Showing posts with label Raymond Carver. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Raymond Carver. Show all posts

Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Labels

I have been retrospectively adding "labels" to my posts, a tedious process, and to use blog-speak, a "gadget" that is not as exacting as a proper index. As a former publisher, the inconsistencies of the labeling process bother me. This is partly my own fault as the labeling was done over several months. Consequently, as an example, President Barack Obama is merely labeled "Obama" while most luminaries are labeled by first and last names, an unintentional gaffe and no disrespect intended. I suppose I assumed we all know who he is. And unfortunately, labels are alphabetized as they appear so first names prevail, an affront to any indexer. But one can scroll over the list fairly quickly although there are more than three hundred labels at this point -- they appear on the left side of the page below "Blog Archive" and "About Me."

Reviewing my four plus years of postings in doing this project I see so much of what I wrote is where the winds blew me and some views have changed. But I intended "Lacunae Musing" as an "everyman's" view of the world going by, so the windblown nature is understandable and the mere passage of time explains some changed views. More painful was to see some repetition, not remembering that a year earlier I had made the same point, perhaps in a different way. Nonetheless, I have not edited or deleted any entries. Let some future generation unwrap this as a buried digital time box. It is what it is.

I expected the blog would mostly cover my diverse interests, but I was somewhat surprised by the number of entries that relate to the economy and politics. Sturm und Drang have characterized those topics during the past few years, so that is no wonder as well. Then there was the incredible open heart surgery I went through last year, a difficult procedure complicated by traumatic intubation so one could say I write this blog on borrowed time, although I feel fine now. Amazing having gone from this:









to this "self portrait" taken during our recent cruise:










As an eclectic blog, "Lacunae Musing" does not have the level of page load activity associated by niche oriented blogs with a dedicated readership. But that's OK by me as I write this mostly as a personal journal and as a creative outlet. Sometimes I wonder if I never did this, and concentrated that same energy in other pursuits, such as the piano or even writing a novel or a play, something I've been tempted to do, perhaps that might be a better use of my time. Or maybe this blog is my excuse for not doing something even more challenging. One will never know unless I find the path to an alternative universe.

However, while writing this blog, I did manage to dramatize four Raymond Carver short stories which I entitled When We Talk About Carver. This consists of dramatic readings of "Want to See Something?" and "Gazebo," each preceding a play adaptation, the former with "Put Yourself in My Shoes" and the latter with "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love" -- perhaps Carver's best known story. As the production requires only two male and two female actors, I thought it would be ideal for smaller theater companies. This required getting permission from the author's estate and the approval (with revisions) of the author's widow, Tess Gallagher, which was finally successful. But my quest to place the play, even for a reading, has come to naught, and it is a lesson learned about how the system "works" (publishing in my days also had its "system" equally difficult to crack). I had naively believed that Carver, as one of the 20th century's greatest short story writers, and my painstaking attempt to use his exact words in the adaptation, would ensure, at least, a placement with a knowledgeable but small non-profit theatre. That is not how it works, and so I can imagine what the outcome might be if I was the author of a play rather than merely the adapter of a writer of Carver's prominence. It is disheartening, but a learning experience. But learning even with disappointing results is better than standing still.

Also, I've managed to keep up with my musical interests, working on several musical programs as I am a volunteer pianist at a local rehab center as well as at a retirement home. The latter gig is particularly fulfilling as I prepare specific programs, my first being the music made famous by Frank Sinatra, followed by one focused on the works of George Gershwin. The Gershwin program was challenging as it required a solid hour of playing his wonderful melodies, including those from Porgy and Bess which are among my Gershwin favorites. I'm now preparing programs by Rogers and Hammerstein (my next), to be followed by an all Steven Sondheim program, and finally a "British / French Invasion of Broadway" program, works by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Claude-Michel Schönberg.

So, "Lacunae Musing" continues to be one of many pursuits, and managing its time requirements is a constant battle. Consequently ,when I started this, I consciously turned off the comments feature of most blogs. However, an email address is included in the "about me" section, so there is a way for people to contact me and I've received many emails over the years and responded to all.

I integrated a "statcounter" about a year so I have a rough estimate that there have been almost 20,000 "hits" since the beginning, most of those from Google phrase searches but almost an equal number from searches of Google Images as I have hundreds of photos in the blog. Unfortunately, BlogSpot is not very user friendly for photographs. I would have carried more otherwise. And there are mysterious inconsistencies with photographs in the blog. Some can be easily enlarged by clicking onto it, and others cannot, even though I treat all work on photographs the same way.

It's been an interesting journey and now with the label "index" I can see the breadth and the focus (or lack of) more clearly. Whether you are a return visitor, or happened to just land here, I hope you find it useful or interesting. I doubt whether I will be able to keep up the pace of writing as I don't want to repeat much of the family history and I might take a little more time to smell the roses, but with the political season heating up, there will be unavoidable fodder for writing. Then, too, there will be more theater, the books I'll be reading, and future travel, whatever suits my fancy. Truly an eclectic journey, one person's views and experiences. Hopefully, it has some relevancy in the real world.

While writing this entry we had a rare concurrent visit of both our sons, our oldest, Chris, celebrating a birthday and so we went to one of our favorite local restaurants, Captain Charlie's Reef Grill. This is a down to earth, funky, lively restaurant with some of the best and most imaginative fish dishes anywhere. One can make a meal of the appetizers, each a unique creation. Part of the fun is even waiting for a table outside in the balmy Florida night. They don't take reservations. They don't have to. People will eagerly wait. We went on a Saturday night, happily passing the one hour wait time sitting on the outside chairs, while others were waiting in a separate bar they maintain a few doors down in the unassuming Juno Beach strip mall where the restaurant is located. The waiters and waitresses have been there forever and they've become old friends. It is a place to see and be seen and the desserts are fabulous such as their chocolate mousse b-day cake!

Tuesday, June 7, 2011

The Financial Crisis Reaches Out to the Arts

The tentacles of the Great Recession and financial malfeasance run deep, as evidenced by the demise of one of the great theaters in the area, Florida Stage. While their move to the Kravis Center this year was a positive development, everything else seemed to be a negative for this local, but well-established theater company, its revenues shrinking because of declining contributions (partly due to the aftershock of the Madoff scandal which hit this geographic area particularly hard), reduced interest income, and changing demographics as well. When we first began subscribing to Florida Stage, more than ten years ago, I remember remarking about the average age of the audience, wondering whether succeeding generations will appear to take their (now our) place. It seems like great theater has taken a back seat to Twitter and Facebook in that regard, Florida Stage's subscription base declining from a peak of 7,000 to now only 2,000 (including our prepaid subscription for next season which now will not be).

Florida State was daring enough to put on many original plays and musicals, not content to take the "easy way" as many theaters do in Florida, serving up the pabulum of Broadway revivals or touring companies as a staple. Of course, it is one thing to be daring during good economic times and strong subscriptions, and another to steer that course when the tide is running against you. I thought this season's offerings could have been stronger, maybe they should have served up a classic play or two to appeal to its audience. Ghost-Writer, I thought, was their best play of the season, with their opening play, Cane , the weakest.

All in all, there have been stronger seasons at Florida Stage, but it is doubtful whether that would have saved the company in face of all its other macro adversities. A really tragic moment for the arts and for the West Palm Beach area.

And this eliminates, still, another venue for new plays, one that I've learned firsthand from experience is fraught with difficulties to produce. More than a year ago I began an adaption of four Raymond Carver short stories into a theatrical work, When We Talk About Carver. Florida Stage was very much on my mind as a possible venue but it took me most of the year to negotiate and secure a formal permission for non-commercial, non-exclusive stage rights (just to show the work) with the Carver estate.

I had thought the success of "Gatz" which is a six hour acted reading of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was an encouraging sign that unabridged adaptations of great literature could make great theatre. As Fitzgerald is to the American novel in the 20th century, Carver is to the American short story, and it is time HIS story and magical power of writing should be dramatically told. Also, interestingly, the new film, Everything Must Go with Will Ferrell was based on Carver's short story “Why Don’t You Dance.” The timing might be right for something more significant by and about Carver.

But without a local theatre that would consider a new work, even one which was essentially written by an established writer of Carver's stature, I now begin a search for a company that is willing to take chances as was Florida Stage.

One can only hope that other such companies can survive these hard economic times, one of the many unintended consequences of putting Wall Street ahead of Main Street (jobs) and failing to address a decade of deficit spending. The closing of Florida Stage is not only a loss for our area, it is a tragedy on a larger scale for the Arts in general.

Sunday, May 15, 2011

Peacocks Preening

The bird moved forward a little. Then it turned its head to the side and braced itself. It kept its bright, wild eye right on us. Its tail was raised, and it was like a big fan folding in and out. There was every color in the rainbow shining from that tail....The bird made this strange wailing sound once more. 'May-awe, may-awe!' it went. If it'd been something I was hearing late at night and for the first time, I'd have thought it was somebody dying, or else something wild and dangerous. --- Raymond Carver, Feathers

It has been that kind of "wild and dangerous" week in Washington, the showing of the feathers -- May-awe, may-awe! -- the Democrats crucifying the oil industry in Congressional Hearings, with the irony of Jay Rockefeller, a great-grandson of Standard Oil Company's John D. Rockefeller, grilling oil executives over tax breaks, even though the "mere" few billion yearly in such breaks wouldn't even move the needle on the national debt. And, of the $4 dollars being paid at the pump, those tax breaks are negligible. Not that I understand their need for those tax breaks: let the politicians battle that one out. But what I do understand is grandstanding when I see it. May-awe, may-awe!

What our Congressional leaders should be addressing is the need for a national energy policy, but we've been talking, talking, about that ever since the gas lines of the early 1970's. We have the technology but not the will to do what is necessary and every administration has kicked that can down the road.

It shows the dysfunctional nature of our government and we are paying for it, literally, in our national debt, at the pump, and at the supermarket, etc. Senator Rockefeller, when you made your political accusation to the oil executives, " I think you're out of touch, deeply profoundly out of touch," you should have been addressing Congress instead.

Speaking about being out of touch, we also had the preening of the Republicans, best represented by House Speaker John Boehner's remarks at the New York Economic club: "It's true that allowing America to default would be irresponsible...but it would be more irresponsible to raise the debt ceiling without simultaneously taking dramatic steps to reduce spending and reform the budget process." May-awe, may-awe! As Congress would like to raise the debt limit by $2 trillion, that means $2 trillion in cuts which sounds idyllic, just like ending oil tax incentives. But we are supposed to hit the debt ceiling within days or weeks. Can one imagine Congress being capable of engineering $2 trillion in cuts in such a short time? Impossible. So there it is, an implied ultimatum to the President: no tax increases and show me the $2 trillion or we don't care whether there is a default by the US on its debt. Catastrophic for our country, but that's the Rambo image our "leaders" like to project, no matter what the consequences to our economy and jobs. May-awe, may-awe!

Thursday, February 24, 2011

Dinner With Friends at Dramaworks

Last night was the first preview, in effect a dress rehearsal, of Dramaworks' production of Donald Margulies' play Dinner with Friends. It will open tomorrow. Although a "rehearsal" the preview had all the earmarks of an opening, not a beat missed.

As my literary maturation was greatly impacted by the likes of Updike, Yates, Cheever, and Carver (each of whom wrote numerous stories about couples), not to mention having lived most of my life in Connecticut (where Dinner with Friends is set), Margulies' play strikes a familiar funny bone. I know these people. It also helps to see the play performed by one of America's finest regional theaters, Dramaworks of West Palm Beach. I can only wonder how the incredibly intimate stage of its present quarters on Banyan Boulevard will translate into their more substantial Clematis Street home next November.

On its present postage stamp sized stage, Dramaworks effectively deals with the seven scene changes required by the play in its two acts, the action shifting from the present in act one to the past at the opening of act two and then back again to the present. The scene changes are effortless as the staging is simple, using mostly three props that can be shifted from being used as table and chairs and, when put together, can be turned into a bed. The changes, rather than being an impediment, seem to move the action along in an engaging way and on Dramaworks' present stage, all of this is happening right before you, bringing the audience into the performance.

The play strikes blunt truths in the finest tradition of tragicomedy, Margulies offering up both the humorous aspects of male female relationships and the wearing of time which can lead to destructive outcomes. As Margulies said in a PBS interview concerning his play Collected Stories: "My plays are fairly diverse, but their unifying theme is loss. The characters in my plays are all dealing with change in their family life, in their professional life, dealing with their own mortality. In Dinner With Friends it's change in friendships and evolving marriages. I think that time is a player in all of my work—very palpably in Collected Stories. The ways that people deal with the effect of time, which invariably entails loss, is probably what unites all these works."
And loss pervades Dinner with Friends, newlywed Gabe (Jim Ballard) and his wife Karen (Erin Joy Schmidt) introducing mutual friends Tom (Eric Martin Brown) and Beth (Sarah Grace Wilson), the two couples becoming best, inseparable friends. But a dozen years later Tom and Beth are breaking up, leaving Gabe and Karen pitching and rocking in their wake, questioning their own relationship and facing the sudden realization of friendships ending combined with the inevitable regrets of middle age.

In Scene 1 there is manic dinner conversation between Gabe and Karen about their recent gourmet vacation in Italy, Beth listening passively, finally revealing the real reason why Tom was not there, their marriage ending. She says that Tom said "This is not the life he had in mind for himself." That becomes a question mark that looms over all the characters for the rest of the play. The shock and betrayal is best expressed by Gabe: "All the vacations we spent together at the Vineyard. How could he walk away?"

In Scene 2, the same night, Tom returns to Beth's bedroom and is furious that she has told their friends the news without him. "You've got the advantage, now....They heard your side, so they are with you....You prejudiced my case!" There is some physical violence, culminating in sex. As Tom later explains to Gabe about the incident, "Rage can be an amazing aphrodisiac!"

Scene 3 finds Gabe and Karen parsing blame, Karen wondering about Tom, "the person you completely entrusted your fate to is an imposter....Maybe he never existed before...your friend." Gabe: " You think you're safe on solid ground and it cracks open."

The opening of Act II shows the couples on Martha's Vineyard twelve years earlier, when Gabe and Karen brought Tom and Beth together. In their youthful bantering, Tom says of Gabe and Karen, after a show of how happy the newlyweds are: "Their job is to make the rest of the world feel incompetent" and in that statement lies the unspoken friction between the couples in ensuing years.

Scenes II and III are interesting as they analyze the unraveling relationship between Beth and Karen, and then subsequently Tom and Gabe. In fact, there are a number of dynamics throughout the play, between the two couples, the two spouses, and then the two male and female friends. Each of these relationships are challenged and changed. In fact, and that is the genius of the play, what is unspoken is really as important in these two scenes, as in spite of the friends' surface reassurances about staying in one another's lives (Tom and Beth now with different significant others), one knows that this friendship is irreconcilably over. Gabe sadly says to Tom, "We were supposed to grow old and fat together," Tom responding, "Isn't that just another way to say misery loves company?"

The last scene finds Gabe and Karen ritualistically making up their bed in Martha's Vineyard, Karen asking "What were all those years about?" The same question we all ask ourselves at times.

Most of us have experienced that unsettling moment when best friends announce they are separating, realizing at the same time one's own life cannot go on as before.. The play rings with an inescapable universal truth, further brought home by the fine directing of J. Barry Lewis, who has orchestrated this piece to fully express his vision: "we create family out of our friends and acquaintances....we recognize a bit of ourselves, as we attempt to engage one another in meaningful relationships to fill the powerful need for family."

The actors are all newcomers to Dramaworks, all pros with extensive credentials. Perhaps the most difficult role to play is Gabe's as he is uptight with a mess of internal contradictions, instinctively empathizing with Tom on the one hand and condemning him on the other. Jim Ballard handles the role convincingly. Ballard is multi talented in that he also has a Broadway quality singing voice having seen him play the Wolf in Sondheim's Into the Woods at the Caldwell Theatre in Boca Raton last year

We saw Erin Joy Schmidt perform the lead a couple of months ago in Florida Stage's Goldie, Max and Milk. She was an ideal Karen, absorbing the shock of Beth's accusation of "You love it when I'm a mess...You need me to be a mess...I was comic relief," Ms. Schmidt dramatically delivering Karen's remorseful reply: "You're my family."

Eric Martin Brown was a convincing Tom, who feels liberated from what he feels was a loveless marriage: "I always felt inauthentic having this life...most of the time I was just being a good sport" (to which Gabe replies, "I thought we were just living our lives.") Interestingly, Brown attended the Yale School of Drama, where Margulies teaches (I wonder whether he was his student).

Sarah Grace Wilson is wonderful as Beth, the sorrowful little "artist" who awakens to the reality that her passion for art was just a substitute for living. And, we find out to our surprise, had a lover earlier in the marriage.

Having, myself, adapted two of Raymond Carver's short stories to one-act plays (presently waiting for permission rights from the Carver estate), each about couples, I have a new appreciation of how difficult it is for a playwright to incorporate all the elements of a great play, the humor, the tragedy, doing it all with dialog, no descriptive narrative, making the characters real, having a story the audience will hang onto until the end. Margulies' play is a master class in playwriting, justifiably receiving the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

And I can more clearly see the incredible confluence that must happen to create great theater, the writing, the directing, the staging, the acting. It is a creative act of teamwork. Arts such as painting and literature are solitary journeys into the soul. Dramaworks knows how to bring all the necessary elements together in their productions, always mindful of its basic mission statement "theatre to think about."
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Monday, October 18, 2010

Tale of Two Economists

In an ironic twist, an economist turned entrepreneur writes a rigidly academic critique, The Recklessness of Quantitative Easing, and an academic pens an anecdotal piece of writing on a different but related subject, I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less.

Recklessness by John Hussman, whom I’ve quoted before in this blog as I consider him to be one of the clearer thinkers about the uncharted territory we call today’s economy, argues that the Federal Reserve’s announced intention to pursue a second round of QE is to drive “interest rates to negative levels in hopes of stimulating loan demand and discouraging saving” and to “increase the supply of lendable reserves in the banking system.” But will this increase output and employment?

Hussman thinks not as “interest rates are already low enough that variations in their level are not the primary drivers of loan demand.” There is simply a lack of confidence – both for the consumer and businesses -- that they will have the income in the future to pay off loans. So low or even negative interest rates is not a barrier and “removing a barrier allows you to move forward only if that particular barrier is the one that is holding you back (the economic term being "constrained optimization" as he explains.)

“Instead, businesses and consumers now see their debt burdens as too high in relation to their prospective income. The result is a continuing effort to deleverage, in order to improve their long-term financial stability. This is rational behavior. Does the Fed actually believe that the act of reducing interest rates from already low levels, or driving real interest rates to negative levels, will provoke consumers and businesses from acting in their best interests to improve their balance sheets?”

The effect of all the talk about QE2 has been to propel gold to new highs and to further erode the value of the US dollar as the Fed dramatically expands its balance sheet. “But once the Fed has quadrupled or quintupled the U.S. monetary base from its level of three years ago, how will it reverse its position?” Hussman’s answer is that many years down the road it will be forced to sell off the instruments it is buying, driving interest rates much higher as foreign buyers might be absent from such auctions, and undermining whatever recovery might have begun of its own accord, just further accentuating the boom bust cycle.

He has constructive suggestions, fiscal responses that might include “extending unemployment benefits, ensuring multi-year predictability of tax policy, expanding productive forms of spending such as public infrastructure, supporting public research activity through mechanisms such as the National Institute of Health, increasing administrative efforts to restructure debt through writedowns and debt-equity swaps, abandoning policies that protect reckless lenders from taking losses, and expanding incentives and tax credits for private capital investment, research and development.” Of course many of these require the cooperation of Congress and watching the mud slinging of the mid term elections, one has to wonder.

But Hussman’s article is must reading it its entirety, especially if you are an individual investor and wondering how to position a portfolio in this strange new economic world. The net effect of the Fed’s actions, besides the obvious nearly zero return on any CD you might buy, is to “force” the investor to move into riskier assets commodities in particular and equities as well. One could also “play” the decline of the dollar by investing overseas or in US multinational companies, which derive a majority of their income abroad. But to what extent QE2 is already baked into the prices of these riskier assets is anyone’s guess. There is also the possibility of a more protracted deflationary period than anyone can imagine right now, with the ongoing real estate crisis and high unemployment having a continuing impact. There seems to be a heavy reliance on the Fed’s future actions leading to an idyllic outcome. I think Hussman would disagree.

One of his suggestions as noted is “ensuring multi-year predictability of tax policy” which leads me to the other economist, Professor Mankiw who is professor of economics at Harvard and was an adviser to President George W. Bush, whose administration has to share some if not a majority of the responsibility of our present economic morass.

Professor Mankiw op-ed piece in the October 9th New York Times, through a convoluted and highly subjective mathematical exercise, argues the proposed tax increase on the 2% wealthiest Americans – some attempt at least to close the budget abyss -- will lead to such people not working much, including, alas, movie and rock stars and even novelists! Outraged, and disappointed that I might not see another Harrison Ford movie, or see my first Lady Gaga “concert” or that Jonathan Franzen will put down his pen, denying us his next novel in protest, I immediately shot off a letter to the editor of the NY Times business section, in which Mankiw’s article appeared. Some very good letters were published in response, but not mine. The nice thing about a blog is I can publish my own rejections! So here is what I wrote:

While it is hard to argue with Professor Mankiw’s math (“I Can Afford Higher Taxes. But They’ll Make Me Work Less”) of what his incremental income might become thirty years in the future in a halcyon tax-free world, his conclusion that movie stars, novelists, rock stars, and surgeons might work less if taxes are increased is based more on his own anecdotal view of working. By his own admission: “I don’t aspire for much more than a typical upper-middle-class lifestyle,” and that’s fine, but don’t blame the tax code for declining his next free lance opportunity. If he should climb down from his Ivy tower and look at the real world with real unemployment around 15%, people trying to work to simply support their families and hold onto their homes rather than handing down wealth to succeeding generations, he might have a little more empathy for a progressive tax code that did not seem to destroy incentives during the Clinton years, the last years in which our country actually had a surplus. And even Warren Buffett and Bill Gates see the fairness in having some sort of an inheritance tax.

Maybe the Times found it too preachy or politically oriented. Perhaps I should have concentrated on the nature of work itself. Remember Hussman’s comment about constrained optimization, that removing a particular barrier only has a beneficial impact if indeed it was that particular barrier holding you back? If Mankiw is entitled to personalize his argument, so can I. I worked as hard when in a higher incremental tax bracket as I did when they were lowered. Why? I loved work, simple as that. And, that is what is missing not only from Mankiw’s formula but how our society looks at work and values workers.

I remember my first visit on business to Japan in the 1970’s, the taxi cab drivers waiting at the hotel for a fare, their cabs gleaming as between fares they would polish and clean their cars. The refuse collector doing his job well was as highly valued by society as a company executive. Japan today, of course, suffers some of the same maladies as ours, with a twenty-year head start on the phenomenon of deflation, so perhaps that has taken its toll on their workers. Somehow, as a society, we need to value all workers and restore work as something to be embraced.

Of course we don’t always have an idyllic choice of the work we do in our lifetimes, but we do have a choice of doing it well or not and by choosing the former, we open a path to finding it meaningful. I’m sorry Prof. Mankiw chooses whether he will write an article or accept an invitation for a speech merely based on what his incremental income bracket might be, although I think most people would envy that he actually has a choice.

I like what the great short story writer, Raymond Carver, wrote thinking about a friend who admitted he wrote something just to make a deadline and make a buck, knowing he could have written something better if he took the time. “If writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labor, is the one thing we can take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven’s sake go do something else. There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don’t justify or make excuses. Don’t complain, don’t explain."

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Wednesday, September 8, 2010

Slouching Towards Nostalgia

When I first began this blog, I really did not know where it would take me. I should have maintained an index as entries have floated like a dandelion in the winds of our time. They are idiosyncratic reactions to the macro and micro moments of my life, but true to my “mission statement” it has been focused on my primary interests, publishing, music, reading and writing, economics and business, photography, and boating. The presidential election occupied a fair amount of angst, not to mention the ongoing Great Recession, the disaster in the Gulf, and “circus occasions” such as the Madoff affair which led to a number of entries.

John Updike’s death was a great sadness to me, the passing of America’s greatest contemporary writer, but luckily, it appears that the baton has now been placed in the capable hands of Jonathan Franzen who has followed up his promising Corrections with Freedom, which has even been acclaimed as the latest “Great American novel.” I got my hands on one of the first copies from my friends at Amazon (a printed copy that is not a Kindle, which I continue to resist). I am so looking forward to reading it, that I am delaying the pleasure until we take a trip in a couple of weeks. Interestingly, taking a page from Updike’s Rabbit series, Franzen has neatly spaced his two novels a decade apart, giving us an opportunity to kaleidoscopically view the differences in our times. So Franzen, I am hoping, will be a worthy successor to a writer I have loved to read for the past fifty years, although he will never be as prolific as Updike, who could move gracefully in many genres, from the novel, to the essay, to the short story, to poetry.

While writing this blog over the past few years, I also “discovered” Raymond Carver, not that I had not read him before, but I immersed myself in his short stories with the publication of the Library of America’s complete collection and Carol Sklenicka's excellent biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. Many of his stories, such as Gazebo, continue to resonate in my consciousness, so perfectly constructed and moving. Carver always wanted to write a novel, but he was the master of the short story and was wise never to leave that field, including writing some very good poetry. Perhaps Franzen will follow suit, recognizing his territory as the novel, and one absolutely brilliant novel each decade would be more than enough by any standards.

I also renewed my passion for the theatre during this time, especially the productions of Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, and am looking forward to my preview seats for the forthcoming season so I can comment on the productions before traditional media intrudes.

But I started this blog with several entries of a personal nature, about my family and childhood, the good, the bad and the ugly and I see that several of my last entries hark back to more nostalgic feelings than was my original intent. This is a far cry from providing a ‘first hand” account of “our” times, and although family and reflecting on my life will always be a part of what makes me write, I’m taking a vacation from that for a while.

However, I can’t resist the temptation to recount one very recent personal experience, occurring on the night of Labor Day. We had taken our boat to our mooring off Crow Island which we have visited now for some thirty years. There we met friends, thinking we would stay for the day and return to our marina before sunset. Instead, we were easily persuaded to stay the night, enjoy a pot luck supper, including fresh dug steamed clams, and although my instincts told me that an exceptionally high tide might make it uncomfortable, I relied on the NOAA forecast of “relatively light winds” for assurance that we would not excessively rock at high tide as we slept. By dark the winds increased to some 20 knots pushing the water of the Long Island Sound over the bar that protects the anchorage. The End Result: all night we rocked, rolled, banged, bow and spring lines loudly snapping and tugging, things thrown off counters, to the point of virtually no sleep. By morning, with the tide subsiding and the wind backing down, we were greeted by this sunrise, a small consolation to a night from hell.
And a few minutes later…..
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Monday, May 24, 2010

Potpourri

Towards the end of the week I am going into the hospital for “a procedure” (a minor one to the medical community, a major one to me) so I attribute this posting to some free floating anxiety and an attempt to get some thoughts down on several topics, all suitable for their own entries. I think of them as a bunch of tweets, albeit more than 140 characters.

The first thing on my mind, other than “the procedure” is how quickly we’ve become inured to the major catastrophic saga of the last month: the oil “spill” in the Gulf of Mexico. I present as anecdotal evidence Sunday’s New York Times. “All the News That’s Fit to Print” fails to mention anything on the topic until more than halfway into the first section, although the front page did carry an article on premium prices for a Jon Bon Jovi “concert” in Hershey, Pa.

Why, I wonder, are we not pressing with all the public opinion power at our disposal for some resolution to this disaster? To watch BP, Transocean, and Halliburton in the brief Congressional Hearings was sickening, each pointing to the other to blame in a see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil routine, finally all pointing to the Minerals Management Service which “oversees” drilling activity. BP says it will pay "all legitimate claims," the operative word being their interpretation of “legitimate,” but that is far from the main issues: why were there no contingency plans in place and how, with all this country’s resources, is there no way to stop this fire hose of black destruction on the pristine waters of the Gulf? Every single one of us should be holding these companies and the federal government responsible and let our justifiable anger be heard.

Maybe I take this personally as we live in Florida and appreciate the natural beauty of its waterways and beaches. But I felt the same way after the Exxon Valdez and it is absolutely stunning that we have failed to learn the sad lessons of drilling in fragile environments.

Then, I shift to another aspect of living in Florida, particularly south Florida that is blessed with some of the finest theatre talent. I’ve written before on the incredible productions at Dramaworks, the West Palm Beach theatre dedicated “to theatre to think about.” Yesterday we saw a concert version of Sondheim’s classic Into the Woods performed by the Caldwell Theatre Company. There we discovered that some of the actors we’ve seen repeatedly at Dramaworks and Florida Stage not only can also sing, but do so at professional levels befitting Broadway. In particular I mention Jim Ballard (who we saw only a few nights before in a Noel Coward reading at Dramaworks), Elizabeth Dimon, Wayne LeGette, and Margery Lowe, and I apologize if I am overlooking others. Also, as a pianist myself, I found Michael O’Dell’s keyboard accompaniment remarkable – almost three hours of Sondheim’s intricate melodies played flawlessly and lovingly. All in all it was a great performance of one of Sondheim’s best works, the lyrics of Children Will Listen reverberating in memory:

Careful the things you say
Children will listen
Careful the things you do
Children will see and learn
Children may not obey, but children will listen
Children will look to you for which way to turn
So learn what to be
Careful before you say 'Listen to me'
Children will listen

We saw Stephen Sondheim last year in West Palm Beach on the eve of his 80th birthday (I regret that Google has removed music uploads from the link). He is a national treasure, our last remaining tie to the greats of Broadway.

Finally, and I’m not sure about the appropriate transition to this topic, but I continue to be mesmerized by Raymond Carver’s writings, including his essay “On Writing.”

From that essay, here is classic Carver as it is exactly what he does: ”It’s possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things – a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman’s earring – with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader’s spine.”

Thinking about a friend who admitted he wrote something just to make a deadline and make a buck, knowing he could have written something better if he took the time, Carver writes, “If writing can’t be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labor, is the one thing we can take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven’s sake go do something else. There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don’t justify or make excuses. Don’t complain, don’t explain.”

It seems this advice is applicable to everything as we journey into the woods.

Wednesday, May 12, 2010

Confluence

It is interesting how things come together, seemingly haphazardly, but connected in some way. Ann and I decided to celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary by taking a cruise in the Western Caribbean, places we’ve been before so we intended to spend most days on board, relaxing and reading, donning our formal wear for our special evening but otherwise, one could find us in a bathing suit and a book in hand.

I suppose that is the value of a Kindle or an iPad, being able to take a number of “books” with you, but for one week I figured one good novel and my half finished Library of America edition of Raymond Carver’s short stories would do. So part of the fun planning the trip was selecting the novel, finally choosing one by a favorite author, Anne Tyler, her recently published Noah’s Compass.

One review commented that she “plunges us into the troubled hearts of her characters and allows us to recognize in their confusions our own riven selves.” Since at times I feel particularly riven, about the past, about my interests; I prepared to be plunged!

Tyler is a master of the tragic comedy, seeing the sadness and the humor in the minutiae of ordinary families and their relationships. The lives of Tyler’s frequently quirky characters are compelling in their own way. And Noah’s Compass is no exception to the winning Tyler formula. And as she moves into a later stage of her own life (we are about the same age), her writing reveals an increasing obsession with time, time spent (on what?) and time passing more quickly through the unrelenting hourglass.

So it is no surprise that Tyler pulled me into her novel immediately and although I am no Liam Pennywell (love her protagonist’s name) in my demeanor, I am, like Liam, struggling with my memories and in fact just reading this novel, while celebrating our 40th anniversary, sparked a discussion while on the cruise as to what exactly happened that day.

We remembered that I spent the night before in my apartment at 66 West 85th Street and Ann at hers at 33 West 63rd Street (although we were already living together on and off). We also recalled that we took a one-week trip to Puerto Rico a couple of weeks before we were married which, unknown to us at the time, was our honeymoon in advance. I was between my first job in publishing where we first met and the one I would occupy for the rest of my working career (like Tyler’s characters I kept my shoulder to the wheel). I returned to my new job in Westport and shortly after, Ann placed a call to The Ethical Culture Society’s leader, Jerome Nathanson, the man she wanted to marry us. He had only one date open in the next seven or eight months: a Sunday in April, exactly one week away. We looked at one another and said let’s take it.

Consequently, Ann began hasty wedding arrangements, including ones to fly her mother and Aunt in from California, picking out a dress for herself and mother to wear, hiring a caterer and picking out flowers. We chose the list of attendees, mostly our immediate families and closest friends, including a few colleagues from work and of course, my young son from my previous marriage. Ann’s brother and sister-in-law offered their home in Queens for the informal reception. Everything had to be done on a shoestring and obviously with a sense of urgency.

The ceremony itself was what one would expect from a humanist minister. A substantial part of the service captured our enthusiasm for the then victorious New York Knicks, with names such as Bill Bradley, Dave DeBusschere, Walt Frazier, and Willis Reed sprinkled throughout our wedding vows. Later that night we returned to my 85th Street apartment. We both had to go to work the next morning, my driving to Westport, while Ann took the subway downtown.


So the broad strokes were clearly remembered but, unlike most married couples, we do not have a wedding album to detail much of the specifics of that day. My father was a professional photographer, but my mother did not want him to be very much involved on that matter. (She did not “approve” of the wedding.) Instead, he hired a freelance photographer. I clearly remember our shock when presented with black and white contact prints a week after the wedding. This was 1970 not 1930 and my father’s business specialized in producing color prints! We refused to order enlargements and those few contact prints were filed away. Forty years later, and we had nothing more than contact prints, postage size photos, and in black and white only, a tease of the past, never to be fully viewed (except for a few color Brownie shots taken by relatives).

Fortunately, the brave new digital world offered some remedy, and I was able to scan and enlarge some of those black and white postage size contacts. It was a fine balance, getting something recognizable, not enlarging them to the point that they were not just a bunch of fuzzy digital shadows. The resulting grayish specters became our fragile wedding album of that late April 1970 day.

Liam Pennywell (back to Tyler’s novel) finds himself out of work in his early 60s, out of touch with his children and ex wife, and soon after downsizing to a smaller apartment comes the first twist in Tyler’s plot, as Pennywell is knocked unconscious by an intruder during the night and wakes up in the hospital, banged up with no memory of the incident. He is intent on remembering (and in so doing conjuring up other memories of his past life as well) by pursuing someone he thinks can serve him as a “rememberer.” This turns into a romance, something he clearly neither expected or even wanted. Liam is directionless, and explaining the Noah’s Ark parable to his grandchild says: “There was nowhere to go. He was just bobbing up and down, so he didn’t need a compass, or a rudder, or a sextant.”

Later, Liam thinks, “We live such tangled, fraught lives…but in the end we die like all the other animals and we’re buried in the ground and after a few more years we might as well not have existed.” But finally he realizes that “if the memory of his attack were handed to him today, he would just ask, Is that it? Where’s the rest? Where’s everything else I’ve forgotten: my childhood and my youth, my first marriage and my second marriage and the growing up of my daughters?” Tyler intercedes: “All along, it seemed, he had experienced only the most glancing relationship with his own life. He had dodged the tough issues, avoided the conflicts, gracefully skirted adventure.”

This wonderful story is told with Tyler’s touching sense of humor, giving her characters the attributes and failures of us everyday folks. Unfortunately for me, while on this trip, the story was so compelling, I blew through the book in the first two days and I was concerned that I would also finish the Carver short story collection I also brought. Then, I would go crazy not having anything to read!

So, before turning to the rest of the unread Carver short stories, I made a visit to the ship’s library. There I found a well-stocked library of remainders, potboilers, mostly titles I never heard of, and certainly nothing I would choose to read. Consequently I was prepared to finish the Carver short story collection and start reading them all over again!

On my way out of the library, a large book caught my eye. What a shock to see one of the titles on my “must read” list, and how serendipitous it should be Carol Sklenicka's biography, Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life. I can’t imagine why or how this magnificent work joined the pop culture potboilers that made up the ship’s “library,” but I resolved to devour its 500 pages for the remainder of the cruise.

The book reminded me of my introduction to the literary biography genre, Mark Schorer’s Sinclair Lewis: An American Life (1961), a reading experience I never forgot because of Schorer’s incredible attention to detail. And there are similarities between Lewis and Carver, their struggle with alcoholism and their keen observations of ordinary American life.

Equally impressive is the detail packed into Sklenicka's biography of Carver and her ability to integrate Carver’s life and work, a biography by someone who clearly loves her subject. I particularly appreciated Sklenicka's relating specific poems and short stories to incidents in his life. Remarkably, Carver defined his career as “writer” while he was still in high school and never looked back. He was dependent on two women in his life, his first wife Maryann Burk and his second love, the writer Tess Gallagher who he married months before his death. They saw his genius and staunchly supported him, through his alcoholism and his early death from lung cancer (Carver was a militant smoker).

His inscription to his first wife in his last work, published only months before his death, but years after they had separated and divorced, says volumes about their relationship: “To: Maryann, my oldest friend, my youthful companion in derring-do, my mid-life companion in the same, my wife and helpmate for so long, my children’s mother, this book is a token of love, and some have claimed obsession. In any event, this is with love always, no one knows, do they, just absolutely no one. Yours, Ray. May 1988”

Still, he was equally devoted to Tess Gallagher for the last years of his life and after he realized the tumors in his lungs had returned they were married in Reno in June 1988, as an expression of their mutual love and as a means of ensuring that she would manage his remaining literary rights as his survivor.

I called this entry “Confluence” as everything came together reading this biography, Sklenicka writing: “When Richard Yates came to Tucson to promote A Good School…Ray finagled the opportunity to spend most of a day with the writer who’d been his hero since he was stopped ‘dead in his tracks’ by Revolutionary Road in 1961. To mention that novel, Richard Ford writes, ‘is to invoke a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees.’” I am one of those devotees, not to mention a devotee to the works of Richard Ford (a life-long friend of Carver’s), and John Cheever with whom Carver ran around at the University of Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop. Carver and Cheever had a mutual admiration society, two of our finest short story writers who were both, at the time of their closest association, serious alcoholics.

Thinking of Sklenicka’s work, I wondered, if I were to write an autobiography, whether I could come up with the details of my own life. (Where’s everything else I’ve forgotten: my childhood and my youth?) It is a testimony to Sklenicka’s love of her subject and her prodigious research that A Writer’s Life should emerge exactly as the subtitle promises.

In Carver’s story Blackbird Pie a man’s wife has left him (this wonderful story was greatly influenced by Carver’s feelings towards his, then, ex-wife, Maryann). He’s bewildered and is trying to make sense of it all, the first person narrator concluding: “It could be said, for instance, that to take a wife is to take a history. And if that’s so, then I understand that I’m outside history now…Or you could say that my history has left me. Or that I’m having to go on without history. Or that history will now have to do without me – unless my wife writes more letters, or tells a friend who keeps a diary, say. Then, years later, someone can look back on this time, interpret it according to the record, its scraps and tirades, its silences and innuendos. That’s when it dawns on me that autobiography is the poor man’s history. And that I am saying good-bye to history. Good-bye, my darling.” Sklenicka is that “someone” who has looked back at that time and “interpreted” it according to the “record.”

And for Carver, he “took another history,” as did I, although mine can be explained only in autobiography and to the extent that memory serves.



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