Ornette Coleman - The Shape of Jazz to Come?

History is such a confusing and inexhaustible muddle, we're always on the lookout for "turning points" to serve as landmarks along the way. Wars and their aftermath are especially dramatic and revealing. Borders change, venerable states disappear, to be replaced by others which, before long, are likely to seem a little arbitrary themselves.

We ask, Why is the world like it is? Whence did these troubles arise? The answers seem to come from previous conflicts, unsatisfactorily resolved, or revolutions unfulfilled. Entrenched interests—the autocrats, the military, the capitalists, the apparatchiks, the one percent—are always claiming privilege, dragging their feet, resisting the tide of creativity and development.

On the opposite side of the coin, we tend to be impressed by those individuals who challenge assumptions, push the envelope, and break out of the mold, exercising their creativity to forge new and revolutionary paths, so that, as they say on the movie trailers, things were never the same, AGAIN. 

I'm laying on the clichés a little heavy, I know. But I have never quite understood why people tend to be suspicious of "progress" yet thrilled by "revolution." Maybe it's just the bourgeois in me, but it strikes me that the term "revolutionary" is value-neutral if not entirely bogus. It's a style statement more than a serious appraisal of merit. This fact may be underscored by the oxymoronic notion of "permanent revolution," which means, basically, "We have no ideas, but if you try to challenge us, you're toast."

Though the rhetoric is often the same in the worlds of art and culture, there are fewer guillotines and death camps involved, and things in general are more anodyne. Revolutionary artists, like revolutionary activists and thinkers, challenge assumptions, push the envelope, and break out of the mold, exercising their creativity to forge new and revolutionary paths, so that things will never be the same, AGAIN.

Picasso once famously remarked that creation involves destruction, and for the artist that may be true. But as new forms of art emerge, the old ones remain accessible to us. We can relish the novelty and zing of the new, while continuing to enjoy aspects of expression in older works that have fallen by the wayside to make way for new visions and excesses.

Ornette Coleman, the groundbreaking alto saxophonist who died recently, offers a classic instance of how new and "revolutionary" styles expand while also constricting an idiom. No one who heard Ornette play back in the late 1950s could fail to notice that his approach was "different" from the styles then popular. 

Regardless of their flavor, hard bop, West Coast jazz, chamber jazz, and Big Band involved improvisation following the harmonic rigors of a series of chord changes dictated by the tune. Ornette wasn't so interested in "playing the changes," as this method was called. He preferred to string together snippets of music--free-flowing motifs and riffs--over a rhythm section that had freed itself from the tyranny of chord progressions. The pianist was no longer welcome. 

And he was very good at sustaining this mode of improvisation for extended periods. It has even been observed that Coleman's seemingly endless melodic lines intimated, if they didn't actually establish, harmonic fields that his band-mates, and especially bassist Charlie Haden, were able to work within and flesh out on the fly, as it were. Coleman hadn't abandoned "the changes" so much as he'd liberated them from the familiar lengths and patterns that listeners commonly recognized.  

It was a fresh, new sound. But was it the shape of jazz to come? Not really.

The 1950s were a great time for "listening" jazz, as opposed to the "dancing" jazz of the Big Bands, which was on the wane. Many of the performers whose names are familiar to us today rose to prominence during that era. I'm thinking of Stan Getz, Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, Zoot Sims, Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Art Pepper, Dave Brubeck, Lee Konitz, Sonny Rollins, Cannonball Adderley, Bill Evans, Paul Desmond, Sonny Stitt, and Jackie McLean, to name a few.

In the early 1960s, musicians who were no longer satisfied with straight-ahead jazz opened three new veins of exploration. Coleman's was one. Miles Davis's complex experiments in modal jazz were another. And John Coltrane's more ecstatic and chant-like religious performances a third. Later in the decade another "school" exemplified by the Art Ensemble of Chicago developed a following.

Alongside these new and revolutionary approaches, plenty of standard small-group jazz was still being performed, though it was gradually being driven out of the clubs by rock and roll. All of which is a roundabout way of saying that Ornette didn't liberate anyone from anything. What he did was develop a new approach to improvisation that took its place alongside other traditions, some new, others long-standing. Though his open, cheerful style undoubtedly influenced many musicians of his and succeeding generations, relatively few followed his path, probably because, in abandoning regularized harmonic patterns, Coleman had significantly reduced the opportunities for coherent expression.

I had an "Ornette" phase, though it didn't last long. Even today, I think I could whistle the first three or four minutes of his song "Dee Dee" from Live at the Golden Circle Stockholm, volume 1 (1965) from memory. Trouble was—at least for me—all of his songs sounded like that, and after three or four minutes, I'd had enough.

Most jazz musicians today would have little trouble delivering an extended solo based on "Body and Soul," a song written in 1930. How many would be able to keep Ornette's "Lonely Woman" or "Folk Tale" afloat? Or would want to?

Anyone who's interested in Ornette's later career, which was hardly less unorthodox than his early prime, can listen to selected tunes with judicious commentary in a recent Guardian article, Six of the Best. Ornette was a cool dude with a mind of his own, and some of his musical theories are so far out they might actually be true.

I was going to give another listen to Live at the Golden Circle, in honor of Ornette's passing, but I don't have a turntable hooked up just now. So I decided instead to put on Motion, a classic Lee Konitz album from 1961. It resembles the early Ornette albums in format—long, intricate, and ceaselessly inventive alto saxophone solos riding over a piano-less rhythm section. But look at the richness of the material Konitz has to work with! "I Remember You," "All of Me," "You'd be So Nice to Come Home To," "I'll Remember April" ...

I also booked two tickets to the Charles Lloyd show on July 1. Honoring great artists posthumously is fine and fitting. Better, perhaps, to see them when they're still making the rounds.

Tom Stoppard - The Hard Problem

Tom Stoppard is well-known as a playwright of ideas. He's woven such things as rock and roll, Russian history, and existential philosophy into the dialog of his plays, while doing a pretty good job of keeping his scripts buoyant and his tone slightly racy. But it would perhaps be more accurate to say that Stoppard writes plays about people who have ideas. The ideas involved are seldom resolved and sometimes not even examined much in the course of a given drama. They often serve merely as decorative elements, giving his often brainy characters something to banter about while the machinations of the plot grind on.

The success of Stoppard's productions depends to a large degree on how closely the fields of banter at which his characters excel dovetails with the action. In Arcadia, the fields are rich—landscape gardening and Romantic poetry—and the interactions between ideas and events genuine and illuminating. In Stoppard's newest play, The Hard Problem, which finished its run recently at the National Theater in London, stimulating banter abounds, but the subjects are less interesting and their application to events on stage more strained.

The milieu in which Stoppard has chosen to set The Hard Problem is neurobiology. The question around which the drama is based, at least according to the marketing campaign, is this: "If there is nothing but matter, what is consciousness?" But the characters in the play have nothing much to say about that subject. The drama actually focuses on (spoiler alert) a bright and attractive young woman named Hilary who gave up a child for adoption as a teenager, and is now nursing a variety of sorrows as a result of it. She enters the world of nuerobiology largely as a coincidence. Much of the drama turns on conflicts between that reductive world and Hilary's more fertile and probing intellect.

In The Real Thing, one of Stoppard's previous plays, a playwright is accused by his wife of giving short shrift to the female character in order to display his own wit. That is certainly the case in The Hard Problem. Hilary's tutor (and soon-to-be lover, as the play begins) Spike, delivers long speeches about evolutionary science, and how a mother will behave so as to maximize her offspring's chances of survival. But Hilary is a mother, and little of what Spike is saying rings true to her.

Later on, Hilary's rival for a position at a small and prestigious think tank, a man named Amal, who has already received a slew of academic distinctions, delivers long speeches about how computers have surpassed the human brain. Hilary has the superior insight. "I wonder what a computer is thinking when he's just waiting for his chess opponent to make a move." But she isn't given much stage-time to elaborate it.

In short, there is little genuine dialogue between points of view, and as the play develops across half a decade, we begin to wonder why Hilary continues to hang around with such arrogant jerks.

A major subplot of The Hard Problem deals with hedge funds. The owner of the think tank Hilary works at makes his living outguessing his colleagues and scamming the markets with the help of behavioral research his institute produces. Amal takes a job with the firm, but makes the mistake of publishing a paper about over-valuation of the market. His observations happen to be true—but the paper threatens to undermine his boss's plans to sell the market short.

The play receives an enormous boost from Olivia Vinhall, who, in the part of Hilary, exudes vulnerability and wonderment, sorrow and goodness. Perhaps Stoppard recognized that the meat of the play consists in a battle not of words but of personalities, the most appealing of whom is driven by serious but inarticulable questions rooted in awareness and emotion, rather than easy answers rooted in fashionable but reductive scientific theories.

The Hard Problem runs a hundred minutes without intermission, and the time goes by in a flash. (I saw it in a simulcast at St. Anthony Main.) That's good news. But I look forward to the sequel, during which Hilary moves to New York to study philosophy at NYU, gets a proper boyfriend, and starts an avant garde theater group to explore the spiritual dimension of human interactions across genders and generations. Maybe Stoppard himself would agree to giving a guest lecture? 

Walks in (Drizzle) Beauty

Walk in beauty: so the Navajo advise us, though it's not that easy to do. Yet sometimes it seems that beauty walks in us. Or all around us. We try to worm our way in.

Hilary had six or seven friends over for book club Friday night. That's a good time for me to get out of the house for a while. I hauled my bike down to Lake of the Isles and did a few circuits. Everyone was out in shorts and t-shirts, on paddleboards, in colorful kayaks and canoes, walking dogs, pushing strollers, sprawled on the grass reading books.

Then on to Calhoun, where I parked on the west side of the lake, just across from the volleyball courts, and pulled out my copy of Roberto Calasso's Ardor.

The Vedic world involved a cult, closely bound up with texts of extreme complexity, and an intoxicating plant. A state of awareness became the pivot around which turned  thousands and thousands of meticulously codified ritual acts. A mythology, as well as the boldest speculation, arose out of the fateful and dramatic encounter between a liturgy and rapture.

I was having a hard time concentrating (maybe you were, too) when suddenly it occurred to me that I was only a few blocks from a shop I'd read about in the paper that sold Minnesota-grown plants such as turtlehead and cup plant. Thus I abandoned the mysterious life of northern India circa 2000 B.C. and penetrated ever deeper into the equally mysterious life of the Linden Hills neighborhood.

The shop was nowhere to be found, but a few blocks down the way I passed 44 France liquor store, which I hadn't visited for at least fifteen years. I parked and went inside.

I liked the place. It didn't seem so Edina-esque as I'd remembered. I was looking over the bargain bins when, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that my old friend Fran was standing right next to me. I play tennis with her husband from time to time, and I happened the know he was in Norway visiting his brother. She told me a little about how the trip was going, and about how much she was enjoying her week of solitude. Though she wasn't relishing it as much as she'd hoped. That horrible thing called work kept getting in the way.

When I asked her about the plant shop I was looking for, she said: "I don't think there's a business like that near here. But there is a woman who sets out some things on planks along the sidewalk on weekends."

Fran suggested we head over to the tasting table but I begged off. "I can't do that," I said. "I tend to like all wines. Stay within your price range and keep trying new things. That's my strategy."

The next morning Hilary and I headed back down to the lakes. We circled Isles and Calhoun by bike, wandered the rock garden north of Harriet, but turned back to the car when it began to drizzle.

Back on 44th Street, we found the woman with her small selection of plants out on the sidewalk and bought a few. (She only sells plants native to Minnesota, so she had the white turtleheads, but not the purple.) 

Passing  Sunnyside Gardens just down the block, we stopped in to pick up some zinnias and ran into columnist Lori Sturdevant. "What are you doing here?" I said. "You're supposed to be a St. Paulite now."

"Oh, I've always loved this nursery. And I'm glad I ran into you. I need some advice about a lilac bush at our new yard. It seems to be in the wrong place." So we chatted about that for a while.

The morning was gray, but the drizzle was a mere tickle—so light as to be non-existent. A perfect day to plant. And not only that. After a good deal of debate, we decided the time had come to repair the crumbling border to the garden.

It's been deteriorating for years, but I was holding fast to the idea that the best solution might be to allow it to disappear entirely, thus naturalizing the space. Once the logs had rotted we could create a far less boxy look simply by shifting a few plants around. One benefit to this plan was that it required almost no work. The drawback was that it might take a decade or more for Mother Nature to complete her part of the operation, during which time the garden would continue to look run down and ill-kept.

Hilary pulled a log out from under the deck that had been there since we moved in 1986. It was a little bent, but it fit the space nicely. My job would be to drive some spikes through the log to hold it in place. And that, I knew, would be much easier if I pre-drilled the holes. And that would be much easier, I was sure, if my drill actually worked.

Ninety minutes later I was holding a bright green Ryobi drill in my hand, with which I cheerily ground a few holes through the replacement log. (I found that the drill worked even better, and stopped emitting an unpleasant burning smell, when it was set on forward rather than reverse.) The salesman at Home Depot had done an exemplary job of explaining what was likely to be wrong with my old drill, and why it might make sense to get it fixed (they don't make them like they used to).

With nary a hint of condescension, he patiently reviewed the relative merits of the corded and battery-powered models currently available. In fact, he was so personable and articulate that I left the store absolutely convinced I'd made a brilliant choice.

The spikes I bought had looked a little big in the store, but they also proved to be perfectly suited to the task at hand.

The gray weather lingered throughout the weekend, and so did the unhurried pace, which added to the pleasure of planting things. You look over the garden spaces in a kind of mental fog as your mind reviews all the plants that have died or disappeared in previous years. You envision sure-fire winners such as zinnia and cleome. You ponder bee- and butterfly- and bird-friendly native choices and wonder where you might find them for sale. You wonder what you might divide, and what you might remove entirely. And there are always violets and ferns to thin and remove.

The weekend was pleasantly punctuated by a birthday party (it happened to be for me), dinner guests, and even a film—the appropriately rural Far from the Madding Crowd.

By Monday morning the sun had arrived. During a trip to the farmer's market (our second of the weekend) I picked up some pre-started morning glories, and on the way home I snagged a red-twigged dogwood at Cub to plant on the far side of the house, where two diseased elm trees are no longer with us.

Throughout the weekend we lived on tomatoes, fresh basil, garlic and olive oil on toasted slices of bread. But this is a summer-time thing.

In Minnesota, spring lasts about three weeks. Summer is here.       

Zenon Dance in the Balkans

Walking down Hennepin Avenue on a Sunday afternoon you're likely to see some interesting people. We found ourselves walking behind a smallish man with curly hair holding a young girl by the hand. They were dressed as if on their way to a picnic—he might once have been a roadie for the Lovin' Spoonful, to judge from his appearance— and I was idly concocting slightly melancholy scenarios on the order of "divorced man finishes his shift at popcorn stand to take daughter to story-time at the library" as we followed the couple down the sidewalk, along the way passing any number of flashy restaurants we'll never see the inside of.

The reality was cheerier and less prosaic: "Man takes daughter to see wife on stage at Zenon Dance Company spring performance." As it happened, we were going to the same show, and we followed them into the lobby.

I haven't been to a modern dance performance since I reviewed one or two for Twin Cities magazine back in the 1980s. I enjoyed them then, but we'd gotten into the habit of spending our entertainment dollars elsewhere. We were attending the Zenon performance because a friend of ours is a member of Mila, a Balkan choir that was providing the music for the first number.

And that number was simply great. Bulgarian harmonies are a little weird to begin with—dense and dissonant—while the articulation is usually crisp and sometimes chirpy. These six barefoot women dressed in simple black outfits filled the auditorium with sound, leaning confidently into rich, throaty chords that most of us seldom hear. (It took me a while to figure out that the choir was also expertly miked.)

The sound alone sometimes carried the force of a Greek tragedy, condensed into a few plangent wails. The addition of dancing lightened the mood. The dancers appeared to be wearing glowing gunnysacks; their movements were dreamlike and incomprehensible. At times they held thin golden branches above their heads, which brought to mind notions of stag-hunting but also of Eleusinian mysteries and pagan fertility rites. I got to thinking about Jason and his Argonauts, who sailed from Greece to Bulgaria—or somewhere in the Black Sea—and returned home with the Golden Fleece...and also Medea.

The performance might have meant more if I'd been able to memorize the song lyrics about village life in the Balkans provided in the program. Then again, the impact might have been diminished. In any case, the music and the movement were well-suited to one another and the entire piece, choreographed by Wynn Fricke, was mesmerizing.

 The last piece on the program, “Coming Home," was hardly less engaging. Composed and choreographed by Osnel Delgado, it, too, had compelling music and drew on folk sources. The flair was Cuban, the theme was baseball. A full troupe of women and men frolicked across the stage in brightly colored muscle-shirts and tights, doing stylized imitations of a pitcher winding up or a batter awaiting a pitch. The music was twang-guitar, rhythmic and repetitive, buoyant and boisterous, and it all had the flavor of a whimsical spring New Yorker cover come to life.

Sandwiched between these number were two post-modern pieces that were far less successful. In “Molten Substance,” choreographer Luciana Achugar set four women with hair down over their faces to fiddling with their jeans to the rhythms of a drummer (J.T. Bates) seated behind them on stage. They kick them around, wear them on their arms, and eventually put them on without using their hands. It took a long time, and it reminded me of an out-take from that 1950s daytime TV show Beat the Clock. In this episode, no one won. I ended up enjoying it, but I think the one-minute TV commercial of a woman seen through an upstairs room putting on her jeans using her hands might be better.

Perhaps I missed the feminist subtext?

In retrospect, "Molten Substance" seemed like a minor triumph. The piece that opened the second half of the show, “Inside Wrinkles,” was truly dreadful. It was mentioned in a local review that the choreographer, Chris Schlichting, likes to use repetitive vernacular movements rather than stylish dance movements in his work, the result being an "intricate webs" of rubbing, flexing, pointing, strolling, and gyrating motions. The piece was definitely intricate. Whether it could be said to be interesting is another matter. To my eyes, the only impressive thing was that the dancers could remember all the monotonous, mechanistic, and otherwise unattractive steps they were required to do during the lengthy silent routine. Whereas other numbers on the program sent me to the Black Sea or a Cuban baseball field, these "wrinkles" called to mind the insane diagrams drawn by medieval alchemists in their attempts to summon evil forces to do their bidding.

Though I know little about dance, it strikes me that such post-modern pieces must be especially interesting to jaded insiders who are tired of all the brilliant work that's been done in the modern dance field during the last quarter-century. It was shrewd of the program coordinator to begin and end with the richer, more musical, and more rewarding numbers.

Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen

Mary Norris, a copy editor at the New Yorker, has written a book that touches a range of genres from Mad Men to The Elements of Style. Personal anecdotes dating back to the 1960s, when Norris first landed a job at that stylish New York magazine, are loosely intermixed with detailed analyses of picayune grammar issues that every copy editor faces—and often enjoys.

Norris herself is a likeable sort—so much so that I have no qualms about referring to her familiarly as "Mary." She worked her way up from a cheese factory in her hometown in Cleveland to the New Yorker editorial department via hard work and a series of accidents. 

Although the magazine has been through several editors and shifts of tone since she arrived there, Mary  isn't interested in that sort of thing. Her steady points of reference aren't William Shawn or David Remnick, but Eleanor Gould (grammarian and query proofreader) and Lu Burke (proofreader). She speaks with school-girl awe of the writers she's copy-edited, which range from Pauline Kael and Phillip Roth to John McPhee and Ian Frazier. Well, who wouldn't?

One of Mary's early "catches" was to hunt down and verify a minor misquotation from a children's book in a piece by Phillip Roth. The fiction editor, Bill Bufford, sent it along to Roth, highlighting Mary's discovery. Roth wrote back: "Who is this woman? And will she come live with me?"

Thus began Mary's abiding interest in Roth's fiction—and the man himself. "I have been smitten ever since the proposition on the page proof. I suppose all he wanted was a housekeeper, someone to keep track of the details. But if he should ever read this I just want to say I'm still available."

Norris's enthusiasm for language and literature is contagious. She seems to have a robust curiosity about a lot of things, in fact, which is a good quality for any editor to cultivate. She writes:

"One of the things I like about my job is that it draws on the entire person: not just your knowledge of grammar and punctuation and usage and foreign languages and literature but also your experience of travel, gardening, shipping, singing, plumbing, Catholicism, midwesternism, mozzarella, the A train, New Jersey. And in turn it feeds you more experience."

Her motive for writing, she tells us, was to pass on the expertise she has acquired to us.

Early on in the book, Mary faces up to the fact that in the public imagination, editors are haughty, mysterious creatures who think they know best and always want to get their way.

"The image of the copy editor is of someone who favors a rigid consistency, a mean person who enjoys pointing out other people’s errors, a lowly person who is just starting out on her career in publishing and is eager to make an impression, or, at worst, a bitter, thwarted person who wanted to be a writer but got stuck dotting the i's and crossing the t's and otherwise advancing the careers of other writers."

She shatters that stereotype by example. Her tone is modest, her judgments provisional, her respect for the author's intention sincere. She describes her position, tongue slightly in cheek, as "anti-ultracrepidationalism." In simple language, she strives not to go beyond her province.

Yet the position she holds at the magazine has a force of its own.

"I always forget that, in the popular imagination, the copy editor is a bit of a witch, and it surprises me when someone is afraid of me. Not long ago, a young editorial assistant getting her first tour of the New Yorker offices paused at my door to be introduced, and when she heard I was a copy editor she jumped back, as if I might poke her with a red-hot hyphen or force-feed her a pound of commas."

This passage may be taken as a typical example of Norris's writing style: breezy, chirpy, and occasionally  daring in its use of analogies drawn from daily life,  but also prone to minor solecisms. 

The phrase "I always forget...", for example, is a little off. If you are always in the process of forgetting something, then you aren't forgetting it at all—you simply have no recollection of it. "I often forget" or "I sometimes forget" or "I tend to forget" would have been better.

Then again, in the last sentence of the paragraph,  "as if I might poke her with a red-hot hyphen" is brilliant, at least to my mind, and corresponds perfectly with the "jumping back" she describes, while the second simile is hard to visualize and dulls the force of its predecessor.

In offering these petty suggestions for improvement, I'm obeying a sort of Murphy's Law, described by David Marsh of the Guardian (and quoted by Mary) as follows: "If you write anything criticizing editing or proof-reading, there will be a fault of some kind in what you have written."  

Alas, the more technical sections of subsequent chapters, such as when Norris tries to explain in detail how nominative and accusative positions affect word usage, can be pretty dull. And I suppose some subjects, such as word-breaks, are going to be dull no matter how you approach them. Then again, I had never considered the fact (until now) that where a word is broken may depend not only on how it's spelled but on how it's used. Thus, when I fire someone, I "ca-shier" him or her; but if I take a job behind the register, I become a "cash-ier." By the same token, a beer that I order might arrive in a "bum-per," but someone who bumps into me at the bar is a "bump-er." That's what Mary says, anyway.

Norris includes a long section on the relative merits of various dictionaries, and a slightly-too-long digression into the life and character of Daniel Webster himself. Her discussion of gender and pronoun issues is garbled a little oddly with anecdotes about her brother's first efforts at cross-dressing. And there are a few analogies to automotive repair that fall flat.

As for hyphens, the book presents us with numerous opportunities to challenge the positions she endorses, after she's finished weighing the pros and cons of her colleagues opinions against her own judgment.

"Eleanor Gould seemed to hyphenate everything," she writes, "and Lu Burke hated anything extra." So, where do you put the hyphen in "baby back ribs," "bad hair day," "bright red car," "blue stained glass"? Or is a hyphen necessary?

Norris settles on bright-red car, but that seems odd to me. I don't think a hyphen is necessary. Why not? Because "red" and "bright" are in two separate categories of attribute already. One refers to a tint, the other refers to a degree of luminosity. These two naturally go together to form a adjectival phrase, which is not quite the same thing as a compound adjective. On the other hand, I see nothing wrong with describing autumn leaves as red-yellow, rather than merely orange.

She goes for blue-stained glass, which is once again a little bizarre. The phrase conjures an image of a piece of clear glass that someone has subsequently smeared with blueberries. In fact, the staining of the glass is coterminous with the production of it. The result of the process is stained glass. What color? In this case, it's blue stained glass.

You may not agree with these assertions of mine, but if you don't find such quibbles at least mildly interesting, you probably won't like this book.

Norris has an aversion to the semi-colon, for no other reason, I guess, than that she feels she's not the type of person who would use them. They're too rich for her blood—as my dad used to say about Jack Daniels. (He also thought semicolons were pretentious.)

But Mary admits she has an abiding appreciation for Henry James's semicolons.

"...Henry James uses semicolons for timing. They accumulate in a way that can make sentiments appear simultaneous, although it's impossible to read two things at once."

Of course, anyone can use semicolons for timing; it's like a rolling stop that keeps the reader moving ahead, while remaining cognizant of what came immediately before.

In the end, what Mary Norris passes on to us, more than any particular rule or concept, is her love of the language—its power, its logic (and lack thereof), its nuances. She also conjures the anxieties that haunt any conscientious copy editor. "Why didn't I query that?" "Why did I let that blooper through?"

Most writers, and many substantive editors, too, have the same feeling about a text as the one that biographer Nicholas Delbanco (quoted by Norris) describes Herman Melville as having regarding his masterpiece, Moby-Dick:  

"The proofs...were replete with errors, but ... he became impatient of such minute, gnat-like torments; he randomly corrected the worst, and let the rest go; jeering with himself at the rich harvest thus furnished to the entomological critics."

Both writers and editors depend on copy editors (and proofers) to alleviate their own anxieties on this account—and hope and pray that their publisher can afford such luxuries.

The New Yorker can. It has copy editors and proofers and fact-checkers galore. Mary Norris wrote a book about it. And it's a lot of fun to read.  

Film Fest 2

The Minneapolis film fest is a three-week event. But when the leaves are opening on the trees you start saying to yourself, "I don't really need to see any of these films. No one else will ever see them. One is more or less like another." That's when it's nice to get an email from a friend:

"I'm lined up for Magicarena, Nowhere in Moravia, and 1001 Grams today, and am thinking about Grandad and El Critico  tomorrow, and possibly Tu Dors Nicole and Unlikely Heroes on Fri...if I don't totally burn out before then ... I do have a ticket for Cowboys on Saturday night as well (gonna hafta take a nap before that)."

My friend has some free time on his hands, and he's viewing for two—his wife is off monitoring an election in Kazakhstan. I was inspired to join him in his quest, and since that time I've added a few more films to my list.

Theeb (United Arab Emirates)

The best film I saw at the fest, Theeb is a tale of a man, the son of a sheik, who agrees to lead a British soldier across the wastes of Saudi Arabia along an old pilgrim trail, now mostly used by bandits, in search of a well. The Arab doesn't know what the soldier is up to, and perhaps doesn't like him much, but he's obliged by the unspoken rules of hospitality to take on the assignment. Matters are made considerably more difficult for him when his baby brother, Theeb, decides the follow the little caravan out into the desert.

Theeb bears some similarity to American westerns like 3:10 to Yuma and Ride the High Country, where the countryside is magnificent, danger is always near at hand, the law is nonexistent, and it's sometimes hard to tell friend from foe. But it's full of plot twists and subtle reversals of fortune that elevate it above the genre (if there is one). Meanwhile, the central role played by Theeb himself, who wants to become a man but is out of his element among seasoned and sometimes devious adults, further enriches the plot. In short, the film has a rock-solid storyline to go with its astounding scenery.   

 Magicarena (Italy)

This is one of those back-stage production documentaries like Michael Jackson's This Is It. But the venue is a Roman coliseum in Verona, and the piece being rehearsed in Verdi's Aida. The elephants involved are mechanical, and there are lots of other gizmos involved, too, including scads of glowing orbs and plastic crocodiles slithering by on skateboards. A few things catch fire backstage, rain and wind upset the proceedings. As usual with such films, we seldom get to hear an entire aria being performed, much less a complete scene. Nevertheless, all the razzle-dazzle is fun to watch.

Nowhere in Moravia (Czech Republic)

Alongside the deadpan tone of many Wes Anderson films, and the Irish good cheer of Ballykissangel, and the energy and genius for outlandish caricature of Amarcord, we have the drollery of the Czech school of comedy, tinged with absurdist overtones and black humor, but also, at its best, capable of developing a degree of existential momentum. Nowhere in Moravia may be taken as a case in point. 

It is never laugh-out-loud funny, but it maintains a consistent tone of stolid indifference that never quite sinks into weary resignation. The small cast of characters includes the barmaid, Maruna; the town's reluctant mayor, two brothers who share a house (and a loony woman), a homeless man named Stinky, a roofer and his young side-kick, and one or two other local laborers.

Most of the men in town are interested in getting into Maruna's pants, and she's very matter-of-fact and obliging for the most part. Maruna's chief distinction is that she used to be a school-teacher and can speak German. She lives with her mother and her sister, who's a nurse.

Nothing much happens during the film. The mayor tried to shoot a stag.  Roofs get repaired. People drink. They also eat a lot of sausages and bread. The countryside looms. It's a timeless world, where dreams have died and the villagers have learned to accept their lot. The rabbit stew is good. Someone gets killed. People drink.

The Iron Ministry (China)

Shot with a hand-held digital camera, this film focuses on feet and the trash under the seats on Chinese trains. We listen in on a few conversations, but most of the time we're watching people sleep, buy snacks from vendors moving down the aisle, butcher meat in the compartments between the cars, and look out the windows at the passing countryside. The film took two years to make, but it seems the footage could have been shot in a single day. The soundtrack is very loud. It's a visceral experience—clickety-clack, clickety-clack.

 

Betibu (Argentina)

Cut from the same cloth as Argentina's Oscar-winning The Secrets in Their Eyes, this film follows the lives of a wizened journalist, a rookie crime reporter, and a romance writer turned columnist as they investigate a murder at a posh country club estate. At times their investigations more closely resemble Almadovar's Flower of My Secret than Curtis Hanson's L.A. Confidential, but the plotline will keep viewers guessing 'til the end, when the tension drops--and then gets ratcheted up again.

Belle and Sebastian (France)

If you liked Heidi, you'll probably like this film about a boy named Sebastian who's being raised by his wise but hard-drinking grandpa in the French Alps during WWII. The local shepherds are being terrorized by a savage beast that turns out to be a sweet, mangy dog whom Sebastian names Belle. There are a few subplots involving the local doctor who guides fugitives across the mountain passes, the German soldiers stationed in town to catch those fugitives, and Sebastian's young aunt Josephine, who's in love with the doctor—though the German commander also seems to be in love with her. The film has three drippy songs that might easily have been removed, and it's hard to escape the fact it was made for children, but the Alpine scenery is spectacular, the chase scenes are gripping, and the crusty peasant sentiments are noble. (I cried.)

Papusza (Poland)

Did the Polish film industry run out of color film, or what? First Ida, and now Papusza. Not that I'm complaining. Papusza tells the story of the gypsy poetess of that name and the gadja (i.e. non-gypsy) who comes to live with the band, recognizes Papusza's talent, and later shares her poetry with the wider world.

The film is rich in long-shots of campfires by the river in the moonlight, caravans slowly crossing fields of stubble, and riotous parties at which the gypsy musicians have been invited to play. But if the cinematography romanticizes Roma lifeways to a degree, the plot-line exposes their patriarchic cruelty and xenophobia. Things do not end well for Papusza. Her big mistake was to learn how to read and write.

Unlikely Heroes (Switzerland)

We return to the Alps for Unlikely Heroes, a film that deserves close scrutiny. Its central character is a Swiss housewife named Sabine. Recently separated from her husband, Sabine works as an assistant to a condescending psychotherapist who has decided to exclude her from a long-standing Christmas event with their mutual friends. 

Following a chain of freak events too complicated and fortuitous to describe, Sabine finds herself leading dramatic therapy sessions with a group of asylum-seekers from Zimbabwe, Turkey, SE Asia, and other unnamed parts of the world. These likeable but generally hapless individuals hardly speak German and have no idea what therapy is, but they perk up when Sabine begins to describe the story of William Tell, who is the classic hero of Swiss self-identity. She brings Tell up merely as an example of a national myth, hoping her students will chose stories from their own countries to act out, but before long they've decided to stage Schiller's famous play.

The poignancy of this should be clear. Although the asylum-seekers don't fit into modern-day Swiss society very well, they respond immediately to a tale involving escape, heroism, and resistance to arbitrary authority. That was Switzerland—a thousand years ago.

Much of the pleasure of watching Unlikely Heroes lies in the sweet dispositions, humorous lack of comprehension, naive enthusiasms, and petty squabbles of the asylum-seekers. But I would give Esther Gemsch, who plays Sabine, my vote for Best Actress of the festival. Her portrayal of an intelligent woman who chose to raise a family and paid the price by being abandoned by everyone, and is now floundering through an unexpected flurry of creativity and renown, still questioning her talent and her motives, is priceless.

The film has been criticized for giving a sugar-coated and unrealistic rendering of the problems that refuges seeking political asylum in Europe face. That's like saying Hogan's Heroes gives a false impression of life in a concentration camp. Unlikely Heroes is a morality tale and an inspirational journey. It chooses its themes carefully and develops them well.

The play turns out pretty good too. (I cried.)


   

Dukhtar (Pakistan)

I have never been to Kashmir, and I doubt if I will ever go there. So I was glad to see the fantastic scenery of Dukhtar. (The growling, machine-gun-toting clansmen I could do without.)

The story revolves around a young girl (maybe twelve?) who is to be married off to a clan-lord to patch up a long-running feud. The girl escapes with her mother, though there are not many places an unchaperoned woman can escape to in Kashmir...

*   *   *

To be able to travel so widely without leaving town is a real treat. And we often extended the experience after a film by hunting up more information back home. After seeing Theeb, for example, I pulled my copy of  The Arab of the Desert by H. R. P. Dickson (1949) off the shelf, and also Desert Tracings: Six Classic Arabian Odes by Alqama, Shanfara, Labid, Antara, etc.

Home from Pabusza, I scoured The Faber Book of Modern European Poetry, but she was not among those anthologized. I thought I might have better luck with Contemporary East European Poetry, (expanded edition, 1993) but once again, no. During my futile search I at least had the pleasure of listening to a long-neglected CD by the preeminent Romanian gypsy band, Taraf de Haidouks.

Old Coots, Young Shoots

There's so much going on at this time of the year that it's hard to decide sometimes whether to shout or merely squeal with delight. The temperature's rising, leaves are returning to the trees. The ducks have been passing through for a month now, the grass is greening up, and it won't be long before the warblers arrive in good numbers. The AWP convention was a unique pleasure, and the international film festival has been in full swing for a fortnight. I've seen movies from the Czech Republic, China, Estonia, Cuba, The United Arab Emirates, Italy, France, Poland, Argentina, and the United States, with three or four more lined up for early next week.

Last week we began to run out of steam just a little. On Tuesday I was torn between attending a book release party for a new Nodin Press anthology at the University Club and listening to Laurie Herzel interview one of my favorite novelists, Per Pettersen, at Macalester College; in the end we spent a quiet evening at home, reading. 

On Thursday the choice was between a sneak preview performance of Far from the Madding Crowd and a reading/seminar on the current state of Swedish poetry at the Swedish Institute. We opted for Happy Hour at the Lowry Restaurant followed by a leisurely drive around the Minneapolis chain of lakes. The evening was simply too grand to ignore.

That was the first night when the air was warm, the leaves were a discernible yellow-green in the waning sunlight, and it seemed that everyone was out. Even the coots.

I normally don't pay much attention to coots. Perhaps I should. They're in the same clade—the Gruiformes—as the sandhill crane. But unlike the majestic cranes, the coot is a pudgy, ash-colored bird with a white beak and a slightly clown-like mien. They travel in large groups, often nervously zigging and zagging across the surface of the water, dependent on a collective will that seems unsure of itself. It's always a treat, when surveying a loose raft of coots, to spot a pied-bill grebe or a horned grebe in the crowd.

But that evening the coots themselves were lovely, swimming in a confident, purposeful pack—almost a V—along the left side of Lake Calhoun, no more than twenty feet off shore. Out beyond them, six or eight red-breasted mergansers were engaged in leisurely courtship displays. (I say "leisurely," but who really knows how intense duck-emotions are?)

The next morning we returned with binoculars. The weather was gray and the lake was choppy, but a few more birds had arrived. There may have been 300 coots all told on Calhoun and Harriet, and we also saw fifteen or twenty eared grebes, a few loons, and a group of shovelers farther out on the lake.

By Sunday morning the weather had cleared, and the leaves on the trees and shrubs were at the point where they were substantial yet still young enough to glow with incoming sunlight rather than merely blocking it. It's an exciting moment—often a fleeting one. 

The four crab apple trees just south of Highway 55 on Theodore Wirth Parkway were full of white blossoms. (I'd like to plant one of those in my yard.)

The ephemerals at Eloise Butler Wildflower Garden were just getting started. Wild ginger, bloodroot, trout lilies, purple trillium. It was a nice stroll, though the only new bird we saw was a hermit thrush.

Ten minutes south of the garden, we were once again circling the lakes. The ducks were gone. Heading for Manitoba, no doubt, on this clear, bright morning. 

There may have been thirty coots near the south shore of Lake Calhoun. We watched half of them come ashore in a large group, re-oil their feathers (I guess?) and hop back into the lake to rejoin their cousins.