Sunday, December 28, 2008

Mark Twain's "Adventures of Tom Sawyer" -- this boy never grows up

What got a'hold of me and made me read Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876)?

I don't know. It was lying there on the discount table at the Barnes and Noble in Brookline, a beautiful hardbound edition, with the Winslow Homer painting, Boys in a Meadow, on the dust cover, and a sticker with $4.95. I had to buy it. The nostalgia? The longing for the pastoral youth that I never had? Maybe. (By the way, that Barnes and Noble is closing down -- yet another book store about to disappear.)

I'm glad I read it. It's always readable. And I remember that I loved, and was surprised by, the novel Huckleberry Finn (it was a great novel). Tom is not a great novel, but I guess it is a kind of warmup for Huckleberry. Many parts are very funny, of course. You can just sense Twain unloading at his favorite targets. The satire is constant, and is still timely. It's worth the time. Here is the town minister:

"He was regarded as a wonderful reader. At church 'sociables' he was always called upon to read poetry; and when he was through, the ladies would lift up their hands and let them fall helplessly in their laps, and 'wall' their eyes, and shake their heads, as much to say, 'Words cannot express it; it is too beautiful, too beautiful for this mortal earth.'

"And now the minister prayed. A good, generous prayer it was, and went into details: it pleaded for the church, and the little children of the church, for the other churches of the village; for the village itself; for the country; for the state; for the state officers; for the United States; for the churches of the United States; for Congress; for the President; for the poor sailors, tossed by stormy seas; for...."

A disappointing thing about the book: despite all he goes through, Tom is the same at the end of the book as he is at the beginning. He's still the very same child, still quick to dream in the very same childish way as when we first meet him. He hasn't grown at all. We like him, of course, but think he should've learned a thing or two.

Tobias Wolff's memoir-novel, "Old School"

I was engrossed with Tobias Wolff's novel Old School (2003). It is written in the form of a memoir recounting the narrator's years at an exclusive prep school somewhere in New England. He is one of a very few Jewish boys in the school. He masks his "Jewishness" for most of his time at the school. He doesn't speak about it to anyone. He desperately wants to be a writer, and much of the novel is about the urgent sense of competition among the boys to write and be rewarded for their writing -- the school mounts writing contests in which the winning boy gets a private meeting with a famous writer visiting the school. We get to see and meet Robert Frost, Ayn Rand, and Earnest Hemingway. The portraits of the writers are vividly detailed and realistic -- they feel as if they must be based on actual journalism.

The narrator does something unexpected in the climax of the story. It surprised me that a voice and a person that I had come to know and trust would suddenly do something so untrustworthy.

It was great to read about a school where literature is taken so seriously! Writers and writer wannabes are heroes in this school.

It reminded me a little of my all-boys high school, Hutchinson Central Techincial High School, in Buffalo. We were a public school, and not exclusive in terms of wealth; we prided ourselves in being smarter than the other public high schools in the city; in my first year, we wore ties and white shirts to school. Like the claustrophobic world described in Old School, we were all boys, and each day you had to make your place in the locker room scenes and bravado.

The environment and scenes are so realistic, they stand out and I remember them now (a few weeks after reading the book) more than the story itself and the thinking of the characters. The book was stoically old fashioned -- no highfalutin language, no obscure allusions, no scrambled time sequences. Just a real story with realistic characters.

One of Wolff's achievements here is that the language is clear and fluid. It seems to disappear and simply leave you with the story itself.

Monday, December 15, 2008

The Masterwork Chorale's surprisingly modern Petite Messe Solennelle, by Rossini

A belated posting on the Masterwork Chorale's performance of Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, which we attended on November 16, at Sanders. This mass surprised me -- a couple of the early movements sounded almost folklike, you could dance to them. I loved the harmonium. Other movements were operatic. And other movements were more traditionally liturgical and mass-like. It takes you on quite a journey. The entire piece sounded surprisingly modern -- yet Rossini wrote it in 1863.

The conductor, our friend Steve Karidoyanes, seems to be steadily shaping the sound of the Chorale. They seem to have a tighter, and lighter, sound then they did a year ago.

Cambridge community Chorus's Messiah

We enjoyed the Cambridge Community Chorus's performance of Handel's Messiah (an abbreviated version) on Saturday afternoon. Their new director, Jamie Kirsch, seems like a great find for the chorus. He seemed energetic, and the chorus seemed to respond to him. Their sound was clearer than it was when we last heard them, in the spring. The sopranos especially sounded good. The movements sung by the soprano soloist Danielle Munsell Howard stood out for me -- she has a powerful and controlled voice.

And who'd have thought that over a thousand people would come out for the Messiah on a sunny Saturday afternoon!

Thursday, December 11, 2008

MIT Gilbert and Sullivan Players "Pirates of Penzance" is a hoot!

We saw MIT's Gilbert and Sullivan Players performance of Pirates of Penzance last Friday night, and really enjoyed it. What a hoot! What a terrific production! And for only $10 a ticket! (We get the MIT community discount, $12 otherwise.) They're still performing through this weekend.

I know Mark Costello, the fellow who plays Frederic, because he sings with me in the bass section of the Brookline Chorus. He was very good. I knew he had a wonderful voice, but was surprised that he could sing tenor this well. And he was very funny, and seemed like a good comic actor (he seems like a natural ham). The student who sang the role of Ruth, Kaila Deiorio-Haggar, had a surprisingly strong voice and comic presence. As did, of course, the soprano Emily Quane in the role of Mabel (she's a conservatory grad, so I expected her to be good). And Lyman Opie in the role of the Major General was excellent (how does he get the words out so fast?).

Lots of funny bits and great touches (the troop of policemen made me laugh out loud every time they took the stage, and the sergeant was very good). This had the feel of a sincerely felt, well-prepared energetic amateur production.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

The Huntington's "Rock 'n' Roll": well-crafted, significant, boring

We saw Tom Stoppard's play Rock 'n' Roll at the Huntington on Saturday, December 6. The play is hard to summarize. It follows a handful of people through the decades as they live through, or in relation to, the Czech velvet revolution.

It's dull.

I know, I know, it's well-crafted. The vicious hothouse atmosphere of left-wing academic politics is nicely detailed, at times funny, and sad. Max, the older professor (played by Jack Willis), is a standout character, and he plays an interesting True Believer (that is, a True Believer in Marx). The scenes of student life in Prague and Oxford will seem comically familiar to most people who lived through the 60s and 70s. And the set design (a sky placed as the background, with our perspective from street level looking up) is striking, and I suppose it has some relevance to the play's stories.

But there are long, long scenes of dry trivia, long discussions about arcane philosophical details. The fellow sitting in front of me (he looked like a professor of some sort), turned to me at the intermission and said, "My snoring wasn't bothering you, was it?"

The rock 'n roll reference...I don't get it. The play seems to have little to do with rock 'n roll. There are references to it, there are short music bits during scene changes, but I couldn't make out anything special about rock's influence on events, other than the usual one about rebellion against authority. As so often happens with a long, turgid play, the director blasted loud music in the last seconds of the play (the Rolling Stones in this case), perhaps to make one final desperate attempt at making you think that maybe you HAD seen something exciting after all.

It seems as if Stoppard wrote this play for a pretty narrow academic audience. How many people would understand the historical and political contexts?

Finally, near the end, there's some life, some drama, as the family starts bashing each other in front of us, some connections are revealed, people do unexpected things. But there's so little to get excited about at this point, after nearly three hours.

Does the Huntington think it can build an audience with this type of play?


Monday, December 8, 2008

David McCullough's 1776

The history 1776 was published in 2005. A very readable, even thrilling, account of the first year of the American Revolution. McCullough is such a good narrative writer I almost felt I was reading a page-turning detective novel. Yet, although he doesn't go deeply into the philosophical and social background of that time (he couldn't in a book this length), he writes with a lot of subtlety about the people and events from both the American and the British perspective. The British and their loyalist North American supporters are sympathetically described, and their perspective on the colonies is given what I feel must be a fair reading. King George comes across less a tyrant than an amiable man deeply out of touch with the events in North America. The same could be said about many of his supporters in Parliament. It was interesting to read about the number of British voices that loudly argued against militarily subjugating the colonies.

But the hero and center of the story is George Washington, and his army. Washington lost battle after battle, and was consistently outsmarted by the British for much of 1776. He is described as indecisive, and that surely is how he comes across. Yet, leading an undisciplined army, without an established administration, almost no battlefield intelligence, with unpredictable officers and soldiers, and with no actual personal experience leading a large force, the reader can certainly understand Washington's predicament, and his propensity to delay making a decision.

It is clear that Washington learned from the early battles, and from his mistakes. He got better as the year went on, and Congress somehow maintained its faith in him. (In a modern media age, would the public have tolerated the terrible defeats in New York without firing Washington? I doubt it.)

He comes across as a real patrician, and bit fastidious (writing detailed letters to his estate agent about remodeling the house while preparing to fight a battle in the muck and cold). He also comes across as loyal to his subordinate generals, and reluctant to punish, even when they have personally betrayed him. His most trusted personal aide carried on a correspondence with General Lee that was critical of Washington to the point of denunciation. This during the worst months of 1776. Washington discovered the correspondence by accident. He must have been painfully shocked. Yet, he benignly notified both men that he was simply aware of their correspondence. He took no punitive measures against either man. He did nothing that would harm the war effort. McCullough is practically reverent in his depiction of Washington as a humane and wise general. Perhaps Washington really deserved this depiction.

Another surprising point is how amateur the American army truly was. Men came directly from their farms, mills, and fishing boats. Some of them were made generals. And some of them turned out to be amazingly good generals.