Milestones

This past weekend marked a milestone birthday for my wife, Ann.  It was also another milestone; after 19 months of relative isolation, we were able to see our son Jonathan and his wife Tracie, and two weekends before our other son, Chris and his significant other, Megan, celebrated Mother’s Day with us.  All of this was feasible because of the effectiveness of the vaccination.  If only we could pull together as a nation and truly make COVID a plague of the past.

We drove Chris and Megan up to The Dive Bar for their famous lobster rolls their first full day and afterwards we walked along the Juno Beach boardwalk, enjoying a beautiful sunny Florida day while watching all the fishermen casting their lines.  A lot of swimming and sunbathing ensued by the sun starved Bostonians and on Sunday, we all loved a sumptuous Mother’s Day brunch.  Unfortunately, it was only a long weekend visit and they had to return before Ann’s birthday.

Jon flew in a few days before her big day and finally on Friday, Tracie joined us.  As a treat to our daughter in law, we made reservations for a High Tea Luncheon at Teacups and Treasures, an experience Ann particularly wanted to share with her.  Obediently, as Ann made it an unconditional invitation, Jonathan and I accompanied them although we noted we were the only men in the entire restaurant!

It turned out that half the restaurant was dedicated to little girl birthday parties, one very large group gathered together behind some clever screening.  All were in their most fancy party dresses.  Even their squealing and giggling wasn’t the least annoying.  Luckily we were at the entire other end of the room and had our own little corner to enjoy our incredibly delicious meal.  I never knew having a freshly brewed pot of tea, a delectable soup and scones, small tea sandwiches and delicious miniaturized desserts could be so much fun!  Seeing how delighted Tracie and Ann were made it all the more worthwhile.

The following day --  Ann’s big birthday celebration -- found us driving up the exquisitely manicured entryway to The Breakers Hotel, for their Sunday Brunch, ridiculously priced, all patrons unmasked, even when getting up to the buffet (after all, this is Florida), but it was an experience to mark a very special occasion.

A word about Ann, who I love dearly.  What times we have shared during our long 51 year marriage.  She and I remarked that indeed, life is but a dream, we are hardly aware of the day to day details, only the major memories lingering, and suddenly we are here, now acutely aware of our days.  Our son, Chris after visiting two weeks ago, wrote a moving tribute to her upon his return home, and I take the liberty of quoting part as it is a great character study, capturing Ann:

When I arrived home and began my work-from-home life, I realized there was a sadness, one that had taken root since my departure. I missed my mother. I missed her stories she shared with us, her frenetic energies and breadth of conversation. I missed how she charmed hostesses and waiters and her spontaneous laugh, a laugh that said “I’m here and love it, dammit!” She loved my father through thick and thin and put up with my brother and my own oddities. She kept a flock of life-long girlfriends near her chest, loyal and loving.  Literature transmuted their essence to her: she read everything from Jane Fonda to Jane Austin. She traveled and played and cruised across oceans, still short by fifty countries compared to my brother, she joked.

It was a lovely couple of weeks, seeing our “kids” at long last.  May it be only one such incident on the path to “normal,” if that is still feasible in this country. 

 

Baseball and a Sense of Normalcy

 

Beautiful.  The field.  The playing of the National Anthem.  The stuff we took for granted, not knowing what its absence would mean.  A year lost.

Minor league baseball has resumed.  I feel for the young players, their own dreams put on hold.  A year is an eternity to these kids.  They play the game with heart and professionalism.  One of the plays in Thursday night’s Class A ball game between the Jupiter Hammerheads and the Palm Beach Cardinals involved Jupiter starting pitcher Chris Mokma unleashing a wild pitch with a man on third, his rushing to home to cover it while the catcher caught the ball on a rebound from the backstop, firing it to Mokma, the ball arriving just as the Jupiter player slid into home.  It’s one thing for a catcher with his protective gear to tag out a runner from third but the pitcher is naked.  Mokma fearlessly dove at the runner for the out.  It just demonstrates heart playing the game.

Mokma gave up three runs quickly but then took command on the mound.

I like to “scout” watching minor league ball – which players might make it all the way to the majors and in a big way.  I’ve watched several in this ballpark mature and correctly called their future success, including Giancarlo Stanton (then Mike Stanton).  Perhaps I’ve witnessed another Stanton in the making , the Cardinal’s 6’5” third baseman Jordan Walker (only 18 years old!), hitting for power in his first few professional games and a .400 average.  He has quick hands at third, a strong arm, and went over the railing for a foul ball (showing heart!) and he will move on to the next level.  At 18, the Cards will probably hold him back for a couple of years.  But #37 reminds me of a young Stanton.

The “sleeper pick” is the Card’s starting pitcher, John Beller.  He was an undrafted free agent out of USC.  Just shows what a good scout can uncover.  I’m biased when it comes to Beller as he is a lefty (as am I ), and a crafty one.  Watching him feeds my old baseball fantasies.  He doesn’t have the overpowering fast ball, but his breaking stuff, makes his high 80’s fastball effective.  In his nearly 7 innings the other night he threw a 3 hit, 0 run game and with 12 strikeouts, demonstrating the effectiveness of his mixing his fastball with curves, changeups and a slider.  At “only” 5’11” he is smaller than most major league pitchers but so was lefty Bobby Schantz at 5’6” from my boyhood years, a pitcher who had great success because of similar tools as Beller.  Would be nice to see him go all the way, perhaps a Cinderella story in the making.

The final score (5-3 Cards) was meaningless to me.  Just to be out there again, under the canopy of a Florida night, watching the field of dreams of some future major leaguers, meant everything.

Baseball.  Another step towards normalcy.  Breathe.

Hall of Mirrors

 

When the Internet is used as an instrument of “affirmation, repetition, and contagion,” it is deadly to promote an alternate reality in its hall of mirrors. 

 After Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, Trump’s culpability seemed abundantly clear.  During momentary “weakness” even political insiders who had publicly supported Trump such as Mitch McConnell expressed that view.  But that was then.  Since, the pro-Trump propaganda machine has kept its shoulder to the wheel and behold, today most Republicans still believe the election was “stolen,” and at least half believe that Trump bears no responsibility for the attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Also since then Republican State legislators have gone to work, to “make elections fair” and to “stop voter fraud.”  Indeed, this disenfranchises minorities which would seem to be the major issue.    As important, it gives subliminal credence to the unfounded claim of voter fraud and a kind of legitimacy to Jan. 6, at least in the minds of the True Believers,

How can this be when our very own eyes and all evidence refute both points? 

I have referenced before the pioneering work of Gustave Le Bon and his 1895 classic The Crowd; A Study of the Popular Mind.  I read this in college and never forgot it. I still have my old paperback edition, with all my original notes and underlinings; strange to look through it some sixty years later in an effort to understand today.

This was written even before radio.  I can only imagine what Le Bon would say about the Internet, other that it merely magnifies the ease in which an obvious falsehood can seize the popular mind, an alternate reality taking on the trappings of the truth.  Read the words of this man talking to us from 1895 and decide for yourself how these beliefs can possibly be. 

This is an excerpt from Le Bon’s work with some passages truncated just to get to the heart of the matter:

When…it is proposed to imbue the mind of a crowd with ideas and beliefs…the leaders have recourse to different expedients. The principal of them are three in number and clearly defined--affirmation, repetition, and contagion. Their action is somewhat slow, but its effects, once produced, are very lasting.

Affirmation pure and simple, kept free of all reasoning and all proof, is one of the surest means of making an idea enter the mind of crowds. The conciser an affirmation is, the more destitute of every appearance of proof and demonstration, the more weight it carries….

Affirmation, however, has no real influence unless it be constantly repeated, and so far as possible in the same terms. It was Napoleon, I believe, who said that there is only one figure in rhetoric of serious importance, namely, repetition. The thing affirmed comes by repetition to fix itself in the mind in such a way that it is accepted in the end as a demonstrated truth.

The influence of repetition on crowds is comprehensible when the power is seen which it exercises on the most enlightened minds. This power is due to the fact that the repeated statement is embedded in the long run in those profound regions of our unconscious selves in which the motives of our actions are forged. At the end of a certain time we have forgotten who is the author of the repeated assertion, and we finish by believing it….

When an affirmation has been sufficiently repeated and there is unanimity in this repetition...what is called a current of opinion is formed and the powerful mechanism of contagion intervenes. Ideas, sentiments, emotions, and beliefs possess in crowds a contagious power as intense as that of microbes….Contagion is so powerful that it forces upon individuals not only certain opinions, but certain modes of feeling as well….The opinions and beliefs of crowds are specially propagated by contagion, but never by reasoning...

To Publish or to “Un-Publish” – That is the Question

 

A friend called yesterday after it was announced that Blake Bailey’s Philip Roth: The Biography had been withdrawn from circulation although just recently published by WW Norton and Company.  Bailey is now accused of being a sexual predator.  In effect, the book is being declared out of print as a consequence of the accusation alone. My friend knows I am a former publisher and correctly thought I must have an opinion on the matter. He was right, although I’ve been away from the publishing scene for some twenty years now.

In full disclosure, I was a “fan” of Blake Bailey’s biographies of John Cheever and Richard Yates (two of my favorite writers), and had praised them in this blog. 

In fact, I was hoping Bailey would be John Updike’s biographer, who, along with Roth, I considered to be the two most important writers of my generation.  But the son (Adam Begley) of another favorite writer (Louis Begley) had an inside track on that and as it turns out Adam Begley’s Updike biography measures up to the work Bailey has done.

So (to me) it was logical someone of Bailey’s stature in the literary biography world would be a leading candidate for Roth’s.  I do not know the ins and outs of how Norton, Roth, and Bailey got together, but I have grave doubts it is, as some have contended, one misogynist finding another, a marriage made in cancel culture heaven.

I have always purchased the hard cover editions of literary biographies of the writers most important to me, but because of the sheer size of the Roth biography, and the fact that I had hoped to read it on our travels after COVID shots set us free, I purchased the Kindle edition.  I now live in fear that Amazon will be forced to “withdraw” those already purchased and refund the $$, Norton making Amazon whole.  Could that be?  Seems Orwellian, but so do the past five years, no make it ten plus starting with the Tea Party and now culminating in the post Trump era with the anti-vaxxers vs. the vaxxers. 

I was primarily an academic publisher and as such we published books from all over the political spectrum.  If we had to run police records on all our authors, and I published more than 10,000 titles in my career, I’m sure we would have found some unsavory people on our list.  But no, provided the author documented his/her arguments, be they conservative or liberal on the political spectrum, we published the work.  We also published works on and/or by people who I would not want as a friend and I’m sure there were misogynists among them, but hopefully no axe murderers.  

I confess that we didn’t have to deal with the kind of high profile cases trade publishers do.  I never liked the business of “trade” meaning books that have potentially wide readership, sold in bookstores and now Amazon, and are sometimes published in large editions or subsequent editions, such as Roth’s biography.  Trade publishers, when publishing non-fiction, want to have a popular subject or writer as they have to compete not only with other books, but with media in general, everything demanding one’s time.  So, the more controversial the better! 

The trade publishing world is now considering cancelling planned publications of some of the people from the Trump administration.  I think it is fine for a trade publisher to take a political position, but thankfully there is always another one with the opposite position.  Imagine if the “me too” or the “cancel culture” was able to dictate not only what should be published in any form by any publisher or what books already in circulation should be declared out of print?   We’d probably lose a majority of the classics.  This is a symbolic form of book burning that only fascists might applaud.

No, there is only one answer to publishing these works in general:  it’s called the 1^st Amendment.  If someone chooses not to read the Roth biography as he/she neither likes the subject nor the author, don’t buy the book!  If it’s proven that Bailey is the monster he is accused of being, let the courts decide what to do with the royalties.

 

“Not with a bang but a whimper”

 

I quote the famous last stanza of T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men,” as it has such relevancy today.

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

This vile pandemic has claimed lives, the means of making a living, disrupting every aspect of our entire society.  The tragedies that ensue have been a tsunami of pain and heartbreak.  More than a half million lives lost in the US alone, and the impact on small business, and all the people they employ incalculable. Restaurants, the arts and all the other service industries have been particularly hard hit, rendering actors, technicians, waiters, kitchen staff, hairdressers, unemployed.  One such victim is our beloved Double Roads Tavern in Jupiter where we were regulars for years to enjoy their Sunday night jazz sessions.  I’ve written about the restaurant in these pages and my Twitter feed on Sundays frequently highlighted a brief clip of performances.  They give a sense of the restaurant’s community experience and the high quality jazz they sponsored on Sunday nights.  Vince Flora and his wife Kelly opened the restaurant in 2014.  Vince frequently played on the DR stage with his rhythm and blues band, Big Vince and the Phat Cats .

The Palm Beach Post tells the story at this link. 

I would be remiss in not covering the closing in this blog as it has been an important part of our lives, and so many others.  My wife, Ann, said it best in a heartfelt letter to Kelly:

Dear Kelly,

It was such a pleasure getting to know you a little and seeing that gorgeous smile during the several years we were regulars at your Sunday Night Jazz Fests.  You always saved our favorite table, right in front of Rick and the band.  I loved seeing Cherie too, who always gave us a hug.  We never knew who we were going to see, from little Ava Faith to an eye-popping, sophisticated Ava only a few years later belting out the standards like a pro.  We met Yvette Norwood Tiger there and still follow her very successful career, booking her Palm Beach International Jazz Festival from its beginning.

We met Mike and Linda at your Club, a very fortuitous friendship as they insisted we consider joining them on the weeklong Jazz Cruise in early 2020.  We did and it was the highlight of a most dismal year.  Thanks to them, we saw Emmet Cohen again on board the ship, a young brilliant and charismatic jazz pianist we had seen once in a NY Jazz club and totally flipped over.  He has held Monday night jam sessions in his NY apartment on YouTube which we never miss.  That lifted our spirits during this Pandemic.  And it’s all thanks to you guys and Double Roads!

Once COVID hit, Bob and I went into quarantine on March 12th and never left the house for most of the year.  That hurt us too, as it meant the end of our standing Sunday night Jazz dates.

Now I can only imagine what you and Vince are going through, closing what was a labor-of-love restaurant/dive/bar/music hangout.  Whatever you two decide to do, wherever you go, I’m sure your hundreds and hundreds of faithful customers will follow. I wish you good luck and good health.  You contributed so much to our well being that we will never forget you.

Fondly,

Ann & Bob

P.S. we LOVED your hamburgers!

I think of that tragedy as being emblematic of the larger issue, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost, and the infinite number of similar wide ranging effects of the pandemic with an overwhelming sense of sadness and anger: as a nation we failed.  Period.  While it would have been impossible to avoid the impact completely, it could have been ameliorated by not denying it and listening to science, and following their recommendations scrupulously.  How many lives were needlessly lost as a consequence?  Even one is too many if the result of negligence. We must hold our leaders accountable.

The saddest part is we are still fighting a cultural war using the pandemic as the battle ground, the anti-vaxxers taking up Trumpism.  How can we reach herd immunity when “leaders,” such as our Governor DeSantis, comes out against some form of “vaccination passport?”  One anti-vaxxer wrote a letter to the editor of the Palm Beach Post, asking that vaccinated people “respect” her “right” not to be vaccinated and not to segregate her from public venues. It was a reasonable letter, but the logic deeply flawed.  I tried to write an equally reasonable letter to the editor, but it turned into an essay so they published it as a “guest columnist.”  Here is the link but as they sometimes do not allow non subscribers to view, I include a photograph of the column.

Will we be forced to live with this virus for the foreseeable future due to “perceived” personal liberties?  In a rational society, that would seem unthinkable, but we’ve lived with outdated gun laws for decades due to the same problem.  There are now so many of these mass killings that I’ve given up writing about more sensible gun control laws, particularly to eliminate military style weaponry (which was not the intent of the Second Amendment).  Is this America’s future, an uncontrolled pandemic, wearing masks, having high hospitalization rates, those injured by gun assaults lying next to those with COVID?  Mass burials?  Are we already spiritually dead as Eliot implies in his poem?

Perhaps this is how a once great society, a representative democracy formerly the envy of the world, finally implodes.  “Not with a bang but a whimper.”

‘So We Can See to See’ – The Belle of Amherst

Margery Lowe as Emily Dickinson

The heading is a variation on the final line of one of Emily Dickinson’s best known poems,” I heard a Fly buzz - when I died.”  A joint production by Palm Beach Dramaworks and Actors’ Playhouse of this well known play shines a bright new light into the very soul of the enigmatic poet so we can see to see her art and Emily, the passionate human being. 

In full disclosure, I feel a personal association with everything Emily.  In college I found myself memorizing several of her poems, or even parts of ones, which opened to truths so transparent that it literally took my breath away. 

I grew up in the Northeast and so did she, although her locale was New England’s Amherst whereas mine was New York City’s Borough of Queens.  One would think they have nothing in common, but when I read the first stanza of poem 320, “There's a certain Slant of light, / Winter Afternoons –/ That oppresses, like the Heft / Of Cathedral Tunes –“ it hit me in the solar plexus.  I know that light.  I have experienced it, and to actually feel it from literature left a never ending impression and I became a reader of Emily Dickinson.  I felt she spoke to me; and the truths about life and death.  What a wise, worldly poet I initially thought, not fully knowing that her wisdom came strictly from within.

The Belle of Amherst was meticulously researched by William Luce who only recently passed away.  He wrote it in the mid 1970s inspired by the actress who would play the role on Broadway, Julie Harris, who is closely identified with the play and one can still see it on YouTube.  But when I heard Dramaworks was contemplating a filmed version of a fully realized, staged rendition staring Margery Lowe, I was intrigued.

If William Luce could see this rendition he would undoubtedly approve.  In addition to his brilliant integration of 19^th century sensibility with Dickinson’s letters and poems, this production breathes real life into the character and her setting.  One would never know there is only one woman on the stage.

Margery Lowe is not only a doppelganger for Emily; she played her in a two-hander premiere at Dramaworks in 2018, Edgar and Emily. That work was light hearted, comic in many ways, and although she was a great Emily, you really didn’t get to know her as you do in Luce’s play.  Lowe is also a “deep diver” into research and she probably knows Emily as few do.  It shows in this production.

Lowe emphasizes that aspect of Emily which is filled with life and expectations and the acceptance of her obscurity as a poet, although secretly hoping for publication.  She has her “words” and words are her life.  Yes, she must seek “the best words” and they swirl all about in her observations of nature, light, love, and the routines of living as well as the inevitability of death. 

An actor’s life can be erratic, filled with uncertainty as casting calls for ideal parts are not in their direct control, but Margery Lowe’s portrayal of Emily IS her ideal role, and although I have seen her perform in many roles over the years, this is the one I will always remember.

I think the fact that this is a one woman show might be lost on the virtual audience because of the Director’s vision.  Bill Hayes doesn’t see this Emily as a shy reclusive intellectual, but, instead, a passionate observer, almost to the point of breathlessness, her mischievous side, capturing her vivaciousness but alas her vulnerability as well.  And she’s a great cook (her own opinion)!  As such he has her moving to and fro, from her writing desk, to her bed, to the parlor, sitting on the floor with her scraps of writing and her finished poems.  And she is delivering dialog not only to the audience, and to herself, but to friends and family, one sided; of course, only she can hear the other’s reply, but the audience can divine the other side from her reaction.  Margery Lowe does all flawlessly.

Hayes and Lowe are in perfect sync, and on a magnificent stage designed by the award-winning Michael Amico.  Every detail on the stage has a purpose, the floral arrangements, the large windows upstage, perfect for lighting touches, her sacred writing desk, not much larger—perhaps smaller – than the one I had in the 1^st grade, the tea cart and service, inspired by historical accuracy.  When the view is of the entire stage, it takes on the feeling of a fine tapestry.  And the centerpiece is the trunk of her poems which she finally offers to the audience as her legacy.  “’Remembrance’ – a mighty word.”

The lighting for a streamed stage production is tricky.  When the light comes from the front, it clearly is through imagined window panes, which beautifully frame Lowe.  During a rare display of the aurora borealis, colors flood the stage from the upstage windows.  Kirk Bookman’s lighting is clearly designed for their stage, yet effectively works with the filmed production.

Indeed, light imagery is so important in her poems, illuminating her omniscience.  We’ve twice visited her home in Amherst which is now a museum and on one such visit we were lucky enough to be allowed to linger in her bedroom where her writing desk was, to be able to look out those same windows, and see the late afternoon light as she would have seen it, the very views (sans the cars) and I was acutely conscious of her imagery of light and the sparse, sometime enigmatic content of her poems.  This streamed production, captured, for me, those same moments.  Indeed “there is a certain slant of light….”

Brian O’Keefe’s costumes are stirring, not only did he masterfully design and create Emily’s signature white dress with the cinched waist and voluminous sleeves, but all the accessories, the shawls, the apron, the bonnet and cape add the finishing touches that lend such authenticity to this production. Sound designer Roger Arnold’s ominous church bells chime during a funeral, and when Emily’s normally strict, staid father sound them as the aurora borealis began.  Arnold’s sounds of a train are in perfect sync with Lowe’s gestures of the local train’s labyrinth path to Amherst.

Hayes has directed a play of enduring significance, but as it is a streamed production performed without a live audience because of Covid, it is missing some of the laughter, or a chortle, here and there.  There are many comic touches in the play but they are addressed with just the right pauses, or by Lowe’s calculating looks. 

Hayes uses the cameras to their greatest advantage in this production, full stage at times and close-ups for others.  Yet Hayes’ editing is seamless, so the production exhibits the best of two worlds, “live” theatre, but well edited and filmed.

To say this production is satisfying is an understatement.  If only it could remain on YouTube, it would be the “go to” version to view, no disparagement intended towards Julie Harris’ performance, which remains inspired in its own way.  We now have the Margery Lowe classic.