Everyday I Have the Blues #11

AOL’s CompuServe features several stories on its home page each day. Here’s the headline and teaser for one from Thursday, October 2:

The Secret of How to Barter
Why pay $100 for something if you can get it for $75? Learn how to barter in 4 steps.

Why indeed? And why barter when you can bargain?

Everyday I Have the Blues #10
Monday, September 29, must have been an extraordinary day at The Times, what with the bailout package collapsing and stock markets swooning. Just look at the lead story on the first page of Tuesday’s Business Day, “The Banking Crisis Trickles Up,” and let your eye travel down until it stops just above the fold. There you will see HEAD W. SANDWICHKICKER TAG, underneath which are two lines of what we call in the business Greeked type. Oops. Of all the things they hate in the newsroom, a big goof in a headline or caption is right up there at the top of the list. Maybe it was corrected in a later edition. I hope so.

But that’s not what gave me the blues. It was a story in SportsTuesday about Charles “Chongo” Tucker, a rock climber who lived in Yosemite Park: “His Roof Is the Sky” by Michael Brick. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I rarely read a sports story. It’s not a very Addison thing to do. This story piqued my interest, though, and I read it from beginning to end, stopping only to puzzle over two sentences.

The first was this one, on the first page: “Rumors of his whereabouts began to trade around the big rocks and rope-walking fixtures of the Western states.” Huh? Rumors traded? “Hold on a doggone minute, Mr. Brick,” I said to myself. “Rumors are not independent actors, no matter how much you may want them to be, and they’re not traveling around the West on their own.” The sentence reads as if he wanted to construct it without any people, who would be the ones trading rumors as they climbed the rocks. Why he’d want to do that I haven’t a clue but it didn’t work for me.

On the next page, Mr. Brick tries to strike another literary note in describing Chongo: “Leathery skin, knowing eyes and a dilettante’s smile gave him the cabalistic twinkle of a movie pirate.” Leaving aside the dilettante’s smile, which I still have trouble imagining, I was baffled by the cabalistic twinkle. If the second meaning of “cabala,” according to Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, is “a traditional, esoteric, occult, or secret matter,” then is a cabalistic twinkle “a way of looking at someone that implies possession of esoteric or occult knowledge,” a la Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean? It could be but just what was twinkling? His whole face? Just his eyes? If they’re already knowing how are they radiating cabalistic knowledge at the same time?

It’s a pity no one had the time to wrestle his meaning out of Mr. Brick when the story was being edited. Except for those two clunkers it’s a good story.

Everyday I Have the Blues #9

Last week, The Times published an obituary of Norman Whitfield, the Motown Records songwriter and producer. As a dedicated follower of obits and a fan of Motown’s golden era, I read it with great interest until the last sentence in this paragraph stopped me cold.

For all his renown as a composer, Mr. Whitfield was even more prominent as a producer and arranger. He was known especially for his work with the Temptations; he produced many of their recordings for Motown, including the album “Cloud Nine,” whose title track earned the group a Grammy in 1969. He also helped usher in the era of psychedelic soul, producing the work of artists like Edwin Starr and the Undisputed Truth.

Look at the name of the second artist. If the group’s name is Undisputed Truth, then that is what it should be called. If the group called itself The Undisputed Truth, then “the” should be capitalized, the same way The New York Times styles its own name. Sheesh.

NOTE: And the same thing goes for The Temptations.

Everyday I Have the Blues #8

David Pogue had me awfully confused today. In his State of the Art column, “Nontechies, This One's For You,” he threw what looks like a comma splice into his review of the Peek.

The power cord ends in a micro U.S.B. connector, alas, you can’t recharge the Peek from a computer, as you can with a BlackBerry or an iPod.

I had to read that pesky sentence two or three times and I still don’t know why he didn’t either put a semicolon after “connector” or just split the darn thing into two sentences. If anyone can explain what he was doing there I’d love to hear it.
“Nontechies, This One's For You,” by David Pogue. Page C1, The New York Times, September 11, 2008.

NOTE: Read the comment for David Pogue’s response.

Everyday I Have the Blues #7

That little gem is from the NewEgg.com e-mail newsletter “Back to School All-Category Savings Spectacular! Up to 60% Off!” from August 19.

Everyday I Have the Blues #6

Sometimes Spellcheck is your friend.

Add creative inspiration and a love for trends and brand indentity, and you’re on your way to forging breakthrough ads.

“Copywriting: Mastering Ad Writing. Break into advertising,” e-mail from MediaBistro.com

This was the pullquote they used:

Before taking this course I knew nothing about copywriting now I know how to take an idea and turn it into a great ad.
--Latrice Harris

Everyday I Have the Blues #5

Typos don’t really count as wince-inducing but this one is too amusing not to pass along.

It is also the most ambitious classical music offering to date at Le Poisson Rouge, a new Greenwich Village club started by a pair of still-practicing classical sting players intent on presenting music of every description.

Can’t you just see Robert Redford on violin and Paul Newman on viola, playing the Maple Leaf Rag?

The Listings: Classical: Opera: “The Coronation of Poppea,” by Allan Kozin. The New York Times, p. E21, Friday, August 15, 2008.

Everyday I Have the Blues #4

When I read today’s sentence my first reaction was “Didn’t anyone read this?” And it’s possible that there wasn’t time to read the story, just run it through the grammar and spelling checker. Spellcheck is a great thing, but it won’t save you if you don’t know the difference between “there” and “their,” “your” and “you’re,” or “a device that fits inside or around a garment for hanging from a hook or rod” and “a covered and usually enclosed area for housing and repairing aircraft.”

A vibrant 55-year-old, Ms. Olsen is coming to terms with the unceremonious end of her fashion career — as the windows of the last remaining stores were papered over last month and the stock sold at discounts of 70 percent, including the hangars — at the same time she is starting over as an artist and entrepreneur.

“Her Forced Retirement” by Eric Wilson. The New York Times, G1, August 14, 2008

Everyday I Have the Blues #3

I tell people not to use “comprise” unless they have the proper training and permit, but do they listen to me? No, they don’t. They just go right on and embarrass themselves in print anyway. This is from sign-on instructions I received the other day from the human resources department of one of the biggest banks in the world.

Step 1 Begin the Sign-on Process.
* Enter your standard ID on the single sign-on screen.
* Enter your default password, which is comprised of:
* The first three characters of your Standard ID
* The last four digits of your Social Security number or national ID number.
et cetera

Everyday I Have the Blues #2a and 2b

I know, I know, it’s not really fair to spotlight goofs in The New York Times. They work under a daily deadline and there aren’t enough copy editors to give the copy a good going over. However, my criterion is the wince factor and these two examples supplied a good wince apiece.

Mr. Medoff said he hoped that people would read the comic and agree. “There’s a certain amount of ongoing pressure, but it’s been so far not efficient to make the authorities bow.”

“Comic-Book Idols Rally to Aid a Holocaust Artist” by George Gene Gustines, p. B7, Saturday, August 9, 2008

Did Mr. Gustines transcribe the interview poorly, did he misread his notes, or can we blame the editor for transforming “sufficient” into “efficient”? I can’t say but the quote doesn't make sense as it was printed.

(Mr. Kraus said he was germophobe when it came to the subway.)

Jamie Bishop/Christian Kraus wedding announcement, Sunday Styles p. 16, Sunday, August 10, 2008

Just what did Mr. Kraus say? That he was a germophobe or that he was germophobic? Maybe the editor couldn’t make up her mind, or maybe she doesn’t know the difference.

Everyday I Have the Blues #1

This is the first in an occasional, though possibly daily, series of posts featuring English usage that makes me wince. Spotlighting these won’t make the world a better place, I know, but they deserve to be shared.

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Membership News, the lead sentence in a story about the horticulturalist at The Cloisters:

Even in a city of more than 8 million residents, Deirdre Larkin easily has one of the most unique jobs.

Another Blogpost for Burma

Top 300 Favorite Songs of All Time III
Gustav Mahler (1860-1911). Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt (Saint Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes) (comp. 1893)

David Ocker, a college classmate and fellow ex-member of the Carleton Orchestra, wrote in his blog Mixed Meters a while ago that when someone asked him why he lost interest in Mahler, he said “instantly, without thinking and completely accurately, ‘I grew up.’” I’m not sure what he meant and I’m curious to find out, because I still find Mahler’s music, especially his songs, as enjoyable as when I first heard it more than 40 years ago.

One of my favorites among Mahler’s works is the song Saint Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes. In his notes to the Virgin Classics recording of Songs from The Youth’s Magic Horn (Des Knaben Wunderhorn), Terry Barfoot quotes Mahler as saying, “Not one of the fish is the wiser for the sermon, even though the saint has performed for them! But only a few people will understand my satire on mankind.” I have to wonder if an urban audience, especially a Viennese audience which was likely as sophisticated as any in the world, would not have gotten the message of the song.

Still, though the message is obvious, it is no less true today. And it isn’t unique to the song. Think of “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.” A great variation on that is the saying collected by Ken Weaver, a member of New York proto-punk group The Fugs, in Texas Crude: “You can buy ’em books and buy ’em books, and they just chew on the covers.”

As I probably made clear in the first two installments of this series, the words are as important to me as the music, and Saint Anthony’s Sermon has a wonderful lyric. From the opening, where St. Anthony (1195–1231) finds his Paduan parishioners have all stayed away from the church and decides he will give his sermon to the fish in the river, on to the ending, where the fish swim away unchanged by what they’ve heard, it paints a great picture.

The text is full of exclamation points which give an elbow-in-the-ribs quality to the printed lyric but don’t carry over to the music. The first comes in the opening verse:

Antonius zur Predigt
die Kirche find’t ledig!
Er geht zu den Flüssen
und predigt den Fischen.
or
Anthony, at sermon time,
Finds the church empty!
He goes to the river and
Preaches to the fishes.

Can you imagine, the lyric says (probably heavily edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano), that the people would have passed up the chance to hear St. Anthony preach? Unbelievable! Maybe it was a nice day or they were all out of town. The song may have been inspired by the story that St. Anthony was such an eloquent preacher that even the fish in Padua’s Brenta River enjoyed his sermons, and created a cynical elaboration on it. Another version of the story, cited by gonomad.com, sets the sermon in Rimini.

While in Rimini, on the Adriatic coast of Italy, he encountered some difficulty in getting the local population to listen to him. Somewhat dejected, he went down to the shore, where the river Ariminus runs into the sea, and began to speak to the fishes.

No sooner had he spoken a few words when suddenly so great a multitude of fishes, both small and great, approached the bank on which he stood. All the fishes kept their heads out of the water, and seemed to be looking attentively on St Anthony's face; all were ranged in perfect order and most peacefully, the smaller ones in front near the bank, after them came those a little bigger, and last of all, where the water was deeper, the largest.

As he continued speaking, the fish began to open their mouths and bow their heads, endeavoring as much as was in their power to express their reverence. The people of the city, hearing of the miracle, made haste to go and witness it.

Right from the beginning of the Lied, Mahler sets up a regularly accented three-quarter meter, possibly evoking the river and the movement of the schools of fish, before the singer sets the song up with the astonishing event of the empty church. With a repeated rising fourth in the lower timpani, a portentous sound that turns out to introduce a less-than-terrifying message, bassoons, clarinets, and string basses provide only about 10 seconds of vamping until the singer comes in and the rest of the orchestra joins (usually) her. Notice the triangle chiming along as the singer describes the sun reflecting off the river and the fishes’ scales. Mahler brings the triangle back periodically as a bit of orchestral color, and perhaps as a reminder of the sun on the river.

The strings are in constant motion, sometimes harmonizing the melody, sometimes stating a countermelody. When they drop out, the winds, especially the clarinets or brasses, by turns take over. In this song, at least, Mahler doesn’t throw the whole orchestra at the audience. Rather, as B.H. Haggin pointed out, he uses all of the resources of a large orchestra judiciously, never just for the sake of making a big sound, contrary to the obtuse views of some critics, perhaps most notably, Olin Downes of The New York Times.

Much of the fun of the song comes from listing of the fish species and their attributes — pike: belligerent, stockfish: always on a diet, crabs: slow moving, sturgeon: delicacies for the wealthy — and the refrain, “Kein Predigt niemalen/Den Fischen so g’fallen!” (No sermon ever/pleased [insert fish species here] as much!), coupled with the subtly ironic melody and orchestral accompaniment.

With a steady, rhythmic drive, the voice and accompaniment work through nine verses of catchy, folk-inspired melody, as potent a collection of hooks as you would want to hear. Finally, St. Anthony reaches the end of his sermon and the singer reports on its effect on his listeners:

Die Predigt geendet,
Ein jeder sich wendet,
Die Hechte bleiben Diebe,
Die Aale viel lieben.

The sermon having ended,
each [fish] turns himself around;
the pikes remain thieves,
the eels, great lovers.

Die Predigt hat g'fallen.
Sie bleiben wie allen!

The sermon has pleased them,
they remain the same as before!

Die Krebs gehn zurücke,
Die Stockfisch bleiben dicke,
Die Karpfen viel fressen,
die Predigt vergessen, vergessen!

The crabs still walk backwards,
the stockfish stay fat,
the carp still stuff themselves,
the sermon is forgotten!

Not surprisingly, the fish, like most preachers’ human parishioners, go away as they arrived. The accompaniment doesn’t even pause to comment, but sinks lower and lower and ends with an extended bass note: as it began, at the bottom of the river. The complete text, by the way, is available at The Lied and Art Songs Text Page and the translation from German to English is copyright © by Emily Ezust.

There are about 15 versions of Des Knaben Wunderhorn listed at arkivmusic.com. Since I have only heard a few of them I hesitate to make a recommendation, though if I had to choose one from that page I’d probably go with Claudio Abbado’s version with Anne-Sofie von Otter and Thomas Quasthoff. I have the Vanguard stereo recording with Maureen Forrester and Heinz Rehfuss, the Thomas Allen/Ann Murray/Sir Charles Mackerras recording, and Thomas Hampson’s survey of the original piano accompaniments. The last two CDs are out of print but might be found in a used CD store or on Amazon.com and are worth picking up. To give a sense of the Lied to anyone who is unfamiliar with it, the opening and closing of Ann Murray’s recording in mp3 format is available here.

A Mensch, He’s Not

Howard Katz, a play by Patrick Marber, who also wrote Closer and Notes on a Scandal, among other pieces, was presented by the Roundabout Theatre Company at the Pels Theatre. This is what The Times said about it:

The subject of Patrick Marber’s comedy of unhappiness about a rabid talent agent, starring a baleful Alfred Molina and directed by Doug Hughes, is nothing more nor less than your standard-issue midlife crisis. This familiar topic gets the better of all the talented people here trying to make it seem fresh. (Brantley)

Yes, it was. It was like The Book of Job without the happy ending, starring Woody Allen’s Danny Rose in a particularly foul mood. Where Rose tried to create a career for his entertainment industry dead-enders, Katz tells them that they have no talent or have had too much surgery. Not surprisingly, this doesn’t go over too well with the owners of the agency where he works. But before he gets the sack, his marriage ends, he tells off his father, and hits his son. Then he doesn’t have sex with a prostitute, quarrels with his brother, fails to buy a gun with which to commit suicide, gives his watch and wallet to a mugger, and either loses or dreams that he loses his last £2,000. There’s also a returning-to-the-faith-of-his-fathers subplot that surfaces now and then, though it isn’t clear what purpose it serves except to provide a little bit of ethnic spice.

The exact order of events is confused by the play’s dreamlike chronology but in the last scene, Katz — sans money, sans home, sans everything — seems to pull himself together to strew his father’s ashes, which he has been carrying around for what must have been weeks, off Tower Bridge.

Maybe Katz would follow the ashes into the Thames since he doesn’t seem to have anything to live for or any idea of what to do, but it isn’t clear. The play doesn’t come to a conclusion or dramatically satisfying resolution. It just ends, and what a relief that is.

Howard Katz was yet another play in which the greatest pleasure was found in the work being done, rather than the work being performed, on the stage. Among the talented actors in the company, nearly all playing multiple parts, were Euan Morton (Boy George in Taboo in London and New York), Alvin Epstein, Elizabeth Franz, and Jessica Hecht (The House in Town). It was a particular pleasure to see Jessica Hecht again, especially in the scenes where she played the co-owner of the talent agency.

Marber seemed to working out something deeply personal with Howard Katz, though exactly what wasn’t clear. Now that it’s out of his system, here’s hoping he moves on to work that says more than “if you’re not a nice person, bad things happen to you and no one likes you.”

Image from Roundabout Theatre

Slightly French is Slightly Good

I saw Slightly French over the weekend and submitted this review to Internet Movie Database today.

Slightly French is a rather a leaden trifle, which today is chiefly of interest to students of Douglas Sirk’s films or Dorothy Lamour or Don Ameche fans. I thought the implausible plot would have worked better in the late 1920s or early ’30s, and found at IMDB that it was a remake of Let’s Fall in Love, a 1933 vehicle for Ann Sothern. By 1949, passing off a New York Irish carnival dancer as the Parisian cousin of a vocal coach, and tying her starring in a movie to bringing back a fired director, was too great a suspension of nearly anyone’s disbelief. (And note that Lamour was 35 in 1949 while Sothern was 25 when she made Let’s Fall in Love. Lamour was far from old but the plot would have been more convincing if she were younger.) The breezy style needed to carry it off was just a memory, at least on the Universal studio lot.

Nevertheless, everyone involved in the production was enough of a professional to keep a not-too-demanding viewer entertained with the plot twists, snappy dialogue, and musical numbers. Lamour gets to sing — in French-accented English — a short version of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler's “Let’s Fall in Love,” the only song in the picture that sticks in the memory, to excuse her calling a playwright at a press party a “plagiarist.” She dances a little, too, though in the big dance number set in the streets of Paris the soloist looks younger and thinner. Ameche is a stereotypical egomaniacal director, single and living with his sister in an oceanfront Hollywood-moderne mansion. The explanation for his bachelorhood is excessive self-love, but his best-friend producer is similarly single. Inquiring minds inevitably will speculate on the coincidence, though both end up symmetrically in love by the picture’s end.

Meant for the bottom half of a double-bill, Slightly French never quite gets out of its B-picture category, but for a low-budget black-and-white musical it isn’t half bad.

A couple of weeks ago I heard a recital by Magdalena Kozena, a soprano with an international career and several well-received recordings. I wrote about it and tried to summon up some enthusiasm for what I thought should have been a good concert — tried and failed. I just wasn’t moved, and I thought something must have been wrong with me: I wasn’t in the mood, or I was preoccupied by some crisis or other in my life. I told a friend that it was a perfectly nice recital but I couldn’t get excited by it. Yesterday, I heard Angelika Kirchschlager sing Schumann and Schubert, accompanied by Malcolm Martineau, who was also Kozena’s accompanist. After the first measure of Schumann’s Freisinn it was clear that the problem at Kozena’s concert wasn't my mood. It was that Kozena wasn’t as moving or as involving a singer.

Kirchschlager, whom I didn’t like the first time I heard her, carried me away, to my considerable surprise. Her voice is smooth and rich, and her legato is exemplary. The voice is not without minor flaws — there were times when an increase in volume came with too much vibrato, though that seemed to abate as she warmed up, and not every note was perfect — but that didn't matter when so her singing was so beautiful. Most of the songs in both parts of the program were unfamiliar to me, which increased the pleasure of hearing her sing them. (The program, complete with the opus numbers Playbill saw fit to leave out, can be found at the la Verdi.org Web site: http://www.laverdi.org/english/quartetto.php. Apparently, Kirchschlager has been touring with this same program, though she was accompanied by Helmut Deutsch in Milan. Note also that the concert there was part of a 10-concert season for 100 euros, or $130. Tickets at Tully Hall were $48 for nonsubscribers.)

Also in contrast to Kozena, Kirchschlager’s dress was much more conservative, that is to say, not cut down to there, and displayed only a bit of lace on the sleeves. If I was in the diva advisory business, I would advise Angelika to “rethink the jewelry,” since a choker and a necklace are a touch over the top, especially when the necklace is evening length and sets up a contrasting movement to the rhythm of the music. Her encores (there were only two) were Widmung by Schumann (Op. 25, No. 1, from Myrthen), which was stunning, and Hôtel by Poulenc (No. 2 from Banalités, FP 107, text by Apollinaire), which was delivered in a wonderfully idiomatic style. It was a pleasurable shock after 24 Lieder to hear so ingratiating a mélodie.

Kozena deserves another chance. Perhaps she was nervous or having an off day. Kirchschlager, after Sunday’s recital and despite the minor shortcomings, takes her place as one of my Top Ten Recitalists.

One Thumb Up, Two Thumbs Down: Three Views of Pynchon's New Novel


Whom do you trust? The complete reviews from which the following excerpts were taken were available on the Times and New Yorker Web sites.

Michiko Kakutani in The New York Times, 20 November 2006
Thomas Pynchon’s new novel, Against the Day, reads like the sort of imitation of a Thomas Pynchon novel that a dogged but ungainly fan of this author’s might have written on quaaludes. It is a humongous, bloated jigsaw puzzle of a story, pretentious without being provocative, elliptical without being illuminating, complicated without being rewardingly complex.

The novel plays with themes that have animated the whole of Mr. Pynchon’s oeuvre: order versus chaos, fate versus freedom, paranoia versus nihilism. It boasts a sprawling, Dickensian cast with distinctly Pynchonian names: Fleetwood Vibe, Lindsay Noseworth, Clive Crouchmas. And it’s littered with puns, ditties, vaudevillesque turns and allusions to everything from old sci-fi movies to Kafka to Harry Potter. These authorial trademarks, however, are orchestrated in a weary and decidedly mechanical fashion, as the narrative bounces back and forth from America to Europe to Mexico, from Cripple Creek to Constantinople to Chihuahua.

There are some dazzling set pieces evoking the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and a convocation of airship aficionados, but these passages are sandwiched between reams and reams of pointless, self-indulgent vamping that read like Exhibit A in what can only be called a case of the Emperor’s New Clothes. Dozens of characters are sent on mysterious (often half-baked) quests that intersect mysteriously with the mysterious quests of people they knew in another context, and dozens of portentous plot lines are portentously twined around even more portentous events: the appearance of a strange figure in the Arctic, a startling “heavenwide blast of light”, the hunt for something called a “Time-weapon” that might affect the fate of the globe.

Whereas Mr. Pynchon’s last novel, the stunning Mason & Dixon, demonstrated a new psychological depth, depicting its two heroes as full-fledged human beings, not merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in “Against the Day” are little more than stick figure cartoons.

Liesl Schillinger in The New York Times Book Review, 26 November 2006
In Against the Day, his sixth, his funniest and arguably his most accessible novel, Thomas Pynchon doles out plenty of vertigo, just as he has for more than 40 years. But this time his fevered reveries and brilliant streams of words, his fantastical plots and encrypted references, are bound together by a clear message that others can unscramble without mental meltdown. Its import emerges only gradually, camouflaged by the sprawling absurdist jumble of themes that can only be described as Pynchonesque, over the only time frame Pynchon recognizes as real: the hours (that stretch into days) it takes to relay one of his sweeping narratives, hours that do “not so much elapse as grow less relevant.”

Where to begin? Where to end? It’s both moot and preposterous to fix on a starting point when considering a 1,085-page novel whose setting is a “limitless terrain of queerness” and whose scores of characters include the doomed Archduke Franz Ferdinand, a dog who reads Henry James, the restless progeny of the Kieselguhr Kid and a time-traveling bisexual mathematician, not to mention giant carnivorous burrowing sand lice, straight out of Dune, that attack passengers of desert submarines — or, rather, subdesertine frigates. In any case, Pynchon (speaking, one presumes, through his characters) dismisses the existence of time as “really too ridiculous to consider, regardless of its status as a believed-in phenomenon,” asserting that civilization has been dead since World War I and “all history after that will belong properly to the history of hell.” He also rejects a fixed notion of place. To him, delineations of the known world are merely maps that “begin as dreams, pass through a finite life in the world, and resume as dreams again.” Let us proceed, then, like Pynchon: as we wish, without a map, and by bounding leaps.

Louis Menand in The New Yorker, 27 November 2006
Do The Math: Thomas Pynchon returns.

Thomas Pynchon is the apostle of imperfection, so it is arguably some sort of commendation to say that his new novel, Against the Day (Penguin; $35), is a very imperfect book. Imperfect not in the sense of “Ambitious but flawed.” Imperfect in the sense of “What was he thinking?”

The book is set in the period between 1893 and around 1920, and this is the plot: An anarchist named Webb Traverse, who employs dynamite as a weapon against the mining and railroad interests out West, is killed by two gunmen, Deuce Kindred and Sloat Fresno, who were hired by the wicked arch-plutocrat Scarsdale Vibe. Traverse’s sons—Kit, a mathematician; Frank, an engineer; and Reef, a cardsharp and ladies’ man—set out to avenge their father’s murder. (Webb also has a daughter, Lake, but she takes up with one of the killers.) This story requires a thousand and eighty-five pages to get told, or roughly the number of pages it took for Napoleon to invade Russia and be driven back by General Kutuzov. Of course, there are a zillion other things going on in Against the Day, but the Traverse-family revenge drama is the only one that resembles a plot—that is, in Aristotle’s helpful definition, an action that has a beginning, a middle, and an end.

The rest of the novel is shapeless, just yards and yards of Pynchonian wallpaper: fantastic invention, arcane reference, virtuosic prose. Elaborately imagined characters and incidents, from a man who may or may not be transformed into a jelly doughnut to a city beneath the desert and a near-death experience in a mayonnaise factory, pop up and disappear after a few pages, so many raisins in the enormous loaf. The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; the mysterious collapse of the Campanile in the Piazza San Marco, in Venice, in 1902; the equally mysterious Tunguska Event, in 1908, in which roughly eight hundred square miles of Siberian forest was flattened, evidently by an exploding asteroid; the Mexican Revolution; and the troubles in the Balkans leading to the First World War all figure in the book’s pages. Longer-running characters include the eternally youthful crew of a sometimes invisible airship, Inconvenience, who style themselves the Chums of Chance; initiates of a British spiritualist society called T.W.I.T.; a private eye named Lew Basnight; a glamorous mathematician named Yashmeen Halfcourt; and an itinerant photographer called Merle Rideout, his daughter, Dahlia, and his ex-wife, Erlys, who has run off with a magician named Zombini. Scenes are set in (among other places) Colorado, New York, Venice, Paris, Croatia, Macedonia, Mexico, various points in Asia, and Hollywood. Characters are given names like Alonzo Meatman, Ruperta Chirpingdon-Groin, Professor Heino Vanderjuice, the Reverend Lube Carnal, and Wolfe Tone O’Rooney. Pig Bodine, a recurring avatar who appeared in Pynchon’s first novel, V (1963), puts in his ritual appearance. There is a literate dog, a machine for time travel, a “subdesertine frigate” for voyaging beneath desert sand, and assorted mad inventors, shamans, clairvoyants, terrorists, drop-dead-gorgeous women, and drug abusers. The whole thing sloshes along, alternately farcical and magniloquent, with threads left dangling everywhere, sometimes for hundreds of pages, ultimately forever. The novel doesn’t conclude; it just, more or less arbitrarily, stops.

Brava Kozena!

Brava to Magdalena Kozena for programming an encore by Erwin Schulhoff at her Alice Tully Hall recital in New York on Sunday. For encore fans everywhere, she began with Schulhoff’s “When I Was on My Mother’s Lap,” about 60 seconds of presto vocal filigree. Try as I might, I couldn’t find an opus number for it. It’s possible, but I wouldn’t want to have to swear to it, that it hasn’t been recorded yet. Kozena followed that with two songs of Dvorak: “There is nothing that could make me happy,” Op. 2, No. 3, and “The Mower,” also known as “When a maiden was a-mowing,” Op. 73, No. 2. Both were lovely.

Kozena put together an interesting program, beginning with five songs of Mendelssohn, which are not often peformed but deserve to be, followed by Schumann’s Frauenliebe and -leben, seven songs of Faure, and concluding with Dvorak’s Gypsy Songs, Op. 55. Kozena has a beautiful voice, and it was fascinating to hear how much she sang without vibrato—very cool, and reminiscent of early music singers like Emma Kirkby. Apparently, there is some controversy over whether she is a mezzo (vide Cecilia Bartoli) but she sounded like one to me.

Her accompanist of the afternoon, Malcolm Martineau, is of the accompanist-as-equal-recital-participant school, playing with the top of the piano up, and not a retiring partner at all. But someone needs to tell him to stop mugging at the audience at the ends of songs. It is jarring. He doesn’t need to swivel his grinning face around at the end of a comical number to make sure we get it. Malcolm, we get it, O.K? After a few grimaces from the keyboard, I had to stop looking at him. (James Levine is another one who gets into the act, in case anyone in the audience doesn’t notice the other person on stage.)

A word on Kozena’s recital dress: She seemed to be in costume for the Gypsy Songs and considering the chill in the air, I hope she didn’t catch a cold. She had on a black lace top, cut down to just above her navel, accessorized by a massive necklace/pendant affair. Her beige dress had a train she had to carry on stage, and doing so highlighted her knee-high (or nearly) black leather boots. It certainly excited comment amongst the audience members. Whether it was in keeping with the tone of Frauenliebe and -leben, and particularly the last song in the cycle, is a valid question but it is a tribute to her singing that I didn’t really notice what she was wearing most of the time.

NOTE: Kozena recorded the Schulhoff song, “Kdyz jsem byla mamince na kline” [“On my mother’s knee”] as part of her CD, Songs My Mother Taught Me. The piece comes from Národní písne a tance z Tesinksa (Folksongs and Dances from the Tesinskso Region) and is WV120 - 15 in Schulhoff’s catalog.

I think I heard Florence Foster Jenkins’ recordings for the first time in the 1960s on WBAI-FM, New York’s left-wing listener-supported station. During the regular pledge drives, a few minutes of Mme. Jenkins was sure to get a steady stream of listeners to promise to contribute if the DJ would get her off the air. Yes, people would pay to stop her singing. And hanging out with fellow teenage musicians as I did at that time, fans of Tom Lehrer and the Goon Show, it was inevitable that we’d come across RCA Victor’s Jenkins LP, The Glory (????) of the Human Voice. So when I saw a notice on Parterre Box for the premiere screening of Florence Foster Jenkins: A World of Her Own, I simply had to go.

Filmmaker Donald Collup, assisted by researcher Gregor Benko, assembled a 91-minute film that explores all the facets of Jenkins’ life, and if it wasn’t tragic, there was certainly more than enough pathos to quiet some of the laughter around her recordings. As it turns out, there was more to Jenkins than someone whose attacks on notes above high C have left listeners gasping in disbelief for more than sixty years. There was the father who stifled her aspirations to study music in Europe, the goal of all serious students at the time. There was the accident that ended her piano studies. Later, her husband was a disappointment and the marriage led to her being disinherited for a time. She never could overcome her small-town background, though she traced her forebears back to the Revolution. A dedicated social climber, her tactic of choice was membership in New York’s women’s clubs. She belonged to more than a dozen and even founded one, the Verdi Club, but her aspirations to be accepted into New York City high society were never realized.

And, of course, there was her singing. She studied for years, performed at her clubs and at society musicales, but her dream was to be recognized as an artist. She could almost be the inspiration for Hyacinth Bucket (pronounced “bouquet,” of course) of Keeping Up Appearances. That Jenkins was in her seventies when she went into the studio explains a lot about the way she sounded. Explaining the rest may be a combination of profound self-delusion and the complete absence of a musician’s ear.

Far from being an obscurity, as I assumed she was, Jenkins was well-known enough to leave a considerable documentary trail. Using a surprising number of articles from newspapers and magazines, supplemented with interviews, plentiful photographs, and period music, Collup has produced a film somewhat in the Ken Burns mode, though there was no contemporary movie footage. The testimony of people who were at the 1944 Carnegie Hall recital —Marge Champion, Alfred Hubay, and Daniel Pinkham — along with the photo taken from the stage, showing Cole Porter, were fascinating, as were articles by critics and gossip columnist Earl Wilson. Overall, we get perhaps too much information about Jenkins — I could have done without the family tree, for example — but the result is that a person takes shape behind the notorious recordings. “Tout comprendre, c’est tout pardonner” applies here.

Collup’s film is aptly titled. Jenkins did her best to construct a world of her own but ultimately had to live in the same world as the rest of us, where disappointment is plentiful and triumphs hard-won and often fleeting. Though not without its longueurs, Florence Foster Jenkins: A World of Her Own is well worth seeing if you are at all interested in understanding the person behind the legend.

NOTE: In response to public (?) demand (!), Video Artists International released A World of Her Own on DVD. It is available from VAI, as well as Amazon and other fine retailers.

Don’t be a luddy-duddy!

A friend recently asked my advice about an investment suggested to him by a salesperson with one of the larger multinational financial services companies. I thought there were some problems with the vehicle, a unit investment trust, though it might not be a bad choice for someone in his circumstances. But it reminded me of the archetypal encounter between salesperson and prospect portrayed in W.C. Fields’ The Bank Dick. It seems likely that Fields was reliving the days before the 1929 stock market crash, when fast-talking brokers unloaded soon-to-be-worthless stock on eager would-be investors, lured by a flowery spiel promising a life of luxury and ease.

The Bank Dick
Universal
1940

CAST:
Egbert Sousé.................... W.C. Fields
J. Frothingham Waterbury...... Russell Hicks
Og Oggilby.............................. Grady Sutton

INT. BLACK PUSSY CAT CAFÉ.

WATERBURY

Pardon me, I couldn’t help overhearing your conversation. Waterbury’s my name, J. Frothingham Waterbury.

SOUSÉ

Very glad to know you. My name is Sousé, accent grave over the e.

WATERBURY

I’m in the bond and stock business. Now, I have five thousand shares of the Beefsteak Mines in Leapfrog, Nevada, that I want to turn over to your bank. I like this little town and I want to get some contacts, I think you’re the very man.

Now, these shares are selling for ten cents a share.

SOUSÉ backs into a table, impaling himself on a fork. Squealing, he removes it.

WATERBURY

Now, these shares are selling for ten cents a share. A telephone company once sold for five cents a share. These shares are twice as expensive, therefore, consequently they’ll be twice as valuable. Naturally, you’re no dunce. Telephone is now listed at one seventy-three and you can’t buy it. Three thousand, four hundred and sixty dollars for every nickel you put into it. The point I’m trying to make is this —

SOUSÉ takes hat off hatrack, puts it on.

WATERBURY

The point I’m trying to make is, these shares sell for ten cents. It’s simple arithmetic — if five’ll get you ten, ten will get you twenty. Sixteen-cylinder cars, a big home in the city — balconies upstairs and down. Home in the country — big trees, private golf course, stream running through the rear of the estate. Warm Sunday afternoon, fishing under the cool trees, sipping ice-cold beer.

WATERBURY mimes blowing foam off beer

SOUSÉ

I can almost see the foam, yes.

WATERBURY

Ham and cheese on rye —

SOUSÉ

With mustard. We have plenty of mustard at the house, yeah.

WATERBURY

Yes. And then this guy comes up the shady drive in an armored car from the bank, and he dumps a whole basket of coupons worth hundreds of thousands of dollars right in your lap. And he says, “Sign here, please, on the dotted line.”

SOUSÉ

I’ll have a fountain pen by that time.

WATERBURY

And then he’s off, to the soft chirping of our little feathered friends in the arboreal dell. That’s what these bonds mean.

SOUSÉ

They do, eh?

WATERBURY

I’d rather part with my dear old grandmother’s paisley shawl or her wedding ring than part with these bonds.

WATERBURY removes a handkerchief from his pocket, wipes his eyes.

SOUSÉ

It must be tough to lose a paisley shawl.

SOUSÉ takes the handkerchief from WATERBURY and dabs at his eyes in sympathy.

WATERBURY

Gosh! Oh, pardon my language. . . I feel like a dog. But it’s now or never. It must be done. So take it or leave it.

SOUSÉ

I’ll take it.

WATERBURY

Fine, fine, fine.

* * *

EXT. LOMPOC STREET.

SOUSÉ walks to the bank in a big hurry.

INT. LOMPOC STATE BANK.

SOUSÉ finds OGGILBY in the vault.

SOUSÉ

Og, my boy, I’ve got you set for life! I don’t hang around that Black Pussy Café for nothing. I met a poor fellow who is in trouble. There’s something the matter with his grandmother’s paisley shawl. He has five thousand shares in the Beefsteak Mine and you can buy them for a handful of hay!

OGGILBY

Hay? And they’re worth. . .

SOUSÉ

Ten cents a share. Telephone sold for five cents a share. How would you like something better for ten cents a share? If five gets you ten, ten’ll get you twenty. Beautiful home in the country, upstairs and down. Beer flowing through the estate over your grandmother’s paisley shawl.

OGGILBY

Beer?

SOUSÉ

Beer! Fishing in the stream that runs under the arboreal dell. A man comes up from the bar, dumps three thousand five hundred dollars in your lap for every nickel invested, says to you, “Sign here on the dotted line,” and then disappears in the waving fields of alfalfa.

OGGILBY

Gosh! Do you think he was telling the truth?

SOUSÉ

You don’t think a man would resort to taradiddle, do you? Why, he sobbed like a child at the very thought of disposing of these shares. How does a bank make its money?

OGGILBY

By investing.

SOUSÉ

That’s the point. You don’t want to work all your life. Take a chance. Take it while you’re young. My uncle, a balloon ascensionist, Effingham Huffnagle, took a chance. He was three miles and a half up in the air. He jumped out of the basket of the balloon and took a chance of alighting on a load of hay.

OGGILBY

Goll-ly! Did he make it?

SOUSÉ

Uh. . . no. He didn’t. Had he been a younger man, he probably would’ve made it. That’s the point. Don’t wait too long in life.

OGGILBY

I’ve never done anything like this, and for another thing, I haven’t got the money. Of course, my bonus comes due in four days — that’s five hundred dollars. I could buy ’em then. And then with all that money I made I really might be worthy of your daughter’s hand.

SOUSÉ

Women really appreciate the fine things in life. You don’t want to die and leave your wife and children paupers, do you? Borrow the five hundred dollars from the bank. You intend to pay it back when your bonus comes due, don’t you?

OGGILBY

Oh, sure.

SOUSÉ

Surely. Don’t be a luddy-duddy! Don’t be a moon-calf! Don’t be a jabber-nowl! You’re not those, are you?

OGGILBY

No. Well, I guess there’s no way you could confuse it with stealing, is there?

SOUSÉ

[Chuckling] Nothing could be more absurd.

OGGILBY

Well, all right, send him in.

Note that Sousé’s invented uncle is named Effingham Huffnagle, an alternative spelling of which might be F---ingham Huffnagle. Fields was always trying to slip double entendres past the Hollywood censor and frequently succeeded. Just one example in The Bank Dick (the title is another one), is when he says, “I don't hang around that Black Pussy Café for nothing.” Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue — “an inadvertent peccadillo,” Fields might call it — but based on the frequent appearance of pussycats in his movies I don’t think it was inadvertent at all.