The Gypsy Scholar

Rhapsody in Blue
George Gershwin

There’s a Word for It

Word Painting
Measures 24-41 of the Tenor line of Every valley shall be exalted Handel’s Messiah
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Every_Valley.jpg

Gershwin’s music captures the movement and the often fractious character of the American city. Woody Allen played this music under the opening sequences of his film Manhattan perhaps because New York City is among the most rambunctious and idiosyncratic of American cities, it often seems the city sees itself this way. Music can often tell stories, sometimes stories that language does not tell quite so well. Just as often, though, music is used in conjunction with language to tell stories more vividly than words or music alone could do.

I have always enjoyed the literary device of synesthesia. It is an under-noticed device I think, but it is used quite frequently. Whenever we refer to the clarity of sound as sound that is crystal clear we are using synesthesia, in that we are using a visual image, that of transparency, to describe an auditory image, a sound without distortion or interference. The image from the score of Handel’s Messiah captures another kind of synesthesia; it illustrates a kind of musical scoring that is called word painting. The music is sung to the words, “Every mountain and hill made low, the crooked made straight, and the rough places plain.” When the mountains are being made low, the music starts low and ascends, imitating the shape of the mountain then ends on a low not suggesting the mountain has been brought “low”. Similarly when the lyric talks about a “crooked” place the melody goes one note up and one note down (alternating “B” and “C” notes I think), suggesting a rough edge. And when the rough places are made plain, a single note is sung throughout the phrase suggesting a level surface. Of course this painting is not done with colors, at least not literal colors, but with sound. I enjoy this flexibility of language that describes a thing by making it into something it is not.

Salman Rushdie wrote an article for the London Times Literary Supplement, “Salman Rushdie celebrates the Paris Review”, in which he praises the English language for its great flexibility. He asked a jeweler friend of his why she liked working in gold and she told it is because the metal is so malleable that you can do almost anything with it. Rushdie sees the English language as being like that, pliable like gold and that is what makes it such a marvelous language for telling stories. Old English has a dark guttural sound to it that makes comedy difficult, Middle English has a musicality that makes tragedy difficult (perhaps just for me) but English as it is spoken today has both Old and Middle English elements to it that give real breadth to the possibilities of story telling.

Self-Portrait
Thomas Nast
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Thomasnastselfportrait.jpg

The picture is a self-portrait caricature of Thomas Nast, America’s first editorial cartoonist. He used pictures and words to tell stories, as comics do to this day. He gave an additional meaning to the word “nasty”, a word that is much older than he. In the picture, Nast is sharpening his “sword” preparing for another strike. Nast used ridicule to show things up for what they were, in his view. Sir Walter Scott once said, “Ridicule often checks what is absurd, and fully as often smothers that which is noble.” This is the danger of ridicule and the editorial cartoon, I suppose. Nast’s targets were often folks like Boss Tweed and his corrupt cronies, but if he ever got it wrong, that satiric edge could do real harm, as it can to this day, whether employed in an editorial cartoon or some other venue.

In the case made against Socrates a reference was made to Aristophanes’ caricature of the philosopher to support their accusations. Aristophanes, in his play The Clouds, named his philosopher Socrates not because he was out to ridicule Socrates so much as philosophers in general and Socrates just happened to be the most visible philosopher of the day. The play is a great play, but it could be argued that if the ridicule it made of Socrates was undeserved than it is also a play that did some harm. Of course the same could be said of any work of art that was used for political purposes that had nothing to do with the real meaning of the work of art or the artist’s intent, at least to the degree that can be known. The artist is not always responsible for the way in which others misuse her or his work.

Con-Ed Explainers
Jules Feiffer
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Conedexplainers.jpg

The cartoon relies almost exclusively on language, though the darkness and the candles make the joke work. You would have to know something about life in New York City in the 1950’s and 60’s to understand what is going on. Con Ed was the local supplier of electricity. They had a reputation for frequent power outages and rate increases and many felt that as the cost of the service went up, the quality of the service went down. The cartoon, though, underscores how simplicity in both the image as it is drawn and the language as it is used can make the most effective commentary.

Ocean Chart
Henry Holiday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lewis_Carroll_-_Henry_Holiday_-_Hunting_of_the_Snark_-_Plate_4.jpg

Lewis Carroll was an inventor of words, mostly nonsense words but he was also adept at capturing the absurd at its most comical. The images above and below come from his poem The Hunting of the Snark. The story is thought by some to have introduced the word “snark,” along with its cognates, to the language. The image is a map of the sea and it captures with some accuracy what you are likely to see on the open sea, though its usefulness for navigational purposes is at best dubious. The joke works perhaps because it does capture what we expect to see in the open ocean and to those that do not navigate the map is as useful as any other while at sea. The second image captures a scene and is intended to illustrate (some think anyway, because the image does not appear with these words) the lines that accompany it (added by me and not the illustrator or publisher of the book).

To illustrate the lines (maybe):
They sought it with thimbles, they sought it with care;
They persued it with forks and hope;
They threatened its life with a railway-share;
They charmed it with smiles and soap.
Henry Holiday
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lewis_Carroll_-_Henry_Holiday_-_Hunting_of_the_Snark_-_Plate_6.jpg

Two prominent figures in the picture are a “careworn” young woman and a “hopeful” looking young woman, the “care” and “hope” referred to in the lines of the verse. Most everyone else has a fork of one kind or another in his hand. Everyone looks very serious and intent, with the possible exception of Hope. The sounds of the words in the rhyme are very serious sounds, though the meaning is of the words is nonsensical. I think this is an aspect of English story telling (though I am sure it is not exclusively English) that I enjoy, the ability of language to sound like one thing when it means something very different and the absurdity of this juxtaposition is what often creates humor in a text, it certainly does in this one. As was pointed out in the Rushdie essay referred to earlier, the English language is malleable and can be shaped in many ways to do many different things, even at times, things that are mutually exclusive, like serious comedy.

Paper Moon
Paramount Pictures

In this film clip we see another attribute of language, its ability to create a kind of verbal slight of hand that the con man can use to manipulate others. I think in the transaction the quick talker, Ryan O’Neal, came away with five dollars, but he may have gotten more, it all takes place so quickly. He is well away before the shopkeeper realizes that something isn’t quite right and even then she is not sure. The dexterous use of language can often achieve unexpected results. Like with many skills, those that use language well often appear to be doing something that is very easy, that anyone can do that is in fact quite difficult. Often in order for this skill to be effective, the person practicing it depends on the appearance of “simplicity” to be successful. As soon as the language is seen to be polished and complex, it becomes suspect and the readers or audience put up their guard, especially when it is language used by those like the Ryan O’Neal character in the film clip.

Language is how we communicate and the better our vocabulary and the more skilled we are at putting words together, the more effective we are at communicating our ideas. However, language is also inherently ambiguous, it means different things to different people. Often it succeeds by using images that lend themselves easily to multiple interpretations so that each hearer or reader can get from the words the message she or he wants to hear. This is often how a political speech works. But it is also how the words of a story enable each of us to use our imaginations in ways that make a story personal. There was an article in the Guardian, “Do you know what today’s kids need? Thumb amputation, that’s what,” about Maurice Sendak and his story Where the Wild Things Are. Sendak was asked what he would say to parents who were afraid their children would find the film version of his story “too scary”. Sendak replied, “I would tell them to go to hell.” For their children, he had the following message: “If they can’t handle it, go home. Or wet your pants. Do whatever you like.” Not a very sympathetic response from a writer of children’s stories.

The point of the article was that we need to be scared a little bit, especially if we are children. Sam Leith, suggests that the stories we most remember are the stories that frightened us. What makes these stories resonate is that they enable us to “leave home” without actually leaving home, to experience some of the dangers and “scariness” of the world while in a place of safety. We can experience danger without fear that we will actually be harmed by it. This serves a necessary purpose, in that it helps us as children to recognize danger before we actually have to experience it. We also learn how to respond to it after a fashion. We certainly learn that there are forces in the world that must be stood up to if the world is to spin merrily on its way through the universe.

Often we want to keep to children safe and this is a good thing, children by definition are probably not skilled enough to protect themselves in the “real world.” But if they are to ever be ready for the world they must learn what to expect and we always learn best from experience. Stories, especially scary stories, offer us a way to experience the dangers we might encounter in the world without actually experiencing them. They also force us to confront our courage, or sense of loyalty and friendship, or proper place in the world.

In the story Coraline, the central character experiences on the one hand a kind of abandonment by her parents, while at the same time she must accept the responsibility of rescuing them. There are two worlds in the story one safe, but indifferent to her, the other quite dangerous and desirous of her. Isn’t this how it often is in life, the people who seem to desire most our affection are the people that we can trust least with that affection and that the people that are most important to us, often take us the most for granted. Stories teach us that the most important people in our lives, those that we can most depend on, are often not the most exciting people. Because we know them well it is easy to take them for granted.

I enjoy the stories I read in English and I delight in the versatility of the language, but in part this is because English is the only language I know well. I suppose in part it is our familiarity with a language that makes it malleable, that makes it gold and that this quality of language is a product of being fluent in that language. All languages tell stories and they all work well in the cultures that these languages serve. But whatever malleable qualities other languages have I know and enjoy the malleable quality of the English language, that can terrify me in amusing ways and let me taste a sour expression.

Bad Man’s Blunder
The Kingston Trio

A Wicked Good Guy

King Richard III
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:King_Richard_III.jpg

The song is about an inept outlaw for whom, perhaps because of his incompetence, the listener feels a bit of empathy. Most of us are incompetent at something and so we understand the poor outlaw’s problem. Still there is the problem of the deputy that, he tells us frankly in the opening stanza, he killed. The name in storytelling circles for such a character, for the likable bad guy, or the guy with too many flaws to be heroic, is antihero. What lies behind the antihero is a belief that we all have the capacity to be villainous and part of our reaction is a “there but for the grace of God go I” kind of sympathy. We see our own potential in these characters. In the conventional tragedy we encounter a good man or woman with a significant character flaw. This flaw proves to be the character’s undoing. Because in so many other respects this character is so good the reader or viewer sees the consequences that result from this single flaw as undeserved. But no one sees the antihero as undeserving of her or his fate; it is just that that fate falls too close to home.

The painting is of Richard III. As Shakespeare tells his story he is a totally villainous unredeemable character but many throughout history have championed his cause. When I was growing up it was Josephine Tey’s novel The Daughter of Time that made his case. Tey was a writer of detective fiction and her detective, while in the hospital for reasons I have forgotten, becomes intrigued with Richard and the story history has preserved of his legacy. He receives a card with this painting of Richard on it and his curiosity is aroused, also his sense of justice. He does not believe someone with the sensitivity the portrait captures could commit the heinous crimes associated with this “wicked” king. According to history, especially Shakespeare’s history, Richard became king by murdering everyone, including two young children, ahead of him in the line of succession. The Richard of the painting, though probably not the Richard of history, is a bit of an anti-hero in the sense that this portrait provokes a kind of empathy that his actions cannot easily support.

Satan
Gustave Dore
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:GustaveDoreParadiseLostSatanProfile.jpg

There was an article in The Guardian last week, “Francesca Simon’s top 10 antiheroes” on the great antiheroes from literature. Number ten on the list is Satan from Milton’s poem Paradise Lost. I am not sure that Milton intended for this character to be seen in this light, but since the Romantic era this view of Satan as the wronged “hero” of the poem has been popular. It is still a popular view espoused by Philip Pullman, the writer of children’s stories who has made a Satan-like character the hero of one of his tales, and Harold Bloom America’s most popular literary critic. Those who see Satan as, well, “Satanic” point out that the Biblical account of this character is as a liar and a seducer consumed with unbounded pride. He has extraordinary gifts combined with ambitions beyond his station. Of course it is the “beyond his station” part that makes him “likable” because most of us have aspired to things that seemed beyond us and have been “put in our place” as a result. Often it is the point of view we bring to what we read that determines how we understand the characters that live in the stories we read. For the atheist and, perhaps, the agnostic Satan is the ultimate hero, for the theist he is the ultimate villain.

Egill Skallagrímsson from Medieval Illustrated Manuscript
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Egil_Skallagrimsson_17c_manuscript.jpg

Egil Skallagrimson is one of my favorite anti-heroes. He is a smart and capable man. He is a ferocious fighter and a great poet. His actions are not always to be emulated but he is audacious and it is his audacity that makes him attractive. His flaws are numerous; he is egotistical, ambitious, and avaricious to name a few. He is slow to let go of a grudge and the “quality of mercy” is not something he was interested in cultivating. One must consider the times in which Egil lived which were very harsh and unforgiving times in which mercy and forgiveness were not often rewarded and were often seen instead as signs of weakness. He belonged to a free and independent people that rather than submit to the authority of a king left Norway and established their own “democratic” nation in Iceland. The Icelandic “Althing” is the world’s oldest standing parliament having met in continuous session since 930 CE and still meets to this day.

The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

The film The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming is about a Russian submarine and its crew that run aground off the New England coast of the United States. The Russians were the villains of the cold war, though there are probably some in Russia who would take a different view. The crewmembers, though, are just ordinary folks who are trying to survive with little interest in international politics. They run aground because the ship’s captain wanted to see what America looked like. When the film was released the cold war was still intense and these hapless sailors were quintessential antiheroes, members of an “evil empire’s” military, who were really not much different from the Americans that viewed the film. What responsibility do everyday folks have for the decisions their government makes. These sailors are not interested in fighting any war, cold or otherwise, they just want to go home, and who of us, in difficult circumstances far from friends and family would not also want to go home?

A Dime Novel Featuring Jesse James
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jesse_James_dime_novel.jpg

The pictures above and below capture another side of the antihero. Some whose behavior was seriously out of line have managed to wrap themselves in the aura of romance. In the “wild west” Jesse James was such a character. He was robber and a killer but one way or another he was greeted warmly by some in the culture. The romance surrounding his exploits inspired pulp fiction like that of the cover illustration above. In this “dime novel” (that according to the cover cost a nickel) Mr. James is not only not an outlaw but he as a protector of the people and a solver of crimes. This Mr. James is “the law” not the outlaw. No doubt his criminal record is the result of some misunderstanding and that at heart he has more in common with Pat Garret than with Billy the Kid. Of course, Billy the Kid established his own aura of romance and is an antihero in his own right.

Coin de table (Corner Table, Rimbaud is second from left)
Henri Fantin-Latour
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Henri_Fantin-Latour_005.jpg

The painting is of a group of French writers. The second writer from the left is Arthur Rimbaud a poet with a “colorful” history. He was an influential and popular poet. He gave up poetry to pursue other interests that culminated in gun running among other things. He is the author as antihero and his life after poetry is part of the “romance” that attaches to this writer. He does not, in this painting, look that radical or counter-culture, in fact no one in the painting looks that revolutionary, with the possible exception of the two bearded gentlemen sitting at the back of the table. He became an inspiration to many twentieth century writers, like some of the Beats in America and folks like Jean Genet in France, who sought to cultivate an aura of anti-heroics. They were antiheroes not because they were engaged in activities that were outside the pale but because they were “labeled outlaws” (culturally not legally) by a culture that was, for them, outside the pale and rather than answer the accusations against them, they embraced those accusations and after a fashion made antiheroes of themselves. Whether the post poetic Rimbaud was an antihero or a true villain would depend on who he was running guns for and who benefited from the business that he transacted.

There is something in human nature that wants to rebel. It is this something that makes the antihero attractive. Whether he is the James Dean character in Rebel without a Cause or Geena Davis and Susan Sarandon in Thelma and Louise. Laws may be broken, maybe laws it would be better not to break, but these characters are seen to be driven to illegality by other “crimes” the culture chooses to ignore, like sexism and intolerance. Often these characters desire to do good but are driven in other directions by a culture that does not believe them to be capable of good. In the book Frankenstein a monster is created. Monstrous things are expected of him because he looks like such a monster. However, he tries to do the good and noble thing, to be compassionate and kind in his dealings with others, but he is always rewarded according to the expectation and not the act. At one point he is shot for saving a young girl from drowning. He changes, he realizes that no one is ever going to give him a chance and he begins to fight back. That too, is part of the story of the antihero. If we do not let people become kind, if for whatever reason we judge them by something superficial, we should not be surprised if they become what we have pre-judged them to be and that it becomes difficult to identify the true heroes and villains.

Promotional photo of Boris Karloff from Frankenstein
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Frankenstein%27s_monster_(Boris_Karloff).jpg

Beethoven – Symphony #5 In C Minor, Op. 67 – 1. Allegro Con Brio
William Weller and the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra
Mendelssohn – Symphony No. 5 in D Major, Op. 107
Cesar Cantieri, London Symphony Orchestra

The Same Old Song

Still Life #20′, mixed media work
Tom Wesselmann
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:%27Still_Life_-20%27,_mixed_media_work_by_–Tom_Wesselmann–,_1962,_–Albright-Knox_Gallery–.jpg

There was an article in this Sunday’s Boston Globe on the cliché. It was called “Let us now praise… the cliché”. The article points out that often clichés convey bits of useful information and folk wisdom quickly and somewhat universally, universal at least to the culture that created the cliché. The opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony has become a bit of a musical cliché, in that it is well known and carries a certain meaning that listeners are quick to recognize, it has in a way become a cliché for Beethoven’s symphonic work and classical music in general. The work itself is not clichéd, or at least it wasn’t when it was first performed but it has evolved into one. The clip from Mendelssohn that accompanies the Beethoven clip employs a musical cliché of sorts from the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther’s hymn “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Because this piece of music is so recognizable it conveys quickly a musical idea that gives its name to the symphony as a whole, it is often referred to as the Reformation Symphony.

The painting also makes use of clichés. The door to the cupboard above the sink suggests Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book being a red square (a cliché in and of itself) with a white star, the symbol of Communist China. The white bread, a cliché for wholesomeness, placed strategically next to another grain product that is a bit less wholesome. Then there is the Coca Cola glass, which is another cultural icon/cliché. The Piet Mondrian painting above the bananas is also a bit iconic, especially as it is representative of a kind of modern abstract painting. These components of the painting, because they are clichés, convey quickly a certain depth of meaning to the viewer that enables the painting to succeed as a comment on American culture of the early 1960’s. The painting is from 1962, before the Vietnam War dominated “popular culture.” The colors and the “product placement” suggest the conflict between Communism and Capitalism or perhaps the consumer culture of America.

As a teacher of writing I am usually encouraging my students to avoid clichés. Because clichés are by definition overused they tend to reflect badly on a piece of writing and make the writer appear to be a bit unimaginative. I am not sure that it is always necessary to find a new way of saying something that can be said effectively by a more commonplace phrase, but that is the “conventional wisdom.” As the article points out, many clichés are still around because they “say best what needs to be said” and we will have to wait and see if any of the substitutes writers struggle to invent will go on to become as successful, though, as the music of Beethoven may suggest, this success is something of a “two edged sword”.

It also important to be careful with clichés and how we use them. Sometimes clichés are used as a way of avoiding a real problem or of ignoring an impending problem or, perhaps, as a way of avoiding a little extra work. “Why”, for example, “reinvent the wheel” may be a way of avoiding the work of reinventing something that needs to be reinvented. We do not, after all, use wagon wheels on automobiles, so at some point it was indeed necessary to reinvent the wheel and it may not always be easy to tell which came first the “automobile” or the “reinvented wheel.” Some will tell us “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” But just because a thing is not currently broken does not mean it is not in the process of breaking and a bit of preventative maintenance may be “just the ticket.” A cliché, like any piece of writing, needs to be judged by the circumstances in which it is employed. Some may always be dubious, but others may at times still serve a useful purpose. It is also very difficult, at times, to find a phrase that is not on some level clichéd. Is, for example, the phrase “serve a useful purpose” a cliché? Is it an over used expression? Some might think so. Others may see in it an avenue to a more economical compositional style.

The Mona Lisa (or La Joconde, La Gioconda)
Leonardo da Vinci
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa.jpg

The paintings above and below are not unlike the two pieces of music, one having become a cliché and the other playing games with clichés. It is a danger for an artist who does something too well that that something may eventually become a cliché. Leonardo da Vinci is almost a Renaissance cliché in and of himself. He is often pointed to as the definition of the Renaissance, an inadequate definition in that he did not represent all areas of cultural advancement with which the Renaissance is associated but probably he was adept at enough of them to make the comparison work. C. S. Lewis said, “For it must be noticed that such dominance (the dominance of a literary form in any given age) is not necessarily good for the form that enjoys it. When everyone feels it natural to attempt the same kind of writing, that kind is in danger. Its characteristics are formalized. A stereotyped monotony, unnoticed by contemporaries, but cruelly apparent to posterity, begins to pervade it.” This is often the fate of the cliché, whether in painting, music, literature, or any other art form. It is because Beethoven’s Fifth (or the opening anyway) has become clichéd that the music often evokes a comic response when there is not necessarily anything comic in the music. Or is there? Was Beethoven being a bit over dramatic to serve a kind of satiric purpose in the music? Does the musical cliché it has become serve the musical purpose for which it was created? I am not sure. I do not think there is a comic intent behind the Mona Lisa but it has devolved a bit into “kitsch” because of the place it holds in the culture.

The Disquieting Muses
Giorgio de Chirico
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The_Disquieting_Muses.jpg

The painting by Chirico plays with iconic forms from classical art for comic purposes and, probably, social commentary as well. It also plays with allusions to classical culture when it plays with the muses from Greek and Roman myth. There is the juxtaposition of the castle, a Renaissance cliché with the factory, a modernist cliché. The muse in the background appears as a conventional human likeness while the muses in the foreground have . . . well I am not certain what they have for heads. The colored box suggests the motley costume of the clown Pierrot from the Comedia del Arte. But are these in fact clichés or are they archetypes or symbols that add richness and do not in any way detract? For an icon of any kind to work it must be readily identifiable with that which it represents and it is this quick identification that gives it power. The issue is not so much the cliché as it is its use, is it a kind of laziness that enables us to avoid thinking deeply about something by letting the cliché do the thinking for us, or does it evoke ideas that lend a bit of depth to the issue being examined.

Plan Nine from Outer Space
Ed Wood

Ed Wood enjoyed a moment of popularity a few years back when a film biography was made about him. But what made Wood an attractive subject for this film was the excruciating excess of cliché and poor production techniques that characterized his films. These excesses made them comic, though comedy was not the Wood’s intent when he made the films. From the clip it can be seen how on one level there is almost a Monty-Python-esque humor to them. The characters are so over-blown and caricatured that it is difficult to take them seriously. Groucho Marx once said of Margret Dumont that she was the perfect foil for the comedian because she did not get the jokes. Others disagree with this assessment, but perhaps it has some truth in regards to Ed Wood, maybe he was a film comedian who did not get his own jokes.

Still, the problem with Ed Wood and taking him seriously as a filmmaker is that he did not seem to understand when a film convention had been overused. Films are full of clichés and conventions, even very good ones. Sometimes these are used to point the viewer in the direction of the filmmakers influences, as when Harrison Ford makes his way across the bottom of the German truck in The Raiders of the Lost Ark. Spielberg is paying a complement to John Ford by evoking a scene from one of his films, Stagecoach, where John Wayne does something similar traveling underneath a stagecoach. It works like an allusion in literature to an earlier piece of writing. These allusions add richness to the film as they add richness to a poem or story. It is not necessary to understand the allusion for the scene to work, but it gives an additional level of pleasure to those that understand the allusion. They remind us that most works of art are produced by a culture that has a cultural heritage full of symbols, archetypes, and images that connect the parts of the culture to the whole.

Front Cover for the LP Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the artist The Beatles.
The cover art copyright is believed to belong to EMI Records, Ltd.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pepper%27s.jpg

If we look at the images that fill the album cover of The Beatles record Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heart’s Club Band we will see figures from throughout the culture, including an early version of The Beatles behind the more current incarnation of the album’s release. But amongst the crew that surrounds them are comedians and cowboys and film stars; writers, scientists, and clergy. There does not seem to be much that is left out. What is the point of putting all these images into the cover? Does it make a commentary on the music or is it just there to catch the eye of the record buyer to help sell the record? Often clichés are comfortable because whether they serve a real purpose or not they do not usually ask much of us or even if they do, it is not that difficult to avoid the work they invite us to perform by just focusing on the cliché itself. This is perhaps the ultimate weakness of the cliché, that even if it is intended to serve a higher purpose and the writer or artist is not being lazy in the use of the cliché, it is still very easy for the reader or viewer to be lazy in her or his interpretation of it.

From Light Over Water: Part III
John Adams

Life in Miniature, or Making Much of Very Little

Paris Metro sign Image
Photograph by ChrisO
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Metropolitain.jpg

The music of John Adams has always aspired, or so it seems to me, to do a lot with very little. There is not much variety in its instrumentation or in its use of the musical scale, but the music has succeeded over many years to draw listeners into the worlds that it creates. I will sometimes give my students an exercise where I ask them to write me a three or four page paper on the Ezra Pound poem “In a Station of the Metro.” The poem is short:

THE apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

It is an imagist poem intended to suggest a Japanese haiku. I suppose a student could manage a page and a half or so on background information concerning the imagist movement in poetry and the haiku as a poetic form. And that is the point of the exercise; in order to write a lot about a poem this short it is necessary to say something about background and influences. But there are other things that could be done as well. What is suggested by the word “apparition”? What is the “Metro” and why make the metro station the subject of the poem? What does the last line suggest? The Wikipedia article on this poem suggests that Pound is playing with the sonnet because the first line has eight words and the second line has six, mirroring the sonnet form of fourteen lines with a turn between the first eight lines and the final six lines. The point of the exercise is that often quite a lot of meaningful stuff can be said about a poem of two lines and a mere fourteen words.

The Paris Metro itself is something of a story in “smallness” or at least short distances. Every building, or so the Paris promotional blurb suggests, is 500 meters from a metro station, meaning that everyone in Paris is within walking distance of a subway station. Being such a convenient rapid transit system it has always attracted a large ridership. And perhaps these riders are the “petals” on the “black bough” and the ghosts that haunt the Metro. The Metro signs, as seen in the photograph above and other aspects of the stations are done in the “Art Deco” style of the time in which it was built. Perhaps this too was something Pound found attractive.

The Shaikh al-Islam Discoursing to an Audience: Page from a dispersed Divan of Mahmud cAbd al-Baki, 1590–95; OttomanIraq (Baghdad)Ink, colors, and gold on paperH. 10 1/4 in. (26 cm), W. 6 in. (15.2 cm)
Gift of George D. Pratt, 1925 (25.83.9)
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/08/wam/ho_25.83.9.htm

The painting above and the carving in ivory below point out other ways in which smallness can be beautiful and deeply evocative. Each of these works is rich in symbolism, and imagery. They both tell stories that the viewer can follow even if they do not have access to a written text. Many of the miniatures painted by Christian artists to fill books of hours, early prayer books, told the story of the accompanying text. The paintings often served a purpose not unlike the illustrations that make up comic books or graphic novels, to tell visually the story that is told in the written text, though in comics and graphic novels the text and the images share the narrative burden as opposed to each telling the same story in a different medium, as is the case with a conventional book of hours. But what I find attractive is how so much meaning is gotten into such a condensed space.

The painting above is an Islamic miniature, a style of painting popular in Persia in the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries. What is intriguing about these paintings, at least to me, is that they come from a culture that eschews representational art, seeing it as being a bit idolatrous. The artwork found in a Mosque, for example, is non-representational and of a highly geometric quality. In fact, if we look at the interior decorating that is captured in the painting we notice that it is geometric and conforms to our cultural expectations. But then art should surprise us and do the unexpected.

Panel with the Evangelist Mark and His Symbol, carved 1000–1100Ottonian (probably Cologne, Germany)
IvoryOverall 5 1/2 x 4 1/4 x 5/16 in. (13.9 x 10.8 x 0.8 cm)
Inscribed in Latin: [I am] the voice of one crying [in the wilderness] (Mark 1:3)
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.36)
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/oton/ho_17.190.36.htm

It is often the little things that matter most in our daily interactions with one another. It is often enough to be kind and courteous which comes at no real cost to us, though they may not be in practice “little” things. There was a review of a number of books on etiquette, “Can’t We All Just Get Along?”, in this week’s Washington Post. The reviewer did not really like any of the books that he looked at and came to the conclusion that those most in need of reading them were the least likely to give them a look. This is no doubt true. Courtesy requires a bit of selflessness, a conscious awareness of those around us and their worth as fellow human beings. Discourtesy is, among other things, a sign of self-absorption, though it may just be a temporary lapse due to a poor night’s sleep or something. Those that are insolent in their treatment of their neighbors probably approach their neighbors, at best, with indifference. Sometimes the little things require more than some people are capable of giving.

My Dinner with Andre
Louis Malle
Saga Productions

The film is a “small” film in the sense that all the action takes place around a dinner table in a restaurant. The two characters in the film are two New York writer/actors Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory. The movie is a conversation about the world and where it is heading. This part of the film focuses on boredom and its consequences. Boredom puts us into a stupor where we will agree to most anything, especially if it promises momentary relief from the boredom. In some ways it seems prophetic, the film was made in the early 1980’s, though it may just be rehashing old ideas in a new medium.

There is much in the film that gives a sophisticated spin to aspects of the “hippie” philosophy and much that is probably a bit naïve. But it is certainly true that the film is difficult to enjoy for a person who is not excited by ideas even if the ideas are beginning to show their age a bit. There is no spectacle, there are not really any raised voices or raised fists. The two men are friends and they are enjoying each other’s company and the conversation, though there may be an undercurrent of competition, an effort on the part of each to dominate the conversation, as Andre Gregory does in this brief clip. But it is a friendly competition and each can be seen to be taking the other very seriously.

Rosary Bead, early 16th century
South Netherlandish (Brabant)
Boxwood
Diam. 2 1/16 in. (5.2 cm)
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.475)

http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/ho/08/euwl/ho_17.190.475.htm

Spectacle can overwhelm us with the power of its images and the force with which it assails the senses. Miniatures surprise by how much is crammed into a small space; it is spectacle of a different kind. The rosary bead above is only two and a half inches in diameter and yet it contains the heavens and the earth. In a world of super sizes the miniature may fail to impress, many may not take the time necessary to see the detail that is present in the carving. Impressed or not, there is much that can be said about this little bead and all the images and symbols that it contains. The bead is part of a string of beads that are intended to aid in prayer. And prayer, if nothing else, takes us out of ourselves and reminds us that there are forces that are greater than we, they may be impersonal forces like those that work in nature to produce evolutionary change or they may be something more powerful and personal, that, of course, depends on the beliefs of each individual looking at the bead.

Watch, ca. 1680
Movement probably by Nicolas Gribelin (French, 1637-1719)
Case: painted enamel on gold; Dial: painted enamel with champlevé gold chapter ring; Movement: gilded brass, steel, partly blued, and silver; Diam. of case 2 3/8 in. (6 cm); Diam of back plate 1 15/16 in. (4.8 cm)
Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917 (17.190.1559)
http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/watc/ho_17.190.1559.htm

The workings of a watch must be small and delicate by definition because the watch must be able to fit into a small place, a pocket or a person’s wrist. The details of the watch are intriguing in their design but the wonder of the watch is in the work it does. When manufactured well and maintained well it keeps accurate time as time passes, it was, after all, a watch that enabled European sailors to find latitude at sea precisely because it kept precise time over a great expanse of time. It is usually the little things that separate a great work from a mediocre one. It is the ability to see nuance and subtlety in a poem or a laboratory experiment that separates the true scholar from the dilettante. To see subtlety and nuance, though, the eye and the mind that operates it must be observant and take some delight in its ability to observe the littlest of things.

God Bless the Child
Blood, Sweat, and Tears

A Passionate Discipline

The Arnolfini Portrait
Jan van Eyck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jan_van_Eyck_001.jpg

The song celebrates the child that knows what she or he wants and is able to get whatever that is. The lyric just says “God bless the child that’s got his own” but I think the thing to have is self-knowledge and the skills necessary to achieve the heart’s desire. Perhaps the song means something different but that is what I think. In an English class the thing to have is the ability to use language well, or the potential that can be shaped into that ability. Not everyone in English class aspires to be a writer, but the English class aspires to make competent writers of everyone. The goal may be seem an unrealistic one to the student, one that makes too many demands on the student, but it is seen as an achievable goal by most English teachers.

Writing as a craft or an art is a very different thing from writing as a skill. I have great admiration for anyone who can tell a story and has the discipline to put that story into a book and then to get that book published. It is a thing that is very difficult to do. There was an article in The Guardian this past week about the writer Dan Brown whose new book The Lost Symbol was published this past week. The article, “True confession: I don’t hate Dan Brown”, is about the reaction Dan Brown’s books often receive from those that write “literature” or “serious fiction and/or non-fiction.” The author of the article, Jean Hannah Edelstein, does not care much for Brown’s books, but is grateful that he brings people into bookstores and gets people excited about reading who might not otherwise get excited about reading and some of these people will go on to read “serious stuff.”

The painting suggests the importance of craft and discipline for the artist. It is a realistic painting that attempts to capture the reality of the scene it portrays down to the reflection in the mirror at the back of the room. The painting, I was told once in an art class, was a kind of marriage certificate and that the scene was not in fact a realistic portrayal of the people in the painting, but a goal for their marriage. The woman in the painting is pregnant. According to the story told by my art teacher she was not in fact pregnant at the time the painting was done, but that was the couple’s hope for the near future. But that said, the painting looks real and is meticulous in its attempt to capture all the little details of the room and the people in it (and also the dog). For the artist that painted the painting this may have just been a commission, a piece of work over which he had few feelings beyond the receipt of his fee. His subject, after all, was chosen for him.

The artist, whether a writer, a painter, a musician, or a worker in some other medium, has to find a balance between passion and polish. If the subject is chosen for the artist, the task becomes one of finding the passion that will give life to the work. If the subject is chosen by the artist passion is probably not the problem, the problem is finding the discipline and the skill to shape that moment of passionate inspiration into something meaningful and “finished.” Wordsworth defined poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility.” This suggests to me that the effective poet is able to capture an emotion after that emotion no longer has power over her or him; it is a recollection of an emotional moment after the moment has passed. This recollection must evoke the emotion in the poet without the poet being dominated by it.

The Dot and the Line
Metro-Goldwyn- Mayer
The film captures the essence of artistic discipline. The squiggle is inspiration without form or control. The line, on the other hand, was uninspired but in firm control, at least initially. He is not without passion; he just does not have the tools to give expression to his emotions. The line, though, finds inspirations and brings control and form to that inspiration. He is in the grips of a powerful emotion, love, and while he uses that passion to inspire his work and to motivate him to do his artistic work, the passion does not control his expression. This is, I think, the essence of the artist’s struggle, though, the degree of freedom from that passion may not always be absolute. There may be a conversation between the passion and the intellect that controls the process and polishes the rough edges.

The Yellow House
Talkback Thames

In this film depicting a painting expedition of Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin it is clear one painter is in the grips of passionate inspiration and the other is not. Gauguin paints deliberate lines and is in absolute control of what he does and what he does has little interest to the viewer. Van Gogh on the other hand seems to be in the grips of powerful emotion and his end product is one the viewer wants to see in greater detail than the glimpse that is given. Van Gogh helps himself control the process by constructing a kind of grid through which he looks but other than that he creates with a good bit of spontaneity and freedom.

Of course, this is a cinematic portrayal of what the director believes the moment was like, but that does not guarantee that the film got it right. It may be that the director, who meticulously controlled the action of the scene, created an effect that agreed with what he imagined the moment to be like, but that effect may have been fathered not by the facts of the moment but by what the director’s romantic imagination suggested to him were the facts of that moment. But is art necessarily concerned with truth or does it create its own truth.

Drawing of Purkinje cells (A) and granule cells (B) from pigeon cerebellum
Santiago Ramón y Cajal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PurkinjeCell.jpg

The painting below and the drawing above both use lines on a piece of paper to suggest the way things work. The image above attempts to illustrate the workings of a pigeon’s brain. The image below depicts the norns, characters from Norse myth who, like the fates in Greek myth, weave a person’s destiny. The lines that run through the drawing are the threads that will make the tapestry that will capture the destiny of the tapestry’s object, the person whose destiny is being cast. I wonder if there is a connection between the lines that illustrate the synapses of the brain and the lines in the tapestry that illustrate a person’s fate.

I have always enjoyed stories that are illustrated. I think the illustrator’s art often adds new dimensions to the storyteller’s art. These dimensions are not always found in the story but if the illustrations are done well, these dimensions were certainly evoked by the story. Tolkien said that he removed a giant’s shoes because he liked the illustration of a barefoot giant more than his description of the giant wearing boots. Sometimes, evidently, the illustrator may influence the direction aspects of the story take. On the other hand there is the story of Seymour. Dickens was hired to write a story around the popular artist’s illustrations. The public, however, preferred Dickens’ story to Seymour’s drawing and Dickens was given the freedom to take the story where he wished. The humiliation led to Seymour’s suicide. Art can be a dangerous business.

Norns weaving destiny
Arthur Rackham
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nornsweaving.jpg

There was an article in the Boston Globe this weekend about books and music and how books rarely evoke music. The article, “Pynchon on shuffle”, was about how Thomas Pynchon created a soundtrack of music from the 1960’s to play behind the events of his story. Most of the songs are real and those who lived through this moment in time recognize them, but many are of his own invention and serve his artistic purposes. But why is it that some art forms are more friendly with one another than others. Why do words and pictures go together so well, and why do words and music when joined in song go together so well, but not words apart from music, words that are not sung but only evoke what might be sung?

I do not think there should be such antipathy between the written word that might be spoken and the written word that was written to be sung. There is often music in the sounds of words and many books to be fully appreciated need to be read aloud. We expect this to be true of poetry but it is often true of prose as well. I think, for example, The Great Gatsby is a very musical text when read aloud. Storytelling began as a spoken art, we ask someone to “tell” us a story and not to “write” us a story (unless of course we are English teachers). The first stories, The Iliad and The Odyssey for example, were not written down until much later, originally they were performed, sung, to their early audiences. Perhaps one day, when the technology allows, books will have their own internal jukebox so that they will sing to us again.

Rosebud
Kay Nielsen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kay_Nielsen00a.jpg

I have always enjoyed the illustrations of Kay Nielson. In this image from the Grimm’s Brother’s story of “Snow White” or “Rosebud” as they called it (or at least as it was called in this edition of the tale), we see an overgrown castle and a prince awakening the sleeping princess. The lines appear in the background and I wonder if they are not the threads of fate woven by the norns in the earlier illustration. Perhaps they are just shafts of light suggesting the first light of morning but they add a nice stylized touch to the image. And being a picture of Snow White, it is difficult not to imagine the story without the soundtrack of the film playing in the background. The title of the painting also evokes another film, a different kind of fairy tale, Citizen Kane, a film in which a different rosebud had a place of prominence. Music and story may not be intimate friends but as stories become films their soundtracks, the music that plays behind the action, become a part of our experience of the story and are often difficult to separate from the story when we are getting the story from the printed page rather than from the silver screen.

Again, though, is the art of the cinema an art that proceeds from passion, as with Van Gogh and his painting in the film clip earlier, or is it one that proceeds from commission, like the painting at the top. A director does not always chose his scripts; actors do not always chose their roles. What part of the process is passion being controlled by a disciplined mind and what part is a disciplined mind seeking out the passion. Can art be the product of a dispassionate process that exerts the artist’s skill on the process without the artist’s emotional involvement? Can the artist be emotionally detached from the work and still produce a work of artistic merit? Can a work of artistic merit be produced without emotional detachment? How much of this painting is unbridled passion and how much is careful control of the painter’s medium? The painter’s emotions emanate from this painting, but the painting is not a squiggle, there is a disciplined hand at work.

Wheat Field with Crows
Vincent Van Gogh
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Vincent_van_Gogh_(1853-1890)_-_Wheat_Field_with_Crows_(1890).jpg