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.

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.

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.