Sherlock Holmes, the movie -- great fun, even though it's ridiculous

Sherlock Holmes, directed by Guy Ritchie. Robert Downey Jr. as Holmes (a pretty good Holmes), Jude Law as Watson (bears no resemblance to the original Watson -- this Watson is a street-fighting stud who dresses nattily), and Michael Strong, as Lord Blackwood (who looks like a 30s movie Dracula).

The new Sherlock Holmes film (no title other than the name?) is a lot of fun. It's really an action film, from start to finish. Much of the time, I had no idea what was going on. And what was going on was preposterous. Doesn't matter.

A couple of things I missed, that I wish they would think about for the sequel: 1) the Holmes stories were always, at bottom, realistic. They presented Holmes and Watson with an inexplicable event or mystery (a person disappears, a crime is committed with seemingly no clues left behind). Holmes always proves that the crime CAN be explained. If we go too far over the edge into the fantastical and unrealistic, then we're left with Holmes and Watson as cartoon figures. 2) We're in late 19th century London and, as Doyle did with the original stories, it's good to linger on the details of the story, or of life. The movie does that a little, but in its rush to get to the next action scene, it obliterates Holmes's background solidity. He meditates. He thinks. He walks slowly and ponders sometimes.

But it's a decent romp all the same.

Up in the Air, a movie that does not make sense

Up in the Air is a modest film that tries hard to say something profound and yet be light and bouncy. I didn't dislike the movie. I like George Clooney, the main character, and I liked his depiction of a man whose job it is to fire people, a man who must stay up in the air flying, always moving, striking and then flying again to the next spot unencumbered by family, possessions, or steady relationships. It's no coincidence that he speaks warmly of sharks in his motivational speeches to audiences of corporate managers.

In the movie, he seems to discover that he might want that family, possessions, and steady relationships after all. He sees his life as vacuous. He attempts to recover these things through Alex, a female flying shark. But it doesn't work out. We end the movie with George Clooney looking gloomy and unsatisfied, which is how I felt.

Up in the Air looks like it was shot over a weekend. I know that the director and screenwriter, Jason Reitman, gets a lot of hype for having serious film creds, but the filmcraft here is uneven. The sound ambiance is unchanging. Clooney is addressing a conference hall full of people, through a microphone, yet we hear his baritone voice no differently than when he speaks to his boss in an office. We don't hear the sound of an amplified voice, nor the room ambiance. Thus, the sound fails to contribute to the movie's emotions. Is this just laziness on the part of the director? An unforgiving deadline? The soundtrack consists of a few cheesy songs meant to mirror the plot. And there is the constant use of closeups. Clooney's face constantly fills the screen, as do the other characters. There's rarely a long shot showing a larger scene, or the relationships of the characters to each other. It's boring visually.

This is a movie about inner, spiritual turmoil. What should I do with my life? What should I do next? Yet, religion doesn't exist in the film. It doesn't exist in any American film I can remember. Priests and rabbis are generally either buffoons or rapacious hucksters, if they're depicted at all. Even the wedding in Up in the Air is devoid of religious scenery. Religion doesn't help sell movies, or the product placements (American Airlines seems to be the only airline in America, and a giant economy size A1 Sauce is naturally what a bachelor wants in his fridge). Yet, the movie can only make sense with some attempt to confront Clooney's spiritual and religious consciousness. And since that's absent, the movie does not make sense.

Richard Wright's Native Son is gripping and painful

Native Son (Harper, 1940), by Richard Wright . A novel on CD by Harperaudio.com. Excellently read and performed by Peter Francis James.

I have listened to more than half of the novel, and I am always sorry when I either get to the parking lot at work, or the garage at home, and I have to turn off the car.

Once Bigger Thomas, the young black man whose mind and thoughts and skin and sweat is detailed in the story, commits murder, I felt as if his nightmare were mine. I found myself imagining a different sequence of events for Bigger, that he would have found a way to control his fear when Mrs. Dalton appeared in the doorway, that he would not have suffocated Mary Dalton, that he would go on to work for the Daltons as their driver, that he would move his mother, brother, and sister out of the rat-infested room they live in, that he would make sure his brother and sister went to school -- a happy ending. But no, Bigger thinks out what he's going to do, and he does it, and it's not happy -- it means carrying a dead white woman down the stairs in a trunk, stuffing her body into a burning coal furnace. It's ghastly. It's depraved. It's hard to listen to.

All the characters act with an almost scary realism. The blacks and whites are as I, and I bet most other Americans who haven't lived sequestered lives, have known them to be.

The saddest line spoken anywhere:

"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow"

- Macbeth (upon hearing that Lady Macbeth is dead)

He goes on:

"Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
the way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!...."

Macbeth -- a murderer goaded on to his crimes by his now dead wife.

Anderson Cooper's book "Dispatches from the Edge"

Dispatches from the Edge, by Anderson Cooper (Harper Collins, 2006)

Cooper's desire to see and be where the action is (usually natural and manmade disasters, wars, upheavals) propels him to work on the edge, reporting for CNN and others on the human misery he encounters. The book journals his coverage for the year 2005, and includes Iraq, Bosnia, Rwanda, and Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. His own misery (a retelling of his father's early death, and the suicide of his brother) is intertwined with the reports, though I'm not sure to what end.

His narrative of the behind the scenes activities reads as a somewhat repetitive amplification rather than clarification of the events themselves. There isn't a lot of insight. He's not really interested in illuminating the events and places. What he wants is to give us a sense of what it's like to be Anderson Cooper. He partly succeeds, though he probably doesn't need an entire book to accomplish this. The workings of the media are presented, and his groping to understand his role in it, but he doesn't turn much attention on his employers (perhaps because they are, after all, his current employers). We're convinced that he's a good guy, but that's not a big enough subject.

Cantalina's Sunday afternoon concert "Northern Lights"

Cantilena (a women's chorale) in a "Northern Lights" concert of Scandinavian choral music (Hovland, Grieg, Heiller, Sallinen, and others), Sunday, December 6, 2009.

It was a likable concert last Sunday afternoon. Their new director Allegra Martin looks like a teenager. We loved the Elgar, and the Sallinen Songs from the Sea. We thought the instrumental musicians were excellent, adding some tonal variety to the concert. The pieces they did with the choir were very effective. The Rautavaara pieces based on Lorca's poetry filled the place with an eerie, dissonant unease.

I can't say that I'd want to listen to an all women's chorus frequnently, but we enjoyed it. A surprisingly good crowd, probably more than 120 people.

An interesting note in the program book: the Scandinavian countries have a higher rate of participation in choral groups than any other nations. Perhaps 10% of Sweden's population sings in a choir.

Brookline Chorus's concert British Cathedral Sacred Works

We performed this concert last Saturday night (November 21). There were a number of short pieces, including John Tavener's acapella Village Wedding and The Lamb (the latter for which I sang as part of the chamber choir), and Hubert Parry's I Was Glad. The highlight was the Britten cantata, Rejoice in the Lamb. I came to love the Britten piece for its melody lines and evocation of music and the creation of music as an expression of the will to know God. The text (from a poem by Christopher Smart) sings that every creature with "the breath of life" searches in its own way to know God.

This was a well constructed program by our conductor, Lisa Graham. The shorter, more traditionally pious pieces contrasted nicely with the modern abstractly religious Britten cantata. In The Lamb, the young shepherd sings, "I a child and thou a lamb, we are called by His name" and the association is on a very personal, intimate scene. Later, in the Britten piece, we sing, "Rejoice in God O ye tongues, give the glory to God and the Lamb...." A much bigger focus on a panoply of lives and creatures.

The Huntington's earnest, instructive, and odd Civil War Christmas

The Huntington Theater's Civil War Christmas, a play by Paula Vogel.

A very earnest play. There are good bits of singing (bits only -- we don't hear the entire songs, which annoyed me). A procession of characters, many of them black, enter and exit the stage, acting out separate vignettes and narratives around Christmas Eve of 1864, around Washington D.C. It all seemed well-intentioned and instructive. Vogel and the cast did somehow make all the narratives intersect, and this is a respectable theatrical feat.

But the characters, aside from sergeant Bronson (the angry former slave, now a soldier, who vows to "take no prisoners" of the Confederates) are thin. There are so many stories going on, we just can't get to know them very well. It didn't add up to much of a theater experience for me.

I can't call such an earnest, heartfelt play a bad play -- we do care about the lost little girl and her mother in Washington searching for each other, we do care about the foolish young man who desperately wants to join up with the rebels to "serve my country", we do care about president Lincoln avoiding his kidnappers. The sentiments are certainly there (a little too much at times), and many of the scenes are skillfully constructed. I just wish Vogel had edited out some of the narratives and given us a more focused play.

Ernest Hemingway's awful yet lovable "Across the River and Into the Trees"

Across the River and Into the Woods, by Ernest Hemingway. Listened to on CD as I drove to and from work.

Harry, 50+ army colonel a few years after WW II, takes a holiday in Venice to shoot ducks, drink, eat, sleep with his 19 year old Venetian girlfriend (she's from Venetian noble family), talk nonsense with Italian war comrades who adore him for leading them in battle during WW I, drink some more, punch out a couple of sailors, squeeze the girlfriend, drink again, reminisce about Rommel and Patton, eat some venison and cheese...well, that all doesn't sound so bad, does it?

What kept my attention was that Harry is such a created character, a literary construction. Every conceivable aspect of the macho, world weary, hard bitten soldier is here in one man. It's absorbing and ghastly at the same time. The couple's relationship is at times howlingly funny (the language Hemingway used to describe their sexual groping in the gondola nearly killed me -- I shouldn't have been driving 65 mph on the turnpike).

But...it's still Hemingway. The torment described, and the will to move forward is still there, and still worth reading.

I read that E.B. White wrote a parody in the New Yorker, called Across the Street and Into the Grill. A good title. Hemingway deserved it. But I still liked the book.

Thea Halo's suprisingly gritty and intimate "Not Even My Name"

Not Even My Name, by Thea Halo (Picador, 2000)

Thea Halo surprised me. I expected a sad, sentimental biography of her mother, Sano Halo, and a sad, horrific re-telling of what her mother suffered in the death marches forced on Greeks, Armenians, and Assyrians in the last years of the Ottoman empire, just before the final expulsion of the Christian populations from Turkey in 1922. Instead, Thea presents the characters of her family as she saw, heard, and experienced them, as both loving and hurtful, generous and petty. The book is full of scenes of intimate family dramas.

Sano Halo's girlhood in the Pontic Greek village of Iondone in Asia Minor glows in her memory like a kind of Eden. I've heard many old Greeks describe their villages in the same way.

The death march that Sano, her family, and the Greeks of her village endured under the whips and guns of Turkish soldiers is agonizing to read. How could people do such things to other people?

Thea Halo, the daughter who wrote the book, is a capable and intelligent writer. She knows her mother well, has heard and researched her life's story, and produced a readable and gripping book about a young girl's loss of her family. As the book's title says, even her name was lost, as she was placed as a ten year old with an Arab family in a desperate attempt to save her life and escape the fate of the rest of her family. Her eventual marriage to a harsh Lebanese-American man, Abraham, and their life together in America, made for surprisingly good reading in the tradition of becoming-an-American novels.

Sano's recalled narrative forms the center of the book. The beginning and end involve mother Sano and daughter Thea on a late 1990s trip to Turkey to find Iondone. The village had largely disappeared. All that's left were a few ruined foundations. Not unlike the empty villages you see in Greece, the remaining inhabitants old people, the young having left for the cities. Or America, or Australia.

The book is valuable if only for its many insights into village life in the Pontic Greek world, circa 1900. We read about how the villagers work, how the farms and animals are maintained, how the family grew their own food, how they cooked, how they subsisted on bare essentials -- and it's all fascinating. Sano's narrative describes clear-eyed depictions of family quarrels, village disputes, petty n, andeighbors, and the presence of threatening forces at the edges of their lives. (Sano refers to oddly dressed strangers, unexplained outsiders, who appear and lurk in the shadows of trees and rocks in the months leading up to the expulsion from the village by Turkish soldiers.)

I don't doubt the details of the death march, though they are written from a memory long past. They are too vivid and distinct not to have been lived.

The main story (from the village, to the death march, to life in America) is ostensibly told by Sano herself. Yet, I was aware of Thea, the creator of the book, with her literary gifts, taking on Sano's voice for her. The book might have been stronger had Sano been allowed more of her own speech, with her own inflections and vocabulary.

Abraham, Sano's husband (whom she married by an arrangement), can be a hard man to love, yet he seems noble and loving in his own befuddled way. Sano and Thea love him. I think there is a perspective here that illuminates the old immigrants from that generation-- rather than rejecting him for his obtuseness, his roughness, his obstinacy, for better or worse Sano and Thea love and protect him.

King Lear: more sinned against, but still quite a sinner

King Lear, by William Shakespeare.

I listened to the exceptional recorded CD set produced by Arkangel Shakespeare, and supplemented the performance with the Everyman Shakespeare edition of the play.

I loved the play and the production. I hope to listen or see it performed again soon.

There are lots of oddities and logical lapses, however, none of which prevented me from the loving the thing.

In the play's opening, when Cordelia fails to express her filial love for Lear in the exaggerated fulsome terms used by Goneril and Regan, Lear throws himself into a rage. He disowns her. Yet, isn't she his favorite daugher? She is. So he must already know how she feels about him. Dramatic foreshortening and all that aside, it's an odd premise that he decides to demand this kind of vocal fealty from the daughters. I suppose this establishes our view of him as an aged arrogant fool.

And Cordelia -- I don't quite understand her coldness. "Nothing" is her reply. We understand that she sees through the oily praise of her sisters, but isn't her reply needlessly cold? If she's the favorite and most loving daughter, wouldn't she express that love a bit more warmly?

So Goneril puts up Lear and his one hundred rowdy camp followers. They like to party. She can't take it any more. Well, who could? Put up a hundred fun-loving knights indefinitely? After three days the fish stinks, the Mediterranean saying goes. Hard to blame Goneril for clamping down on the old blowhard. It's hardly abusing him!

Of course, he does eventually understand what an arrogant bastard he's been, in those sad scenes out in the storm, in the open, and finally with the dead Cordelia in his arms.

The Huntington's Fences: what's great about August Wilson, and what isn't

In the first act of Fences, the main character Troy Maxson (in a big performance by John Beasley) radiates everything that is great in August Wilson's plays. He's enraged at the white world that denied him his chance to play baseball professionally. He's a dictatorial father who demeans and brutalizes his son Cory who dreams of playing pro football -- Troy doesn't want his son dreaming of anything other than a steady job. Troy himself is a steady wage earner (a trash collector in Pittsburgh) who loves his wife (or seems to). I felt as if Wilson had put everything he had into this man.

The second act crumbles into an odd melodrama. Troy reveals to his wife that another woman is about to bear his child. And he's not sorry. He demands that she and the rest of the world accept this fact, and him, and still love him. He throws Cory out of the house -- Cory can't take it any more.

I wanted the flawed hero of the first act to show us in the second act, to prove to us, why we should love him, why he really is heroic. He didn't do that. Instead, Troy makes a complete mess of his life and his family's. Troy dies near the end of the play, and I suppose that's supposed to absolve him. But all it does is prevent us from blaming him, which is what we want to do.

For a substantial and interesting review of Fences and August Wilson, read Thomas Garvey's article at Hub Review.

The Boston Globe's review (Doc Aucoin) was admiring but thin.

Loved Jame's Joyce's "Dubliners," even with its mundane passages

On my sometimes long drives to and from my new work location (Marlborough, thirty miles each way), I have started to listen to books-on-CD. The CDs come from the Watertown Public Library. The first book I listened to was James Joyce's Dubliners (published in 1914). I last read these short stories in college.

This was a a Caedmon CD. The stories are clearly and artfully read by a variety of Irish actors and actresses.

I was moved by many of the stories (I didn't get to The Dead, deciding that would be better read in a book than listened to). The small domestic dramas kept me listening, and imagining scenes from my life. They're pretty good listening for driving on the Massachusetts Turnpike. Here are the last lines from Eveline, in which a young woman, after much agony, has decided to go with her lover to Argentina to start a new life. Her life in Dublin is miserable, stifling, and yet she finds herself held by it. Here they are, at the station to take a steamer and begin their trip. He calls to her:

"Come!"

No! No! No! It was impossible. Her hands clutched the iron in frenzy. Amid the seas she sent a cry of anguish.

"Eveline! Evvy!"

He rushed beyond the barrier and called to her to follow. He was shouted at to go on but he still called to her. She set her white face to him, passive, like a helpless animal. Her eyes gave him no sign of love or farewell or recognition.

I played the scene over and over in my head for days -- Eveline gripping the iron railing. The better Dubliner stories have that power.

Yet, I was surprised by how pedestrian some of the stories were, and how bland and drab some of the writing was. Some of it is cliched. Here is some text from After the Race:

The car ran on merrily with its cargo of hilarious youth...Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money. These were three good reasons for Jimmy's excitement. He had been seen by many of his friends that day in the company of these Continentals...The dinner was excellent, exquisite. Ségouin, Jimmy decided, had a very refined taste. The party was increased by a young Englishman named Routh whom Jimmy had seen with Ségouin at Cambridge. The young men supped in a snug room lit by electric candle lamps....

A cargo of hilarious youth -- these are cliches. You find them here, and sprinkled around some of the other better stories. It's sort or reassuring in a way -- even James Joyce occasionally passed off the mediocre as finished work.

What is missing from "Peeling the Onion," by Gunter Grass

Peeling the Onion, by Gunter Grass (Harcourt, 2007).

There is one scene in particular in this memoir that has stuck in my mind. In a village behind Russian lines in 1945, Grass is an 18 year old member of the Waffen SS, trapped in a basement with five or six other German soldiers. Grass writes that he does not remember how he got there. Russian troops are firing at them. Across the square are German troops. The sergeant orders the men in the basement to each grab a bicycle (it is apparently the basement of a bicycle repair shop), and get ready to escape. "Now or never!" Grass informs him that he doesn't know how to ride a bicycle, so the sergeant tells him to stay and cover their escape with a machine gun, assuring him they'd return later for him. Grass takes his position at a window.

"I was at the cellar window taking up a position with a weapon I had not been trained to operate. The doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire, however, because no sooner had the five or six men emerged from the cellar, bicycles -- including girls' bicycles -- and all, than they were mown down by machine-gun fire out of nowhere, that is, from one side of the street or other, or both."

Grass watches as the pile of men wriggle and move for a short bit, and then all is still except for the spinning of a bicycle wheel. He has not fired a shot. He turns and makes his escape from the basement, running in the opposite direction taken by the men.

We have to take Grass's word for what happened in the basement, of course. He is the only survivor. His behavior throughout, at least as he describes it, is of a scared young man trying to stay alive amidst the collapse of the German army facing the advancing Russians.

I was struck by the sudden change of perspective in referring to himself -- "the doubly incapable soldier never had a chance to fire" instead of "I never had a chance to fire". It's an affect that Grass uses suddenly and repeatedly, as if he wants to express an objective point of view that cannot be assailed.

Apparently, Grass wanted to write this memoir to disclose his involvement in the SS as the involvement of a naive teenager, more interested in adventure, heroism, and escaping his stifling family life, and less interested in killing Russians, Jews, and all the other enemies of the Fatherland.

There are many enthralling passages. I don't think of Grass as a likable man. An air of comfortable self-importance emanates from the book, with frequent references to "Oscar," the first name of the main character of The Tin Drum, his most famous novel, and to other characters and scenes from his writing, as if the reader would naturally be familiar with them all. (It's true, this is his memoir -- why would you be reading it if you weren't at least somewhat familiar with his writing?)

I found him believable. I didn't sense strategic silences on details, such as to what really happened in that basement, before or after. What he is silent about is what he was taught about the Jews. The Poles. Or all the other populations who deserved extinction, according to Hitler. As a young man who read constantly, and as an SS recruit, he must have known the propoganda. Perhaps Grass handles those subjects elsewhere. If so, I haven't read them. He doesn't handle those subjects here, there is barely a word about them, and that seems like a strange and unsatisfying omission.

Publication news

Some good news: the Greek-American newspaper The Hellenic Voice has published my short story, How You Catch A Cold. It appears in the August 12-19 issue of the paper. I'm thrilled to see the story in print, and hope it reaches a few readers.

If you don't have a subscription to the paper, you can read the story by clicking the link in the right-hand column of this blog page, under one of my "short story" headings.

Aurelia's Oratorio, at the A.R.T.

We saw Aurelia's Oratorio with friends at the American Repertory Theater on Saturday night, August 1. Aurelia is Aurielia Theriee Chaplain, the daughter of Victoria Theriee Chaplain (the creator and director of the show) and a granddaughter of Charley Chaplain. Jaime Martinez is the other lead performer in the show.

We saw imaginative circus acts, mime, puppetry, acrobatics, dancing, illusion, and magic. I was mesmerized. Aurelia and Jaime perform acrobatic stories, sometimes together, but mostly as individuals. In the opening sequence, she appears and disappears from inside a chest of drawers. A little later, she struggles with a scarf, the scarf grows and becomes as long as one of those vines that Tarzan used to swing through the jungle with, and she lifts herself into the air, ten or twenty feet above the stage, twirling, tying and untying, play-acting at creating a hammock and falling asleep, struggling to stay aloft as the entire set shakes as if it was hit by an earthquake.

Any slip and she could fall to her death.

Aurelia is beautiful. She races around with a kind of breathless energy, as if she cannot ever rest, or ever get enough satisfaction out of life. She seemed to be less about grace than about furious activity.

Jaime is graceful and powerful. He danced and moved like a ballet dancer, even when performing those improbable stunts, like walking up a wall as if it were level ground.

What was it all about, the skits, the little comic reversals and pratfalls? I found myself a little annoyed in the early part of the 70 minute show, wondering whether there was an overall story. Were they lovers in an elaborate apache dance? Were they people constantly struggling against absurdity?

I didn't care after a while. We just enjoyed the show, and the pleasure of watching the circus.

Louise Kennedy gave the show a good review in The Boston Globe, and I can't disagree with her.

Running and living a small lifetime in a 10K

I ran in the Newton 10K race on Sunday morning, June 7. Although it had been a cool, chilly spring up to then, that morning was very hot for a race -- at least 70 degrees in the shade, and much hotter in the direct sun. I am not a good hot weather runner.

It was the first 10K (6.2 miles) I had run since 2001, when I ran in the James Joyce Ramble in Dedham. In that race, I finished in 49:37, finally finishing a 10K in less than 50 minutes, after several years of trying. That was nine years ago, and I was now 54 years old when I lined up in the crowd of other racers at the Horace Mann School in Newton. Most of them were much younger runners.

We were a couple hundred people, probably none of us professional athletes. Most of us would not receive a prize. Certainly I knew I would not. Yet, we were willing to strain to our limits for 6.2 miles.

I suffered in this race. The first few miles were steadily uphill. I was gasping hard. My time at mile 2 was over 17 minutes. With the sweat blurring my eyes, I knew I was not going to make it under 50 minutes that morning.

A race is a kind of theater, a ceremony. It offers a stage on which a small lifetime is completed. Along the way, you experience running in tight spaces, nearly tripping, running too fast, too slow, pacing yourself according to somebody else's pace, privation, exhaustion, not enough water, pain, early disappointment, irritating runners. In the end, there's the finish line, and small bits of joy at seeing your wife there. With a bottle of water.

I suffered through this race. My time was a disappointing 54:25. I was 9th out of 18 other geezers in my 50-59 age range. I felt sick (nausea and stomach aches) for most of the day, and sat in my comfortable chair with my head laid back.

These races are strange cultural events. A little lifetime for each runner. I am thinking of running another one in the late fall, when the temperature won't be so high. I want to do it under 50 minutes again, the way I did eight years ago.

"Grant" - Jean Edward Smith's thorough biography of Ulysses S. Grant

Grant, by Jean Edward Smith (Simon and Schuster, 2001) is a well-written book about U. S. Grant, the man who led Union armies to victory in the Civil War, and who served two respectable terms as president of the United States afterward. It is a quicker read than its 628 pages would suggest. (There are also over 70 pages of notes at the end, many of which are worth reading.)

Smith likes his subject, and set out to improve Grant's historical image; he felt Grant has been unjustly maligned as a lazy, hard-drinking simpleton, a mediocrity both as a general and as president. The Grant depicted is an analytic thinker, a flawed but inspiring leader, a humane man who cared deeply about the plight of African and Native Americans.

As a soldier and commander, he made mistakes but quickly learned from them and modified his approach. The battle scenes in the book show him formulating an overall strategy and entrusting his subordinates (notably Generals William Sherman and Phillip Sheridan) to carry out his plans, often with a great deal of independence.

He was not the drunkard depicted by some historians and popular writers (Smith indicates that a number of the histories written soon after the Civil War, books on which Grant's later reputation was founded, were written by Southern historians who wanted to discredit him). He did drink heavily at times, throughout his life. Smith contends that those instances were rare, and quotes a number of friends who refer to Grant's constant sobriety.

As a soldier, he believed in constantly attacking. He liked Sherman and Sheridan because they were aggressive -- they attacked, they charged. In the exciting battle scenes that make up two thirds of the book, Grant's greatest irritation was with generals (such as Meade, Buell, Wallace) who were slow to act and too conservative.

Grant was surprised by the Confederate resistance at the battle of Shiloh. The losses were in the tens of thousands on both sides. That battle (which the Union forces won) convinced Grant that only total victory -- total surrender of the Confederacy -- would be enough. A compromise strategy, one of holding some important land, town, or resources, in order to force a compromise, was not enough. He felt he had to destroy the Confederate army.

As a man, Smith shows him to be a good judge of character (at least in military matters), and he was very loyal to those who were loyal to him. To a fault. His honesty and commitment to ethical behavior made him seem quaint and odd to his associates, and much loved by his friends. Loyalty got him into trouble as president, where he gladly appointed his friends and comrades from the war, even though their qualifications were slight.

He was a terrible businessman, and was frequently duped out of his money. Over and over, he lost money on business ventures that reminded me of Ralph Kramden's schemes from the old TV comedy, The Honeymooners.

As president, he vigorously protected the freed black Americans of the South. He sent troops repeatedly to suppress the Klan and to remove southern white supremacist governors and mayors from office. (Smith details the savage riots and lynchings; Grant felt they were nothing less than an attempt to reverse the outcome of the war under the banner of "states rights".) He enacted a reconstruction policy that asserted the rights of black people as full citizens. Grant's defense of black voting rights was the strongest by any American president until president Johnson's enactment of the voting rights bill in the early 60s.

Grant enforced a realistic and humane policy toward American Indians. He believed them to be a wronged and oppressed people, their lives destroyed by settlers and government suppression and interference. Although his attempts to assimilate Native Americans (mainly by assuming they would relinquish their way of life, and essentially be Christianized) would strike us as unethical today, looked at in the perspective of his time, he seems a surprising defender of American Indian rights.

Grant may have been an anti-Semite (naturally, even great, noble men are capable of vile behavior). The book depicts a single event during Grant's generalship in the South -- at Vicksburg, Grant expelled all Jews from the army and government of Tennessee (he was convinced that Jewish traders had profiteered at the expense of the Union army). Happily, Abraham Lincoln countermanded the order immediately. Smith doesn't mention Grant's anti-Semitism again, remarking only that he shared in the common prejudices of that era.

I would like to have learned more about Grant's interior life. He lived in a religious era -- you were expected to go to church and attend Bible study regularly. Did he? He certainly seems to have loved his wife, and he was a devoted father. But the book is mum about family or husband and wife scenes and interactions. There is not much detail about life in the Grant household, and I missed reading that. Smith enjoys writing about the big, public, military, political and diplomatic events, which he does with a terrific narrative style.

I felt both awed and perplexed by the men that served Grant and fought under him. They willingly faced death day after day under terrible conditions. They raced towards well-defended positions, running over the bodies of dead and wounded fellow soldiers, charging directly into rifle fire. They died in the tens of thousands. Sometimes in one day. Why did they do that? Would we do that, today? Would I? Smith shows us how Grant inspired the men with his steadiness, his good sense, his folksy manner, his self-confidence, his brilliance. But I wanted to know more about why they were willing to charge. What was it about Grant, and the cause of the North, that made them charge?

Pirates! at the Huntington Theater -- if the Marx Brothers did Gilbert and Sullivan

We saw Pirates! (or Gilbert and Sullivan Plundered) on Saturday night -- I enjoyed it and laughed a lot. It was good-natured fun, as if the Marx Brothers invaded and took over a Gilbert and Sullivan production. There is a lot of acrobatic dancing and humorous singing in the style of G&S. I thought they stayed true to the spirit of G&S, even with some of the updating of sensibilities.

I can, however, understand Louise Kennedy's damning review in the Boston Globe. This isn't for everybody -- you have to like the non-stop slapstick and broad humor (some people call it "energy", other people call it "low burlesque" or something like that). I think Louise actually did everybody a favor -- the Globe got a lot of irate people hitting their web site to rant about the review, and the Huntington got a lot of buzz. A win-win situation!

Our good friend who saw the production with us didn't like it -- he said it was "too much", that Gilbert and Sullivan is great, and witty, and funny, just done straight. Why make a parody of something that is already a parody? It's a good point. But it didn't prevent us from liking the show.

This was the strongest show in an otherwise mediocre season at the Huntington.

The anti-modern sensibility of Haydn's Stabat Mater

The Masterworks Chorale performed Franz Joseph Haydn's Stabat Mater on Sunday, May 17, at Sanders Theater.

Stabat Mater means "sorrowful mother" in Latin, referring to Mary, the mother of Jesus. I was struck by the insistent and sometimes graphic desire to share Christ's and Mary's suffering:

"Fix the stripes of the Crucified deeply into my Heart."

"Make me a sharer in His Passion and ever mindful of his wounds."

"Let me be wounded by His wounds."

In these lines, Christ and his mother are not abstractions, distant figures of another era. Each singer longs to know them, as if they could be touched and felt.

Whether we're religious, irreligious, agnostic, or whatever, few people actually think and feel this way today. We don't think of Christ in such intimate terms, perhaps because we're afraid of being ridiculed -- it's just not the way a modern educated man thinks.

The experience of the concert reminded me of my conversations with my father, when I was a boy, and we worked together in the back of our candy shop. I went there after my high school classes were finished for the day. We worked alone for hours each night. Often we came around to talking about Christ, the apostles, Mary, Judas -- all of them as if they were people we might know, perhaps from our family, as if Doubting Thomas could appear in the doorway and could tell us, wasn't it perfectly normal to doubt that Jesus had returned? Or for Pontius Pilate to say to us that the crucifixion wasn't really his fault, that he had a state to govern for Rome. We discussed their motives. Did Christ have girlfriends? How could it be that Mary was a virgin? Did we really believe that? We had lots of time, of course, making candy, and talking.

It was brave of Masterworks to perform Stabat Mater.

The Brookline Chorus's Elijah

I sing as a bass in the Brookline Chorus. We performed Felix Mendelssohn's oratorio, Elijah, at Sanders Theater in Harvard Square, Saturday, May 9. This was the first time I have ever sung in Sanders. It was the first time the Chorus had ever sung in such a large, prestigious hall.

All week, through the dress rehearsals with the 40+ piece orchestra, I felt the tension and excitement building among the other members of the Chorus. I saw the tension in our conductor Lisa Graham's face -- normally so young-looking, at moments in the week before the concert her features were taut, almost grim in her concentration.

We had a crowd of about 800 people, maybe more. As we stood in the wings, waiting to make our entrance, we strained to see the crowd through the doorway. Was it sold out? No, not quite. But it was more than enough.

The orchestral overture ended with a rising set chords that climaxed with the chorus's "Help, Lord!" -- and we were off. The people of Israel were suffering through three years of drought, brought on by their sins, and were pleading for help from God. What a blast of sound. And it sounded right. Despite our singing at top volume, it sounded right.

I could tell the audience was deeply involved throughout. During quiet passages, I heard an odd rustling sound -- hundreds of pages in the program book being turned at the same time, as people followed along with the libretto. It was troubling to think of that distracting interruption, yet oddly gratifying -- I edited and formatted the program book. How often do you get a demonstration of people using something you've helped create?

David Kravitz was our baritone soloist. What a huge voice, yet he stresses the syllables and consonants in such a way that he doesn't overpower the words. You understand what he's saying, and you understand the emotion. And Ethan Bremner, the tenor who sang Ahab and Obadiah, sang so easily, and yet I'm sure everybody in the place heard every syllable.

At the end, the audience stood and clapped and cheered for a long time. Lisa and the soloists (Jenni Samuelson and Krista River were the soprano soloists) came out twice. Lisa beamed, pointed and waved at the Chorus, at the orchestra, at the cellist, at the concertmaster, giving everyone their due.

David Kravitz came out center stage alone, and modestly tapped his chest, that gesture that says, "I'm overwhelmed. I'm so grateful." Everybody in the Chorus felt the same.


Two weeks ago: singing Carmina Burana with the Wellesely and Brandeis Choruses

Lisa had asked for bass and tenor volunteers to help fill out a Carmina Burana concert with the Wellesley and Brandeis choruses. I was pressed for time, but I love Carmina so much that I volunteered. There were a handful of us older men, surrounded by students. The concerts (there were two of them, one at Brandeis and one at Wellesley) were wonderful, and the students were wonderful singers. I was so glad to see younger people interested in Carmina Burana.

I especially loved hearing the soprano soloist, Andrea Matthews. I've heard many good sopranos now in the last few years, but her singing is different. She doesn't just sound great, she expresses the sentiment, the subject of what she's singing. I was moved by her singing. She's not a young woman herself, but when she sang, "Sweet boy, I give myself to you," she sounded so young.


Noel Perrin's book of essays, Third Person Rural

I read these essays about country life in Vermont a few weeks ago. He's not as engaging or dramatic as E.B. White describing life on a Maine farm, but Perrin is very good at describing the reality of farm life (or being a part-time farmer, which is how he described himself -- he also taught English Literature at Dartmouth). There's no sentimentality in his work, and his prose at times seemed a little too matter-of-fact and dry.

The Masterworks Chorale's concert, Sunday March 15

Because we know Steve, the director, and Sandy, one of the singers and have attended so many of Masterworks' concerts, these afternoon concerts really have taken on a friendly, relaxed feeling to them, as if we were spending time with friends.

The music was friendly as well. Selections from Brahms Liebeslieder Waltzes, Mendelssohn's Six Songs to be Sung in the Open Air, and Mendelssohn's opera Son and Stranger.

I knew the Brahm a little because the Brookline Chorus had included some of the songs in one of our concerts last year. They're wonderful pieces, and the Chorale sang them well, particularly the one that was sopranos only (though I forget the name of that one).

For the Six Songs, I imagined a German family picnic, in which the townsfolk formed up in choirs and sang. Did they do that?

The opera was the highlight of the concert, of course. It's a rarely played opera. I could really sense how deeply the singers were invested in their roles. I found it a bit hard to follow the story. Yet, there was enough acting to pretty much demonstrate what was happening. And it was in English, after all. All the singers were wonderful, especially Sumner Thompson, the baritone as Kaus. He's got a big, hall-filling voice, and he showed the right sense of comic timing and acting skill to make the role come alive. It's a light opera, not dramatic, and it doesn't have big, defining moments.

Recent events I haven't blogged about

I'm going to quickly catch up on a few events we attended recently, but which I failed to blog about.

The Huntington's production of Two Men of Florence, March 7

This is a recent play by Richard Goodwin (who happens to be the husband of Doris Kearns Goodwin). A very earnest play. It's excellent that large issues of God and Reason are explicitly argued in front of us, here with Pope Urban and Galileo acting as spokesmen for the respective sides (though here, the pope appears to be the man of Reason, and Galileo is the more religious). I felt as if I were watching a very well acted historical re-enactment not unlike what we see on PBS. And that I've seen this same show several times. I found a lot to like in the characters, and the performances, but the play is short on drama and overly talky, like a slightly senile professor.


The New Repertory Theater's Exits and Entrances, a play by Athol Fugard, March 5

Really wonderful performances by Ross MacDonald as the young playwright, and especially Will Lyman as the grisled veteran actor. Some touching scenes as Lyman recalls his past in the theater. But very little drama. A little too earnest. The younger man-older veteran story is a good one, but there's not much story here. I kept wondering if there was a sexual component here that Fugard never explored. It seemed like a possible undercurrent, but too far under.


The Brookline Chorus concert Songs of Freedom, February 28

(I sing in the bass section with the Chorus). A very short concert. I think the centerpiece of the concert was the Kirk Mechem songs from his opera, John Brown. I enjoyed singing them. Overall, the theme of "Freedom" is too diffuse. Going from Horizon (a tragic South African song by Peter Van Dijk about a Bushmen tribe that includes claps, hisses, finger snaps), to John Brown, to the Greg Bartholomew piece The 21st Century: A Girl Born in Afghanistan (set to excerpts from Koffi Anann's Nobel Peace Prize lecture), didn't quite hang together for me. I didn't feel the thread that held it all together, though Lisa Graham, our director, tried mightily to make it work musically and thematically.


Chameleon Arts Ensemble recital, A Tale that's Told in Ancient Song, February 15

Not easy for us to get to, down on Beacon Street, at the Goethe Institute. But we enjoyed it. Especially the Manel de Falla songs sung by Sabrina Learman. Liked the Smetana Trio in G Minor too.


Lexington Symphony concert, February 7

A wonderful orchestra and concert. I especially wanted to hear Samuel Barber's Knoxville Summer of 1915, a nostalgic piece. It was sung beautifully by Janna Baty. It's haunting and scary, even as the singer describes a protected and beloved childhood. "After a while I am taken in and put to bed. Sleep, soft smiling, draws me unto her: and those receive me, who quietly treat me, as one familiar and well beloved in that home: but will not, oh, will not, not now, not ever; but will not ever tell me who I am." So the song ends.

Jonathan McPhee seems like a wonderful conductor.

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, by Giles Militon

Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922, by Giles Milton (2008)

The title Paradise Lost works as a pun on two levels. The British writer Giles Milton is the author (no relation, I assume, to the classical poet John Milton). "Paradise" was the name of the Smyrna neighborhood of wealthy British and other European merchant families that had made Smyrna their home for several generations. This neighborhood was certainly "lost" to those families, as Smyrna was lost to the Christian population that had lived there for nearly two thousand years. But since the events described in the book amount to a horrifying tragedy in which hundreds of thousands of people were brutally killed, the punning should have been avoided.

The title aside, this is a terrific book. It recounts the history leading up to the massacres of Greeks and Armenians in Smyrna, and the expulsions of their populations in 1922. The Greek army's ill-conceived occupation of the city following WWI, and its nearly insane expedition to defeat the nationalist Turkish forces that followed, along with the atrocities by both sides, and the ultimate defeat of the Greek army, are all dramatically recounted.

I found it hard to put down, and the last few chapters, which narrate day by day the terrible weeks of September 1922, kept me up at night reading. Milton does the right thing by telling his story from the point of view of members of these wealthy clans. It's a fresh perspective on the Smyrna tragedy, and one that most modern day readers will be better able to understand. These family members, with their middle class British sensibilities, probably seem familiar to most modern American readers, more so than the village Greeks, Armenians and Turks of that era.

For American readers unfamiliar with those events, this is a great book to read. The awful scenes in the streets of Smyrna and on the Smyrna quay were created by great power politics combined with the constantly-stoked frenzy for ethnic revenge. This is foreign to most Americans -- no foreign country has ever manipulated armies and politics and resources here, nor pitted one ethnic or racial group against another. We have the racial and class divide, and memories of slights and injustice, but nothing on this scale. We don't know what it's like.

And what can you say about Asa Jennings? I haven't read his story before, but if we're to believe this account, Jennings was the American YMCA director who took it on himself to cajole and con the demoralized Greek Navy and the reluctant navies of the major powers into rescuing tens of thousands of Greek and Armenian refugees desperately waiting on the quay for days. There should be statues of him and streets named after Asa Jennings all over Greece.

The Huntington Theater's production of "The Corn is Green"

The Huntington Theater's wonderful cast and their performances (Kate Burton, her son Morgan Ritchie, Will LeBow, and all the rest) was not enough to keep me from feeling that this was a dated, tired play. It does have some good moments, the third act finally has a little tension, and there are the performances, especially if you simply want to see Kate Burton.

In its time (I think Emlyn Williams wrote it and first produced it in 1940), I suppose the depiction of the headstrong independent Miss Moffat might have seemed more original. We're to take it on faith that Miss Moffat is brilliant -- there's little evidence of it shown onstage. In the first act, the village boys are unruly childish louts. During the intermission, they become receptive bright-eyed eager-beavers, with Morgan surpassing them all as a natural genius (sort of like Tarzan, growing up in the jungle and learning to read and speak English in time for Jane). What Miss Moffat did to make this happen is unexplained. She is just magic.

The sets are homey and comfortable looking. The occasional background music between acts (Welsh choral music) is pretty but I can't tell if it has anything to do with the play. I guess the biggest reason to see this, aside from Will LeBow's humorous and lovable Squire character (a character he excels in), might be to watch Kate Burton. Except that she's simply playing Kate Burton. In the three or four performances we've seen with Kate Burton, she plays pretty much the same character -- Kate Burton, the center of attention, an actress who gives off a sense of energy and heat.

The New Reportory Theater's "Cabaret" is menacing and satisfying

We liked The New Repertory Theater's Cabaret. It's the third time we've seen the Kander and Ebb play in the last 15 years, and I'd say this was the best production.

How do you write about a play as complex as this? Some of the numbers are rollicking "fun" -- and yet we know about the rise of Hitler and the enormous tragedy to come. The director, Rick Lombardo (who's leaving the New Rep for San Jose at the end of the season) struck a good balance between the fun and the menace. This production brought out the sinister undertone of the play in a coherent way. It all made sense, whereas previous productions I'd seen left me confused -- why are these people enjoying themselves so much? In this production, we sense the desperation of the characters, despite the laughs and the jiggling Kit Kat girls.

Those Kit Kat girls -- they were hilariously dirty, and almost over the top with the sleazy bump and grind numbers. They were explicit and raw. And therefore perfect for the play.

I thought the stage was a bit big for this show -- with so much space, I didn't always feel the claustrophobic, crowded ambience of a cabaret. Aimee Doherty, who was wonderful as Sally Bowles, was reaching a bit in her "Cabaret" song near the end, a little too intent on producing a Lisa Minelli showstopper. And Cliff Bradshaw (nicely played by David Krinnit) puzzles me. If he is, or was, gay, then how can he be in a love affair with Sally? His sexual persona is ambiguous, yet the play depends on their love. That didn't make sense. Finally, John Kuntz was an excellent Emcee.

B.R. Myers's "A Reader's Manifesto": I agree with him, but why do these authors sell?

B.R. Myers wrote A Reader's Manifesto in 2002. The subtitle, An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose, pretty much sums it up. The chapter titles themselves are satirical bits of lit-crit-speak: Evocative Prose, Muscular Prose, Edgy Prose, Spare Prose, and so on. It's a fast, entertaining read and -- unlike the lengthy quoted sections he takes from famous current authors -- it's well written. His basic premise is that much of what is praised as great current literary fiction is actually laughably mediocre.

Myers asserts that fiction, and the literary culture that surrounds it, has become pretentiously high brow and and that celebrated writers have come to ignore basic precepts of clear narrative story-telling in order to mystify and scam their readers.

It's easier to produce a gushy incomprehensible word soup than swift, thoughtful prose. Readers have to accept it or risk being considered unsophisticated. Myers pretty well demolishes Annie Proulx, Don DeLillo, Cormac McCarthy, Paul Auster, and David Guterson, using them as examples of what is bad, and yet critically praised.

When Myers quotes from novels, he's devastating. And after he has blasted each writer in turn, he makes the rubble bounce.

Myers: "Sure, Proulx has plenty of long sentences, but they are usually little more than lists:"

Annie Proulx (from a piece of her fiction): "Partridge black, small, a restless traveler across the slope of life, an all-night talker; Mercalia, second wife of Partridge and the color of a brown feather on dark water, a hot intelligence; Quoyle large, white, stumbling along, going nowhere."

I did start to feel sympathy for these writers, they're so thoroughly gutted, and their quoted excerpts so terrible. I've tried to read Annie Proulx, and found her constant stream of disconnected images too much. I've tried reading DeLillo, and felt bored. The others I haven't read.

I'm surprised Myers didn't make more of the academic background of literary fiction. Many contemporary "serious" writers have (or had) academic positions in English and Writing departments (by necessity). I think these writers find it hard not to write for their academic colleagues and their literary agendas -- a writing professor is naturally interested in gaining the esteem of fellow professors and department chairmen, and not necessarily that of readers in Butte, or Buffalo.

I agreed with a lot of what Myers says in this book. And I see the parallels to some of the theater we've seen produced in the last ten years. Yet, I wondered -- how do these writers keep getting published? I know that some people really like Annie Proulx, McCarthy, and the others. Can it really be that it's lit-crit cultural pressure and bullying that's making people buy their books?