Willa Cather's novel, "My Antonia" -- if Jim is Willa

I always liked the title of this novel, though I never got to reading it until now. Aside from indicating a permanent attachment or possession (as with a married couple or a close relative), the "my" can imply that one can keep and love a version of a person, or a particular cherished image of the person, regardless of what the real person does, or even if the person is far away.

This book was published in 1919. The novel's main character and narrator is Jim Burden, who is sent as a young boy to live with his grandparents on the Nebraska prairie frontier. The time seems to be the 1880s or 1890s, before motor cars and rural electricity. Jim develops an affection for Antonia Shimerda, a Czech girl four years older than he is, who lives with her dirt poor immigrant family on a nearby farm. The book follows their lives and their affectionate (but arms length) relationship into adulthood. Antonia eventually gets pregnant with a local lout, but then marries a kindly older Czech and has a huge happy family with him. Jim moves East, to New York, where he becomes a successful railroad lawyer.

Along the way, the characters and their families endure hardships, romances, rural intrigues, death, small town life, small and large incidents. I read the he first part of the book avidly, and loved the details of pioneer life as seen through Jim's eyes. The harshness of life, the never-ending farm work, the warm bonds with the people around him (even people he didn't necessarily like), and Antonia herself -- all detailed with a nostalgic, dreamlike intensity. He loves Antonia, and she loves him. Yet, there seems to be an undefined distance between them, and a sort of agreement that they will never close the distance. It's mysterious. Once they become adults, and Antonia's age (four years older than him) is no longer such an obstacle, what prevents them from being more than cousinly? It's as if both of them are already married to others. But they're not. The book gets sentimental towards the latter part, and seems a bit long.

I've read that Willa Cather was remarkably open about her own lesbian sexual persona (remarkably open for that time, at least). What if we imagine Jim Burden as a woman -- that the narrator is actually a woman growing up on the prairie, with a powerful desire for Antonia? Then, their forbearance would make more sense. Given the mores of that era, the two of them simply could not express their affection for each other in other than a chaste fashion. Perhaps this is Willa Cather, truly writing about her own Antonia.

The Chorus Pro Musica's performance of Rachmaninoff's Vespers

The Chorus Pro Musica performed Rachmaninoff's Vespers at St. George's church this past Sunday, November 9. Lisa Graham conducted (she is also our conductor in the Brookline Chorus). The Vespers are sung acapella. I immediately enjoyed the beautiful tone of the chorus. They moved so well from the loud to the soft passages, with many tricky layers of music in between.

I loved the poetry of the verses. I've always been moved by the simple hymn, Bless the Lord, O My Soul (Blagoslovi, dushe moya, Ghospoda), and these lines, familiar to me from the Greek service:

Thou art clothed with honor and majesty.
Blessed art Thou, O Lord.
The waters stand upon the mountains.
Marvelous are Thy works, O Lord.
The waters flow between the hills.
Marvelous are Thy works, O Lord.
In wisdom hast Thou made all things.

To me, the verses say that the infinite complexity of nature -- seemingly random in its ends -- from which we humans draw the ability to live our lives, is in fact God's work.

The alto Marion Dry sang with a throaty, solemn sound, her voice vibrating with...fear (fear of God was a common expression throughout). The tenor Charles Blandy sang intensely, and transmitted a kind of purity and innocence, in a voice full of longing for God.

Penetrating the visual design of the network election broadcasts

Watching the network election returns on Tuesday night (NBC, CBS, ABC), I was surprised by the distracting amount of visual information the set designers crammed into the screen. Always, one or more news anchor spoke, seen from waist up. Behind him or her were flashing moving screens and maps. The front of the anchor's desk had lit panels. The network logo fluttered in the lower left corner of the screen. Two lines of barely legible block letters (NY, CN, MO) flipped and moved across the bottom of the screen announcing results and names from states. Checkmarks everywhere. Behind it all, a background of even more moving color and light framed everything and screamed for whatever attention we had left.

Were viewers actually expected to absorb information from this cacophony?

There wasn't a warm tone or an expanse of quiet color anywhere. The set designers must have studied at a Vegas strip mall. NBC was the worst. The other two networks were marginally better. I suppose this reflects the infiltration of an internet web design mentality into these live broadcasts. I think the producers and designers should reconsider their strategy: when it comes to news, an unobstructed person speaking on TV should be the focus of our concentration. After all, Tim Russert was remembered and sought out by viewers for his work with a whiteboard and a black marker.

Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father"

I almost abandoned Barack Obama's memoir, Dreams From My Father (published 1995) after thirty pages or so. He is a cool writer, not unlike the character he represents in public life. I sometimes felt that it was only his best face that was put forward -- as if he was running for some kind of office. (The book was published in 1995, I believe before he had attained political office.)

But I kept on. Fortunately, that politico tone doesn't dominate the book. And now I think this is a fairly good book. He's a better writer than I expected.

He describes his boyhood with his mother and grandparents, in Hawaii and Indonesia, his years working as a community organizer in Chicago, and his search for the details and connection to his father's Kenyan family -- the central theme of the book. I felt a kinship with him in my own attempts to learn about my parents, and to stay connected with my Greek relatives and their histories.

His hungering for his African self -- for his Kenyan father, whom he barely knew firsthand -- is good reading.

I finally decided that it was overall a good thing that he's cool as a writer -- he shows us the characters of people around him by how they look, what they say, how their eyes and bodies work.

In the best passage in the book, he finally attends Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church in Chicago and hears a sermon there (he was not an avid church goer to that point, some time in his early 20s). He repeats a portion of Wright's sermon: "The audacity of hope! Times when we couldn't pay the bills. Times when it looked like I wasn't ever going to amount to anything...at the age of fifteen, busted for grand larceny auto theft...and yet and still my momma and daddy would break into a song...Oh yes, Jesus, I thank you...."

And then Obama concludes the chapter on Chicago like this: "And in that single note --hope!--I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones...As the choir lifted back up into song, as the congregation began to applaud those were walking to he altar to accept reverend Wright's call, I felt a light touch on the top of my hand. I looked down to see the older of the two boys sitting beside me,his face slightly aprehensive as he handed me a pocket tissue. Beside him, his mother glanced at me with a faint smile before turning back toward the altar. It was only as I thanked the boy that I felt the tears running down my cheeks."

It must have been wrenching for Obama to reject Reverend Wright earlier this year, when Wright gave that sermon about God damning America. But Barack Obama did it. As far as we know, he took his family and left.

As far as what the book says about him as a potential president, I can think of three things.

1. He trusts subordinates and other people. More than that, he promotes other people, putting them forward to accept the glory, as he does with his fellow organizers, whom he was managing in Chicago. (And sometimes he puts unprepared people forward to face a hot crowd, while he stays somewhere in the background.)

2. He believes in collective solutions to problems. But they don't have to be governmental solutions. His organizing days involved work with private community groups, often trying to motivate and organize neighborhoods to work on their own.

3. He naturally empathizes with people, and is able to understand and argue an issue from more than one perspective. With a white mother and a black father, this must come naturally to him.

Gutenberg! the Musical!-- a workshop idea stretched into a paying show

The New Repertory Theater's Gutenberg! the Musical! is about a pair of young actors who want to put on a brilliant musical. They need producers and financial backing, and we, the audience, serve as the producers for whom they audition the show. What follows is a frantic spoof of musicals and musical songs and story lines.

I appreciate the idea to give new and "cutting edge" (dreaded phrase) productions a chance, I like the energy and talent of the two actors, and I like the idea of getting some laughs. But this is a poor thin show. It feels like a college theater workshop idea that's been stretched into a show that people are expected to pay for.

I did get the premise, that these guys are spoofing musicals. How could you not get it? They explain it to you. But no amount of screeching, dancing, frantic gestures and diving around can hide the miserable story line, the empty songs that are supposed to be ironic and funny, and the labored cliches presented as new. They simply copied bad musical shtick. And did we need all the sight gags about masturbation? This must be the result of theater people raised on Betty's Summer Vacation. If they shorten it to 15-20 minutes, well, that might work.

We left at intermission. We like the New Rep a lot, and have been attending their shows for years. But we left at intermission.

Edmund Hillary's autobiography, "Nothing Venture, Nothing Win"

Sir Edmund never explains the odd grammar of his 1975 autobiography's title, although after reading a few chapters, you will realize that the old adage "nothing ventured, nothing gained" perfectly summarizes his attitude to his mountaineering exploits, the people around him, and his life.

The great Everest expedition is the heart of the book, of course, and he added more details and interesting impressions about fellow mountaineers and the Sherpas who accompanied the expedition than were included in his 1955 account High Adventure (see further down). His writing is earnest, a bit dry, humble, occasionally funny, and full of his passion for detail. I admire him. He spent much of the latter part of his life working to build schools and hospitals in Nepal, for the Sherpa people. It's not an exciting, juicy book -- it's just a depiction of an admirable life.

In fact, how is it that he seems to have remembered the location of every handhold, the width of every crevasse, the shape of every minor slope, the feel of the snow at each step? It's amazing. He seem to replay every step of his expeditions. How did he record those details there, at 27,000 feet? I can only assume that he wrote prolifically in his journals at every possible resting moment. After all, he wanted others to be able to retrace his steps.

The New Reportory Theater's exciting "Eurydice": unforgettable scenes of eternal love and eternal loss

Sarah Ruhl's play is an exciting re-creation of the story of Eurydice, who dies on her wedding day, and Orpheus, her husband who descends into the underworld to save her. It's a wonderful play, and Rick Lombardo, the director, does a great deal with the actors, a small stage space, and a very few spare props.

I felt as if we watched an inspired group of actors, as if they were very young, and struggling to make names for themselves. Zillah Glory is very good as Eurydice, spontaneous and sexy. Ken Baltin, her father, is terrific.

There are two powerful scenes that will stay with me:

• Eurydice's father in the underworld, aware of her upcoming wedding to Orpheus, happily and silently miming his role in her wedding (holding out his arm, feeling her arm in his, stepping with her towards the imaginary altar);

• and Eurydice at the end, drinking water from the river Lethe in order to save herself from a hideous fate as eternal concubine to the clownlike and vile Lord of the Underworld, knowing of course that Lethe will erase her memory and everything that makes her Eurydice -- she truly surrenders to death as the only escape possible. Her last motion is to take her father's dead hand into hers and pull his arm around her.

Ruhl employs a number of artificial theatrical devices that seem evocative and natural: the father building a "room" for Eurydice in the underworld out of string, written messages accurately sent between the lovers from the world to the underworld and back -- carried "hopefully" by a worm, an elevator delivers characters to the underworld. It all works magically well.

Eurydice might have been a bit too ditzy in the beginning of the play, the three stones being played by young girls got tiresome, the music has a New Age cliched air, and the getup of the lord of the underworld was a bit like something from Alice in Wonderland. But these were small flaws that only made me love the production and its cast more.

The Huntington's "How Shakespeare Won the West": what were they thinking?

A letdown. I'm baffled that the Huntington would produce this as their first play of the season, and the first play in the tenure of their new artistic director, Peter DuBois. A very long hour and forty minutes of theater!

For a generally (and inexplicably) upbeat view of the play, you can read Louise Kennedy's review in the Boston Globe.

The playwright Richard Nelson starts out with a great premise -- in the 1840s, a likable group of out-of-work New York actors in a tavern get the bug to go west and perform Shakespeare for gold miners. They'll find their own gold and fortunes out there. You can imagine the comic possibilities and are anxious for them to get going. We love Will LeBow, and the whole cast was fine.

What follows for the next hour is a tedious compilation of small barely connected story bits on their journey. The stories are abrupt, and the characters' personalities remain thin, never escaping the caricatures we meet in the beginning of the play. I kept thinking that the playwright was taking us somewhere and this was all going to take off any minute now...maybe he was, but I never saw it, despite the actors finally staggering into San Francisco. I could feel the writer struggling to mechanically fill out the scenes.

The last ten minutes -- in which the troupe puts on a hilarious production of Hamlet -- was where the play should have continued early on.

Should the Huntington put on a play that takes up less emotional space than an early episode of Bonanza?

What was the Huntington thinking?

Edmund Hillary's awesome and humbling "High Adventure"

This book is Hillary's account of the exploratory and Everest summit trips of 1951-53. He writes in a matter-of-fact style that I imagine reflects his character. It certainly suits the character that comes through in the narrative -- an unassuming man of endurance, focus, and courage, not without a warm and funny side.

I am two thirds of the way through this book, and constantly impressed by the effort demanded of these men. Even exhausted from a day of clinging to icy handholds and near-death events slipping and falling into crevasses, they eat a small dinner and prepare to wake up at 3:30 AM so that they can hike to a new route. They do this day after day for months. Each mission to the Everest area took about three months.

I'm struck by the number of people involved -- it's not just Hillary up there. There are teams. Dozens of people. (Surprisingly, he freely uses the word "coolies" to describe hired porters, men and women villagers who are not necessarily mountaineers. Perhaps the word was not seen as derogatory in 1955, when Hillary wrote this account.) They make frequent exploratory trips searching for better, safer routes to Everest. The first two years were reconnaissance trips. It's a huge logistics effort within a finite amount of time. All the while, they work in freezing cold and wind or extreme heat, sometimes both within a few minutes. Their food seems to be barley gruel, potatoes, some chocolate, tea. I wish Hillary had written more about the details and logistics. He doesn't write much about the type of gear and clothes they wear, their training, the food, the reasons for choosing the spring or fall months.

It's the mental toughness that's truly impressive. Trying to sleep in a tent with a howling wind, wind chills of -50 F, exhausted, hungry, afraid of being blown off the mountain, and knowing that you'll be getting up in a few hours regardless to carry on -- because you have no choice, you'll die if you stay there -- it's awesome and humbling.

It's Not Just Google That's Making Us "Stoopid"

Nicholas Carr's essay in the July/August Atlantic Magazine, Is Google Making Us Stoopid?, attempts to make the point that using the Web and hopping from link to link has changed the way we think -- that we are now less able to concentrate on and finish longer pieces of writing or work of any kind, even written content on the Web itself. We now grab a snippet of info and jump to the next somewhat-related snippet. Carr contends that our brains are actually working differently as a result -- they are "wired" differently. The essay's title singles out the Google search engine and environment as the culprit, but that's just a handle for his main argument that the Web is at the bottom of this supposed change.

That a medium of a communication influences the message and shapes the audience as it interacts with it is not a new observation. Carr got 5-6 magazine pages and a cover story out of this point. He offered only a few weak bits of anecdotal evidence to back it up.

My sense is, he is not wrong. But I think that if it is harder for us to concentrate, it's because we simply have less time to do so. A number of changes have occurred in the last forty years to fragment our attention, with less and less time available to us for us to apply that attention:

1. In most families, both parents work. With both adults working, household tasks get pushed into the evenings, where they compete with everything else that has to happen in the evening.
   
   
2. There are more single-parent families than ever, and families with divorced parents. Life is complicated in these families, with parents and children dealing with multiple schedules and connections to family members inside and outside the house.
   
   
3. The proliferation of media, including cable channels, DVDs, games, the Web, mobile phones. All of it competes for our attention, so we have to give all of it smaller and smaller bits.
   
   
4. The technological unification of work. Corporations can now cram more and more disparate tasks onto individual workers, and thus employ fewer workers. A corporate worker with a computer has the tools of dozens of different professionals.

In each of these changes, don't we see the same pressures to fragment our attention that Carr writes about in his essay? We have more and more things to do in the twenty four hours of every day.

Judith Herrin's Wonderful Book about Byzantium

Byzantium: the Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire, by Judith Herrin

In 28 chapters, most of them 10-12 pages in length, Judith Herrin shows us how the Byzantine empire survived for over 1,100 years. The theme that runs throughout the book -- whether the topic is about life in Constantinople, the Moslem conquests of Christian lands, taxes, Venetian allies and enemies, monks, the crusades -- is that Byzantium articulated and defended a centralized governing system that was creative enough to modify itself, regroup, and endure repeated crises until the final siege in 1453.

A few years ago, I read John Julius Norwich's three volume History of Byzantium. I loved his story telling ability, but I remember thinking that the narrative was almost entirely on the big battle scenes, the ugly successions from one emperor to another, and one conquest after another, all of which was exciting to read, but did not tell me much about how people lived their lives.

Judith Herrin's book is different. She writes interesting portraits of individuals: emperors, scholars, patriarchs, solders. She quotes from their letters. I can practically hear the one emperor, scolding his son in Greek, that he must closely follow the advice he leaves him in his autobiography about when to start a war and when not. I can see him thumping the table with his finger while the boy stares back, bewildered.

A number of points in the book stuck with me, and are worth remembering.

• The iconoclast movement that banished icons from religious observance was deeply influenced by the Arab invasions of the 8th century. The empire suffered a number of major defeats to Arab Islamic armies bent on spreading Islam. The Byzantines lost Jerusalem, and much of Syria. The defeats shocked them -- if they were Christians, and anointed by God, why did they lose so badly to infidels? Some, many from the eastern provinces, who had long established connections with Arabs and Islam, felt that God was punishing Christian Byzantium for an obvious heresy -- the veneration of icons in their worship. Islam forbids any human images in worship. To them, this was proof that God was unhappy with the Christian eastern Roman empire. The iconoclast movement among the Byzantines lasted over a hundred years, and many icons and mosaics were destroyed, until the empress Theodora finally established icons in the religious life of Byzantium and the Orthodox church in 843.

• The empire recovered from the Arab invasions, and even reclaimed some territory. The overall decline of Byzantine power began later, with the devaluation of the nomisma, the gold coin that emperors had maintained for seven hundred years, and had not permitted to fall below 90% gold content. In 1048, the emperor Constantine IX Monomachos, because of pressing military campaigns on all sides -- Pechenegs, Normans, Seljuk Turks -- raised money and paid for his campaigns by devaluing the gold nomisma. He undermined internal and foreign faith in Byzantine money, and signaling the weakness of the empire. Which of course encouraged the empire's enemies further. (Obviously, something to think about in modern times.)

• Byzantium was unjustly derided by Western classical historians as corrupt, weak, and morally cowardly in part because the derision provided justification for the West after the sack of Constantinople in 1204 by the fourth crusade. The West's view of the Constantinopolitan Greek emperors was contemptuous: the Greeks were willing to compromise and negotiate with Arabs, Turks, and other infidels; the Greeks were untrustworthy allies; the Greeks refused to follow the pope; the Byzantine court employed eunuchs; the Byzantines dressed like Asiatics; and the Byzantines spoke Greek instead of Latin. It all went into justifying the destruction and looting of the city, from which the Byzantines never fully recovered.
  

• The tenacious ability of Byzantium to survive, even fragmented, and flourish in times of crisis. After the 1204 loss of Constantinople, it wasn't until 1261 when Michael VIII Palaiologos regained the city and re-established Byzantine rule. Yet, even in that interim period, the empire continued, forming autonomous despotates in Asia Minor and the Greek mainland. They not only managed to carry on, but the artistic and scholarly achievements of this period were among the greatest in Byzantium's history.
  

Throughout, Judith Herrin's love of her subject and sympathetic, fair treatment of the heroes and villains makes this a wonderful book. I was sorry to finish it.

Two Beethoven Sonatas and a Trio -- yet, the music wasn't enough

At the Boston Chamber Music Society concert (all Beethoven) Saturday night at Longy, no one from the BCMS got up to introduce the concert, to talk about the other three August concerts, or to urge people to attend the coming season. The two performers of the first piece, the Cello Sonata in C major (Wilhelmina Smith, cello, and Pedja Murzijevic, piano), simply marched onto the stage from the side door. Their shoes boomed loudly through the hall for a few steps until the audience of mostly retired professors realized the concert was about to begin, and began clapping.

To me, that's no way to start a concert or a recital. I want somebody to say something.

The second piece was theViolin Sonata in C minor (with Steve Copes, violin), and the third was the Piano Trio in D major.

I usually like the heavy, not to say morbid, sound of the cello in sonatas and trios. But Wilhelmina's playing, while obviously accomplished, didn't seem to me to have enough emotional range. The level of intensity in the Cello Sonata was so unvarying that it sounded...boring. The violin sonata had a little more color and feeling. The trio was okay.

I felt disgruntled. We could have just played CDs at home. A concert or recital has to have some element, something, I'm not sure what, that makes the music seem important, that we're here for a purpose. I think just baldly presenting the music is not enough.

Marilyn thinks that sonatas and trios in general just don't have enough range and color to keep her interest. I don't think that's true for me, but in this case, there was something hollow to the experience. (Maybe it has something to do with this being the last year for the main cellist and artistic director of the BCMS, Ronald Thomas. At the end of last season, he had announced he's leaving at the end of this coming season.)