymous Economist scribe. It is, as mentioned, not in any index. So here is “Beginnagin.” (I leave it as an exercise to notice the differences between the “quotes” I used above, and the actual piece.)

From The Economist, March 30, 1985, page 94:

Beginnagin

AFTER THE WAKE: A Selection from the Papers of James Joyce in the National Library of Ireland
Edited, and with a commentary by Dermot O’Grady.
The University College Press, Cork. 185 pages. I£15

It has long been a source of annoyance to Joyce scholars that the National Library of Ireland should have imposed a seal on those private papers of James Joyce that came into its possession shortly after the second world war. These papers, consisting of several thousand letters to and from the harassed and impecunious author, a great many unpaid bills and what appears to be the first draft of a long poem intended to be the successor to “Finnegans Wake”, were retrieved from his apartment in Paris a few weeks after Joyce’s death in January, 1941, by his honorary secretary, Mr Paul Léon. Mr Léon handed the papers to the Irish Free State’s ambassador to Vichy, with the instruction that they should be deposited in the National Library under a 50-year seal if he should fail to survive the war.

Mr Léon perished at the hands of the Gestapo and the papers were duly sent to Dublin, since when they have languished in 16 metal boxes in Kildare Street, uncatalogued and unread until Professor O’Grady was allowed access to them. The senior tutor in Celtic studies in University College, Cork, he has hitherto enjoyed a career undistinguished even by Irish academic standards and it is difficult to imagine why he should have been chosen as the recipient of this honour.

The seal on the papers had been imposed by the library on the advice of Constantine Curran, a schoolboy acquaintance of Joyce’s, whose adherence to the Roman Catholic faith was steadfast, and was not due to expire until 1991. This earlier examination of the papers was allowed apparently on the personal intercession of Dr Garret FitzGerald, the taoiseach (prime minister). He has opened a hornet’s nest.

Professor O’Grady is exceedingly parsimonious in his quotation from the correspondence. This is not surprising, given the incendiary quality of many letters, particularly those written to Joyce by his wife, Nora Barnacle, and by the sensitive nature of the private exchanges, previously unsuspected, which passed between him and Eamonn de Valera. Joyce was formally invited to meet de Valera, shortly after the latter’s installation as president of the executive council of the Irish Free State in 1932, and answered in most unrepublican terms. “Not even an escort of battleships and the loan of a bulletproof vest,” he wrote, “could induce me to set foot in your Free-fire [sic] State, nor would I wish to put in jeopardy the pension which has been so generously been bestowed upon me by the British at the behest of Sir Edmund Gosse. I notice, incidentally, that you persist in the impudence of depicting on your postage stamps a map of the whole island of Ireland although your write [sic] runs in only three-quarters of it.”

The letters written to Joyce by his wife are, as previously suspected, highly pornographic. Professor O’Grady does not sully his pages with more than the barest allusion to their content. Joyce was several times away from Nora Barnacle on what he alleged were business trips and she was in the habit of sending him, at his own request, what he called “dirty letters”. Professor O’Grady makes it abundantly clear that large stretches of the Penelope episode of “Ulysses” (commonly known as Molly Bloom’s soliloquy) were the work not of James Joyce, but of his wife. The passages quoted show convincingly why Constantine Curran, after he had examined the papers for the library in 1951, passionately pleaded for their destruction. In his introduction, Professor O’Grady also calls for continued suppression of the papers for a further period of 50 years beyond 1991.

His argument appears to rest on his contention that to allow the publication of Joyce’s comments on his own work and on the work of other modernist masters, particularly Eliot and Pound, would deal literary scholarship a blow from which it would be a long time recovering. This is a tendentious argument, and the standard of Professor O’Grady’s own scholarship falls well below mediocrity. His text is by no means free of error (Chapelizod, for example, is not in County Wicklow), and the bibliography is grossly inadequate and there is no index. The whole publication is shoddily printed and bound. The publication date — the Monday after this issue of The Economist is published — seems entirely appropriate.

The strange coincidences of Miss Hanff

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I originally did this as a comment on someone else’s LJ, back in 2008. But I’d like to get it over here, so it’s more easily searchable.

So. I’ve been owing you this for a while. I mostly do my LJ stuff at my job, where I work the graveyard shift. It’s been such that I haven’t really felt up to it. But, as I say, I owe you, and who knows? This might be the first draft of a letter to le Carré, where I’d like to see what he says before he dies.

Return with me now to those thrilling days of yesteryear. Specifically, 1998, and Ulrika is on her royal progress as North American TAFF delegate to the UK, and I’m the consort along for the ride.

We go to London, and as a devoted reader of le Carré and Hanff I want to see two things: “The Circus” and 84 Charing Cross Road. I know neither SOE nor MI6 ever had a HQ near Cambridge Circus, but there you go. I also know that Marks and Co., the bookshop in 84 Charing Cross Rd the book and movie, is now only marked by a brass plaque. Again, no problem, I’m just curious.

So we go to the physical location, 84 Charing Cross Rd and… Well, have you ever seen Charade? Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn? There’s a sequence in it when everyone is walking through a stamp fair in Paris, and then suddenly each of them put two and two together, and their heads start whirling about.

This was very like that. Because, you see, 84 Charing Cross Road is just on the edge of Cambridge Circus.

Now, let’s fill in a bit. “Marks and Co.” stands for “Marks and Cohen,” and was the actual shop. Leo Marks — screenwriter of Peeping Tom, friend of Helene Hanff, and cryptographer extraordinaire — was the son of Mr. Marks. If you read Between Silk and Cyanide, Leo’s memoir, you’ll see that he frequently used antiquarian books as the plain text for various ciphers he would send with agents into the field during his days at SOE/MI6. In addition, le Carré, who worked at MI6 at roughly the same time as Marks (a little later, but not much) does exactly the same thing. Note his use of the Simplicissimus in A Perfect Spy, acknowledged to be his most autobiographical book.

So… If one was a cryptographer who used antiquarian books as plain text, and if one was also the son of the owner of an antiquarian book shop, what would be the easiest way to distribute such books around the world?

One of the big questions that just slides by in 84 Charing Cross Rd is, what in the world was Marks and Co. doing having an ad in the Saturday Review for Miss Hanff to find in the first place? This hypothesis suggests an answer.

But it goes further.

Frank Doel (Anthony Hopkins’ character in the movie) had some very interesting neighbors. Namely, Morris Cohen and Lona Cohen (known during their UK days as Peter and Helen Kroger). The Cohens were Soviet spies of long standing, having been among those assigned to Los Alamos to try to get nuclear information during WWII. Not only did they live quite nearby to Frank Doel, they also worked — wait for it — as antiquarian book sellers.

I don’t think that was an accident. I think the Sovs twigged on to what was happening at Marks and Co., and assigned the Cohens to try to keep tabs on Frank Doel. Hanff jokes this about in the book — or rather, she publishes a letter from Nora Doel (Mrs. Frank, played by an almost unrecognizable Judi Dench in the film) that treats the whole matter lightly.

But I think le Carré also knew what was going on, and placed headquarters at “The Circus” because, even if there was no staff housed there, there were considerable communications going through the place.

Heck, dare we say it? Could Frank Doel be the role model for George Smiley? Was he sufficiently bookish and anonymous in person for that, no matter how much wit comes across in his letters to Helene?

I can’t point to any particular flame. But it seems to me there are quite a few wafts of smoke here. Certainly enough for a Waldropian story or novel. 🙂

I did write that letter. And Mr. le Carré was kind enough to reply:

The problem, of course, is the “All Cretans are liars” issue. What else would le Carré reply? But for this fanboy, it was quite a thrill.

Nicky K. and running shoes

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Here’s a cute ad from Brooks shoes. Back in 1979, 1980 or so, they would take the back cover of Runner’s World.

Эти туфли убивают меня.
(Eti tufli ubivayut menya)

It’s Khrushchev (Хрущёв) banging his shoe on the podium at the UN. A fairly famous incident.

The slugline reads, “Sometimes a comfortable shoe can make all the difference in the world.”

Not being a Russian speaker, I took the magazine to my high school cross-country coach, Greg Baranoff, who is. And he started laughing at great length. When he finally caught his breath, he translated:

“These shoes are killing me!”

They never forget

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From the movie Strange Days. Mace (Angela Bassett) tells Lenny (Ralph Fiennes) about how memories are designed to fade. Meanwhile, though, elephants are watching from Lenny’s wall.

I got to ask director Kathryn Bigelow about whether the symbolism meant anything, and/or was intentional, at a screening. (The same screening where I noticed this shot.) “No… I’m going to have to ask my art director about this someday.”

I’m amused by the idea of the art director (John Warnke) rebelling against the script in the most subtle way possible.

You are writing a character

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(NOTE: I originally wrote this in 2009. But instead of back-posting it, as I usually do with old material, I’m going to leave it up here at the top of the pile, in hopes it’s more visible.)

You are writing a character who happens to be yourself. The only thing the reader can possibly know is what you tell them.

I’ve been meaning to write this piece (or something on its theme) for a while now. Perhaps it’s just observational cluelessness on my part, but while it seems obvious to me, hardly anyone writes as if they’ve thought it through, to my eye.

I was reminded by reading the following recently in Joseph Epstein’s essay, “Quotatious”:

“Although there is very little of Geoffrey Madan in Geoffrey Madan’s Notebooks, which is chiefly composed of things he had read or heard other people say, when you have read through this slender volume you feel rather as if you have come to know Madan — and in a way that you may not feel you know the author of a book twice the length, every word of which was written by the author. Merely by knowing what he finds amusing, and what profound, one feels one comes to know the man himself. W.H. Auden, who was nervous about being the subject of a biography, felt that he had tipped his mitt quite as much as he cared to when he published A Certain World, his commonplace book, a compilation that he called “a sort of autobiography.” In a brief foreword to the volume, he noted: “Here, then, is a map of my planet.” I believe it was Gayelord Hauser, the nutritionist, who said that “you are what you eat,” but if you happen to be an intellectual, you are what you quote.”

I agree with Epstein completely. In fact, I’d extend the idea: The internet, as a medium, is good for only two things — reading text, and writing text. When you write text in the format some call a blog (and others a journal or diary), you are writing a narrative. You are inviting others to know what you find amusing, and what profound. You are selecting some actions of your life to highlight, while discarding others.

In short, you are writing a character.

Whether that character accurately reflects you, or is wholly fictional; an idealized version of yourself, or even a deliberately villainous portrait… That is up to you as a writer.

Make no mistake, though. Your readers will find you sympathetic or antagonistic wholly on the basis of what you choose to tell them, and how. Just like a character in a work of fiction.

I know a blogger who has a large reputation. Part of that reputation is how they get into scuffles with their readers or with other big name bloggers every now and then. What’s interesting, in this context, is how they’ll then write, “This blog is not the totality of who I am. You may think you know me, but you don’t. I have other qualities, both good and bad, that you know nothing about, and to judge me solely on what you see here is to work on very limited information.”

I’ve told them an early version of this piece. “If so, whose fault is that? Who chose to omit those qualities from what the world sees? Do you think your readers are somehow clairvoyant, or telepathic, and can see something you’ve never told them in the first place?”

Ezra Pound once said, “The secret of popular writing is never to put more on a given page than the common reader can lap off it with no strain whatsoever on his habitually slack attention.” While that can be used to justify writing a sequence of “A… C” and having faith the smarter reader will infer the elided B (or even, if one is lucky, “A… D“), it does not justify “L… U”.

So, some modest pieces of advice:

* When writing a blog post, consider how you would react if you read it as a character’s statement in a novel. Is it interesting? Is it consistent with what has come before? If it isn’t consistent, does it illuminate the character in useful ways? 

* Does the post show you in the light you want to be seen? If you’re showing a part of yourself you don’t like, can you withstand the criticism that may come, or, even better, will you be willing to use the criticism to become more like who you’d really like to be?

My hope is this thought can be useful to fiction writers as well:

* If I were to read this narrative from my character in a blog, what would I think of them? Would I find them interesting enough to read the next day?

UPDATED TO ADD: I was talking this over with Ulrika over dinner, and she replied with Mamet’s Question: “What’s my action?”

For those who don’t know, there’s a book called, A Practical Handbook for the Actor, based on workshops the authors attended with David Mamet. “What’s my action?” is Mamet’s analogue to the Method Question, “What’s my motivation?” Mamet’s point is that motivation doesn’t matter if the audience cannot see an action you, as an actor, are showing them. All the internal despair in the world means nothing if the audience can’t see it through your actions.

Same thing here. Without the action of communicating to the reader through writing it down on the screen, you don’t get your character across — no matter how well you might know the character, because they’re “you.”

Venice is a space station

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campo san barnaba space station 2015-10-20 10.21.20

Venice is a space station.

Hear me out. I’m not saying this just to accept the Mary McCarthy Challenge (“Nothing can be said here (including this statement) that has not been said before.”).

The picture above is of the Campo San Barnaba. You can just see a boat in green, with some carts in front of it.

Those carts are for trash. Venetians put out their trash every day in bags, and carts like those are pushed by hand to come along and pick them up. The mechanical arm that’s also just visible on the boat picks up the cart, the bottom falls out, and the trash goes into the hold of the boat.

Why?

Because everything in Venice comes in by boat, and everything has to go out by boat.

Yes, there’s the Piazzale Roma, where the buses come in, and its garage. But even then, to get to anyplace in the city itself, it has to be transferred to a boat.

The fire department (Vigili del Fuoco). Police. Ambulances. Groceries. Packages. Produce. Mass transit. All of these we saw as boats, at one point or another on our visit.

The boats orbit the city, like a hazy swarm of fireflies.

And if the boats are the shuttle pods of the city, the railway coming into Ferrovia Santa Lucia is the space elevator. Tying the city to the mainland by means of the causeway.

Others have commented on how Venice is without cars. That carlessness also plays into the space station nature of the town — one is forever going up and down stairs, down narrow passageways, seeing the boats just in the corner of one’s eye, or one rides on the vaporetti through the tunnels of the Grand Canal, the Giudecca Canal, or the northern edge by the Fondamenta Nove.

Another aspect that’s like a space station is how Venice is fully urbanized, edge to edge of the archipelago. Others have commented on this, but it makes the calli and canali seem all of a piece, all going to the skin where Venice meets the laguna.

Venice is of the Earth, but not on the Earth. Tethered, but floating. That it floats on water instead of in space is immaterial.

Venexia is a space station.