Archives for 2004

“Efficiency of a practically flawless kind may be reached naturally in the struggle for bread. But there is something beyond–a higher point, a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspiration which gives to all work that finish which is almost art–which is art.”

Joseph Conrad, The Mirror of the Sea

Tonight I walked by someone’s elaborately ready-for-Halloween house in my neighborhood, Hyde Park. Four fresh faux graves graced the front yard. Two of the inscriptions on the gravestones:

SEE, I

TOLD YOU

I WAS

SICK!

and

BETTER

HERE

THAN

EVANSTON

I giggled all the way home.

As Terry mentioned, the Paul Taylor program I saw Sunday night at the College of Du Page’s McAninch Arts Center included Taylor’s great 2002 dance “Promethean Fire.” The other dances on the program were “Klezmerbluegrass,” in its world premiere, and “Dante Variations,” another new dance that premiered earlier this year. This was my second time seeing Taylor’s company at the comfy McAninch Center. Despite the longish drive from Chicago, it’s a nice place to see a performance. There’s not a bad seat in the house.

“Klezmerbluegrass” was vivid and delightful, alternating jubilant sections danced by the ensemble with more wistful solos and duets. The group parts reminded me of two of my all-time favorite dances, Eliot Feld’s “The Jig Is Up” and “Skara Brae,” both of which are set to traditional Irish music and make me want to dance all the way home. The ensemble parts of “Klezmerbluegrass” had that same care-extinguishing exultation about them, which never felt very far away, even during the most brooding solo. Commissioned by the National Foundation for Jewish Culture (with support from the McAninch) to commemorate 350 years of Jewish life in America, Taylor’s new dance convincingly celebrates the capacity of the communities we form to blunt the occupational angst of individual existence. It doesn’t, much to its credit, pretend that they can cure it.

I have more to say about the other two dances on the program, especially “Promethean Fire,” but it will have to wait a bit. I’m blogging sub rosa right now, and I don’t want to push my luck….

“C. D. paused under the archway, breathing dedicatedly. Picture if you will a C. D. gone mad. A bull in a china shop–an aesthetic bull that is–a bull run mad on aestheticism. For if American education had struck him as eclecticism run mad he was striking me as aestheticism run mad. His eyes shone and darted about ferociously coveting all they beheld. His mouth salivated (at least he licked it several times in a kind of mopping up gesture), his hands clenched and unclenched, his brow perspired; a most unnatural fever seemed to have overtaken him. And then he got a grip on himself, marched boldly into the room, took a good look around him and relaxed. And he looked upon everything and he looked everywhere in that old man’s way of his that struck me now as being also so very like that of a very young baby–so lovingly, so gently, so wonderingly. But with an avidity too, that avidity special to C. D. A hungry look cast upon each object of beauty as it flowed and filled and satisfied the innermost reaches of his soul. His eyes would seize upon the object with the impatience of youth, then–here was the difference–come to terms with it; set it down: the eyes avidly picking up each beloved object in salutation–putting it down gently in farewell. Eyes look your last! Strange old man, heart-breaking, heart-broken old man–to be so moved by the polish of wood, the curve of a chair-leg, the glint of crystal, the fade of Aubusson. As though he were missing it all already. There. There. Don’t mind so much; don’t let yourself miss it.”

Elaine Dundy, The Old Man and Me

I promised to tell you all about my trip to Minnesota, and I will, but not yet. I just got home from the New York premiere of Sin (A Cardinal Deposed), and I’ll be getting up first thing in the morning to review it for Friday’s Wall Street Journal. After that I’ve got to knock off a quick piece about Bright Young Things, Stephen Fry’s film adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies. Once that’s finished and filed, I’m planning to stuff a couple of CDs in my shoulder bag (most definitely including this one), go pick up a rental car, and hit the road. I’m heading for the Hudson House Inn, where I expect to spend a couple of days sleeping late, eating well, and looking at the fall foliage.

I’ll be back some time Friday afternoon…but you know what? I might not blog again until Monday! How about that? It’s more likely that I’ll at least post my Friday Journal teaser and an almanac entry, but if I don’t, fear not–I shall return.

Later.

I really like what Our Girl posted yesterday about the advantages of letting your mind wander while listening to music. I do it, too–I think everybody does, though some of us are more reluctant to admit it than others. For that matter, I suspect that many, perhaps even most musicians not infrequently let their minds wander while playing music. The late Dick Wellstood, a wonderful jazz pianist who had an intellectual streak, once told Whitney Balliett in an interview that people might be surprised to know what “ordinary daylight things” he thought about while soloing (I’m quoting from memory–I loaned the book in question to a friend a few months ago, and just realized that she hadn’t returned it yet).

I felt a prick in my memory as I read Our Girl’s posting, and suddenly it came to me that E.M. Forster had written something on this very subject. I couldn’t quite recall what or where, but thirty seconds’ worth of Googling led me to the fifth chapter of Howards End, in which Forster describes Helen Schlegel’s thoughts as she listens to a performance of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony:

For the Andante had begun–very beautiful, but bearing a family likeness to all the other beautiful Andantes that Beethoven had written, and, to Helen’s mind, rather disconnecting the heroes and shipwrecks of the first movement from the heroes and goblins of the third. She heard the tune through once, and then her attention wandered, and she gazed at the audience, or the organ, or the architecture. Much did she censure the attenuated Cupids who encircle the ceiling of the Queen’s Hall, inclining each to each with vapid gesture, and clad in sallow pantaloons, on which the October sunlight struck. “How awful to marry a man like those Cupids!” thought Helen. Here Beethoven started decorating his tune, so she heard him through once more, and then she smiled at her Cousin Frieda. But Frieda, listening to Classical Music, could not respond. Herr Liesecke, too, looked as if wild horses could not make him inattentive; there were lines across his forehead, his lips were parted, his pince-nez at right angles to his nose, and he had laid a thick, white hand on either knee. And next to her was Aunt Juley, so British, and wanting to tap. How interesting that row of people was! What diverse influences had gone to the making! Here Beethoven, after humming and hawing with great sweetness, said “Heigho,” and the Andante came to an end. Applause, and a round of “wunderschoning” and pracht volleying from the German contingent. Margaret started talking to her new young man; Helen said to her aunt: “Now comes the wonderful movement: first of all the goblins, and then a trio of elephants dancing”; and Tibby implored the company generally to look out for the transitional passage on the drum….

(Read the whole thing here. I don’t like Forster in general or Howards End in particular, but I do like this chapter.)

Now tell me something, dear OGIC. Here’s what you wrote about watching Paul Taylor the other night:

I spent most of the evening bouncing between asking myself “What does it mean?” and simply forgetting the question. Forgetting about words and language themselves, really, as something especially stunning or delicate unfolded on the stage. For me, anyway, this shuttling mode in which I seem to watch dance offers the best of both worlds. As a dance begins I inevitably find myself pushing lightly toward an interpretation, but when the work does something that exceeds or confounds the interpretation–as it continually does, if it is any good–I happily give up thinking and, as Terry says, eat it up. I love this ebb and flow of thought, the thinking and the being drawn away from thinking by fresh experience.

I couldn’t have put it better. “Forgetting about words and language themselves” is exactly what you have to do in order to experience a non-verbal art form in all its rich ambiguity. But it happens that you saw a Taylor dance, Promethean Fire, which is widely thought to make oblique but nonetheless intelligible reference to the events of 9/11. Did you see such allusions in Promethean Fire? And if so, how did they affect your response to it? Inquiring co-bloggers want to know.

A reader writes:

Shouting “Brava!”, sir,

Might impress your friends from Queens,

But not Joe Volpe.

I wish I were that clever….

A reader writes:

For your next blog perhaps you can explain for the rest of us just why New Yorkers are suddenly enamored of the word schadenfreude. I had heard it once or twice until a couple of months ago and now suddenly it’s everywhere. What gives? And now there it is in today’s New York Times, on the front page of the Arts and Leisure section. There must be an explanation.

I don’t read Frank Rich’s column–it hurts my ears–so I didn’t notice that he’d had occasion to deploy one of my own favorite words. I try not to drop foreign words or phrases into my writing (in fact, I told a member of my criticism class yesterday to remove C’est vrai and Gesamtkunstwerk from the piece of his that I was editing). Once in a while, though, there’s no good alternative, and schadenfreude is one of those rare exceptions to my personal rule. To derive malicious joy from someone else’s troubles is, if I may be so bold as to say it, precisely the sort of concept for which one would expect the Germans to have coined a word, and it seems to me altogether fitting that we should have taken it over without change.

I must admit, though, that I hadn’t noticed any sharp uptick in the popularity of Schadenfreude: The Word. I checked just now and noticed, somewhat to my surprise, that it appeared only twice on this blog before today. Google returned 127,000 hits when I searched the word a little while ago, among them a couple of blogs and Web pages for a Chicago comedy ensemble and “a monthly deathrock and gothrock night in Washington, D.C.” (that one I like). I also ran across several references to Joseph Epstein’s clever little book about envy, whose treatment of schadenfreude I commend to your attention (he calls it “a hardy perennial in the weedy garden of sour emotions”).

Be it in German, English, or pig Latin, I expect schadenfreude is here to stay–and no matter what happens at the polls next Tuesday night, I also expect that a large percentage of voters will be experiencing it come Wednesday morning. That might just explain why my correspondent has been encountering the S-word so frequently of late. Nice it’s not, but it’s definitely part and parcel of the human condition, at least for those of us who aren’t saintly.