February/March 2014

Books Bought

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim

Gary Shteyngart, Super-Sad True Love Story

Andre Aciman, Harvard Square

Willa Cather, The Song of the Lark

JND Kelly, Golden Mouth: John Chrysostom—Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop

El Libro de Oración Commún

The Enlightened Kitchen: Recipes from Japanese Buddhist Temples

George Balanchine, 101 Stories of the Great Ballets

Books Read

Eusebius, The History of the Church

Michael Ondaatje, Running in the Family

Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach

Maimonides, Guide of the Perplexed Part III

Augustine, Enerrationes Super Psalmos Liber I

Numbers, Deuteronomy, Gospel of Mark

Music Bought

Beck, Morning Phase

Bob Dylan, Blood on the Tracks and Blond on Blond

Karen Jonas, Oklahoma Lottery

Performances Attended

Roseanne Cash (14 February, GWU Lisner Auditorium)

New York City Ballet (1 April: Balanchine, Jewels; 3 April: Mixed Reparatory)

Rebel (6 April, Dumbarton Oaks: Music by Telemann, Bach et al.)

In my beginning is my end.

Eliot's line from Four Quartets, that ode to a civilization and a piety that is no more (and maybe never was), kept recurring to me these past weeks, as the relentless winter brought us three major March snowstorms.  Not until April did it gradually, reluctantly yield to spring.  I spent many of the cold, dark nights immersed in music and books and pondering the overlap and interstices between the two.  Paul Elie's Reinventing Bach certainly straddles both worlds.  Modeled on a Bach fugue, it interweaves a music-first biography of Bach with similar treatments of the three greatest Bach performers of the 20^th century (Albert Schweitzer, Pablo Casals, and Glenn Gould), thumbnail sketches of a dozen other Bach-centric musicians, musicological essays, and reflections on the impact of recording technology on the experience of music for performers and listeners alike.  The effect is mesmerizing, with flashes of brilliance on every page and several full-stop revelations per chapter.  A major insight, convincingly documented and argued, is that Bach was no conservative, but rather the most innovative artist of his age, transforming old structures and inventing new ones in his compositions, then relentlessly seeking the newest instruments and the best musicians to bring them to life.  Equally arresting is Elie's argument that the golden age of Bach is now, with myriad versions of his major works available on a variety of media and his music constantly performed throughout the world.  Turns out Bach's contemporaries, who heard his music seriatim in one-off performances at church and in concerts, scarcely knew him at all.

Roseanne Cash and her band made it to D.C. for their Valentine's Day concert, but it was a close thing.  They had played several dates in the U.K. the week before, and their return to the U.S. was delayed by a Nor'easter that dumped a foot of snow and scrambled flight schedules up and down the eastern seaboard.  Their fatigue and perhaps their stress were evident in a certain rote, pro forma quality to Roseanne's between-songs jokes and banter, and in the band's refusal to return for an encore despite thunderous applause.  But when they played, they were gold.  The first half of the show consisted of a song-by-song, in-sequence performance of her new album, The River and the Thread.  The band was spirited yet studio-tight, and Johnny's daughter was in rare form, looking fitter than she has in years and with her voice half an octave lower than three decades ago but, if anything, stronger and more confident, more supple to her will.  After intermission, she and the band ran through a few early hits, plus several songs from The List (including her father's Tennessee Flat Box Top), and a terrific version of Bobby Gentry's Ode to Bobby Joe.  The show closed with her great Seven Year Ache, sans the annoying early-80s synthesizer that marred the original recording.

Absent from the set list, however, were some of her strongest songs: the elegiac duet September When It Comes, recorded with her father just a few months before his death, and the great songs of love, lust, and loss (What We Really Want, Seventh Avenue, Sleeping in Paris et al.) from her mid-career albums Interiors and The Wheel.  September When It Comes is among the most heartbreaking songs ever recorded, and it is perhaps understandable that Roseanne chose to omit it from a Valentine's show.  But What We Really Want and Sleeping in Paris are as romantic as they come.  Why then the swerve?  I'm just speculating, of course, but I suspect biography played a role.  Interiors was written and recorded as Roseanne Cash's marriage to the singer/songwriter Rodney Crowell was beginning to fracture and fail; The Wheel documents its death throes, as well as the incept of her relationship with John Leventhal, now her husband and lead guitarist.  That period (late 80s/early 90s) was transitional for Cash in other ways, as she turned her back on Nashville, country music, and the South, moved to New York City, bought an apartment in Chelsea, and began recording new music for a new record company.  Over the past decade and a half, of course, she has walked much of this back, starting with The List, a recording of country standards suggested by her father.  And now comes The River and the Thread, an open-armed embrace of her family's southern heritage.  Yet, for all that the new album is clearly a labor of love, marked by impeccable craftsmanship and featuring some fine songs (Sunken Lands, Modern Blue), it seems to me to fall a little flat.  At times Cash tries to channel a southernness that she simply no longer possesses, if she ever did. (To invoke Eliot again, many of the songs lack an objective correlative, a state of affairs sufficient to account for the emotions she describes.) When the Master Calls the Role, a song that moved me to shivers on first listen, now seems to me the album's most serious misstep.  Here Cash was plainly trying to write an Appalachian story song, a tear-jerking ballad for the ages.  But her reach exceeds her grasp: she leans on shopworn clichés (a newlywed soldier heading off to war and certain death, leaving behind his heartbroken bride) as well as some forced, awkward rhymes (It's the love of one true-hearted lass/that made the boy a hero/But a rifle ball and a canon blast/cut him down to zero).  Its piety feels insincere, and the end is rushed, with the lyrics bounding ahead to lay claim to a pathos they haven't earned.  Like the album as a whole, the song strikes me as more aspirational than realized.  As we filed out of packed Lisner Auditorium into the frigid, flurry-filled night, it occurred to me that what was missing was Cash's trademark urgency, as well as the above-mentioned triad—love, lust, and loss—that made her mid-career work so great.  In their stead she has substituted nostalgia, which just won't do.  I was reminded of a scene from the film Trainspotting, in which two characters try in vain to identify a genuinely good rock n' roll record produced by a musician over 40.

”What about Bowie?  His new album isn't bad."

"Yeah, but it's not too bloody good either, is it?"  

This, in turn, led me back to Eliot.

                Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age

                To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.

First, the cold friction of expiring sense

Without enchantment, offering no promise

But bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit

As body and soul begin to fall asunder.

Well.  That's certainly one way of looking at it.  On the other hand, in 1781 a hitherto obscure German professor quietly published his first book, at the age of 57.  The professor was Immanuel Kant; the book was The Critique of Pure Reason.

Thank God for hope, and spring.

January 2014

Booknotes et cetera

 January 2014

Books Bought

1.       Essays of E.B. White

2.       Nick Hornsby, Ten Years in the Tub

3.       Stephen King, On Writing

4.       Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird

5.       John Eliiot Gardiner, Bach: Music in the Castle of Heaven

Books Read

1.       Dennis McFarland, Nostalgia

2.       Ari Shavit, My Promised Land

3.       Genesis, Gospel of Matthew

4.       Nick Hornsby, Ten Years in the Tub

5.       Essays of E.B. White

6.       Dennis Turner, Thomas Aquinas: A Portrait (part)

7.       Brent Shaw, Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine

8.       Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach (part)

9.       William Faulkner, Light in August

Music Bought and Listened To

1.       Roseanne Cash, The River and the Thread

2.       Joni Mitchell, Blue

3.       Sade, Lover’s Rock

Movies Seen

1.       American Hustle

2.       Inside Llewyn Davis

There is in our bedroom a fireplace we never use, which is kind of a shame since even though it is a gas fireplace with faux logs, if you turn it on at night when all the lights are off it is indisputably pretty and creates a romantic mood that I would normally be all for.  Unfortunately, it has only one flame setting, about halfway between wood-fired pizza oven and thermonuclear meltdown.  Even Alba, who was born in Cuba and grew up in Miami and is about as cold natured as they come, agrees it's a bit much.   Happily, the fireplace is not entirely a white elephant, for it has a redeeming feature in the form of a sturdy, chest-high 4'x3' top.  Before I moved in, this surface held a chess set and a gorgeous art nouveau glass vase with glass tulips and a variety of knick-knacks and family photos.  The chess set and vase remain, but nowadays the rest of the acreage, or most of it, is given over to books, specifically Books I've Recently Bought But Haven't Read Yet.  Back in May there twenty or so of these, occupying an expanse of about two and a half feet.   In the eight months since both the number and length have doubled.    

                Initially, the presence of these books was a source of deep pleasure.  There they stood, tall and crisp as sentinels, each promising to entertain or enlighten.  Month by month, however, as the row has lengthened, they've become more like mute, reproachful witnesses, silently convicting me of the vices of profligacy and sloth.

                Hence the above list of books bought versus books read comes as a comfort and a pleasant surprise.  Both in terms of purchases and reading, January 2014 was about par for the course.  Yet clearly nine is more than five.  Ergo, I read more books than I bought.  True, those of caviling disposition might note that two of the nine were read only in part and that counting Genesis and Matthew as an entire book is a bit generous, or even disingenuous.  I’m willing to grant the former point, though only if I'm allowed to point out that Brent Shaw's estimable Sacred Violence: African Christians and Sectarian Hatred in the Age of Augustine is a Cambridge University Press tome of some 806 pages, replete with honest-to-God old fashioned footnotes, many of them in Latin and most of which I actually read, and thus could fairly count as two books.  (It also covers its chosen topics—Christian-pagan, Christian-Jewish, and intra-Christian violence in North Africa from c. 312-450—in such magisterial detail that could I remember it all—if only!—I would never need to read anything else on them again.)  Two takeaways among many: the enormous corpus of St. Augustine's writings is both blessing and curse, making possible an amazingly detailed reconstruction of his era while simultaneously making it impossible to treat it with anything resembling objectivity and balance; and, hundreds of years of Roman rule had so deeply inculcated the habit of settling disputes via recourse to the law courts and/or petitioning civil rulers that by the time Christianity came along, the notion of resolving large-scale disputes by any other means was quite literally unthinkable.  (Henceforth I shall read all controversial patristic literature as essentially law briefs.  On counting Genesis and Matthew combined as a full volume, however, I'm not budging an inch.  Together they constitute 120 pages in my edition of the Bible, or 78 (admittedly rather brief) chapters, and that's good enough for me. 

                On the other hand, it remains the case that row of books has steadily lengthened these past eight months.  Facts are annoyingly stubborn things.

                Of the books I've read in the New Year, Nostalgia was the most surprising, My Promised Land was both awe-inspiring and deeply disturbing, and Light in August was, well, a masterpiece.   Nostalgia was surprising to me because, despite the raft of glowing reviews from reliable reviewers that led me to buy it in the first place, I had a presentiment that it would prove overly derivative of War & Peace + Red Badge of Courage.  When it arrived dressed in a dustjacket bearing a discouraging faux-lithograph of a Civil War battle scene, my doubts increased.  Yet despite the self-inflicted handicaps of a cumbersome postmodernist structure (fragmented time, mostly) and a dubious and melodramatic explanation of why the protagonist, Summerfield Hayes, enlisted in the Union Army in the first place, it seems to me Dennis McFarland has produced  something of a wonder.  Nostalgia does indeed pay frank homage to both Tolstoy and Hawthorne as well as to the Jamesian strategy of creating suspense out of moral complexity, yet it finds its own voice.  Never, for instance, have I read a novel that used so effectively the modern freedom to graphically describe the horrors of war without employing a single overwrought phrase or everslipping into pornographic gore.  McFarland makes revealing and ultimately beautiful use of Hayes's dreams and fevered hallucinations, not to symbolize or foreshadow but to reveal character.  He is clearest and most realistic precisely when he is most eloquent; poetic phrases and deft description, so often show-offy and distracting in literary fiction, are in Nostalgia the means of communicating deep truths which cannot be expressed otherwise.

                The subtitle of Ari Shavit's My Promised Land—the Triumph and Tragedy of Israel—sounds like the kind of thing some hack publicist would come up with, but in this case it is not only apropos but perfect.   The trick is that he slights neither side of the conjunction.  From the ex nihilo rise of Israel's citrus industry, which was born in the 1920s and then prospered even as the world economy plunged into depression, to the astonishing creativity and prosperity of its modern tech industries (Israel generates more technology patents than Germany, with less than a tenth its population), to its nonpareil feat of absorbing 600,000 mostly refugee immigrants between 1946 and 1954 into a population of roughly the same number and somehow providing housing, schools, medical care, and jobs for them all, Shavit demonstrates conclusively and vividly that Israel is beyond question the demographic, economic and political miracle of the twentieth century.  Yet, simultaneously, he shows not only how literally de-moralizing the endless occupation of the West Bank has become, but also how inextricably bound the entire Israeli project is with a past marked by opportunistic ethnic cleansing.   Finally, and despite a final chapter whose forced optimism strikes the book's only false note, Shavit demonstrates with merciless clarity just how quixotic and untenable is the existence of Israel-- a Jewish, westward-looking island of six million people in a sea of 350 million Arab Moslems, itself surrounded by an ocean of another billion Moslems.  Despite all the doubts and questions Shavit's book raised, I remain a friend and admirer of Israel.  But I closed it with a terrible sense of foreboding.                       

                Light in August limns an altogether different tragedy: that of race in the American South.  Such honesty, such high moral seriousness, and such epic and biblical resonance are unparalleled in any American novel of my acquaintance.  To it The Great Gatsby should yield pride of place in the canon, forthwith.