Category: Literature

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Guest Observation: Antonio Carlos Jobim

Just watched “Synechdoche, New York.” I need to/want to/will watch it again to try to see if I really did miss something–it’s a Charlie Kaufman movie, so less that straightforward. One memorable moment is the final credits, covered by a ballad called “I’m Just a Little Person.” That made me think about “The Waters of March,” by Brazilian songwriter Antonio Carlos Jobim, which rolls at the end of Jerry Seinfeld’s movie, “Comedian.” Thinking back, I can’t remember how the end of the movie segued into this number, which combines a bossa nova jauntiness with a pointedly bittersweet flavor. The song has been done many, many times, but the version in the movie was by the late Susannah McCorkle, a Berkeley native and New York cabaret legend. The lyrics, as she sang them:

The Waters of March

A stick a stone
it’s the end of the road,

it’s the rest of the stump
it’s a little alone

it’s a sliver of glass,
it is life, it’s the sun,

it is night ,it is death,
it’s a trap, it’s a gun.

the oak when it blooms,
a fox in the brush,

the knot in the wood,
the song of the thrush.

the wood of the wind,
a cliff, a fall,

a scratch, a lump,
it is nothing at all.

it’s the wind blowing free.
it’s the end of a slope. …

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Guest Observation: Jem Casey

In honor of the day. From Flann O’Brien’s “At Swim-Two-Birds,” whence this comes, and where it might be better appreciated in context.

Workman’s Friend (or, A Pint of Plain)

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night –
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When money’s tight and is hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt –
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say that you need a change,
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare –
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN.

In times of trouble and lousy strife,
You still have got a darlint plan,
You still can turn to a brighter life –
A PINT OF PLAIN IS YOUR ONLY MAN

“… There’s one thing in that pome, permanence, if you know what I mean. That pome, I mean to say, is a pome that’ll be heard wherever the Irish race is wont to gather, it’ll live as long as there’s a hard root of an Irishman left by the Almighty on this planet, mark my words.”

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Guest Observation: E.B. White

From a collection we have, “E.B. White: Writings from The New Yorker, 1927-1976”:

Crossing the Street

July 16. 1932

Possibly you have noticed this about New Yorkers: instinctively, crossing a one-way street, they glance in the proper direction to detect approaching cars. They always know, without thinking, which way the traffic flows. They glance in the right direction as naturally as a deer sniffs upwind. Yet after that one glance in the direction from which the cars are coming, they always, just before stepping out into the street, also cast one small, quick, furtive look in the opposite direction–from which no cars could possibly come. That tiny glance (which we have noticed over and over again) is the last sacrifice on the altar of human fallibility; it is an indication that people can never quite trust the self-inflicted cosmos, and that they dimly suspect that some day, in the maze of well-regulated vehicles and strong, straight buildings, something will go completely crazy–something big and red and awful will come tearing through town going the wrong way on the one-ways, mowing down all the faithful and the meek. Even if it’s only a fire engine.

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Guest Observation: Upton Sinclair

oil.jpgNeeding to have something in my hands to read the other day, I spotted a book of Thom’s (I think): “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair. It’s a Penguin edition with Daniel Day-Lewis’s picture on the front, because “There Will Be Blood” is “loosely based” on the novel.  

I’ve barely read anything by Sinclair; I have dim memories of “The Jungle,” which I got for Christmas in eighth or ninth grade. The prose didn’t do much for me then. This book opens with an account of a car trip somewhere in Southern California–somewhere from the lower end of the Central Valley over the mountains to the Los Angeles area, probably. It’s immediate and colorful and actually reminds me a little of Tom Wolfe’s fiction: self-consciously thorough about contemporary details and observing the scene with an arched eyebrow. Here’s a passage from the opening chapter, titled “The Ride.”

Fifty miles, said the speedometer; that was Dad’s rule for open country, and he never varied it, except in wet weather. Grades made no difference; the fraction of an ounce more pressure with his right foot, and the car raced on–up, up, up–until it topped the ridge, and was sailing down into the next little valley, exactly in the centre of the magic grey ribbon of concrete. The car would start to gather speed, and Dad would lift the pressure of his foot a trifle, and let the resistance of the engine check the speed. Fifty miles was enough, said Dad; he was a man of order.

Far ahead, over the tops of several waves of ground, another car was coming. A small black speck, it went down out of sight, and came up bigger; the next time it was bigger yet; the next time–it was on the slope above you, rushing at you, faster and faster, a mighty projectile hurled out of a six-foot cannon. Now came a moment to test the nerve of the motorist. The magic ribbon of concrete had no stretching powers. The ground at the sides had been prepared for emergencies, but you could not always be sure how well it had been prepared, and if you went off at fifty miles an hour you would get disagreeable waverings of the wheels; you might find the neatly trimmed concrete raised several inches above the earth at the side of it, forcing you to run along on the earth until you could find a place to swing in again; there might be soft sand, which would swerve you this way and that, or wet clay which would skid you, and put a sudden end to your journey.

So the laws of good driving forbade you to go off the magic ribbon except in extreme emergencies. You were ethically entitled to several inches of margin at the right-hand edge; and the man approaching you was entitled to an equal number of inches; which left a remainder of inches between the two projectiles as they shot by. It sounds risky as one tells it, but the heavens are run on the basis of similar calculations, and while collisions do happen, they leave time enough in between for universes to be formed, and successful careers by men of affairs.

“Whoosh!” went the other projectile, hurtling past; a loud, swift “Whoosh!” with no tapering off at the end. You had a glimpse of another man with horn-rimmed spectacles like yourself, with a similar grip of two hands upon a steering wheel, and a similar cataleptic fixation of the eyes. You never looked back; for at fifty miles an hour, your business is with the things that lie before you, and the past is past. …

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Guest Observation: Samuel Beckett

The Netflix business model is brilliant if all customers are like us. We got a DVD of several Samuel Beckett plays (part of an Irish-British TV project, “Beckett on Film”) about a month ago and still have it. I don’t know — “The Wire” and even a reprise of “Band of Brothers” have gotten in the way. But Kate told me that the production of “Waiting for Godot” was great, so we put that on tonight while we waited for the rain to come. One nice surprise: Johnny Murphy, who played Joey “The Lips” Fagan, the trumpeter, in “The Commitments,” plays the tramp Estragon, one of the two main characters. Barry McGovern plays the other tramp, Vladimir. The set up to the little speech below–little, but one of the longest in the play–is a line from a character who twice passes through the tramps’ landscape. His synopsis of the human condition: “They give birth astride of a grave, the light gleams an instant, then it’s night once more.” That prompts a reflection from Vladimir.

“Was I sleeping, while the others suffered? Am I sleeping now? Tomorrow, when I wake, or think I do, what shall I say of today? That with Estragon my friend, at this place, until the fall of night, I waited for Godot? That Pozzo passed, with his carrier, and that he spoke to us? Probably. But in all that what truth will there be?

(Estragon, having struggled with his boots in vain, is dozing off again. Vladimir looks at him.) He’ll know nothing. He’ll tell me about the blows he received and I’ll give him a carrot.

Astride of a grave and a difficult birth. Down in the hole, lingeringly, the grave digger puts on the forceps. We have time to grow old. The air is full of our cries. But habit is a great deadener. (He looks again at Estragon.) At me too someone is looking, of me too someone is saying, He is sleeping, he knows nothing, let him sleep on.”

So: now we can send the DVD back. And just now, the rain started.

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Guest Observation: Russell Banks

From “Cloudsplitter” (I’ve been reading this for what seems like months. Beautiful prose, and an amazing story — though it really is the first time that I’ve ever encountered the details of John Brown’s story.):

When we reached the road, without a glance or a thought one way or the other, I turned southwest instead of northeast, and Fred followed. cloudsplitter.png

For a few moments, we walked along in silence. “Where’re we going?” Fred finally asked.

“Well, to Kansas, I guess.”

A quarter of a mile further on, he spoke again. “Father wants us to go to the farm in North Elba. That’s what you told me, Owen.”

“Yes. But we’re needed more in Kansas.”

There was a long silence as he pondered this. Finally, “Why?”

“To fight slavery there.”

More silence. Then, “Doing the Lord’s work?”

“Right.”

“Good. That’s real good.”

“Yep.”

A little further down the road, he said, “But what about Father? He won’t like this, Owen.”

“Maybe not, at least at first. But don’t worry, he’ll come along soon to Kansas himself. He won’t let you and me and the boys do the Lord’s work, while he stays out east … . Anyhow, John says there”s going to be shooting in Kansas before long. That’ll bring the Old Man on. He hates it when he can’t give us the order to fire,” I said, and laughed, and he laughed with me.

So on we went, walking and sometimes hitching rides on wagons, barges, canal boats, moving slowly west and south into the territory of Kansas–a one-armed man and a gelded man, two wounded, penniless, motherless brothers marching off to do the Lord’s work in the war against slavery. In this wide world there was nothing better for us to do, except to stay home and to take care of the place and the women, which neither of us wanted to do and neither could do properly, either. We had to be good for something, though: we were sons of John Brown, and we had learned early in our lives that we did not deserve to live otherwise. So we were going off to Kansas to be good at killing. Our specialty would be killing men who wished to own other men.

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Guest Observation: Dylan Thomas

The closing lines of “A Child’s Christmas in Wales.” My favorite part of one of my favorite poems. Merry Christmas, wherever you are on this Christmas night.

“… Always on Christmas night there was music.

An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang

‘Cherry Ripe,’ and another uncle sang ‘Drake’s Drum.’

It was very warm in the little house.

Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip

wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death,

and then another in which she said her heart

was like a Bird’s Nest; and then everybody

laughed again; and then I went to bed.

“Looking out my bedroom window, out into

the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow,

I could see the lights in the windows

of all the other houses on our hill and hear

the music rising from them up the long, steadily

falling night. I turned the gas down, I got

into bed. I said some words to the close and

holy darkness, and then I slept.”

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Guest Observation: Russell Banks

From “Cloudsplitter,” a fictional memoir of Owen Brown, one of the sons of radical abolitionist John Brown. Not a new book–it came out ten years ago–but I just started reading it the other day. It’s beautiful and charged with the strangeness and rage of John Brown’s story.

“… Though there was never a man so detached from the sinner who so loathed sin, when it came to the sin of owning slaves, which Father labeled not sin but evil, all his loathing came down at once and in a very personal way on the head of the evil-doer. He brooked no fine distinctions: the man who pleaded for the kindly treatment of human chattel or, as if it could occur naturally, like a shift in the seasons, argued for the gradual elimination of slavery was just as evil as the man who whipped, branded, raped, and slew his slaves; and he who did not loudly oppose the extension of slavery into the western territories was as despicable as he who hounded escaped slaves all the way to Canada and branded them on the spot to punish them and to make pursuit and capture easier next time. But with the notable exception of where a man or woman stood on the question of slavery, when Father considered the difference between our way of life and the ways of others, he did not judge them or lord it over them. He did not condemn or set himself off from our neighbors. He merely observed their ways and passed silently by.

“And he knew all the ways of men and women extremely well. He was no naif, no bumpkin. My father was not the sort of man who stopped up his ears at the sound of foul language or shut his eyes to the lasciviousness and sensuality that passed daily before him. He never warned another man or woman off from speech or act because he was too delicate of sensibility or too pious or virtuous to hear of it or witness the thing. He knew what went on between men and women, between men and men, between men and animals even, in the small crowded cabins of the settlements and out in the sheds and barns of our neighbors. And he knew what was nightly bought and sold on the streets and alleys and in the taverns of the towns and cities he visited. The man had read every word of his Bible hundreds of times: nothing human beings did with or to one another or themselves shocked him. Only slavery shocked him.”

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Guest Observation: August Wilson

Went with some friends to the Berkeley Repertory Theater this afternoon to see “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone,” part of the playwright August Wilson’s historical cycle of African-American life. It was a great show — and I’d say see this or any other production. A favorite passage:

” … When you look at a fellow, if you taught yourself to look for it, you could see his song written on him. Tell you what kind of man he is in the world. Now, I can look at your, Mr. Loomis, and see you a man who done forgot his song. Forgot how to sing it. A fellow forget that and he forget who he is. Forget how he’s supposed to mark down life. Now, I used to travel all up and down this road and that … looking here and there. Searching, just like you, Mr. Loomis. I didn’t know what I was searching for. The only thing I knew was something was keeping me dissatisfied. Something wasn’t making my heart smooth and easy. Then one day my daddy gave me a song. That song had a weight to it that was hard to handle. That song was hard to carry. I fought against it. Didn’t want to accept that song. I tried to find my daddy to give him back the song. But I found out it wasn’t his song. It was my song. It had come from way deep inside me. I looked long back in memory and gathered up pieces and snatches of things to make that song. I was making it up out of myself. And that song helped me on the road. Made it smooth to where my footsteps didn’t bite back at me. All the time that song getting bigger and bigger. That song growing with each step of the road. It got so I used all of myself up in the making of that song. Then I was the song in search of itself. That song rattling in my throat and I’m looking for it. See, Mr. Loomis, when a man forgets his song he goes off in search of it … till he finds out he’s got it with him all the time. …”

Links:

The book (at Amazon.com)

The Berkeley Rep production

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Remembrance Day

A war ends:

What General Lee’s feelings were I do not know. As he was a man of much dignity, with an impassible face, it was impossible to say whether he felt inwardly glad that the end had finally come, or felt sad over the result, and was too manly to show it. Whatever his feelings, they were entirely concealed from my observation; but my own feelings, which had been quite jubilant on the receipt of his letter, were sad and depressed. I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. I do not question, however, the sincerity of the great mass of those who were opposed to us.

General Lee was dressed in a full uniform which was entirely new, and was wearing a sword of considerable value, very likely the sword which had been presented by the State of Virginia; at all events, it was an entirely different sword from the one that would ordinarily be worn in the field. In my rough traveling suit, the uniform of a private with the straps of a lieutenant-general, I must have contrasted very strangely with a man so handsomely dressed, six feet high and of faultless form. But this was not a matter that I thought of until afterwards.

We soon fell into a conversation about old army times. He remarked that he remembered me very well in the old army; and I told him that as a matter of course I remembered him perfectly, but from the difference in our rank and years (there being about sixteen years’ difference in our ages), I had thought it very likely that I had not attracted his attention sufficiently to be remembered by him after such a long interval. Our conversation grew so pleasant that I almost forgot the object of our meeting. After the conversation had run on in this style for some time, General Lee called my attention to the object of our meeting, and said that he had asked for this interview for the purpose of getting from me the terms I proposed to give his army. I said that I meant merely that his army should lay down their arms, not to take them up again during the continuance of the war unless duly and properly exchanged. He said that he had so understood my letter. …

***

General Lee, after all was completed and before taking his leave, remarked that his army was in a very bad condition for want of food, and that they were without forage; that his men had been living for some days on parched corn exclusively, and that he would have to ask me for rations and forage. I told him “certainly,” and asked for how many men he wanted rations. His answer was “about twenty-five thousand;” and I authorized him to send his own commissary and quartermaster to Appomattox Station, two or three miles away, where he could have, out of the trains we had stopped, all the provisions wanted. As for forage, we had ourselves depended almost entirely upon the country for that.

***

I determined to return to Washington at once, with a view to putting a stop to the purchase of supplies, and what I now deemed other useless outlay of money. Before leaving, however, I thought I would like to see General Lee again; so next morning I rode out beyond our lines towards his headquarters, preceded by a bugler and a staff-officer carrying a white flag.

Lee soon mounted his horse, seeing who it was, and met me. We had there between the lines, sitting on horseback, a very pleasant conversation of over half an hour, in the course of which Lee said to me that the South was a big country and that we might have to march over it three or four times before the war entirely ended, but that we would now be able to do it as they could no longer resist us. He expressed it as his earnest hope, however, that we would not be called upon to cause more loss and sacrifice of life; but he could not foretell the result. I then suggested to General Lee that there was not a man in the Confederacy whose influence with the soldiery and the whole people was as great as his, and that if he would now advise the surrender of all the armies I had no doubt his advice would be followed with alacrity. But Lee said, that he could not do that without consulting the President first. I knew there was no use to urge him to do anything against his ideas of what was right.

I was accompanied by my staff and other officers, some of whom seemed to have a great desire to go inside the Confederate lines. They finally asked permission of Lee to do so for the purpose of seeing some of their old army friends, and the permission was granted. They went over, had a very pleasant time with their old friends, and brought some of them back with them when they returned.

When Lee and I separated he went back to his lines and I returned to the house of Mr. McLean. Here the officers of both armies came in great numbers, and seemed to enjoy the meeting as much as though they had been friends separated for a long time while fighting battles under the same flag. For the time being it looked very much as if all thought of the war had escaped their minds. …

–U.S.Grant, “Personal Memoirs”