Archives for October 30, 2007

I’m nearly to the end of Kate Christensen’s latest, The Great Man, having last summer devoured her novels In the Drink and The Epicure’s Lament. This one is good, too, and has me particularly impressed by Christensen’s range with characters. In The Great Man these include the seventy- and eighty-something wife, mistress, and sister of Oscar Feldman, a recently deceased painter whose biographers have started in. It’s hardly original to note that women of a certain age don’t get a lot of nuanced or lively representation in fiction, but it’s true. In Christensen’s novel, each of them is fascinating company: Maxine, the headstrong sister whose art can give Oscar’s a run for its money; Teddy, the proud mistress; and Abigail, the homebound wife who may not have suffered as much as you’d think in the face of her husband’s infidelities. That goes for Teddy’s best friend Lila, too. For those of us who aspire to be interesting old women someday, the novel is awfully reassuring.
The Great Man has also made me sit up and take notice of what, with this novel, no longer seems incidental in Christensen’s work: food. As you might surmise, it plays a substantial role in The Epicure’s Lament, whose title character Hugo is an able and exacting cook. In this novel sumptuous meals are everywhere, unattached to any particular character, and hungrily described. Teddy cooks, but Maxine and Abigail find themselves at a dinner party and restaurant, respectively, where the food is both prepared and described meticulously. It’s almost enough to make me press the book on the Gurgling Cod, who does in fact have a birthday coming up.
Here’s a taste: a dinner party scene that put me in mind of Tom Wolfe’s famous satirical take on 1980s haute cuisine in Bonfire of the Vanities.

The soup bowls were whisked away and plates of summery salad replaced them: a Japanese woodcut sea of curly pale green frisee lettuce on which floated almond slice rafts, each holding a tiny, near-translucent poached baby shrimp as pink and naked as a newborn. Crisp blanched haricots verts darted through the sea like needle-nosed fish. Cerise-rimmed radish slices bobbed here and there like sea foam. The dressing was a briny green lime juice and olive oil emulsion. Maxine stared at the thing, trying to imagine the person who had so painstakingly made it. It would be demolished in three bites.

Just because it’s absurd doesn’t mean it wouldn’t be delicious.

I’m still receiving e-mail–and lots of it–about my “Sightings” column discussing the New York Philharmonic’s proposed visit to North Korea, which appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Saturday. Virtually all of the people who’ve written so far have agreed with the stance I took against the visit, though I did get one letter that made me smile, albeit grimly:

Why don’t you get your facts straight about North Korea before engaging in your petty little smear campaign. Fat heads like you need to be slapped around and kicked in the groin.

I suspect that Kim Jong Il’s staff would be more than happy to oblige, since they already do it for so many other people.
Of far more interest, however, is this (unedited) e-mail from one James Zhu, part of which he also sent to Greg Sandow, whose earlier postings on this subject I quoted in my column:

I was a bit unsettled by your article on New York Philharmonic visit to North Korea, 10/27/2007. You never lived in such a society (“Darkness at Noon”, nothing less) and culture, how do you evaluate the impact of classic music to people “not familiar with Western composers”? I was first exposed to Mozart at a time when one of my school teachers was beaten to death on the street like a wild dog. I didn’t quite understood what was going on, but through his Serenade I said to myself, “there are got to be a better world”. I was timely punished and sent away to a camp for scavenging these Columbia 33 1/2 records and listening to them. After the same New YorK Philharmonic came to China (the audience was highly controlled but not telecasted), nobody over there thought it was a support to Mao, knowing you wouldn’t be raided anymore if you listen to Duke Ellington, and knowing the better stuff was coming. I surmise the viewpoints in media like yours must be more vocal before NYPO did China. Alas, look at what happened.
I am not sure how to put it politely: you are really sounds out of your line of work to the last few paragraphs of the article. When we are opinionated out of our circle of competence, we just show off our back end.

He certainly isn’t sure how to put it politely! (Greg either didn’t receive or was too nice to post that second paragraph.) Nevertheless, Zhu’s point of view is very much worth hearing, since it reflects, in Greg’s words, “the ghastly experience of living under a totalitarian regime.” This does not, of course, mean that his experience as a survivor of the Cultural Revolution is directly relevant to the situation in North Korea, about which he has as much first-hand knowledge–none–as I do.
Still, the point Zhu makes deserves to be taken seriously. It may well be that some contact between North Korea and the West, however narrowly restricted and closely monitored, is better than none at all. I hope he’s right, too, since my guess is that the Philharmonic is going to go to Pyongyang in any case.
Yet I remain skeptical, and am far more inclined to agree with the op-ed piece by Richard V. Allen and Chuck Downs of the U.S. Committee for Human Rights in North Korea that appeared in the New York Times the day after my column was published:

Any outsider who reaches out to the suffering millions in North Korea must be cautious not to worsen their oppression. Consider how the regime prohibits international food donors from verifying who actually gets the food. Food aid is distributed only to the military and the faithful, and denied to those judged unreliable or disloyal. This is just one reason why Doctors Without Borders withdrew from North Korea in 1998.
Normally, concerts in North Korea are limited to performances of music that Kim Jong-il himself is (falsely) credited with having written or at least approved. Merely to listen to radio broadcasts from other nations is to risk imprisonment. During a party on Christmas in 1992, one of the regime’s former propaganda officers, Ji Hae-nam, made the mistake of singing a South Korean song. She was sentenced to three years in jail and, as she testified to the United States Congress after her escape, beaten so severely she could not get up for a month.
It would be wonderful indeed if the Philharmonic could expose an audience in Pyongyang to some of the West’s great anthems to freedom, or at least demonstrate that excellent music has been written outside North Korea’s borders–and that the outside world is not so threatening after all. But negotiations so far on the terms of a visit are not promising.
If, as some starry-eyed commentators have suggested, the dictator’s willingness to let the Philharmonic perform demonstrates a new level of “openness,” then the orchestra should be able to make reasonable demands: that the orchestra alone set its program; that the performance be broadcast on state radio for everyone to hear; that the concert hall be open to the public, not just the elite; and that the Western press be allowed to attend. If the regime refuses these conditions, the Philharmonic should, in the name of artistic freedom, decline to perform in North Korea.

We’ll soon see what the North Korean government demands of the Philharmonic–and what the orchestra’s management, not to mention the members of the orchestra itself, will agree to do in order to play there.
Incidentally, you may find this book to be of interest. (Be sure to check out the customer reviews!)

“I packed a bag and was headed out. I was headed out down a long bone-white road, straight as a string and smooth as glass and glittering and wavering in the heat and humming under the tires like a plucked nerve. I seemed to be over the road just this side of the horizon. Then, after a while, the sun was in my eyes, for I was driving west. So I pulled the sun screen down and squinted and put the throttle to the floor. And kept on moving west. For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and see the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire. It is where you go when you hear that thar’s gold in them-thar hills. It is where you go to grow up with the country. It is where you go to spend your old age. Or it is just where you go.”

Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men (courtesy of The Rat)