A podcast about books, art & life — not necessarily in that order
A few weeks ago, one of my pals asked me for advice on picking a translation of the Divine Comedy
Early this year, I reread the Iliad
The problem is, the Fagles translation seems a little too “poetic” to me, as though it’s been sweetened for the reader. So I may have to go back to Lattimore, tiny print and all. Or maybe the Fitzgerald
Anyway, this reminded me of my buddy’s request: Got any suggestions for a good Dante translation?
I recall that Sayers
So help a brother out!
Another Wednesday, another evening in the city! I’m happy to report that the St. John’s College alumni NYC chapter seminar featured far less formalwear than last week’s JoB gala. The trip was a bit more harrowing than my previous one, since it involved getting to 38th St. during rush hour. I wish I had the patience for mass transit. And the people on it.
Which, in a sense, gets me to the subject of the alumni seminar! Those of you who’ve had to put up with my crap all these years know that St. John’s College (my graduate school, a.k.a. SJC) is based on study of the “Great Books,” and that our seminars consisted of the conversation that spins out of a leading question. Rather than professors, we had “tutors,” and everyone gets referred to as “Mr.” or “Ms.” There was also ritual scarification, but I heard that was only for the undergrads.
Anyway, a month or so ago, I received a card about the upcoming alumni seminar. I hadn’t attended one in five years, for whatever reasons I can muster. But I noticed that this one was
a) on a quickly readable work (Moliere’s comedy The Misanthrope
b) being led by one of my favorite tutors (Chester Burke).
Again, if you’ve had dealings with me over the years, you’ve probably heard me ramble about how my two years in Annapolis (1993-1995) were my most formative. Sure, I’ve gained plenty more experience over the years, and a lot of my views have changed as a result, but the foundation of who I am and how I read the world was laid during that span. [Obligatory joke about what else got laid back then, followed by a Dice-like”OH!”.]
The funny thing is, while I consider Mr. Burke to be a strong influence on my life and learning, I never actually had a class with him at St. John’s. No, our relationship consisted of countless hours on the basketball court, plus locker-room shooting of the breeze, and conversation on the way to and from the fieldhouse. In fact, I’m hard pressed to recall an encounter with him that wasn’t somehow related to basketball. I believe the only time we met off campus, it was to attend a Washington Bullets game at the Cap Center. In other words, I viewed much of our relationship through Worthy-esque Rec Specs.
The opportunity to catch up with Mr. Burke — whom I’d last seen in 1995 when he handed me my master’s degree and uttered, “Knicks in 7,” under his breath (unprophetically, since they wound up losing to the Pacers in 6) — was one I couldn’t pass up, even if I was a little disappointed that the seminar was being held at the boardroom of the Theatre Communications Group, rather than Basketball City over at Chelsea Piers.
A bunch of alums met up beforehand at a sushi restaurant, so I got to catch up with Mr. Burke for a bit. The 12-year hiatus in our conversation made it necessary for us to use broad strokes, but that’s one of the ways in which we start to figure out what’s important to us. When you only have a little time to talk, you have to figure out the essentials. Or you have to talk faster than a tweaker with logorrhea, and hope the other person can keep up. But I really did TRY to talk only about the big changes. And so did Mr. Burke, who told me about his new marriage and how he played in a pair of intramural hoops games the day before. He’s in his early 50s, which left me embarrassed that I’ve only picked up a basketball once in the past two years.
For a while, I was the youngest person in our pre-seminar group by at least 10 years. Some of the early arrivals were from early 1980s classes, and one was from the class of 1949. Mr. Burke, in fact, graduated from St. John’s in 1974, which provides more evidence for my thesis that the best career a St. John’s education prepares you for is . . . being a tutor at St. John’s! (According to SJC’s Wikipedia page, it looks like the best-known alumni from the Great Books era are Ahmet Ertegun, Charles “Quiz Show” Van Doren, and the guy who created MacGyver.)
As more alums arrived, I found myself in conversation with someone from the class of 1982, who explained to me how and why George Bush, Sr. may have ordered the murder of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme in 1986. At one point, he said he was having trouble remembering a name; I suggested that the CIA may be shooting a pink laser beam of information into his brain. I think he found that funny. Here’s his website.
Later, one of my oldest friends joined the group. John attended SJC as an undergrad. We haven’t really talked in more than 4 years — a subject I’ve written about before — so we pretty much just acted as though we knew each other, even if we still managed to complete each others’ sentences a couple of times during the seminar.
Eventually, we made our way upstairs. John & I lagged behind, helping guide a stone-deaf member of our group out of the restaurant and up to the seminar. By the time we reached the boardroom, two dozen alumni were already gathered, spanning 60 years of SJC classes. I noticed that we were all white, and there was only one woman among us, but this was St. John’s, not Hampshire College, so hey.
The seminar was a pretty intense two-hour take on the play: the nuances of its characters, its word-choices (among our various translations and Mr. Burke’s French edition) and, of course, its plot. It was a great seminar, and I’m sorry that I can’t really provide a ton of details it. Like all good conversations, it was organic, covering a million topics and perspectives. We explored the nature of the Alceste’s misanthropy, the self-centeredness of his love for Celimene, the redemptive vision of love offered up by Eliante, and the utter strangeness of 17th century French court, among other things.
I thought I made a pretty good point about the structure of comedy and how Moliere either missed a great payoff or was trying to make a point about the delusional self-importance of Alceste. It got derailed by the next person who spoke up, and I felt it would’ve been, um, self-important of me to push back to that point. But deep down, I know I was right.
My old pal John had a much better time of things, making excellent points about the play and the growth of two characters, nudging the conversation when it began to go awry, and getting some of the alums to re-ask their questions, in a bid to get them to better grasp what they were trying to say. We hadn’t shared an academic setting since our junior year of high school, so it was nice to see how he explored both the play and the dynamic of the seminar group.
(John also got the biggest laugh of the night when one of the “elder statesmen” talked about how flattery was the key job requirement for the French court in Moliere’s time. John remarked, “God, you are so perceptive! That is the best thing I’ve heard tonight!” It beat out my rendition of Alceste’s pal Philinte defending him, as channeled by Mink La Rouie of Miller’s Crossing: “He’s a right guy! He’s a straight shooter! I know he’s got a mixed reputation, but for a misanthrope he’s got a lot a good qualities!”
(Those goddam eggheads don’t know comedy when they hear it . . .)
That dynamic reminded me of how much I miss those Annapolis days. Living and working where I do, there aren’t many opportunities to talk about books the way we did Wednesday night. I still read an awful lot, but conversation helps bring books — and life — into their fullness.
After the seminar ended, we were to re-gather at a nearby café for a late dinner. Amy was waiting for me at the café, having stayed in the city for dinner with a friend. I wanted to introduce her to Mr. Burke and get a little more time to chat with him, but unfortunately, it was almost 9:30 at that point, and the lot where I was parked was closing at 10:00. So I gathered her up and we headed back to my car, meeting up with a bunch of the alumni who were on the way (I had used my mutant superpower of walking very fast to get out to the café and back before the rest of the crowd had gotten its act together).
I got to introduce Amy & Mr. Burke briefly out on the sidewalk, and John asked us to head back to the café. I explained that the lot was closing, but he wouldn’t take that for an answer. I then said, “We have to get up pretty early tomorrow,” which people never take seriously, even when I add “. . . seriously”. But you try getting up at 5:15am every weekday and see how ready you are for the nightlife, okay?
John wanted to shake hands, but I gave him a hug instead, which led to my near-suplexing, since John’s as big as a bear. Now I know how my wife feels, since I tend to hug her off her feet at least twice a day.
I didn’t take any pictures from the evening, which I’m sure is bumming you out, since you made it this far. Also, there was no tearful reconciliation or anything with my pal John. I wrote him a day after the seminar, but haven’t heard back from him. French comedy beats NYC drama.
I haven’t written to Mr. Burke yet, because I’ve been trying to get this post finished first. Now that I’m at the end, I feel that I’ve failed pretty heinously at describing just what I feel gained by knowing him during my time at SJC. I know I haven’t conveyed that sensation I had that he always heard music in his head, that some of his words were an attempt at translating that divine harmony. I certainly haven’t mentioned his deceptive first-step and the quick release of his jumper. Fortunately, there’s a new generation of students who are getting burned by that very shot.
Lookin’ for links in all the right places? Just click “more”!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Nov. 30, 2007”
If I stare at the screen longer than the duration of the Anglo-Zanzibar War without writing a word, it means my idea for a post was no good. So, the salient points I had hoped to make are:
is now one of the funniest novels I’ve ever read, and I was bored by it when I read it in 1992
after 70 pages that I tossed it into my “Books To Sell” box after the San Diego trip
Saturday night before my San Diego trip, we watched Andy Warhol: The Complete Picture
I think discussions of Warhol’s work tend to center more on “the art world” than on art per se, and whether he was perpetrating a massive fraud on such. Unfortunately, I’m not versed enough in art history to give you guys a real critique of Warhol; I’m sure some of you have enough knowledge of it to beat any of my assertions to death on the rocks of my ignorance. Since the documentary raised enough questions about Warhol as a person, I’m gonna follow that lead.
The early stages of the movie — chronicling Warhol’s family history in Pittsburgh, his work as a commercial artist in NYC, and the rise and significance of pop art — tease out a number of elements that hint at the “boy behind the myth.” Perhaps it was a simplification of his formative years, but at least it yields a singular idea of who Warhol was. It’s a straightforward story, described mostly by his brothers, of a kid who was overly attached to his mother and didn’t really fit in at school.
(Note: I’m really want to see a documentary about the lives of his two brothers. It seems that they knew their brother was an artist in New York City, but had no clue as to how famous he was. One is filmed in a Harley-Davidson trucker cap, and it seems that he and Andy talked often, if not daily. At his death, Andy left each of the brothers $250,000, but his estate ended up valued around $600 million. No word on how they felt about that.)
What piqued my interested was the explicability of that young Warhol as contrasted with the ambivalence of the later edition(s).
Once Warhol becomes famous, there’s an explosion in the number of perspectives on him — understandably, since many more people knew him — but the figure they describe becomes much less clear. The more material there is, the less it makes for a coherent picture. This phenomenon seems to arise partly from the nature of the interviewees — artists and hangers-on, in a particularly drug-addled era — and partly from some elusive aspect of Warhol himself. The more they had to say, the less of a Warhol there was. I found myself wondering how this multiplicity of self paralleled one of his main forms of art: silk-screening. Do these prints, meaningful in their repetition and reduction, tell us something significant about the life of this artist?
Watching the documentary, I kept trying to resolve this issue of identity, especially as Warhol becomes a stand-in for the concept of celebrity and fame throughout the ’70s and ’80s. One of the interviewees talks about watching O.J. Simpson’s low-speed chase in 1994 and how similar it was to Warhol’s movie Empire, which consists of eight hours of a static shot of the Empire State Building.
Flipping through websites like the Superficial, I wonder what he would’ve made of today’s celebrities — even the marginally talented ones — who are followed by dozens of photographers every time they step outside. I suppose Paris Hilton, famous for being famous, would’ve made perfect sense to him. But that “everyone will be famous for 15 minutes” aspect of Warhol doesn’t describe him.
What perplexes me about this is the fact that Warhol was an obsessive recorder of his activities, a “recording angel.” One of the interviewees considered this an attempt at staving off death; that is, by accreting so many moments, they can never really be lost (there’s a reason I call this blog Virtual Memories). The downside of such voluminous recording is that the task of sorting through it all becomes overwhelming. And, as Kierkegaard tells us, we need to be able to forget. (I think he said that.)
Even though there are mountains of tapes, I think the documentary only has one brief segment of Warhol’s voice: after his mother’s death in 1972, he calls his brother and tells him that he won’t be coming out for the funeral and that she would’ve wanted the cheapest arrangements possible. Occurring near the end of the film, it’s a perplexing choice. The only time we get “the man” in his own words, he’s essentially tossing his mom into a cheap pine box. (He was buried next to his parents at the “Byzantine Catholic Cemetery.” According to Wikipedia, he was buried in a solid bronze casket with gold-plated rails and white upholstery. And, of course, a platinum wig.)
As Virtual Memories go, I saved the answering machine tape of my dad informing me of his mother’s death. I’m not sure why I did that, but the likeliest reason was because of the emotion in my dad’s voice. Warhol, on the other hand, could almost be making a call to a caterer, for all the feeling he shows on that tape.
Far be it from me to judge how someone relates to his family. Cutting off his family and excising his past would’ve been explicable — I’ve known enough artists and poseurs who’ve followed that route — but that’s not who he was. Warhol kept his mom with him in NYC from around 1949 to 1971 or so. There’s a cute anecdote about how some visitors to his apartment assumed this elderly woman with the heavy accent was Warhol’s cleaning lady.
I know this is getting all over the place, but that’s what I’m trying to get at, this electron-cloud of self. The movie portrays a man who starts out somewhat “normal” and winds up bifurcating over and over into a range of human experience that no one can put a finger on. While this isn’t such an extreme phenomenon — I’ve written about the impossibility of biography before — it raises the question of whether there was an “essential” Warhol behind all the mysteries.
Far too early, the documentary mentions how Truman Capote once described Warhol as a “Sphinx without a secret.” I thought it was an ingenious metaphor for the man. When I looked up the phrase, I found out that Oscar Wilde used it first.
I’m back from San Diego, dear readers, and ready to do a day or two of work before taking a Thanksgiving break! Have some links, whydon’tcha?
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Nov. 16, 2007”
I guess “Norman Mailer, Outspoken Novelist, Dies at 84,” is better than “Norman Mailer, Novelist Who Stabbed His Wife, Dies at 84.”
I found Charles McGrath’s obit more entertaining than any of the Mailer I’ve tried to read, and I hope someday I can “reliably be counted on to make oracular pronouncements and deliver provocative opinions, sometimes coherently and sometimes not.”
(Update: the NYTimes has changed the headline on its main page from “Outspoken Novelist” to “Towering Writer”! And the obit itself has gone to “Towering Writer With Matching Ego”!)
(Update #2: Two of the contemporary writers I respect most have implied that I’m sort of a bonehead for making that remark, and that I need to read An American Dream and Executioner’s Song, as well as Mailer’s early essays. I’ll put some on my wishlist.)
Unrequired Reading never rests, dear readers! Even when I’m in between business trips! (on to San Diego this Sunday)! Click “more” for more!
Continue reading “Unrequired Reading: Nov. 9, 2007”
Maybe I’m misreading the signs, but it looks like we’re due for a round of worlds-enough-and-time! In this case, the publication of Pierre Bayard’s How To Talk About Books You Haven’t Read opens the door for literary types to name the “great books” that they’ve never read (and likely will never get around to).
In this case, Slate has followed up 2001’s Literary Critic’s Shelf of Shame with a new piece: The Great Novel I Never Read. While the former canvassed critics (duh), this new feature garners responses from contemporary authors.
I’m usually leery of this sort of exercise, as it can degenerate into people disparaging some legitimately great novels because they’ve never gotten around to reading them. I used to think that I keep that gigantic list of all the books I’ve finished since I began college in 1989 just to scare people out of asking my opinion about any particular book. After looking over this article, I’m starting to think that my real reason is to justify not having read some of those great books, myself: “Ferchrissakes! Look at how many other books I’ve read! There are only so many hours in a day!”
(Of course, I’m guilty of disparaging great books on flimsy grounds, most recently in my rant about the immediate sense of alienness (not alienation) I got when starting Middlemarch
Fortunately, that snide attitude isn’t on display in the new Slate piece. Instead, I noticed something funnier: while I’ve read a number of the books cited in this article, I’ve actually read only one book by any of these contemporary authors (Little, Big
Now back to Raffles & Bulstrode! (which means I’m just about to finish book five)