Silverlake Blvd.

Lorrie Moore's Bark

 

Last week, LAPL notified me that, as per my request, they were holding a copy of Bark: stories by Lorrie Moore for me at the Silver Lake branch. “Who is Lorrie Moore?” I replied. Two pages into the first story I remembered: the woman who wrote the story about the girl freeloading her way through Africa, that ends, decades later, with her falling off the top of a skyscraper. “Oh, her.” Yes, her.

 

I don’t understand the title, but it doesn’t matter. The eight stories are all masterful astonishments. LM has the gift of writing about ordinary people in ordinary situations in a way that makes them breathlessly exciting. She has a variety of arrows in her quiver. Her descriptions are admirably clear and concise. She has an ear for dialogue. Without being pretentious, she hints at bigger issues: the first story takes place during the first Gulf War, and the last takes place just after Michael Jackson died. She can wrap things up with an ingeniously unexpected paragraph, as in “Wings,” the longest and most difficult of the stories. Difficult because it’s about two jerks: KC, a talentless singer-songwriter-performer, and her handsome, parasitic boyfriend Dench. She befriends an elderly neighbor, who changes his will to benefit her. It’s very Wings of the Dove (as in the title and opening epitaph), and the ending is suitably Jamesian: we get a glimpse of KC, comfortable in a new life of service and good works, nevertheless remembering the day, a lifetime ago, she first met Dench:

 

… she had wondered whether it would be good to love him, and then she had gone broodingly to the window to look out at the street while he was singing and she had seen a very young woman waiting for him in his beat-up car. It had been winter with winter’s sparse afternoon stars, and the girl was wearing a fleece chin-strap cap that made her look like Dante and also like a baby bird. KC herself had been dressed like Hooker Barbie. Why had she put this memory out of her mind? The young woman had clearly driven him there—would she be tossed away? bequeathed? forgotten? given a new purpose by God, whose persistent mad humor was aimless as a gnat? She was waiting for him to come back with something they could use.

 

I hadn’t realized it until I got home, but the upper right corner had been gnawed on the copy I borrowed from LAPL. A dog, apparently. Everyone’s a critic.

 

ISC’s Twelfth Night @ Griffith Park

 

ISC did a beautiful production in 2008, and it was time to revisit it. But what a strange play; it’s one of the genuinely funny ones, but nothing amusing at all happens until Viola and Feste exchange nonsense at the beginning of the third act. The first two acts are devoted to setting the scene, which is dark. Illyria is a dysfunctional city.

 

Most of the action is generated by the fact that the characters are unable to communicate with each other—either because they are too self-absorbed (Orsino, Sebastian), or because they are play-acting (Viola, Olivia, Feste), or because they are numbskulls (Sir Andrew, Sir Toby).

 

The atmosphere of misunderstanding is accentuated by little exclamations of frustration uttered throughout the play, in Shakespeare’s most piercingly plainspoken style:

“What should I do in Illyria?”

“Take the fool away.”

“Your fooling grows old.”

“You are too proud.”

“I was adored once, too.”

“Nothing that is so, is so.”

 

The word “peevish” comes up a lot, and rightly so. All these people are dishonest, discontented, and too lazy, vain or silly to sort themselves out.

 

In Act 3 the first crack appears when Feste admits, “I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words.” Then in Act 4, Antonio’s impassioned outburst—the first public utterance of an earnest thought in the play—shatters the stultifying Illyrian routine. Orsino and the police can make nothing of his “Virtue is beauty,” of course, but Viola is awoken.

 

And what about Malvolio? He’s a wet blanket, not a villain; hardly meriting the demeaning practical joke he’s subjected to. Yes, it serves the purpose of demonstrating that his austerity and self-control is a sham—like Olivia’s grief. But where Olivia is rewarded with an utterly unexpected answer to her desires—Sebastian—Malvolio is banished and forgotten.

 

And so the play concludes with the bores and the bullies all handsomely rewarded. Fabian’s vindicatory speech at the end is a desperate attempt to soften the sourness with intellectual justifications. But the real consolation comes when Feste steps out of this hopeless Illyria, to sing that “The rain it raineth every day.” He doesn’t offer arguments, but notes the world going on.

 

David Melville’s Feste was first-rate. The part also gave him opportunities to sing, which he does charmingly—especially with Julia Aks (Fabian) accompanying him on accordion. I also appreciated his pre-performance shout out to the Illyrian Neighborhood Council.

 

Danny Campbell excells at disreputable old men, and his Sir Toby blazed like a star.

 

André Martin’s Sir Andrew was as hilarious, as his Don Armado in Love’s Labor’s Lost a few years ago—he’s obviously developed a special knack for playing absurd scorned lovers. I think Shakespeare wrote a lot of these parts: More, please. 

The wrong moderns

 

A strange week. My most compelling literary experience was deciding to stop reading Canetti’s Auto-da-fé after 206 pages. The final straw was coming across, in the latest Bookforum, Gary Indiana’s description of Canetti as “a self-important windbag,” which put precise words to the impression I was getting. I’m keeping my copy; I might find my way to finishing it some other time, but not now. It was depressing me: the humor, the satire, the allegory, the absurdity were all so heavy and boring.

 

The only thing interesting about it was considering it as an example of Pretentious Square Modernism—the genre traditionally favored by the Nobel Prize committee. Canetti obviously admired Kafka, Joyce and Kraus and other modernist masters, but his appreciation was not accompanied by any insight into their artistry. He misunderstood their art as spiritual propaganda. Being a vulgarian and a square, he sought to transmit The Message in a Big Book. The Big Book was intended to be epic, intricate, irrefutable, and above all impressive.

 

Just think: Auto-da-fé came out in 1935, the year Borges published A Universal History of Infamy, a year after Waugh’s Handful of Dust and Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves. Quite a contrast between literature that’s alive and dead. Canetti’s ambition to impress is the antithesis of what’s really valuable in modernism, as also seen in the works of Mann, Roman Rolland, Sartre, Broch, Gaddis, even Beckett ….

 

[Image: Sartre’s translator, Hazel E. Barnes on TV 1961]

Allan Sekula @ Christopher Grimes Gallery

 

It took me all day to realize how good Ship of Fools (2010) was. I glanced at the photos and the video yesterday morning, noted the august melancholy of the last work of an admirable artist, and went out in search of something more cheerful to look at.

 

In fact, I spent the rest of the day driving through the construction site that is the West Side, up Colorado, down Venice, Culver City, and Wilshire. Massive disruption in the name of circulation, progress, and money: Southern California was putting on its own tribute to Sekula all around me. All that inchoate, but significant ordinariness, of which Sekula was a supreme poet.

 

Sekula’s portraits of Novorossisk crewmembers seem straightforward, but are far from simple ...

 

Likewise the set documenting men moving bags of sugar: it’s process art and investigative journalism, but also a warily lovely composition. Sekula’s oddly compelling colors will someday be clichés of art chatter.

And he really has a gift for capturing light and water. Churn (above) the seascape of the sky and the water and the ship’s wake, is an image Turner would have admired. The goodness of Sekula is that his critical acuity about the shipping industry did not preclude a feeling for its Odyssean romance, which he suggests is not yet extinquished.

Karl Ove Knausgaard's My Stuggle, Book 1

 

At first the title seemed to refer to me, not the writer. The first 168 pages presented a formidable fortress wall, excluding all but the hardiest readers. In terms of boredom, Proust’s presentation of Little Marcel’s anxious wait for his mother’s goodnight-kiss was scintillating fun compared to Knausgaard’s stupefyingly circumstantial account of the failed attempt of two provincial Norwegian teenagers to crash a New Years Eve party. And, as weird as he is, Little Marcel is never as big a jerk as young Karl Ove, who, in Part One, we glimpse at several stages of awfulness en route to adulthood. But then, in the last 20 pages, Spring arrives, then July, and an unexpected, drunken party at his Dad’s. The light, for me, dawned.

 

Part Two concludes with an 140-page account of Karl Ove and his older brother Yngve cleaning their grandmother’s house, after their father died there. I suppose long ago one of the Greeks wrote a Hercules in Elis, describing the cleaning of the stables of King Augeas, but it hasn’t survived. So Knausgaard's revolting, brilliant, compelling, excruciating account stands unique in literature.

 

It’s not that it’s deadpan—Knausgaard’s language often takes flight. And it’s not that it’s plotless episodes—Knausgaard imposes order on his material, like Proust, by echoes, analogies and repetitions. The beauty is KOK’s focus, in every episode, on the immediate, palpable, and sensuous physical reality. He doesn’t dismiss second-hand experiences, histories, or other people, but he’s not so concerned about them. It’s poetic in the sense of focusing on the sensual and emotional content of his immediate situation. Whether it’s a novel or a memoir, it has no faith in explanations.

 

“A gust of wind blew across the yard. The overhanging flaps of the table cloth fluttered. A napkin went flying across the lawn. The foliage above us swished. I lifted my glass and rank, shuddered as the acidic taste hit my palate, and once again recognized that clear, pure sensation that arose with approaching intoxication, and the desire to pursue it that always followed.”

 

[Image: Spring cloud study (Constable, 1822)]

Sharknado 2

 

 

I really derive solace from the fact that people still can make things like the Sharknado movies. Despite Putin, ebola, the Koch brothers, etc. ... there might be hope.

Cav/Pag @ Hollywood Bowl

 

Last Sunday night was perfect for picnicking and a concert.

 

The music of Cavalleria rusticana unfolds with the logic and dramatic inevitability of a symphony; from the first note to the last, one ravishing tune after another. It’s so concise there’s not one lull. Mascagni eliminated recitative, subplots, comic relief, and all the boring claptrap of antique dramaturgy that Mozart, Beethoven and Verdi meekly submitted to. And yet, he finds time for ample orchestral interludes (which Scorcese used unforgettably in Raging Bull) and songs—choral and solo—which sound like spontaneous, genuine singing.

 

Stuart Neill was tremendous as Turiddu, the simpleton who pays for his infatuation with his life; an act of justice that remedies nothing. Equally powerful were Michelle DeYoung (his discarded Santuzza), Nancy Maultsby (his mother), Tamara Mumford (the icy Lola), Christopher Maltman (Lola’s enraged husband). Just as important & impressive were the L.A. Master Chorale and the Children’s Chorus.

 

Cavalleria lost nothing being presented without sets, costumes or stage effects. If anything, the concert format emphasized its amazingly modernist swiftness. And the cast could focus all its energy on singing. Boy did they!

 

Pagliacci shares the same concision and focus. The music is less magnificent, but the drama is more compelling. Moreover, the conceit of the play-within-the-play, and the private lives of the actors spilling tragically onto the public stage, the tears of the clown, provide indelible poetic images. And it, too, dramatizes “justice” that provides no solace, as Nedda dies for her infidelities. As embodied by Julianna Di Giacomo she was utterly familiar, fascinatingly strange, and mesmerizing. 

 

 

[Image top: Scene from Cavalleria rusticana (Rauzzini, 1891) Image below: cover of the piano reduction of Pagliacci (1892)]