Tangled Up

Bob Dylan has won this year's Nobel Prize for Literature.

 When I saw this I immediately recalled a moment in my senior year of college--1967/8--when I railed to a lit professor that the literature of our times was being written by Dylan, the Beatles etc. in the form of a few minutes of song.

 It wasn't an original idea. I recall reading an interview with Donovan who referred to "Eleanor Rigby" as a three minute novel.

 But as important as Dylan's songs have been to me and to our times, this news didn't arrive as a vindication. I'm actually disappointed.

The truth is Bob Dylan doesn't need any more awards. I'm pretty sure he'd tell you that himself.  He's a pop star, and has been recognized for his contribution to American culture many times, including at the White House.

 But there are a lot of writers who aren't pop stars who have only a few shots at recognition. Yes, they can get medals from their nation for cultural contributions. But this is the big international prize for their art.

I think of Ursula LeGuin who is 87. She is only one of several I can think of who deserve this prize, which is given only to the living.

Giving Dylan this prize does nothing but muddy the waters. Does this make Sting and James Taylor and Joni Mitchell and Bruce Springsteen eligible? I guess so. But why? They don't need it. The world doesn't need it.

 Giving this prize to, say, Kim Stanley Robinson on the other hand could actually change the world. It would recognize a form of literature and give him a platform for expressing ideas and focusing a dialogue the world needs to survive.

 Hey, even a National Book Award or a Pulitzer would go a long way. But writers in the sci-fi ghetto don't get those awards, despite their contributions to literature and literary culture, not to mention the world. They have a better shot at the Nobel.

 So it's another occasion to celebrate Dylan's work (though eventually somebody is going to point out that his borrowings remain controversial) and that's fine. But we know about Dylan's work. We've been swimming in it for more than fifty years.  Is this more of an award for us?

Sure, I recognize that songs like "The Times They Are A Changin" and "Tangled Up in Blue" and a few dozen more have had more lasting and layered effects on me, including deep visceral effects, and may even say more about life in these times than almost any novel or poem.  But their power is in their nature as songs.

Without the music, Dylan might be--as Allen Ginsberg came to believe--a good minor poet.  That's not faint praise.  There aren't that many good minor poets. But that's not really relevant.  This is a different form.  Dylan would probably tell you that.  (And come to that, where is Allen Ginsberg's prize?)

 This prize is for literature, and the work of literature gets no greater recognition. Think of all that Margaret Atwood (for one) has written and done, and the example she sets for a literary culture. Or Gary Snyder (age 86.)  Or is that over now? That's not good.

It's possible to argue that songs of the kind that Dylan wrote aren't being written or at least heard as much anymore because popular music has changed. But that's a different argument. The fact is that the popular music forms are not threatened. They still bring in big bucks. Literary culture around the world is endangered. And this prize does nothing to support it.

Music

"You don't have to sell a hundred million records, you don't need thousands of platinum disks, you don't need to sing to millions and millions of people for music to nourish your soul.  You can sing and play to the cat, it will still mend your life.  My mantra is five simple words: Music is its own reward."

Sting

The Gouldberg Variations

On the occasion of J.S. Bach's birthday, I share the opening--the Aria-- for what has become my favorite piece of music, the Goldberg Variations, in my favorite version, the 1981 recording by Glenn Gould.

A local classical music station played some of the variations today to mark Bach's birthday.  The announcer repeated the standard story (sometimes disputed) that Bach wrote it as a commission by a nobleman who couldn't sleep--it was to be played by his private keyboardist, a 14 year old boy named Goldberg, who was also Bach's pupil.  It was supposed to promote sleep yet be lively enough to offer solace if sleep didn't come.

Though I was first inspired to listen to it by Richard Powers' description of it in his novel The Goldbug Variations, I too attempted to use it in this legendary way, and listened to it so many nights in succession that it was no longer necessary for me to turn on my mp3 player, I could just play it in my head.  Since then I've scaled back, but I still listen to it in part or all of it pretty often.  And still find new moments in it.

Some years back the NY Times or somebody asked a bunch of classical music people their opinion on the best classical recording.  Several named Gould's Goldberg's Variations, though they were split on which version--his first recording in 1955 or his second in 1981 (they were his first and last recordings of anything.)

Both are somewhat controversial, but the 1981 probably more so.  The most obvious difference is the Aria--it is slower in 1981, but that only begins to describe the difference.  The difference is a revelation, and speaks to me of time, melancholy and acceptance, and savoring the moments of life's beauty.

I know a pianist who disdains both Gould versions.  On the other hand there are people like me, not classically educated or employed, who are devoted to Gould's piano performances, and specifically to one or the other of the Goldberg Variations he recorded.

I knew the radio station was going to play the Goldberg Variations so I made sure to tune in, hoping they would play a version I hadn't heard.  It's said that before Gould it didn't seem possible for one pianist to play the Variations (it is astonishing to try to follow what two hands are doing--it sounds impossible) but since then, many pianists have recorded them.

But the version the station chose wasn't a piano (or a harpsichord, the keyboard for which it was written) but a transcription for strings.  There are several of these--I have two--and they seem to emphasize the lyrical quality of the 1981 Aria.

But Gould's playing--especially on parts of the Goldberg--has also always reminded me of jazz.  Gould apparently thought of some of his playing as approaching jazz, and it seems that way to me.  So I also have a jazz version of the Goldberg by the Jacques Loussier Trio.  And like it a lot too.  I could well be wrong, but I don't think either the string version or the jazz version would exist
without Gould.

The above clip is from a video recording of Gould playing the 1981 version in the recording studio.  The whole performance is also on YouTube, but I have it on disk.  It's a remarkable thing to watch.  Gould was a handsome young man in 1955 but in 1981 he was just a few years from the end.  In this video he looks apish, not at all capable of making the sounds he is in fact making.  Add to his appearance his eccentricities--strange posture and approach of his hands to the keyboard--and it is not really easy to watch.  Until the camera lingers on his hands as he plays, and then it's mesmerizing.  

The Aria has become somewhat familiar from movies and television shows, but in total it is for me a great 3 minute piece in itself, and I offer it to cyberspace in the hope of introducing it to enhance someone else's life.  Paying it forward.

"Music's not for stopping.  You go till you drop...For me, it ends when it ends.  Johnny Cash did his best work in the last two years of his life.  That's what musicians should aim to do."

Roger Daltrey, lead singer of the Who, interview
in August 2011 "Uncut"

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould
White Pine Pictures

Nearly 30 years after his death, pianist Glenn Gould remains an icon. He’s one of the few classical musicians revered by peers who also has awestruck fans without expertise in that area of music. I’m one of those. I’ve collected his recordings, read two biographies, and have listened to few pieces of music—and none of classical music—more than I have of Gould’s 1981 version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.

There are a number of videos about Gould that are limited, bathetic or complete rip-offs.  Also a fine fictional film based on Gould's life, Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould by Francois Girard (it took me years to catch on to the fact that the number corresponds to the number of variations in "Goldberg": this film had to have been called The Glenn Gould Variations at some point.)  And a 2006 film I haven't yet seen called Hereafter by Gould confidant Bruno Monsaingeon that adds dramatizations and encounters with Gould fanatics to archival video and audio. But this film, Genius Within by Michele Hozer and Peter Raymont is a satisfying biographical treatment with a fair amount of music. It's been on the festival circuit, but the DVD extra interviews really contribute.

I happened to rent this along with the docu DVD on 1970s popular singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson, and they have provocative similarities. So instead of recapping the Gould story, I’ll suggest some of their commonalities as artists.

Artistic success is often a matter of being ready with the right skills at the right time and place. It also tends to be circumscribed in time, between the damage or obsessions that motivate, and the time when their effects accumulate.

Nilsson had a troubled childhood, Gould perhaps a lonely one. They both were successful in their 20s with a clear path to an artistic career, and they both violated career rules, to their benefit and at a cost. (Both notoriously avoided live performance for the recording studio.  Gould felt touring drained imagination, causing him to "grow old very quickly.  It's a dreadful life.")  Drugs (alcohol and 70s recreationals for Nilsson, prescription drugs for Gould) arguably fueled their work and arguably hastened their demise.

Both men mesmerized their friends, and demanded much of them. Both explored other creative areas but returned to culminating works—Gould especially, with his second Goldberg Variations in the last year of his life. They were both hyperactive and intuited an early death, and both died in their early 50s.

But their legends can lead to distortions. One woman on this DVD reveals a romantic relationship and implies a sexual one with the reputedly virginal Gould. Nilsson’s life also became more balanced with a happy family life in his later years.

Yet crucially they each followed internal guides, and apart from personal failings their unorthodox career decisions turned out to be artistically right.  Perhaps this sentence from Thoreau, from the journal passage quoted in the previous post, applies not only to individual works but to the arc of a career: “We must walk consciously only part way to our goal,” Thoreau wrote, “and then leap in the dark to our success.”

Random Notes

I found a video cassette at the library of a PBS (actually a CBC) production called "Singing Our Stories," featuring Native American/First Nations women singing and talking about their tribal music. Before I had a chance to screen it, the program turned up on our local PBS station when I happened to be surfing through.

It's a very good program, but I took particular note of a moment near the beginning. Years ago at the summer arts festival in Pittsburgh, I heard a duo of two Native women called Pura Fe and Soni. They've since become two/thirds of one of the better known Native recording groups, Ulali. At that performance at the edge of Point State Park, one of them (probably Pura Fe) prefaced one song with a bit of history, involving an area of the South (I believe it was North Carolina) where black slaves interacted with Indians, and their music merged to become the blues.

I never forgot that, and the more of traditional Native music I heard, the more I heard aspects of the blues and elements that would be incorporated in jazz singing. But I could never find any documentation for what Pura Fe said. I still haven't, but at least I've heard her say it again, on "Singing Our Stories." In that program she was singing with four generations of women in her extraordinary family, in which there have been seven sisters for several generations. They were singing and dancing barefoot on a smooth and bending wood front porch. The blues was clearly in that music, and she said she felt that way, and intimated that a lot of Native people feel that way. The way she said it made it sound as if it is still a heretical observation.

I didn't hear Ken Burns' emphasize it in his multi-hour historical "Jazz" series, for instance. But as Pura Fe pointed out, there were American Indian slaves working side by side with black slaves in the Southeast. There is a clearer if almost as unacknowledged connection in New Orleans, where the "juns" in Cajun are Indians. This mixed blood music is part of the richness of jazz that left that city and headed north to Chicago and Kansas City, and to the world.

Music-making is an undeniably wide-open tradition. Musicians copy whatever sounds good to them, and they've been doing it probably as long as there's been music. It's one of the reasons that despite instances of exploitation, many of the first blows against segregation came from black and white jazz and rock and roll musicians playing together. Racial harmony was more literal than most people imagine. Cultural sharing extends to ceremonial music as well---certainly in Christian churches, black and white. But it's way past time for the Native American contribution to jazz and the blues be explored and acknowledged.

A Cat Column

Our favorite San Francisco Chronicle columnist, Jon Carroll, has taken to warning readers in a variety of ways that a "cat column" is coming up.
Tess, the cat for whom I staff, deserves her column inches as well. So consider yourself warned.

I'm moved to write this because I'm now convinced that Tess not only uses language, she invents language. I don't mean her variety of vocalizations as much as her gestural language. For instance, she invented a way to signal that she wants her wet cat food from the refrigerator. Tess is very structured. She understands schedules and gets upset if we don't keep to ours, and of course, to hers. She knows how many times a day she gets wet food, and what part of the day. She's been known to demand it at exactly the same hour every day. The signal she devised for "requesting" it is to position herself in front of the refrigerator and shake her hindquarters in what we used to call her "tuna dance," before we stopped giving her tuna due to mercury content.

For awhile she corrupted this signal by refusing the food and wanting something else, so the signal became ambiguous. But lately she's returned to a one to one correspondence, Tuna Dance= I want my wet cat food, it's time.

The connection between her actions and what she wanted is pretty clear, and pretty eloquent. But then she began doing something that is closer to pure language. As she's gotten older she likes being held and petted a lot more, and more often. Lately she's been using a signal to indicate her desire to be held and petted. She vocalizes, then stands underneath one of the kitchen chairs, and vocalizes some more. If I don't get the message, she emerges and goes under another chair and repeats it.

What's really interesting about this is that her action has no relationship to the action she's requesting. In fact, it's counterproductive because it's difficult to reach her when she's under the chair. I've pointed this out to her a number of times, but she persists, perhaps because she sees that despite my complaints I get her meaning. Because of the difficulty of reaching her, I don't see how I could have given her the idea that if she goes under the chair, I am more likely to pick her up. This is a signal that she created, specific to this one thing she wants.

So what else is this but the invention of language-a meaning invented for a gesture that has no relationship to what's meant.

Tess considers herself a fully equal member of the household. Since we moved our kitchen table to an area she can see clearly, she has taken to eating or at least hanging out at her dish whenever we sit down for a meal. She participates in our daily routine and expects us to keep it. For the middle part of the day there is no set routine, as one or both of us may be absent, and she understands this, too. She also has routines established with each of us separately. Her sense of order orders us. But how she made the leap to inventing language is something else again.


American Dreams

This season's "American Dreams" has the kids growing up, the youngest getting an operation to correct a polio induced handicap, the middle child---the girl who seemed to be the central character in the first season---going on with her adolescence in this fraught context of the mid 1960s. The black family has also emerged as a strong if secondary set of developing stories. But the major arc follows the oldest of the Pryor children, the son who is now a Marine, and is now on his way to Vietnam.

There are no characters now in the series that correspond with my situation in the period---that is, no one for me to identify with, one to one. Nevertheless I feel an emotional connection to J.J., the oldest son, who is nothing like I was at his age. I'm surprised at the depth of my feeling after all these years concerning my contemporaries who went to Vietnam. Especially one I think about, a guy I didn't know very well in college-we had our political differences since he was gung ho ROTC, but we met accidentally alone shortly before graduation day, and made our separate peace. He was killed in his first week in Vietnam.

Maybe that's it---at the time, the draft and the war were at once so specifically personal, and also so political and large in implication. As I've said in this space before, whatever hostility there was for soldiers soon dissipated when the first of them started coming back from Vietnam, "radicalized." But perhaps this area between the very personal and the broadly political, the area of empathy, is one that I haven't fully experienced emotionally. So in a way I do identify with J.J., and his journey becomes my road not taken.

It's more than that, for Margaret seems to be similarly affected. And really, has there been the opportunity to emotionally experience this through a character over time? Not with the intensity of a book or a movie, but in these fully furnished moments of something like the past, stretched out over weeks and months? Following a character we've seen "grow up" for awhile? I don't think so. This TV show is not entirely accurate in its depiction of the 60s, but in particular scenes it can be devastatingly evocative. I never had to ship out to Vietnam, but in the draft process and otherwise I was in several sorts of military circumstances. So the scene of J.J. leaving was very powerful.

The West Wing

Aaron Sorkin is gone, can the West Wing survive? So far it seems to be successfully adding more personal and personality elements and conflict to political stories, in apparently well thought-out arcs that are subtle yet definite. Within the shows the writing is a bit uneven, especially the dialogue, but that's been getting better. (And, it's worth noting, at least one episode I noticed was written by a team of two women, a first for this series.) The integrity of the show seems to be intact. In any case, I doubt if any current TV series would produce an episode heavily advertised as a "Christmas show" that had less sentimentality and more reality about families and relationships, yet still had moments of authentic, earned feeling.