Saturday, December 18, 2010

Especially enjoyed Navidad Nuestra, by Ariel Ramirez, at the recent Cambridge Community Chorus Concert

Cambridge Community Chorus concert, Sunday, December 12, 2010, at Kresge Auditorium. Jamie Kirsch, Music Director.

It was a good concert. (And a packed auditorium, on a rainy afternoon! Probably at least 500-600 people.) I especially liked the lively Navidad Nuestra, by the Argentine composer Ariel Ramirez. I loved the combination of the South American folk melodies, guitars, and the real immediacy of the Nativity text. Ramirez's lyrics moved me in their earnestness and simplicity. Here is two lines from the second movement, The Pilgrimage:

On the road, on the road,
suns and moons,
almond eyes,
olive skin.

Oh, little burro of the plains,
Oh, ruddy ox.
My child is coming,
make room for him!

Mary comes alive as a young flesh and blood woman. Usually, she is depicted as a divine being, without human form. Ramirez's lyricist was Felix Luna. What a wonderful text.

The Chorus did a nice job, making it a lively afternoon.

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Huntington Theater's Vengeance is the Lord's -- family members that can never escape

Vengeance is the Lord's, a play by Bob Glaudini, at the Huntington Theater, November 27, 2010. Directed by Peter Dubois.

A type of family drama. Instead of the usual diner or candy shop, the family business is small-time crime. They're not above murder. The family is ruled by the patriarch and matriarch, Mathew and Margaret Horvath. Good performances all around.

A good play. Despite the profanity, dog-eat-dog morality, and glimpses of loathsome personalities, Glaudini got me to believe that these people were, in fact, a real family. They treated each other as family members, even when they were swearing at each other and Woody was twisting his younger brother Donald's arm, or the mother was beating Donald with her cane. Something kept them all together, observing family holidays, hierarchies, and traditions. The affection went along with the beatings.

In fact, they were better at being a family than most families I've known. And that seemed a bit hard to believe. It's touching to see Woody (played with a measured, restrained menace by Lee Tergesen) helping his mother up the stairs. Yet, what is it in this mother that makes her worth helping up the stairs? Why would a Woody stay in this house? He seems to be trapped, like everyone is this family.

Friday, October 15, 2010

A Film Unfinished, an admirable film by Yael Hersonski

A Film Unfinished, documentary film by Yael Hersonski. We saw the film Saturday night, October 9, at the West Newton Cinema.

I admired Hersonski's work in this film. She managed to identify a historical series of events -- how German soldiers staged and filmed scenes in the Warsaw Ghetto of starving and dying Jews being ignored by more prosperous-looking Jews as a way of further vilifying Jews -- and we believe in her reconstruction of those events, using the Germans' own film footage, and the testimony of Willy Wist, the only cameraman ever connected with the project.

I think the agonizing scenes of the Ghetto are worth preserving and seeing. Starving, dying people, Jews forced to drag and bury the dead, and the very subject of the film itself, the making of Nazi propaganda and the manipulation of victims in their own humiliation, are not easy to see. It's fortunate that Hersonski is a good filmmaker and artist.

One of the survivors interviewed in the film remarked about how crowded Ghetto life was, and I was interested in this. Strangers, whole families, were forced closer and closer together, into smaller and smaller apartments. There were numerous similar revealing details.

A few points left me a little confused. I was not always sure whose narrative I was watching, and would have liked a little more help from the filmmaker. In a sequence of scenes, were we seeing the work of a Nazi editor, or of Hersonski? This is an important point, given that the film centers around the Nazis' manipulation and forced staging of scenes. Sometimes the film narrator helped us with the context, but I would have liked more.

There were a number of references by the film narrator to the German effort as amounting to a theatrical-cinematic level project, not unlike a Hollywood project. That would involve large film crews, sound engineers, lighting specialists, squads of laborers. But we don't really see evidence of that. Willy Wist, the cameraman, refers to himself and three "reporters" assigned to the project. They were definitely creating propaganda, but a handful of reporter-cameramen doesn't make this a large-scale theatrical project as claimed by the documentary. Was something left out, or did I not catch something?

And there was Wist himself. Was that him interviewed on camera, in a Nurembergs style setting? Was that an actor? I don't recall a clarification in the film on that point, or if there was, I missed it.

But none of this detracts from Hersonski's achievement in constructing a subtle film narrative that we believe. Her film deserves to be seen by all types of audiences, particularly in a time when we are saturated with imagery and video, much of it staged, edited, and manipulated, yet presented to us as a supposedly truthful record of events.

Thursday, October 7, 2010

The Huntington Theater's production of William Inge's "Bus Stop" -- are we laughing at our poor country relatives?

We saw Bus Stop, by William Inge, at the Huntington Theater, Saturday, October 3. The play was directed by Nicholas Martin.

There is a scene in the play in which the lecherous professor Lyman and the young waitress Elma act out the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Elma recites the lines badly -- the scene could be very sad or very funny. The director Nicholas Martin had the actors play it funny -- Elma is depicted as so naive and earnest in her over-acting, so inexperienced on how to deliver lines of a play, so awful, that she is very funny. I laughed, as did almost everybody else in the theater.

But there is a meanness to our laughter, isn't there? The actress didn't have to mouth the lines so awkwardly. Martin makes her a clown. It made me feel a little guilty to laugh. And angry at the director.

I know, all humor supposedly has some element of cruelty in it. But laughing at Elma's ignorance, and all the small town, country characters on stage, seemed like a way to make us urban theater goers feel good -- we're better, smarter than they are. We're relieved to realize the ridiculous condition in which other people live their lives.

It's a sad play. The main story is predictable -- you know that Bo is going to soften, that Cherie is going to marry him in the end. What you don't know is that Bo and Cherie's happy ending (or happy beginning) comes with a sense of loss.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Catch-22's subversive attack on authority

As much as I liked listening to Catch-22 on an audio book, there was something significant about the book that bothered me.

In the book, anybody with authority was depicted as a self-aggrandizing buffoon. The officers who commanded the lives of the men in Yossarian's group were stupid, self-serving incompetents. They enforced their control over the men with the Army's rules and punishments. Their real mission was their own advancement. They were impossibly (and hilariously) greedy, egotistical, and ambitious.

But eventually the officers became more than just funny caricatures. They were evil. They blithely sent their men to their deaths. They threatened and persecuted the kind-hearted ineffectual chaplain. They ignored the crimes of a murderer and rapist, but arrested Yossarian for going AWOL and becoming a malcontent.

Heller seemed to say that authority itself was evil, at least, all authority in the fictional world of the novel. At some point, the endless satire became too much for me. I didn't like the book's relentless attack on all authority.

Thursday, July 8, 2010

Catch-22 is still fresh thirty years after my first reading

Catch-22, by Joseph Heller (1961)

I last read this novel about thirty years ago and recently listened to it again, this time on CDs while driving to work. Heller made me laugh over and over again. The main "catch" of course, is that Yossarian, the main character, (a World War II bombardier with lots of missions) wants to be declared insane so that he can be sent home from the war, but anyone who would want to be sent home from flying dangerous missions in which people are trying to kill him obviously cannot be insane, so he must keep flying missions.

The repetitiveness of the book surprised me. Some of the gags, such as those involving Milo Minderbinder's schemes, are repeated over and over until they lose their ability to make you laugh. Some of it got tiresome.

The book is not so much a plotted narrative as it is a series of scenes that magnify and detail the characters trapped in the war: Yossarian and his increasingly desperate attempts to get out; Major Major's forlorn humiliation as he struggles to avoid any decision-making or conflict; the sensitive chaplain Tappman's futile attempts to make his beliefs and moral arguments meaningful; the surprisingly courageous hypochondriac, Doc Daneeka; the screamingly funny and incompetent commanding officer, Colonel Cathcart. They all attempt to either escape the war, change the circumstances of it (with no luck), or exploit it.

Or rather, it is not the war, but the army. I have read about Catch-22 described as being anti-war. It of course depicts the terrifying absurdity of the war. There is a lot of pain and grief. A number of the characters that we come to laugh at and like, die. But mostly it is an anti-organization book. The organization -- the system -- is what makes possible and encourages the absurd behaviors. It is the army that promotes and protects the incompetent Colonel Cathcarts and Scheisskopfs of the world with their crazy drive for promotion masked by raving patriotism. It is the army that enforces their orders and behavior, no matter how petty and insane. It is the army that makes possible Milo's impossible capitalist schemes to make money on the black market in the middle of huge suffering. It is other officers that interpret and give absurd orders, usually for their self-protection, or reward. While it is people and characters who act out the story, you feel that it is truly the army itself that is Yossarian's tormenter.

Sunday, May 30, 2010

The Huntington Theater's "Prelude to a Kiss" is a modern fairy tale that needs a re-think

Last night, we saw Craig Lucas's play, "Prelude to a Kiss" at the Huntington Theater. The story depends on the audience suspending belief and accepting a supernatural event -- the exchange of one soul with another, in this case the soul of a young bride with that of an old man in declining health, thanks to a kiss.

I think the playwright has created two likable characters in Rita, the bride (played by Cassie Beck, who has a wonderful nasal voice that makes every syllable reach the balcony, and a hefty real body to match), and Peter, the young man (played with breezy authority by Brian Sgambati). The performances are strong. They meet, fall in love, and seem happy.

I like what seems to be the main idea here -- that once you marry (that is, once your relationship is formally bonded), there comes a point where you say to your spouse, "Hey, you aren't really the man/woman I thought you were! You...you lied to me!" You might be right, and you may have been deceived, and you may have been involved in your own self-deception.

But why is the soul-exchange kiss performed between Rita and an old man? I had a hard time making sense of the mythical situation. If it had been an old woman, and Peter was then forced to come to grips with the old woman that his wife would someday become, and thus with his own mortality, should he stay married with Rita, it might have made more sense. As it was, the exchange with an old man seemed like a writing workshop gaffe that Lucas couldn't figure out how to handle. The slight homo-erotic buzz of the relationship between Peter and the old man seemed more ridiculous than enlightening.

Everything comes out right in the end. We have a happy ending. It's a little sappy, in fact. After reading the glowing reviews of the play (here is Louise Kennedy's review in the Globe), I wanted to like the play. I liked the characters, but I think the play is slight.

Wednesday, May 26, 2010

What the old sensibility of James Russell Lowell says to us

As a bass member of the Brookline Chorus, I sang in our final concert on May 15 at All Saints Parish church in Brookline. Included in our program was a new ten minute choral work by Kirke Mechem, "Once to Every Man and Nation". The text for the piece is from a poem by the 19th century poet and abolitionist James Russell Lowell. The song is tuneful in an old-fashioned way, its melody based on a Welsh folk song. The poem itself expresses a sensibility very different from our time. Lowell wrote poetry to inspire people to fight slavery in America. Though I don't listen much to modern pop music, I think the idea of poetry or music inspiring action now seems odd. The last time that happened was, I think, in the 60s, with Dylan, Peter, Paul and Mary, Pete Seeger, and a bunch of others.

Here's a couple of examples of what I mean. Lowell's poem starts:

Once to every man and nation,
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth with false-hood,
For the good or evil side;


Do people nowadays believe that any decision will confront us "once" in a lifetime, in a "moment to decide"? The choice is stark, between truth and false-hood, between the good or evil side (between abolition and slavery). One might use the terms good and evil, especially if one is a religious conservative, but we don't see any decision as an irrevocable between good and evil. Partly, we think of this as realism, a recognition of the world's complexity and ambiguity. And we try hard to see things in shades of gray, so that we can compromise and maintain some benefit from each side. We believe that thinking in stark terms is not very sophisticated. (I struggle with almost every decision I face, like a neurotic in a Woody Allen film.)

The poem is a call to action, a call to be brave. Once you choose the "good", then you must be prepared for sacrifice. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers died in the Civil War, from both sides. Perhaps our modern avoidance of that type of thinking is a way to avoid that type of sacrifice.

---

I enjoyed singing the piece, and I know the rest of the chorus did as well. (I'm sorry that Kirke Mechem wasn't able to attend our performance -- he fell ill in the days before the concert and had to return home.)

Here is the rest of the poem:

Some great cause, some great decision,
Offering each the bloom or blight,

And the choice goes by forever,

'Twixt that darkness and that light.

Then to side with truth is noble,
When we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit,
And 'tis prosperous to be just;

Then it is the brave man chooses,
While the coward stands aside,
Till the multitude make virtue,
Of the faith they had denied.

Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet the truth alone is strong:
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong,

Yet that scaffold sways the future,
AND, BEHIND THE DIM UNKNOWN,
STANDETH GOD WITHIN THE SHADOW,
KEEPING WATCH ABOVE HIS OWN.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

Reading The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald

The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald (first published: Vito von Eichborn GmbH & Co Verlag, 1992)

At my mother's house, we have an old black leather suitcase filled with family pictures. They are mostly 2 x 3 and 3 x 5 black-and-white pictures, many of them of our family members in Greece from over the last 60-70 years. We used to take out the suitcase, open it on a table, and pull out the pictures (though we haven't done that in years). We would spend an enjoyably melancholy hour two talking about the people in the pictures.

Reading The Emigrants is a little like shuffling through those family pictures. Sebald was a German Jew who himself had emigrated to England, where he lived much of his adult life. There are four chapters in the book, each chapter devoted to a family member that the narrator either knew slightly, or not at all. Each chapter explores the life of that relative, pieced together by the narrator from interviews with surviving cousins, friends, and other relatives. The four people are each emigrants: an artist living in northern England, a peripatetic waiter who traveled through much of the world, a German schoolteacher, a retired professor. The time span of the lives is from the 30s to the 70s. Their generally sad lives are reconstructed, at times vividly so. The Holocaust is not referenced directly, but it seems to be there in the background.

There are no plots, no dramatic events. There are a few interesting conversations with people who reveal unknown facets of the lives being investigated. It is very much like sitting at home, for hours, talking about family members we've known, or hardly knew. To me, it's completely absorbing.

It's not exactly memoir, but an investigation in memoir. It is fiction, even though it may be based on real people, and real events. The very real photographs interspersed throughout the text give the book a documentary feel. But then, I believe almost all writing, even memoir, is either definitely fiction, or closely akin to it. This is a wonderful re-creation of lives, and it's full of life.

Monday, May 3, 2010

MetroWest Opera's Magic Flute -- a lot of fun, and don't worry about the story line

We saw Mozart's "Magic Flute" Saturday night in Weston, put on by MetroWest Opera. I didn't know that the company was founded by Dana Schnitzer, the soprano soloist who sings for the Brookline Chorus. It's an amazing feat of energy and organization to sing (and sing well) and to organize an opera company. And to not grab a leading role for herself in the opera, despite having the talent to justify such a move, said good things about her.

I had never been to The Magic Flute, though years ago we had seen and since forgotten the movie Ingmar Bergman made of a performance in Stockholm. The music was wonderful, the singers were wonderful. The bass who played Sarastro, John-Paul Huckle, filled the hall with his big voice. His voice startled me, full of the deep conviction and weight you expect from the character. The Queen of the Night, Christine Teeters, sang the amazing aria scene where she gives Pamina a dagger and orders her to kill Sarastro, with a surprising amount of menace (why did Mozart compose those cheerful soprano notes for that aria? And it works). And Matt Wight, as Papageno, sang well and was really moving, particularly in the scenes where Papageno (this silly clownlike man) sings that all he wants in life is a Papagena and family.

But the story line of the opera -- we couldn't make it out. It's very convoluted. We heard from a friend that Mozart was influence at the time by the Masons. There's a lot of mumbo jumbo about quazi-religious rituals, trials, citadels, membership among the elect. It was painful to follow. Better to concentrate on the music and singing, which was a lot of fun.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

Singing Brahms's Eine deutsches Requiem

March 7, 2010 performance of Johannes Brahms's Eine deutsches Requiem by the Brookline Chorus at All Saints Parish church in Brookline, MA

A belated entry (I've been busy the last month, didn't have time to blog).

It was an afternoon concert on a sunny Sunday. The sun lit up the huge stained glass windows of All Saints. Friends were in the audience. I can't imagine a better place or time for this Requiem.

I loved singing this more than anything else I've sung since joining the Chorus, except perhaps for Carmina Burana. It's challenging and long. You have to pace yourself in order to have enough energy left for the last movement. It's a terrific journey.

To me the most heart-stopping moments come early, in the second movement, when we sing:

Denn alles Fleisch, es ist wie Gras
und alle Herrlichkeit des Menschen
wie des Grases Blumen.
Das Gras ist verdorret
und die Blume abgefallen.

For all flesh is as grass,
and all the glory of man,
as the flower of grass.
The grass withers,
and the flower thereof falleth away. I Peter 1:24

We sing the words at first as a funeral march, a dirge, an acquiescent, resigned lament about the temporary nature of all life.

But then, a few minutes later, we blast out the very same words in an almost violent complaint against God and the universe. There's an orchestral buildup to this fortissimo over many bars. The music builds in tension and volume. You can see it, of course, in our director, Lisa Graham; with her increasingly tense gestures and her face, she makes you, the orchestra, and the audience understand that these are also very angry words.

The Huntington's "Becky Shaw" just manages to be a play, and not a sitcom

The Huntington Theater Company's production of "Becky Shaw," a play by Gina Gionfriddo, directed by Peter DuBois. We saw it Saturday night, March 20, 2010.

15 minutes into the play: what is this, television? A sitcom?

25 minutes: the moving sets -- whole sets sliding ostentatiously onto and off the stage, does it mean something? Am I not getting it?

The names of these people...Suzanna Slater, Max Garrett, Susan Slater, Andrew Porter, Becky Shaw. Not only is it television, but it's daytime soap opera. From the 60s. Maybe the town they're in is called Middleville or something like that.

Well, a high toned soap opera, actually, with some witty lines, a few laughs. Parts sound like a Woody Allen parody. The premise -- a group of academics or academically trained characters generating drama out of their neuroses, loves and self-loves. Yes, it's been done. This is a 2009 version.

Why are they swearing all the time?

30 minutes: The actor Seth Fisher, who plays Max Garrett -- he's very good. He takes over the stage whenever he's present. As soon as his cynical self is present, the energy level rises, and the story make sense (sort of).

60 minutes: wait, you mean this woman, who has lived with her adopted step-brother most of her life, who has a tormented relationship with him, finally has sex with him when they're in their thirties? Wouldn't they have worked all this out by now? Seems implausible.

80 minutes: the swearing, maybe it's a generational thing. Maybe they don't really mean it. The words don't carry the same weight for these 30 somethings as for us 50ish types. Really?

90 minutes: the cover photo of the program book is actually a good snapshot of the play. Becky Shaw, an adult woman, sits in a floral dress, showing a good bit of cleavage, yet her white-socked foot is turned in, in the manner of a little girl. Her blind date with Max gives her an opportunity to not so much seduce as to trap someone with her neediness.

110 minutes: This isn't a bad play. It's barely a play. A bit static. But it has a few laughs. The ragged nature of the relationships, the chaos, the emotional damage -- it all does seems real.

At one point, Susan says that love in marriage is a matter of "putting up" with your spouse. A lover is there to support you, despite your rottenness.( I'm not saying this is the playwright's belief -- it's what the characters express.) And whether you agree or not, Gionfriddo does capture this cynical view of what might be termed love on the stage. Love and marriage as devotion, as self-sacrifice, that's not here. For better or worse.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Honore Balzac's "Pere Goriot" -- it's all the same

Pere Goriot, by Honore Balzac (first published in 1835; I listened to it on CDs from Recorded Books).

It's a good story, how Eugène de Rastignac, a poor student from the country, his family's great hope, decides to take a short cut to fame and wealth by ingratiating himself into Parisian society. It's risky. He meets up with the most cynical people you could imagine, and acknowledges that he himself becomes one. It's old Goriot, Jean-Joachim Goriot, an old vermicelli dealer, who calls him back to reality with the example of his selfless (and cloyingly bottomless) love for his daughters.

I wondered if there was anything new in this book, compared to Lost Illusions and Cousin Bette, the two other Balzac novels I've read. The cast of characters are similar (maybe even the same in some cases). The experiences and motives of the characters -- all based on greed -- are similar. It's a decent pot boiler. But I'm not sure there's a good reason to read it if you've already read the the other two. Or even Lost Illusions alone.

Thursday, February 11, 2010

Malone Dies, by Samuel Beckett: who cares?

Malone Dies, by Samuel Beckett (a Naxos Audiobook, originally published 1951)

Who cares?

Who cares about Malone's story, his life, his impending death? After hearing Malone describe the minutiae of his dying days, the routines of the asylum he finds himself in, the contents of his pockets, morbid scenes from his life as a parent, morbid scenes from his own youth, morbid scenes that I can't even place the time or location of...I was ready to say I don't really care about that guy, that old man in the asylum room.

Yet I kept listening/reading. All the way to the dispiriting, nightmarish end. That there is nothing there is surprisingly gripping. And after having spent time in nursing homes over the last few years, I do think Beckett has the environment right. Day after day, what else can the patients (or inmates) become to the staff other than objects to be moved and washed, like Malone?

And who cares that Beckett wrote the book? When I started writing this post, I was ready to say, "I don't". And now (with a few days pause in between), I'm ready to say that I'm glad he wrote it, and that I heard Malone's story.

Saturday, January 30, 2010

Viewing the great movie "The White Ribbon" is a disturbing experience

"The White Ribbon" directed by Michael Haneke. In German, with subtitles.

This is an imperfect but very powerful film about a particular Protestant German village, in a particular time, 1913. The movie does not boil down to simplistic maxims about paternalism or repression, as some reviewers have suggested. It does show a drama of how people commit and respond to evil, and there's no single maxim you can put on that.

It is a well crafted film. The details of the characters' lives, their clothes, their hair, their manners, the flies in summer -- it all made me think that this was how it had to have been. There's a lot of Bergman-like cinematography here.

Is it possible that the village children committed the crimes depicted in the film? We don't know for certain. The schoolteacher who narrates the story has his suspicions. There are several scenes in which a window's curtains are drawn, the window opened suddenly, and there they are -- the group of them, blond children, presumably innocently inquiring about the health of a stricken classmate. I found myself gripping the arm rests. It's like a Hitchcock horror film in those moments.

It may be that the film's story dramatizes one of the deep currents that led to the rise of Nazism twenty years later -- that intimate, brutal repression results in the repressed himself committing small and large acts of evil. Of course, Nazism had many other roots (the collapse of the Weimar Republic, the economic and social chaos after WW I, the German longing to recover and avenge their lost territories, and on and on), but those are themes for other movies and stories.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Arthur Miller's play "All My Sons", at the Huntington Theater

We saw the Arthur Miller play "All My Sons" this past weekend at the Huntington Theater. The word "intense" was used often by local reviewers, and that's obvious enough as you watch the play, but I thought the words "improbable" and "overwrought" were better adjectives. I appreciate the clear moral drama, the nicely formed characters, and the actors were quite good (especially Will Lyman as the father, Joe Keller), but there was something way overheated about this play. The anguished yelling from every direction went on for a long time.

Monday, January 18, 2010

Woody Allen's humorous story, "Udder Madness" in the New Yorker Magazine

Udder Madness, a short story by Woody Allen, in the January 18, 2010 New Yorker Magazine. A first person narrative from the point of view of a cow who decides to murder a guest at the farm.

I read it aloud to Marilyn. We laughed so hard, we were gasping and nearly crying. "Imagine my surprise when I lamped the triple threat I speak of and registered neither a brooding cult genious nor a matinee idol but a wormy little cypher, myopic behind balck-framed glasses and groomed loutishly in his idea of rural chic: all tweedy and woodsy, with cap and muffler, ready for the leprechauns...lunch was served on the lawn, and our friend, made bolder by a certain Mr. Glenfiddich, proceeded to hold forth on subjects he hadn't a clue about...misquoting La Rouchefoucauld, he confused Schubert with Schumann...midway, the insufferable little nudnick beat his glass for attention and then attempted yanking the tablecloth from the table without upsetting the china...I needn't tell you that this proved to be a major holocaust...catapulting a baked potato into the cleavage of a tony brunette...."

It was like the younger Woody Allen, but even funnier.

Eric Jay Dolin's readable "Leviathan: the History of Whaling in America"

Leviathan: the History of American Whaling, by Eric Jay Dolin (Norton, 2007)

Full of detail and scenery, I found this an earnest, very readable history of whaling in America, with much of the book describing the destinies and fortunes of whalers in the ports of Nantucket and New Bedford, Massachusetts during whaling's heyday (about 1830 to 1860).

I was surprised to learn how important whale oil was to American industry, and to the history of American industry in general. It was the best lighting fuel in the world, and made life at night possible in cities all over America and Europe. There were other important products that came from whales -- ladies' corsets get mentioned a lot. But it was chiefly whale oil that industrialists and financiers made big money on.

Dolin navigates away from the moral issues that moves modern Americans, whether it's right to kill these wild, large, warm blooded mammals, and kill them nearly to extinction. He reports without contradicting the prevailing philosophy of people of the seventeenth and nineteenth century -- that these animals were meant to be hunted and harvested. I think that's fair, despite how I feel about whale hunting.

It's well researched, sometimes reading a little like an academic work. Dolin includes 75 pages of often interesting footnotes.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

More about Native Son: Max's appeal for Bigger's life

More thoughts on Richard Wright's novel, Native Son (which I listened to on a Harper Audio recording).

Max, the white-haired, Jewish, Communist lawyer, defends Bigger Thomas in the court room and attempts to save him from execution. Bigger is the most despised man in America at the moment of his trial, a black man who has murdered two women, the white Mary Dalton, and his black girl friend, Bessie, though everyone knows that it is for Mary's death that he is to be executed. He is surrounded by people who hate him, except for Max and Jan (the young Communist white man who was Mary's boyfriend).

In his jail cell, Bigger wonders, "What was Mr. Max in it for?" (or thoughts to that effect). He thinks Max is "all right". But he doesn't see why Max has put himself forward to defend him. I wondered that too.

It's confusing. Max must want to clear the party of blame for involvement in Bigger's crimes. The police initially thought Bigger was inspired in some way by Communists (Bigger did, after all, sign his blackmail note as "Red" and drew a hammer and sickle in an attempt to mislead the police). But as Wright presents him in the novel, it's apparent that Max has larger motives for defending Bigger.

Near the end of the novel, during his lengthy appeal to the judge for Bigger to be spared the electric chair, Max accuses and indicts American society. This must be Richard Wright speaking through Max. His argument is the basic Marxian analysis -- we live in a system in which the labor of the poor, the oppressed, generates wealth for the upper classes. And in the process, the debasement of the poor leads to the creation of Bigger Thomases, and will continue doing so.

What an argument for saving a confessed murderer's life! Max depicts Bigger as a kind of soul-less agent of historic forces, without much of a will. Bigger's personality and character are hardly visible. There's no attempt to use the only possible argument for clemency -- sympathy for Bigger's impoverished background, for his mother, brother and sister. Max even insults the Dalton's (calling Mrs. Dalton's outlook and sensibilities "...as tragically blind" as her eyesight). The Daltons (who have lost their daughter to Bigger) are the only ones in the courtroom who could make a meaningful appeal for Bigger's life, but Max ignores that. Instead, Max gives out a lengthy ideological spiel. Max comes close to challenging the judge: send Bigger to the chair, and you contribute to the time when they (the blacks and poor whites of the country) will eventually rise up and get us.

This is an appeal guaranteed to fail. Richard Wright may have found a good stage, through Max, for presenting his ideology, but he did it at Bigger's expense.

And yet, this doesn't sink this novel. Despite its flaws, there is truth and power in this book, in its depiction of its characters and events. I can't get the scenes and words out of my head.

The novel's moving last scene, of Max talking with Bigger in his cell, just hours before Bigger is to be executed, are unforgettable, and probably make one of the best arguments for ending the death penalty I've ever read -- because it is an act of vengeance that forever ends the potential for redemption.