Rae Imamura 1945-2008

YESTERDAY WE ATTENDED a memorial service for Rae Imamura, the Berkeley pianist who died eight days ago of a brain tumor very recently discovered. Rae was a fine musician and a remarkable woman, dedicated to her students and to the music she played. She was particularly dedicated to contemporary music, which she served with fidelity and egoless intelligence.

The service was held at the Buddhist temple on Channing Way, where her father had been an officiant for many years. It was quite moving, beginning with chant, moving through three songs sung by the Rockridge Choir which Rae often accompanied, and reminiscences by two friends, and ending with incense burning and flower tributes.

There were a lot of people there, from the Japanese-American community — Rae was born in a relocation camp in September 1945 — and from the music world. I had a short conversation with her sister Hiro, who pursued a considerable concert career of her own.

I was moved especially by Rae's caretakers, who sang with the choir; and by remarks by two of her close friends, Janet Woodhams and Andrea Yee, who spoke of Rae's loyalty and humility and humor. And moved, too, by hearing recordings, at the end of the service, of Rae's performance of some limpid, clearly written two-part music, maybe Beethoven bagatelles, I'm not sure; very sure, elegant, no mannerisms at all.

Fifteen years ago Rae asked if I had anything for piano that would work in just intonation. One piece, I told her, and a piece I've never heard played at all; Three Pieces for Piano, written in the winter 1963-64. She played them on a wonderful program, with Charles Ives's "Concord" Sonata, at Annie's Hall, Berkeley, on an instrument tuned not in equal temperament but to Kirnberger 3. Alas, no recording equiipment was on the scene. The music was splendid in that tuning.

I told Hiro yesterday that I remembered that when Bob Basart was dying, twelve years ago I think, I produced a radio broadcast of his music. There was one piece he'd never heard, his last one, for solo piano. I gave it to Rae as soon as I got the music, two days before the scheduled broadcast, and she learned it and recorded it at KPFA. I told her the second movement was too fast judging by Bob's indications; he particularly wanted it quite slow.

"I don't have time to learn to play it slow," she said. "I recorded it on the Disklavier; you can slow the tempo to whatever you want." Bob was pleased. He died a week or so later.

First you learn the notes
find the (spirit) behind them
brush the notes aside

I have found the way, she said
good! What is it like? I asked

I can't tell you now…
(this is what her friend recalled)
…cannot find the words

Gli Uccelli

Via Dionigi, Rome, Nov. 23—

Birds over the Tribunali

FOURTEEN MILLION STARLINGS doing their exercises in solid geometry, is what I wrote from Rome over four years ago — Feb. 1, 2004, to be precise. That's the only precision here: don't regard the phrase, or any other above or below my name, as factual. The number may be off by quite a bit. They may know no more than I about solid geometry. And they may not have been starlings.

I've asked a number of people what these birds are called, and only one person has hazarded a guess more specific than uccellini, little birds. Passeri, he said they were called, passeri, because they migrate. At least I think that's what he said; he definitely called them passeri, which my little dictionary tells me is Italian for "sparrow."

I'm pretty sure, though I'm no birder, that these aren't sparrows. They might not be starlings. I tend to call any small black annoying bird a starling. They act like swifts. You don't see them at first, you only sense they're about to show up; then suddenly there they are, great clouds of them wheeling about in the sky. You stare at them in open-mouthed (not a good idea) wonder. Why do they do this; how do they avoid collisions; what communication exists among them; do they have leaders in any sense.

We got off the number 280 bus in the Piazza Cavour and saw, first thing, people standing around looking at the sky. We knew why: the bus had come up the lungotevere, the avenue along the Tiber; it's lined with plane trees, and the birds were already lighting among those trees. You could hear them, and you could see their dirty work on the pavement, which is washed daily, I think.

(You could also see an astounding exhibit of their work on one unfortunate car which must have been parked under that tree for a number of days. If the car were mine I wouldn't claim it until well after the rains have come.)

The birds have been flocking here to Rome for some time; we first noticed them a couple of weeks ago, when we saw two people in hazmat suits working the Piazza Cenci, down the street from the Argentina. They were brandishing machines that made eerie electronic sounds, in an effort to frighten the birds away from the piazza's trees — a futile gesture, I thought, rather like blowing leaves into the wind: but I suppose it makes work, and maybe there's something particularly sacred about the Cenci.

I've always enjoyed looking at birds in flight, and particularly like the ever-changing patterns of these huge flocks. Since in Rome one's mind is always straying back to antiquity you can't help thinking of how these avian exercises may have struck the ancients, whether rustics out tending sheep — who, come to think of it, flock, the sheep I mean, not the rustics, pretty much the way the birds do — or whether city-dwellers here in Rome. Birds, of course, were Meaningful; the patterns of their flights, and of their entrails and on their livers for that matter, were useful in precipitating decisions of various kinds, and in foretelling the future.

The hotel clerk has no idea what these birds are called, but he knows why they're here: Rome is warm, being a city full of burning petroleum products, and has plenty of nice tall trees; Rome attracts these birds from all around.

C'e un disastro, a man on the street said the other day, It's a disaster, they come every year at this time, they're noisy and dirty, they ruin the passaggiata, you can't walk under the trees, or sit outside with an aperitif.

I suppose he's right: I certainly don't walk under the trees, not if I can help it. But the displays are beautiful, arresting and beautiful and utterly organic, natural and transient and amazing.

Rome Photos

I JUST PUT 35 photos taken this month in Rome up on the Web; you can see them here.

Music in Rome

Via M. Dionigi, Rome, Nov. 18—

ROME HAS GIVEN US an amazing variety of music this last week, and it's time to think about it. Monday last — can it really only be eight days ago? — we went out to the Parco della Musica, a complex of concert and rehearsal halls, a fine bookstore dedicated to the arts, and cafés — to hear a concert of Gagaku, of all things. A touring group from Japan performed three items from the traditional repertory and a piece by Toru Takemitsu written for the traditional ensemble.
Two of the pieces involved dance, one for a solo male dancer, one a duet — if a work involving two men, side by side in indescribably complex and beautiful costume, performing identical choreography, can in fact be thought of as a duet.
The music was delicious and strange, veering from unison ensemble to various solo instruments, a continuously lyrical, pungent, keening sound, now quiet, now suddenly full-throated, played by reeds, flutes, plucked strings, and percussion.
The performers knelt on the raised platform, all dressed in formal yellow gowns, very gravely walking in and out with their instruments, meditating some moments before beginning each piece. The concert lasted only a little over an hour; the hall was sold out; the crowd was appreciative and extremely excited afterward.

TWO DAYS LATER we were at the Rome Opera Theater, in the center of town, a fine small opera house with seven ranks of galleries, to hear Der Rosenkavalier in a co-production with Tolosa. Sung in German, a language I don't know at all, but intelligently supertitled in Italian, Hoffmansthal's book was expressive enough; and Strauss's music was beautifully played by the orchestra and sung by the cast (barring wide vibrato in the first few minutes of each of the three sopranos).
I don't know any of the cast — it's years since I kept up at all with opera, and in any case I'm sure these were mostly young singers near the beginnings of their careers. The Feldmarschallin and the Rosenkavalier were really quite wonderful; Sophie was fresh and lyrical; Ochs a bit exaggerated, of course.
Since it was a traveling production the set was fairly minimal: the tedious jokes of the third-act opening were therefore minimized; fine with me. This production was more about age and youth, or perhaps I should say experience and youth, than it was about the clash of court and country.
Perhaps because the Bellini show was still in mind, this Rosenkavalier seemed unusually philosophical, ultimately both moral and aware: every Moment dissolves into Continuity, true enough; but it's also true this involves Loss. A beautiful, resigned, realistic view of transience; an appropriate subject for this Eternal City.

A FEW DAYS LATER we moved from the sublime to, well, it wasn't ridiculous, to pure entertainment with a revue in the Auditorium on the Conciliazione, Good Morning Mr. Gershwin. A dozen dancers moved through solos, duets, small ensembles, and full production numbers involving tap, break dancing, hip-hop, comedy pantomime, and jazz dancing, all to (alas pre-recorded) music by Gershwin.
Behind them a screen filled the huge width of the stage with video projections of the same dancers, sometimes mirroring the choreography on stage, sometimes serving as pure décor, often nude but prettily, not provocatively. The numbers were often but not exclusively comic: one routine involving a sturdy woman eating an éclair might have come straight out of 1920s vaudeville.
Toward the end, though, the act turned serious, recapitulating the social history of the "Negro" in the U.S. The projections became documentary; the choreography expressing, without ever simply depicting, the emotional quandary of this huge subset of the American population as it was so stupidly and wrongly marginalized.
Our president-elect was never mentioned or depicted, thankfully: the production was set long before the historic election of two weeks ago. But the evening ended on a note of celebration: the worst of those injustices are far behind us, a Dark Ages of our own time. Again, the house was full; again, fully appreciative — jubilant, in fact.

LAST NIGHT WE HEARD an orchestral concert: two Third Symphonies, one by Schubert, one by Bruckner; again at the Conciliazione which is now, since we've moved into a hotel in the Prati, our neighborhood hall.
It's a dry, bright hall, and the Orchestra Sinfonica di Roma is a young, brash orchestra, and while last night's conductor, Lior Shambadal, was neither young nor brash himself he did nothing to tame his brass and timpani players; the resulting interpretations weren't memorable.
The Schubert was more ponderous than it should have been and the Bruckner was unbearably slow much of the time, as if Bruckner's vast architecture was being examined with a magnifying glass. But what a delight to hear these two composers coupled on a program, and to hear and watch their music being played live! Next week they play the "Unfinished" and two Mahler song-cycles, and perhaps we'll be there again.

Bellini: mental perspective

Via Corsini, Rome, Nov. 15—

TO THE SCUDERIE the other day, up on the Quirinale, to see a blockbuster show of paintings by Giovanni Bellini, ?1435-1516, an artist who had the luck to live in a time of great change, the intelligence to be aware of that and to respond to it, and the genius to do that in work that continues to seize the intelligence and sensibility of onlookers half a millenium later.

Giovanni Bellini: Pesaro Altarpiece

The Scuderie show offered dozens of paintings, beautifully hung and lit in ten rooms on two floors, beginning with the Pesaro Altarpiece, perhaps Bellini's major breakthrough, painted when the artist was thirty or so (his birth date is uncertain). This online reproduction does the work no justice, of course: the first thing you have to know is that it is nearly eight feet wide. In a curious way, thanks to Bellini's mastery of recessive space, as you contemplate the painting the distant landscape gradually becomes its most significant component. It's as if the figures at the foreground and the divinity symbolized by the cherubim above were mediated through landscape, I thought looking at it; and indeed the little pamphlet we were given agreed:

…here the relationship between divine and human is very nagurtally and simply translated into landscape. A relationship that becomes mental perspective.

This mental perspective returns in what was to me the most arresting and memorable work in the show, the "Sacred Allegory" of perhaps twenty years later. The painting is arrestingly modern, even ahistorical, bringing to mind such disparate work as Fra Angelico's Annunciation and Degas's Spartan Youths.

Giovanni Bellini: Sacred Allegory

Incredibly rich and moving, this painting refers to Plato's allegory of the cave, to pagan times (the centaur barely visible at the right edge beyond the lake), to the Hebrew creation story and Christian legend (St. Peter about to go fishing, left of center), to the progress from youth to age (figures on the right, foreground), and to contemporary times (that timeless woman, left, in the black shawl).
I don't know what to make of the porcini-like, flying saucer-like apparatus at the upper left corner, but the distant landscape full of architecture, center, recalls by its placement the one in the Pesaro Altarpiece — though more fully elaborated. Oddly, though you don't see it in this reproduction, the classical temple facade with the dark doorway, just above exact center, is the most brightly lit passage in the painting.
I think Bellini, at least by the time he painted this Sacred Allegory, was not Christian but Hellenistic: I mean, uncommitted, privately, to an exclusively monotheistic, let alone Christian, view of life and nature, individual and society, moment and continuity. The progress of his Madonnas is a fascinating thing to see, and can be seen readily in this exhibition: when again will you ever see the identically posed Detroit and Milan Madonnas in a single room? Painted a year apart from a single cartoon, they show an increasing secularization of the subject. Bellini's view of the Madonna and Child is more about Maternity than theology, I think; the foreboding in the Madonna's face as she considers her son's future is universalized because it is generalized beyond anguish toward contemplation of an inevitable. Birth incorporates death, as the Moment incorporates Continuity, once self-sentiment is transcended.
I suppose this is what Christianity attempted, two thousand years ago, here in Rome: a mythic apparatus that would appeal to a rising sense of individual self in a society grown insanely complex. As far as I'm concerned, in succeeding at appealing to hoi polloi at the expense of scrapping Hellenistic subtleties of intellect, it lost its usefulness; I suspect Bellini has this in mind late in his career.

Peace memorial

Via Corsini, Rome, Nov. 9—

Richard Meier's building for the Ara Pacis

UPTOWN TODAY — I always think of upstream in Rome, toward the Piazza del Popolo, as "uptown", I don't quite know why — to see the first new building in central Rome in eighty years, or something like that: to my taste rather a nondescript flatroofed boxy thing of glass and concrete, next to the Tiber; set on a plaza and backed by a handsome travertine wall down which water sheets into a gutter leading to a clichéd square pool with four rows of four vertical jets. Some like this; I find it a little unsettling — it refers to Rome, of course, with her fountains and piazzas; but it's unlike anything else here, yet insufficiently arresting to justify its irrelevance.

Oh well: this container is interesting for the thing contained, the Ara Pacis as it's called — in fact not the Altar of Peace, apparently never found, but the cube of a roofless building that enclosed it. The Ara Pacis was erected a couple of thousand years ago to commemorate the Roman pacification of Spain and Gaul, as I understand it: I have no idea what the altar looked like, but its enclosure, say thirty feet square and nine or ten high (I'm guessing), is a thing well worth seeing, even worth commissioning a nondescript new building to protect.

Inside Meier's museum the first thing you notice is a scale model of the supposed original spatial context, very different from today's. The Tiber makes the same bend, but only three buildings are to be seen on the huge expanse that was then the champs-de-Mars, the training ground for young soldiers: the Pantheon, built in 27 BCE by Augustus Caesar's son-in-law Agrippa; Augustus's mausoleum, which he himself had built at about the same time; and, midway between them but considerably east of their axis, the Ara Pacis, dedicated eighteen years later. (Between the Ara Pacis and the center axis was an horarium, a paved rectangle serving as sundial whose gnomon was an obelisk.)

Reconstruction of the Campo Marzio, 9 BCE: at left, Augustus's Mausoleum; right, Pantheon; center distance, Ara Pacis beyond Horarium

Two things are immediately striking about this: first, the apparent emptiness of the zone, given more to Nature than to architecture; second, the location of the Ara Pacis, away from the river and oriented toward the sun — an orientation underlined by the Horarium, designed so that the gnomon's shadow will fall on the Altar at noon on the equinox, as I understand it.
The deliberate mirroring of the Pantheon, celebrating all the gods, and the Mausoleum, celebrating Augustus Caesar, is unmistakable. I think, too, that the openness of the plan, all that empty grassy field between, reinforces a sensibility that must have been oriented more toward Nature and her spaces, less to the city-dwelling system of "development" and its complex economic, political, and technological structures.
Augustus was passed off as a god himself, descended from Apollo: after the experiment of the Roman Republic failed it took divine intervention to restore a degree of order and impose a degree of "peace" on society. It must have been important for him to have been seen as something apart from the mass of humanity in the city that had built up to the south, in the harbor and the forum and the apartments and villas surrounding the Capitoline hill.

WELL, YOU CAN'T put things back as they were two millenia ago, and I suppose this new installation of what's left of the Ara Pacis is a good thing, though the point of the original setting is largely lost, and the Ara itself is missing, and its original enclosure turned 180 degrees from what was intended as I understand it. The fragments that have turned up so far are set into a concrete wall reconstructing the size and shape of the original; missing figures from the bas-relief sculptures are indicated in two dimensions; the entire surround is placed high on a podium. Walking up those steps and entering the enclosure is a solemn kind of experience, quite like entering the Pantheon.
There are plenty of explanatory panels, in Italian and English, identifying the figures in the reliefs, which portray a kind of parade celebrating the peace Augustus has imposed on those distant colonies. Considerable light falls from all sides, thanks to Meier's glass curtain walls. The sculpture itself is intensely interesting, both for its intrinsic qualities and for its historical significance. (It's hard to think of it colored, though, as it must have been when new; but that's a subject for another day.)

From the sublime to the ridiculous: We left the Ara Pacis and headed for the Spanish Steps, with the usual Sunday crowds jamming the streets. It was the hour of the passaggiata, that slow amble Italians and other latins, I think) love to take on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Something was heightening the effect, though, and as we neared the Corso we heard a marching band just stepping out of sight toward the Piazza del Populo, enthusiastic children marching along behind it; and then here flew nine fighter-jets low overhead, right up the airspace over the Corso, red, white, and green smoke trailing behind them to lay the national colors out across Apollo's sky. We've largely lost the Augustan context, but human nature continues to respond to his instincts. I suppose it always will.

Shopping in Rome

Via Corsini, Rome, Nov. 8—

"Garden" of the Villa Corsini, across from our apartment

ANOTHER LAZY DAY in Rome, begun with an amble up the via della Scala, through the Piazza Sant'Egidio (whose trees have grown considerably since we stayed there four years ago), through the Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere, down the via S. Francesco a Ripi to nearly the viale, then up the Natale del Grande, pointing out our favorite shops for pastries, cheeses, salume, household items and the like. Pointing out, too, the Pizzeria da Ivo where we really must eat one of these days, since we both (both couples, I mean) have grandsons named Ivo, and since it is a soccer pizzeria, and Hans is a soccer adept.

The goal was the Santo Cosimato market, our local market. Last time we were here it was being torn up; now everything's back in order. Not as many stalls, Lindsey said; I disagreed. Finally I asked a saleswoman at one of the stalls: Ci sono tanti banchi come avanti, um, avanti la ricostruzione della piazza?
The woman looked puzzled, and well she might: my Italian is atrocious. But she figured it out, and said No, not quite as many.
Mi dispiace sentirlo, I said, I'm sorry to hear it: it means my wife is right, and I am wrong.
Sempre così, it's always like that, said the smiling woman.

We bought clementines and bananas and a scarf for me, a nice black one, and Anneke found a carry-bag, and I found a couple of used books. But where was the handsome tall redhead we'd enjoyed looking at four years ago? I approached an unoccupied fish-merchant: There used to be a tall, thin, red-headed guy here—
He stopped me, waving toward the man we'd bought the clementines from. It's his friend, he said. Yes, he's still living; he doesn't come as often. A contadino.
Reassured, we turned back down the Natale del Grande toward the viale. Time for tea. More shopping on the street, though: socks, sweaters, scarves, a nice black hat. I always buy my socks from stalls on Italian streets. They frequently give out at the toes after a few wearings, but some of them don't, and they're cheap enough the gamble's worth it.

We sat out the rain with a cup of tea, then toured San Francesco a Ripi, stopping to enjoy the theatrical lighting of Bernini's nearly obscene Beata Lodovica Albertoni, an amazingly lifelike marble sculpture of a robed woman in ecstasy — spiritual ecstasy, we're assured. I was more interested in a small painting — perhaps a self-portrait? — memorializing Margareta d'Arezzo, a woman who had been a painter of flowers in the mid-19th century. The inscription referred to her as modest, productive, and devout, and she looked so ordinary, so down-to-earth, that I wanted to know her. She, and the funeral whose close we respectfully waited before touring the church, meant more to me than Bernini's virtuosity.

Mid-day dinner at Alberto il Sardo (described at Eating Every Day); then the tram 8 up the viale, pointing out G.G. Belli's statue at his piazza, to the Argentina to see about concert tickets. Alas, no music these days at the Argentina: but at Feltrinelli's box office we bought opera tickets for next Wednesday; then trammed back to Trastevere to shop a little for our supper.
Bread and foccaccie at "our" bakery on the via Mora, where I finally made the cold beautiful blond behind the counter smile when Lindsey corrected my Italian: fiore di zucca, not zucchini. Zucca, zucchini, zuccaccia, I said; Sì: tutti corretti, zucche, zucchini, zuccaccie, the woman smiled, and served out our foccaccie and cut a loaf of bread in half, for we buy it half a loaf at a time, warm from the wood-fired oven.
Up the street, the wrong street, and back to find the right one, and up that one to our little supermarket for a bottle of water and a few rolls of toilet paper and such.
Past the casual market at the Piazza Trilussa — another Trastevere poet, though not as ribald as Belli: who could be? — where once again Hans did not buy a beautiful black cap though he admired it, and where none of us was interested in the jewelry. Up the via Benedetta past my favorite breakfast bar, but we did not go in for a coffee; it's time rather for a pot of deicious Lapsong Souchong at home. And back to thumb through the guidebooks, to read the e-mail harvested on my pocket computer as we walked past a wifi hotspot, to read a few pages of Calvino, to nap.
Lazy days in Trastevere.

Via Corsini

Via Corsini, Rome, Nov. 6—

the via Corsini

TIME TO WRITE a little about our apartment, no. 10C, via Corsini, Rome. Except for one problem we couldn't have done much better. The apartment is huge: thirty-one meters long, Anneke says, after pacing it off, and nearly five wide, divided into two bedrooms, a big sitting room with two couches and an armchair, two bathrooms, and a nicely equipped kitchen.
The via Corsini is rarely driven on; across the street from our building is the Villa Corsini's "back yard," a one-acre lawn behind a handsome iron fence and set about with huge palm trees; down to the left, at the corner, past the carabinieri station (which keeps us safe), is the equally handsomely gated entrance to Rome's Botanical Garden, always worth a stroll.
We're at the foot of the Janiculum hill, and Garibaldi's huge bronze presence above the Garden seems to watch over us. Down the street to the right, the via Lungara would take us straight up to the Vatican, if we only cared to go. Instead we turn the other way, coming in twenty meters or so to the Porta Settimiana, the southern gate in the old Roman wall on this side of the Tiber.
Across the Tiber: trans tevere; Trastevere. We feel at home. A free wi-fi cafe around the corner on via Dorotea takes away the sting of our apartment's one failure: the advertised Internet connection has never worked. A little further down, my favorite breakfast place supplies organic milk and blood-orange juice and fine breakfast pastries, to be eaten there with Trastevere's best cappuccino or taken home.
The Ponte Sisto is very close, just at the Piazza Trilusso: it's only a few minutes' walk across the river to the Campo dei Fiori, the via Pellegrino, and, a little further, Piazza Navona and the Pantheon, where the best coffee in Rome (and possibly all Italy, therefore the whole world) is available at Tazza d'Oro.
The days have been quiet and lazy. There was of course the exciement, muted in our apartment for lack of Internet and English-language television, of the presidential election. Otherwise we've been strolling with Hans and Anneke, taking in the Pantheon, the Piazza Navona, Trastevere, and, yesterday, the Aventine, whose hill I'd not yet climbed.
Last night we dined at the American Academy, where we first listened in on a little seminar comparing Ovid lines in Latin, English, and Italian translations. I've written about dinner over at Eating Every Day and won't repeat that here: but let me note that after dinner we ventured downstairs to a media room to watch Margaret Fisher's Letters from Duchamp, a video presentation of her work from my opera The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, and then her half-hour video Exquisite Corpse, a cut-up of haunting prose, sound, and visual material including actors and documentary footage. I always find Margaret's work supremely intelligent, deep and solid; clearly narrative though never restricted to linear story or fixed plot. Work, I think, for connoisseurs.

moonlight at the Academy

We left the Academy about eleven o'clock, walking across the dark dark garden, admiring the moon beyond the pines, then turning down the street, past carabinieri protecting a consulate, across the piazza in front of the silent Fontanone supplying Trastevere's many fountains, and turning down a staircase to find our way home easily. Quiet night; civil town. We feel quite at home.

Il Mondo Cambiato

Via Corsini, Rome, Nov. 6—

WE STOPPED OFF at the edicula on the Piazza Sta. Maria in Trastevere this morning, on our way for a day's walk to Sta. Cecilia and then the Aventine and so on, to buy the historic newspapers. Reppublica had a dozen pages on the election, with articles by Madeline Albright and others, and the complete acceptance speech (in Italian, of course).
Le Monde also had complete coverage, including detailed results state by state, and a twelve-page supplement into the bargain. And the International Herald Tribune, of course, was not to be outdone.
Huge photos of the serious or smiling president-elect Obama were on every front page. Surprised in spite of myself I exclaimed to Lindsey: Look at them! Obama everywhere!
A woman on my other side turned and asked pointedly, in American English, Where are you from? California, I said, Northern California.
I'm from New Hampshire, she said; We couldn't be farther apart.
But now we're very close, I said; side by side, in fact.
She wasn't buying it. I'm afraid, she said, Very afraid. I don't know what is going to happen.
Are you afraid for his life, I asked.
I'm afraid of everything, she said. And I believe she was. Her face was nearly rigid with fear; fear sat in her eyes. I didn't know what to say, I'm sorry to report, and didn't think to try to reassure her.

Her fear does not seem shared by the newspapers. They all report that the world is changed; a new optimism (or at the least realism) is in place; America has reassumed her position of enlightened leader into the new millenium.
Most curiously, Obama's election, it's widely reported here, has ended racism and finally ended America's Civil War. This is proclaimed in headlines, even adjacent to maps showing most of the Confederacy went red for McClain. It's a little odd to be here at this moment; we wonder what the mood is really in the States, the mood among those voters, nearly half of them, who voted against Obama, the ones who voted against equal rights to marriage.
And I continue to wonder if democracy can work in a culture that replaces education with propaganda, paid advertisments, and trivialized "information" elicited and published by a press whose chief role seems to be entertainment.
We elected the right president, I think, and we seem to be giving him the support he'll need in Congress. Western Europe is clearly behind him one hundred percent. Perhaps this has been the turning point; perhaps now America will address social problems internationally and at home as just that: problems, to be recognized, analyzed, and dealt with intelligently and practically, not from an ideological program. Let's hope so.

The flight from I Mandorli

Apeldoorn, October 31—

TOO SHORT A STAY at I Mandorli early this week, sharing its pleasures with our friends Richard and Marta; but this is a trip with a social purpose, and we flew up to The Netherlands yesterday.

We'd driven from Monferrato to Bergamo on Thursday. What a drive: we took the wrong highway at Alessandria, forcing a turnaround and losing twenty minutes; then the wrong toll-gate at Milan, winding up in the dreaded town of Rho where I'd been stopped by a traffic cop twenty years ago: another loss of twenty minutes.

That meant we were no longer following Richard and Marta, and had to find our way to the day's destination using a description that misled us. Get off the autostrada at Casella Bergamo, it said; so we went past the Bergamo exit, expecting Casella Bergamo to be next. It wasn't: Seriate was; so we went on. We took the next exit, though, and a good thing we did: "Casella" turns out to mean, simply, "exit." I'm going to look more closely into this later; I suspect casella is more like "tollgate"; uscita remains legitimate Italian for "exit": but I could be wrong.

Phone calls, small roads, traffic congestion; and finally we pull up in front of a café and wait for the hotel to send someone to lead us into Trescore Balneatico, an odd little suburb outside Bergamo, where we spend the night at the Hotel al Torre. We'd spent half an hour finding this hotel the night before, consulting a 1997 Michelin Guide we found in the breakfast room at I Mandorli. Bergamo was indicated, because we fly out of here: it's the third airport of Milan these days, much used by cut-rate airlines like Ryanair. We'd have preferred staying in the old city of Bergamo itself, fascinating and dedicated to good eating — little birds (thrushes) with polenta being only one of its delicacies — but the hotels are full; there's a feria on, a business show of some kind; Milan and Verona and Bergamo are dedicated to these big commercial expositions; in a way trading and trade fairs have kept northern Italy and central Europe busy since the Amber Route days.

The hotel turned out to be quite nice, with an inviting garden, a pleasant bar-café, a comfortable big bedroom, and an acceptable restaurant; and Trescore is only twenty minutes' drive from the airport. Bergamo Orlo e Serio, as the airport's called, is small and accessible once you figure out the car-rental return (always an airport problem, it seems) and deal with the improvements being made (ditto), and yesterday's flight to the equally provincial Dutch city of Eindhoven was smooth and quick.

From that airport, a bus ride was enlivened by a small accident when a little delivery truck pulled out in front of us, earning its German driver a sober lecture (delivered in Dutch) from our driver. Oh well: no harm done, though it was unsettling; miglior qui che giù, better here than up there, said the Italian fellow next to me who'd shared our flight from Bergamo, pointing up toward the heavens.

Train to Utrecht; change to train to Amersfoort; change to train to Apeldoorn, all quick and efficient once you figure out which platform you need. Low-roofed Dutch houses; open Dutch pastures; orderly rhythmic lines of Dutch elms in the fading autumnal light. I ignore the industrial complexes, the endless clusters of huge new apartment-building suburbs, the occasional heap of scrap metal or concrete awaiting orderly recycling. Italy is delightful and cluttered, like the shouted conversations of the Italians in the airplane; The Netherlands, here in the east, away from the big cities, is delightful and serene. We feel at home, wherever we are.

A few days in Monferrato

I Mandorli, Cardona di Alfiano Natta, October 28—

WE FLY THIRD CLASS, excuse me, "Coach." Though I stand six feet tall my legs are a little short; I'm not disfigured, I like to think, just a little long in the waist; in any case my legs don't mind the cramped airplane seat on a reasonably short haul, say nine hours.

This, though, was not a short haul, and we were lucky to be boosted into "Business Class." I'd never realized what a difference it makes. The flight from San Francisco to Milan began well enough, a smooth ride halfway across the States to JFK where we'd change planes. Over the Great Lakes, though, the weather began, and by the time we were approaching JFK it was pretty rough.

We circled so long waiting for weather to clear enough to land that fuel was running low, so we touched down at Dulles, Washington D.C., to refuel; then, after more delay, flew on up to JFK where we landed in the roughest weather I've flown in, fishtailing our way down the slick runway.

We were four hours late, and the Milan plane had left, of course. There wouldn't be another until the next night, so we were put on an oversold flight to London, where British Airways would pick us up for the short hop to Milan. We had no seat assignment, and were not given one at the gate. Don't worry, we were told; we'll page you.

We waited. Boarding began. Passengers were paged. Standbys were seated. We were left waiting.

I went back to the desk, where the clerk drew me aside with a conspiratorial air, beckoning also to Lindsey. She whispered, as if afraid others would hear: We have two seats in Business, but they aren't together. Will they do? Yes, I assured her, and we finally boarded, to be greeted by a glass of Pommery, a menu offering various meals, white and red wines poured from real bottles — and, best of all, noise-cancelling headphones, and a seat that reclined fully. I haven't slept so soundly in years.

Arrived finally at Milan Malpensa, nine hours later than expected, we found our baggage had not accompanied us. We were not the only ones, of course, many Milan-bound passengers had missed flight 198 out of New York. Niente a fare, nothing to be done about it: we got into our little rented Panda and drove here to Cardona, in one of my favorite corners of the world, to I Mandorli, where though we'd missed Sunday dinner's bollito misto its soul was awaiting us: see Eating Every Day.

The weather has been foggy, autumnal; the colors muted and deep though subtle. White truffle weather; knit sweater weather. Richard and I took an hour's walk to the next town, Alfiano Natta, along an unpaved country road past modestly imposing farmsteads, big sturdy buildings that are homes at one end, haymows and corncribs at the other, with elegant brickwork and molded stucco decorations, and beautifully tended gardens whose lawns are set about with pines, elms, poplars, cypresses.

The days are devoted to conversation at breakfast, drives in the country, conversation at lunch and dinner, and the occasional fretfulness at missing baggage.

Ah! Here it is! The poor deliveryman had been detained by little "incidents", foggy weather, and mystification at the many hamlets and winding roads here in Monferrato. Did I mention the telephones (and therefore Internet) have been out for days, victim of a mouse attack on the trunk line?

Nassim Taleb and his black swans

LAST WEEK I WROTE about Nassim Taleb's book The Black Swan, forgetting to steer you to an interesting online review here. Then last night on the McNeil News Hour who should show up, at the end of the show, but Mr. Taleb himself, in an interview with the News Hour's sometimes determinedly entertaining economy commentator Paul Solman. Even more striking, exciting really, Taleb was joined by the man he claims as mentor, Benoît Mandelbrot.
For ten minutes they talked about Taleb's book and the economic crisis. The interview was both fascinating and disturbing; I wish it had been an hour long. Fortunately PBS does a good job of making itself available: you can read the transcript, listen to or download the audio track, or watch the streaming video of the interview on the PBS webpage.
Not to be overly dramatic, but Taleb and Mandelbrot say that this crisis may well be the greatest disturbance since, not merely the Great Depression, but the American Revolution. Citing the incredible complexity of the global economy, they see the entire apparatus to a chain reaction of unknowable effects. As Taleb explains:

You may have chain reactions we've never imagined before. And these come from the intricate relationships in the system we don't understand.

PAUL SOLMAN [turning toward the 84-year-old Mandelbrot]: You've been around a lot longer than we have. That's possible. Is it likely?

BENOIT MANDELBROT: Well, we don't know the probability. We don't have enough knowledge. We don't have enough information. We don't have enough reliable information on data which are not published. I mean, I sleep better, perhaps, than Nassim, but I don't sleep very well.

Sorry if I've disturbed your sleep.

"Values," abstraction, accumulation, chaos

FOR SOME TIME NOW I've wanted to write about a fascinating book read last month, Nassim Nicholas Taleb's The Black Swan: the Impact of the Highly Improbable (New York: Random House, 2007). Alas, I read it from the library, and did not take notes; I won't write about it in any critical detail here. (There's an extended discussion of the book online.)
Briefly, it's Taleb's point that history is the litany of convulsive unexpected events punctuating daily predictability. (It occurs to me that The Blog is a convenient analogy.) The title refers to the scientific and philosophical certainty, going back to Aristotle, that swans are white, a black one being exceedingly improbable — a certainty convulsed by the discovery of black ones when Australia was "discovered" in the 17th century.
Taleb uses analogy and metaphor to propel his book, analogy and metaphor and above all humor; and he does this so well that one races through it where one should stop and consider, take note and perhaps demur.
Another bird metaphor intrudes: his Turkey Narrative. The turkey, according to Taleb, assumes that tomorrow will be just like today, someone will come and feed it as has happened every day of his life. The turkey does not suspect that final morning, when instead of being fed he'll be sent to slaughter.
As you might have suspected, The Black Swan is largely about Wall Street. It is also an assault on the idea of the Bell Curve, on the notion that Experts Are Infallible, on The narrative fallacy which, according to the Wikipedia discussion referenced above,

refers to our tendency to construct stories around facts, which … may serve a purpose, but when someone begins to believe the stories and accommodate facts into the stories, they are likely to err.

and on the division of information among the categories Known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.
That last will sound familiar to those whose memories go back to the early days of the present Iraq war. I always thought in not amusing that Secretary Rumsfeld talked about "unknown unknowns"; it seemed a perfectly legitimate concept to me. Turns out that Nassim Taleb was a consultant, on occasion, to the Department of Defense. Indeed he writes, in The Black Swan, of a brainstorming session he attended in Las Vegas, of all places:

The symposium was a closed-doors, synod-style assembly of people who would never have mixed otherwise. My first surprise was to discover that the military people there thought, behaved, and ated like philosophers… I came out of the meeting realizing that only military people deal with randomness with genuine, introspective intellectual honesty—unlike academics and corporate executives using other people's money. … the military collected more genuine intellects and risk thinkers than most if not all other professions. Defense people wanted to understand the epistemology of risk. (p. 126)

TALEB REFERS TO HIMSELF as a "skeptical pragmatist," a phrase I like; and divides the world we live in into two mental constructs: Mediocristan, "the province dominated by the mediocre, with few extreme successes or failures," ruled by the bell curve; and Extremistan, "the province where the total can be conceivably impacted by a single observation," like that of the final arrival of the turkey-farmer. His book goes a long way to suggesting reasons for the institutional failure of the market this year, and indeed the statistical near-certainty that such failures will happen. Another publication, much smaller and less public, discusses a different philosophical approach to the problem: Money and the Crisis of Civilization, an essay by Charles Eisenstein published at Reality Sandwich, an online forum-magazine-construct so visually cluttered I haven't had the desire to explore it further.
I am impressed, though, with Eisenstein's essay (and thank Richard Burg for sending it to me). It explains the paper credit crisis very clearly (perhaps too simply, economists might object), and then comes to a startling conclusion. The entire affair is of course a gigantic Ponzi scheme (here again Wikipedia is entertaining): moreover, Eisenstein suggests, the entire history of capitalist economy is a Ponzi scheme, and the current crisis is another in what may be the death throes of capitalist economics as we've known it for the last century or so.
The startling conclusion is that Capitalism has very nearly eaten itself to death. The problem lies in the conversion of Things to Money. Money originated as a token of a pledge, an object to stand for the promise to pay in the future, with a service or a product, in return for a temporary loan symbolized by the token: a shell, gold, a slip of special paper, whatever.
Eisenstein recites the dismal litany of Things sacrificed, one after another in the several centuries of capitalist history, to the conversion into Money — which had gradually grown from token of delayed repayment to retained "Wealth":

Essentially, for the economy to continue growing and for the (interest-based) money system to remain viable, more and more of nature and human relationship must be monetized. …
The crisis we are facing today arises from the fact that there is almost no more social, cultural, natural, and spiritual capital left to convert into money. Centuries, millennia of near-continuous money creation has left us so destitute that we have nothing left to sell. Our forests are damaged beyond repair, our soil depleted and washed into the sea, our fisheries fished out, the rejuvenating capacity of the earth to recycle our waste saturated. Our cultural treasury of songs and stories, images and icons, has been looted and copyrighted. Any clever phrase you can think of is already a trademarked slogan. Our very human relationships and abilities have been taken away from us and sold back, so that we are now dependent on strangers, and therefore on money, for things few humans ever paid for until recently: food, shelter, clothing, entertainment, child care, cooking. Life itself has become a consumer item. Today we sell away the last vestiges of our divine bequeathment: our health, the biosphere and genome, even our own minds. This is the process that is culminating in our age. It is almost complete, especially in America and the "developed" world. In the developing world there still remain people who live substantially in gift cultures, where natural and social wealth is not yet the subject of property. Globalization is the process of stripping away these assets, to feed the money machine's insatiable, existential need to grow. Yet this stripmining of other lands is running up against its limits too, both because there is almost nothing left to take, and because of growing pockets of effective resistance.

---

WHICH LEADS ME TO the phrase in today's subject-line. I think of this latest crisis, the one centered on the Global Economy and its collapse (though no doubt to be set right temporarily by the infusion of money promised, yet again, by an unknowable Future), as more evidence that contemporary social life is accelerating itself to death. Matt Matsuda writes about this in his book The Memory of the Modern (Oxford University Press US, 1996):

One key, recurring word explains all: acceleration. Pierre Nora begins Les Lieux de mémoire under its sign: "The acceleration of History: let us try to gauge the significance, beyond metaphor, of this phrase. An increasingly rapid slippage of the present into a historical past that is gone for good, a general perception that anything and everything may disappear." As History accelerates, the "lieux de mémoire" are designated sites which defy time's destroyer, the places of commemoration where memory anchors the past. My studies, rooted in the biology, technologies, and political economy of the late nineteenth century are somewhat differently oriented: they attempt to approximate Henri Bergson's understanding of memory as action and transformation. In looking to shattered monuments, financial markets, high-seed machines, and the nervous system, my subjects are not the memories preserved from an accelerating history, but histories of accelerated memory, subjected to the dramatic rhythms of an age.

(Think of Francis Ponge's note, in Soap, that that (French) literary device the momon is typical of late historical eras in which rhetoric, dying, turns on itself; Ravel's La Valse is a good example.)
If we're indeed in a "downhill slide," acceleration is as inevitable as gravity; putting on Henry Paulson's brakes will generate a lot of heat, very little light, and only somewhat slow the collapse of the monetary economy. So what should we do? In Taleb's words,

Snub your destiny. … You stand above the rat race and the pecking ordere, not outside it, if you do so by choice.
Quiting a high-payiing position, if it is your decision, will seem a better payoff than the utility of the money involved… (p. 297)

And in Eisenstein's:

Individually and collectively, anything we do to resist or postpone the collapse will only make it worse. So stop resisting the revolution in human beingness. If you want to survive the multiple crises unfolding today, do not seek to survive them. That is the mindset of separation; that is resistance, a clinging to a dying past. Instead, allow your perspective to shift toward reunion, and think in terms of what you can give. What can you contribute to a more beautiful world? That is your only responsibility and your only security. The gifts you need to survive and enjoy will come to you easily, because what you do to the world, you do to yourself.

I THINK IT'S OUR endless tendency to evade the immediate that gets us into trouble, whether the evasion is prompted by boredom, distaste, laziness, or greed. It has something to do with our apparently also innate tendency to abstract and generalize, to categorize. Obviously it's useful to do that; it makes it possible to sort things out, to lay things aside for future use, to communicate concepts effectively (if not always truthfully) by using analogy and narrative. The problem is that it's so easy to forget that that's what you're doing, that you're dealing with not the thing but the idea of the thing. The Industrial and postindustrial ages have accelerated the extend to which the concept, the idea, has displaced the thing, the real. Profit-based economy is in a state of near-terminal confusion about this, generating commodities sold and bought for their code value, conceiving and generating services serving artificially generated needs.
When Senators Obama and McCain are asked what they will do about the economy they tend to talk about taxes, bailouts, jobs, mortgages: all of them very important politically. Lately Obama has also been talking about government kicking the economy by addressing infrastructure repair, which sounds a lot like a WPA effort: if so, good, say I: that was an triple effort aimed at improving the economy, employing the out of work, and providing for the community.
In the last analysis much of what I've been calling vaguely "the problem" results from the detachment of details from the context in which they exist. Money from an economy; concept from a reality; profit from an exchange; individuals from society. And, increasingly, it seems to me that this kind of detachment grows exponentially — accelerates, in fact — in a society whose numbers increase unsustainably, resulting in greater pressures of various kinds, and the temptation to turn against one's society, one's community, for sheer survival (as one thinks), rather than to trim one's individual sails, turn away from the accumulation of wealth, and take an appropriate place within the world as it is.
As the turbulence accompanying this process, and generated by it, continues, the things that truly matter to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are overcome by an accelerating accumulation of complexity leading to chaos. I hope the next Administration will think about these things. Perhaps the Department of Defense can give the departments of the Treasury and of Health and Human Services some pointers.

The Late Mattia Pascal

LAST MONTH, CASTING ABOUT for a book to read while visiting in Portland I picked up an early novel by Luigi Pirandello, whose short stories entertained me fifty years ago or so, and whose plays have always fascinated me — though opportunities to see them actually produced have been far too rare.
(An important exception to that was The Imaginists's Tonight We Improvise, seen in January 2007 in a marvelous production.)
I hadn't read his novels, though, and was unprepared for this. Written in 1904, preceded by at least two earlier novels, The Late Mattia Pascal is clear, entertaining, thoughtful, nostalgic, as complex as you want to make it, accessible, and a quick read. I won't give you the plot; you can find it summarized here: it's enough to report that Mattia Pascal has the luck to be found dead even though he is in fact on what Algernon Moncrieff called a Bunbury. The novel concerns events as they play out during Pascal's second life, and climactically as he returns to the scene of his apparent suicide.
I suppose it's only because of the time and place their authorship shares, but The Late Mattia Pascal made me think of Italo Svevo's novels and plays, and of Alberto Moravia's novel Gli indifferenti; there's a similar meticulous lassitude, shared by Pirandello and his character I think. The precision of Pirandello's descriptions of Pascal's awareness is really quite wonderful; you might think of Henry James, but a very efficient James.
William Weaver's translation seems fluent and expressive, placing the novel in its time but holding the 21st-century reader's attention. I'm sorry I now have to return the book…

Luigi Pirandello: The Late Mattia Pascal. Translated and with an introduction by William Weaver. 1995: Marsilio Publishers, New York

Does he really want to win?

WATCHING THE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE tonight, and thinking about it afterward, I suddenly begin to think it's possible McCain doesn't really want to win the election — or at least doesn't really care that much about losing. Do you remember his saying at one point that he'd rather lose an election than sacrifice a principle? (I paraphrase; I don't have an exact quote at hand.) Clearly he would have had to have gone on the attack in the debate to reverse his ebb in the recent polls, and he's stated at various times that he wasn't going to engage in that kind of campaign.
I think that statement was not disingenuous, even though his campaign, if not he himself personally, has turned to character attacks — certainly his vice-president pick, Sarah Palin, has done that. But in the debate tonight, McCain really didn't. I think he can't bring himself to that kind of conduct in live real time, and of course the physical presence of Obama would have had a sobering effect.
Don't get me wrong: I don't think McCain's any better a man than he needs to be, and I certainly don't give him points for consistency, let alone fidelity to principle. But I wonder if, faced with the recent polls, the overwhelming economic disasters, the difficulties shaping up on the international front, and his age and perhaps his physical condition, he doesn't really mind not winning. Perhaps his main point all along was to revise and reshape his party, not to be president. Perhaps he came to some kind of awareness when he told his party he wanted Joe Lieberman for vice president, and the party told him no. Perhaps the Palin choice was a challenge, not to the Democrats, but to the Republicans.

Further on flarf

FLARF IS A WORD new to me; I found it yesterday, in the course of reading further, among the many comments posted to Ron Silliman's blog, about Issue 1, the huge "anthology" of "poems" that included one attributed to me. One of Ron's commenters referred to it as a "fauxthology," a word I like.
"Flarf" apparently refers, originally, to a specific kind of writing: poems — let's beg that question for the moment — generated by a computer routine that trolls the Internet for source material and then, using various algorithms, chops up the material it finds and reconfigures it into lines with the appearance of poetry.
There's lots to like here, beginning with the neat trick by which the figurative "net" of the Internet is used to sieve material on the Internet.
Recursiveness. Matt Matsuda, I think it was, suggested that our culture like all previous cultures will die of acceleration: but our own culture's death will result, I think, from an accelerated recursiveness, and flarf may be a straw in the wind.
In any case it's a procedure with an honorable source going back to the cut-ins of William Burroughs and, beyond them, to the "random" generation of literature by Marcel Duchamp, of art by Hans Arp. It's inevitable that the literature of our time would be spelled with the double "l" of litter; Joyce got to that one in Finnegans Wake.


Flarf is automated Oulipo, and that's a contradiction in terms; surely any real Oulipo outcome must proceed from deliberateness. Perhaps the ouvroirs of potential literature — or should it be translated "literary potential"? — are taking over the consciousness of the workers within; perhaps that's what interconnected computers are doing to us all.
Fine with me: let bots do their mindless thankless work all they like; if some of the result is amusing, or poignant, or possibly even provocative, so much the better. But there's more to this affair than simply flarf.

Issue 1 has resulted in metaflarf by activating a sizable community; many of its 3,164 "contributors" are apparently readers of Ron's blog, or have been mentioned in it; and the sixty-odd comments that have appeared so far on his complaint about the fauxthology amount to flarf criticism, in both senses of the term.

While I've never been a fan of the concept "intellectual property," which sounds to me like a contradiction in terms, there are two things about a completely open public domain that bother me. One is the possibility of one's own work being forwarded or distributed inaccurately — with errors, whether deliberate or not, attributed to one's original work. The other is the possibility of one's own name being attached to things one has had nothing to do with, as is the case with Issue 1.

In this case, or at least in my own case, no harm done: no one would remotely think of me as a poet, or of the "poem" reproduced here yesterday as something I would or might have written. But if I were a poet, as Ron Silliman (to name only one of the thousands of "contributors") is a poet, then a casual reader may easily have made that mistake, and formed an opinion of the poet completely outside the poet's ability to influence. This, it seems to me, is an intolerable situation; it goes beyond hoax in the direction of fraud.
So I revise my feeling of yesterday that Ron goes too far in his anger with this event. His outrage is justified, and the perpetrators of the event can't be excused with the explanation that their work is art. I've never before been comfortable with the idea that artists, however outrageous their work may seem, are hoaxers. But then I've never before had to deal with anything quite as postmodern as this event seems to be.

Charles Shere, poet

I have written a new poem, as follows:

An ardent point

Supernatural as a point, more supernatural than evolution
Natural as an organism, more natural than development
Natural as an access, more natural than disputation
Natural as a point, more natural than stage

Perturbation on a forest and rare
       science, fair in
            news and privacy
Rarely simplifying, condemning, tottering
       slowly at a kindly crumb
What if she should have
       known at night?

Approached and got
She reached for timidity
Ardent as point, more ardent
       than nightfall

She vanished the point
       and pointed to the approach

Knew and ignored
Came and went

---

Well: I didn't write this, of course; I suspect it was generated artificially; it doesn't look like a poem that a conscious human would have written.
It appears online in an "anthology" called Issue 1, a 3785-page .pdf file containing poems attributed to 3,164 different writers. I found out about this over at Ron Silliman's blog, a daily reading that has provided me quite a lot to think about over the months.
Ron's in a dudgeon over this, and I can see his point: he's a professional poet, and annoyed at seeing something attributed to him that he certainly never wrote. It's even more automatically synthesized than the one I've reproduced above. The first four lines:

Lost as food and won as a coast
Inefficient as a corner and efficient as a recess
Lost as balance, won as a time
Lost as a coast and found as a recess

You can see the similarity of form in the openings of these two "poems." I don't know if others in the anthology are similarly generated; I haven't looked. There are enough books around here I haven't read that I want to read that I don't have to spend more time on this anthology.
But it's interesting, I think, that someone has programmed a computer to do all this, and to post the result on the Internet, and as a .pdf file: why's he doing it? And where did he get those 3,164 names? And what made him think I'm a poet?

Time-Based Art

LAST WEEK IN PORTLAND we attended three events in PICA's Time-Based Art festival. PICA is the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; "time-based art" is, well, art whose perception requires the passing of time, I guess; what art would that not be?

Not to be snide: it is of course art whose point, or much of whose point, is the awareness of the passing of time. I think I first started thinking about this on learning about Japanese traditional art forms, especially the Noh theater; soon enough this was associated with the music of John Cage and, especially, Morton Feldman.
Well, anyway, PICA has been running a festival of Time-Based Art for a number of years now, and the festival was on last week while we were visiting that fascinating city. After more than twenty years of retirement I still prefer not to go to performances or galleries casually, and I hadn't planned on going to any of these. But three events were irresistible.

On Saturday we tagged along with Khris Soden on his Portland Tour of Tilburg. We and about thirty other people followed him as he led us, walking backward most of the time and holding a little paper Dutch flag aloft, along forty blocks or so through downtown Portland. Along the way he discussed the buildings, sculpture, fountains and streets we were "seeing" — "seeing" in quotes because while we were looking at Portland he was describing Tilburg, Netherlands.

Some of us had booklets of photos of the described places (some of them) in Tilburg. They were helpful, I suppose, but soon enough I was more interested in the cognitive dissonance between what I was actually seeing and what I was hearing being described. It helped, of course, that I'm quite familiar with the generic appearance of Dutch cities; their parks, traffic, cafés, shops, architecture, and the like — even though I am not at all familiar with Tilburg, a fairly large city in Brabant, the part of the Netherlands I know the least.

Today (Friday, Sept. 19) my granddaughter Grace is taking Soden's tour of Portland in Tilburg; I wish I could have been with her. What Soden does is part sculpture, part walking, part dance; wholly active, wholly contemplative. I'll be thinking about it for a while.

SUNDAY WE ATTENDED an event that was pure Dance, The City Dance of Lawrence and Anna Halprin, with choreographers Linda K. Johnson, Cydney Wilkes, Linda Austin, and Tere Mathern, writer Randy Gragg, and the Third Angle New Music Ensemble, a dozen or so musicians, playing music by Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, and Terry Riley.

Probably a thousand people gathered at the first site to watch two corps of dancers in what amounted to a proscenium situation at Ira Keller Fountain Park. Morton Subotnick's electronic music surrounded the dancers and audience; many of us looked on from behind, or alongside. Toward the end ropes were thrown down over the lips of the cascades and dancers climbed them to the lips of the upper fountains, where they threw themselves into the pools; dance and athletics have rarely been so beautifully, so strikingly combined — and in a setting that also includes terrain, plantings, and the audience awareness of itself as participant.

From here, a number of ushers quietly and tactfully guided the audience to the next stop, Pettygrove Park: three fairly small circular berms set among broad-leaved trees. No fountain; just quiet land and trees. Musicians — flute, clarinet, trumpet, French horn, violins, viola, cello, bass — were scattered widely within the landscape, and dancers appeared, holding positions, then coming to life. The music was by Pauline Oliveros, and it was delicious. Hearing unpredictable but logically appearing sounds, from conventional instruments conventionally played, in an outdoors public space, is one of the great pleasures of civic musical life: it binds the audience together with itself, its community, and the traditions of its culture. And seeing the music punctuated and "interpreted" — not only the music, but the park setting as well — knits all these factors together.

At Keller Fountain we'd been on the extreme margin of the audience, hardly able to see the dancers; here we were at the center, the dancers on their berms around us; Pauline's music, with occasional called-out words and phrases from writings of Lawrence Halprin, somehow both floating and focussing the audience into a gentle fabric of urban sound. Distant traffic and more local natural sound contributed, as did uncontrollable small motions within the audience.

We were led next to Lovejoy park, where an ornate grand piano stood in water up to its ankles in a broad, flat pool. Once again the audience had moved into the arena before the dancers, but they soon appeared, by ones at first, then the entire company. As before, the choreography was an homage to Anna Halprin, the seminal San Francisco dancer whose "task" dances, like the great Parades and Changes, had rewritten dance history in the 1960s.

The music here was Terry Riley's, and before it was over a musician had waded to that piano and begun to hammer out the familiar octave "C"'s that begin his equally groundbreaking In C. Before the act was over dancers had taken to the back wall of the fountain, methodically splashing cupfuls of water against the concrete wall, claiming Action Painting as just another part of the entire, integrated mise en scène.

I found the entire event absolutely exhilarating. The Modernism of the 1960s retains its vitality, its optimism, its freshness: it lacks utterly the cynicism and cool detachment of the postmodernism of the present day. I'm almost sorry I'm no longer reviewing art for a daily newspaper: but, since I'm not, let me refer you to this review online: I couldn't do it any better.

ONE EVENT REMAINED: a screening at the Portland Museum of Art of Zidane, un portrait du 21e siècle , the 2006 film by Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno. Ninety minutes long, it is nothing more nor less than the entirety of the soccer game between Real Madrid and Villareal of April 23, 2005, "entirely filmed from the perspective of soccer superstar Zinedine Zidane," in the description at imdb.com. I found the film utterly fascinating and somewhat frustrating: you never really see soccer; you focus entirely on the persona of Zidane, who naturally spends much of the game physically relatively inactive while mentally entirely focussed and committed. When he does move, of course, he's definitive. Athletics and Dance fuse completely in this film, as they did in the Halprin homage; and when we left the theater I couldn't help breaking and running. Gotta dance.

Shameless self-promotion

LISTENING TO CAGE, by way of his Thirty Pieces for Five Orchestras, made me think to check out Feldman, so I went to E-Music to download his Coptic Light. Hearing that made me think of my own Nightmusic, so I put it on next. I'd forgotten how nice it sounds.

Googling it I discover it's available from Audiophile, with the Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano — to my knowledge Kent's first recording. (It was released in 1982.)



I wrote the piece forty-one years ago, I suddenly realize, on looking at my account of it over at shere.org. As recorded, it's a bit over 24 minutes long; quiet; mostly consonant.

Ashland 4: Two American Classics

Portland—

WE SAW SEVEN PLAYS in six days last week at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, only once having to squeeze in two performances on a single day. I've told you about the Shakespeare: here's a roundup of the remaining three. I won't go into details; click on the play-title links for OSF's webpages (casts are available there by clicking "Artists").

Thornton Wilder's Our Town is a classic, of course, stripping away all but the irreducible generic from its portrait of small town USA, turn of the previous century. There are those who no longer find it relevant; who think of it as simple-minded and sentimental. I'm not one of those; Chay Yew apparently was -- until he reread the play on being asked to direct it here in his OSF debut.

To my taste the overall success of this production is muted for much of its duration. Played in the outdoor Elizabethan Theater, it lacks two kinds of intimacy it would gain indoors: the stage is too apparent within its setting, but the audience, concentrating on that stage, loses contact among itself. I think Our Town is almost a community meeting; it profits from being shared by an audience aware of itself as part of the Grover's Corners community. Our Town, summoned up by its Stage Manager and playing almost entirely without props or sets, is meant to engage, even enter, the collective consciousness of its audience; for that to work, the audience needs to be aware of itself as a group. The darkness of the Elizabethan Theater audience makes that very difficult: the evening is like a nostalgic family snapshot, sixty years old, printed with far too much contrast, losing informative details in the dark.

But this production was evenly cast, beautifully narrated, nicely scaled; and it closes very effectively, melting away the specificity of individual life into the beautiful and reassuring inevitability and permanence of the future collective history that is death. I think it a magnificent play, and probably particularly one to see during a presidential campaign.

Arthur Miller's A View from the Bridge is another American classic, another essay on family and commmunity, another play with immediate political relevance. Staged in the (indoors) Angus Bowmer Theatre, it filled the wide stage with realism and action equally effective at presenting the exterior — dockside Brooklyn and its Italian-immigrant community in the late 1940s — and the interior — family life; psychological drama; challenge, defeat, and retribution.
Where Our Town is a philosophical romantic comedy, A View from the Bridge is a full-fledged Greek tragedy, lacking only the unity of time (it represents several months, not a single day, in the running its infernal machine).

For a number of years Miller's been consigned, I think, to a dusty corner of American theater. Setting his plays on specific American history — Italo-American Brooklyn, Puritan witch-hunt, middle-America traveling salesman — seemed to date him. But he wrote for his immediate present, couching the political issues that concerned him in parables his immediate audience would recognize. If the next generation lost interest, the one after that sees the universality, or rather the again timely, in this work. We continue to need it, alas.

Luis Alfaro's Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner is another matter. In Alfaro's words "a comedy about serious things," it concerns a woman who continues to eat, to inflate, finally to change utterly. Her own journey is set within the distractions of her family — a two-dimensional husband, a nymphomaniacal sister — and two rather undeveloped outsiders: her sister's cop boyfriend and an enigmatic Chinese woman met at a fat farm.

The production is well acted. (We saw an understudy, Kate Mulligan, in the lead role; she was absolutely first-rate.) In fact, I'd say the actors do more with the roles than the playwright has given them; credit has to go to Tracy Young's direction, too. But the production rides on a gimmick of stage mechanics* that ultimately becomes tiresome, turning Alfaro's "magic realism", I think, into bogus magic. I kept thinking there was a play here, somewhere, in fact; but that despite everyone's best intentions and efforts it never quite emerged; it floated away.

*Since writing this I've learned that the second act has been restaged and that "gimmick" — a flying harness — has been eliminated from the production. After two months, it became too much physical strain for the actress; presumably this is why we saw an understudy in the role.

at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland:

Thornton Wilder: Our Town, running through Oct. 11

Arthur Miller: A View from the Bridge, through Nov. 1

Luis Alfaro: Breakfast, Lunch and Dinner, through Nov. 2