29 April 2010

London to Norway to Denmark to Italy to London, April/May 2010



The view from our hotel window, day; and night...


"There's a tea tasting. I would love to go to a tea tasting" calls Joselyn from her luxurious bath tub where she is scubbing off the jet lag... We are finishing our one day in London just now... enjoying that strange sense of dislocation.... We are staying at the Millennium Knightsbridge on Sloane St, near Harrods and Have A Nickel's... sleeping and trying to adjust to the new time zone. Our first stop outside this morning was to have coffees at Cafe Nero, an "Italian" coffee shop with no Italians in it. However, tonight we plan to have dinner a one minute walk from this hotel, at Sale e Pepe, a small Italian restaurant where they greet you in Italian.

 I will speak Italian one way or another. 

I will say: "Abbiamo un prenotazione... mia moglie e' una vegetariana..." 

They will hear: "I dunno... I think he said he has a premonition that the milk is spoiled, or made out of vegetables.

"You take care of them. I can't understand a word they say."

On the way over from San Francisco we were given seats in the middle of a five, and if you've flown you know what that means. We objected, pointing out the J has to go the lav a lot, and were moved, no charge because the clerk was in a good mood at the baggage check, to economy plus (exactly four more inches of leg room), saving us $200. Then we asked again, later, and because the plane was only 3/4 full, were moved to a 2 bulkhead seat with LOTS of room. By pressing our feet against the bulkhead we could (a) summon help (b) stick a leg out the window or (c) relieve our cramps.

Did you know there is an Italian bookstore in London? It's called The Italian Bookshop. 5 Cecil Court, closest tube station is Leicester Square tube Station. Charing Cross is close as well. Opening time 10:30-6:30pm. Near to Foyle's, Waterstone's, and 100 small antiquarian book shops.

Tomorrow we give ourselves over to the good hands of Natl Geographic and Lindblad Expeditions. We meet in the lobby here, then proceed to Winchester, then Exeter, to Totnes, a ferry down the Dart to Dartmouth, overnight in Exeter, then finally join our ship there (it was delayed a day in a drydock in Spain to fix a leaking seal).... I know there's a joke in there, but I'm too spaced to find it. The ship will take us around the outside of the British Isles -- Scilly isles, Skelligs, Dingle Peninsula, Aran islands and cliffs of Moher, county Donegal, Iona and Staffa, St Klida and Callanish (Hebrides), Inverewe Gardens, Orkney islands, Fair Isle and Mousa, and the Shetlands.... whew... all this in about two weeks.

Hope this log wasn't too boring. See you all soon, one way or the other.

22 April 2010

Under the Volcano, and Over It, and Around It

That darn volcano in Iceland (this week renamed Warmland) disrupted a lot of things and a lot of people. Last weekend the London Book Fair proceeded with virtually no participants from North America.

The London Book Fair traditionally ends midweek, a day one correspondent tagged Volcanic Ash Wednesday. He reported the fair was quieter than usual, with many fewer Americans about. Some European publishers who ordinarily would not show up at the USA version of the event, BookExpo America, are now booking hard-to-obtain transatlantic seats in hopes of meeting the missing Americans in New York city next month.

We kept our noses in the news every day this month, because long ago we had picked this particular week to fly to London. When and if our plane does touch down at Heathrow we shall cheer and applaud, watching through portholes as our plane skids through volcanic debris. I’ve heard that most of the English now are permanently covered in Icelandic volcano dust. Anti-influenza masks are in fashion, and lemon-scented tea is served with a light covering of ash on each dainty cup.

We’ve packed extra lungs in our suitcases, so we should be OK, unless KwaklbakleLackle (or whatever the volcano is called in Warmlandic) should exhale again, or perhaps its sister exhale 12 miles away. Health care is free in Britain, so unless there’s a queue we expect to have substitute lungs installed as needed.

The question was raised today on local radio: Is Mother Earth angry with us? She’s busy, everywhere exploding, earthquaking, global warming, ocean rising, glacier melting. We dig her fossils for fuel (and she sets fire to oil rigs in Louisiana, blows up mines in China and Appalachia) and we drain her aquifers faster than she can refill. What did I leave out? Oh yes, we fight wars in her deserts and clearcut her forests. No wonder Mother is annoyed, especially today, the 40th Annual Earth Day.

Earth Day. Now there’s a concept. What are the rest of the days – Not Earth Days? Sky Day? Earth & Sky Day? No wait, that name’s taken by an annoying radio program. Of course every day should be Earth Day, just as every day should be Christmas, New Year’s and the Fourth of July. It’s not yet possible, but we’re working on this. You can fan us on Facebook.

In addition to lungs and masks, we’re packing Britishisms as well, to get ready for the lift, the lorry and the courgette, whatever that is and please don’t enlighten me.

Things that are singular over here, such as teams or companies, are plural over there. My sweater becomes a jersey; trousers are kecks, shoes are gutties or plimsolls or wellies. A fight is a row, scrumpy is cider. To swot is to study and if one is anti-social in a pretentious way, prepare for the oft-tossed epithet “toffee-nosed.”

Some of these Brit terms are simply cute. The postman is a postie. A wanker you don’t want to know. A wart, on the foot, is a verruca. If you develop a wart on the tip of your nose, it’s still a verruca.

And as for food, there’s toad-in-the-hole, don’t ask, and clingfilm for your takeaway.

I’d love to get into the much larger selection of dirty words and insults, older terms such as blockish grutnol and grouthead gnat-snapper, but bollocks, we’re out of time. Now don’t get all argy-bargy on me. Back in June.

NOTES:

Some of the terms quoted here came from “Blooming English, Observations on the Roots, Cultivation and Hybrids of the English Language” by Australian linguist Kate Burridge. Published in 2004 by Cambridge University Press paperback $26.99. ISBN 0521548322.

Burridge’s follow-up book:

“Weeds in the Garden of Words: Further Observations on the Tangled History of the English Language” by Kate Burridge. Cambridge University Press paperback $24.99. ISBN 0521618231.

Burridge plays the hurdy-gurdy with the medieval music group, Carnevale and does readings of Old English. She currently is professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia. Short biography here where it also is possible to view her “Wise Words” segments on the Australian TV show “Can We Help?”

18 April 2010

Professors and prostitutes...

I am reading “Blooming English” published by Cambridge University Press in 2004, subtitled “Observations on the roots, cultivation and hybrids of the English Language.” Pondering this densely rich, entertaining book while studying Italian makes me half-crazy (the other half, of course, remains absolutely sane).

Australian linguist Kate Burridge exposes the hidden under the obvious – we know that children miss-hear things, but why do they do it? Why are there no “white spaces” between words we speak as there are between words we write (and how do we figure out what those spoken words mean)?

Take all of this interesting complexity (and I’m only referring to the first 27 pages of this book) and relate it to another language... say, Italian. Then the truly perplexing questions arise.

For example... English uses expressive infixing to intensify some words, and there are rules about this. “Fanfuckingtastic” is a common intensification of “fantastic.” You don’t infix words of fewer than three syllables. The infixes themselves have to have more than one syllable.

So... are there expressive infixes in Italian?

What is the longest word in Italian? Is there an equivalent to floccinaucinihilipilificationalization?

Do Italians use certain endings (or beginnings) to create new words? Is there “hearism” and “tasteism” and “Gatorade” and “limeade” and other ades? Pcdom, fandom, moviedom, parentdom? Do Italians diarize, prioritize, burglarize? Acutalize? Prayerize? Picturize?

Do Italians play Scrabble? And if so, are there problems when someone lays down “typer” instead of “typist”? Is there an Italian equivalent to “er” as in comer, studier, presider, cycler, supposer, stealer, groaner (one who groans; and a dialect term for a whistling buoy; and a joke that makes one groan in agony)?

All of these observations on English do or do not have their equivalents in Italian, and I’d like to know more about this. Help!

Do Italians have favorite words, words that please them; and the opposite, words they dislike intensely? English speakers like “serendipity” and dislike “toothbrush.”

Howabout nonce words: words that are created and forgotten pretty much on the spot. Examples in English: “foreploy” (any misrepresentation or outright lie about yourself that leads to sex) and “bagonize” (to wait at the luggage carousel for a suitcase that takes its time appearing when you are in a hurry). In Italian?

Mondegreens – oronyms – misheard words and phrases – are common in English. “Gladly the cross-eyed bear” for “Gladly the cross I bear” and disarranged phrases, as the famous one “Eats, Shoots and Leaves” for “eats shoots and leaves”... “I scream” instead of “ice cream;” “The stuffy nose can lead to problems” for “the stuff he knows can lead to problems.”
Or playful mistakes such as “Be Alert – We need more lerts!”
Do things like these exist in Italian?

And Pig Latin? After all, Latin began in Italy long before there was an Italy.

Does Italian have the equivalent of an exaltation of larks, a conjugation of linguists, a shelf of librarians, a gaggle of geese?

Four Oxford dons see a group of prostitutes. “A jam of tarts!” A flourish of strumpets!” An essay of Trollope’s” and “An anthology of prose!”

Four Italian professors from Padua see the same group of prostitutes. What do they mutter?

15 April 2010

Matterhorn

The Vietnam War, or the American War as the North Vietnamese would have it, officially ended the morning of April 30, 1975, as a final helicopter lifted out the last ten marines from the American Embassy in Saigon.

In the novel “Matterhorn” historical time and historical dates don’t matter much to author Karl Marlantes. What matters is the jungle, the fog, the enemy. Bullets, bombs, staying safe or getting killed.

“Matterhorn” is a fantasy – these events didn’t happen, but similar ones certainly did. Some General decided to name high jungle peaks after Swiss Alps. This story revolves around a hillock designated Matterhorn, in the mountainous jungles, a very long way from here.

The sense of danger and dread is unrelenting. Marlantes provides very few moments for the reader to stop and wonder. The book is a nonstop tale written in mud and blood by an author who lived through it. I read this book late into the night four or five days in a row.

One reader commented online, “When they ask, fifty years from now, what was the Vietnam War like? Someone will hand them ‘Matterhorn.’ There it is.”

The way I’ve heard this novel described to those who haven’t yet read it is simple – you will feel you are in the jungle, with the Marines, from the very first page.

The book stands out crisply from other war books for that reason alone. It doesn’t get all gung-ho war movie or sadly sentimental or all Norman Mailer and the Great American Novel on you. There is a satisfying minimum of foxhole philosophy, no halfway authentic battles.

“Goodwin sauntered up to the CP group. He was eating a can of spaghetti and meatballs mixed with a package of Wyler’s lemonade powder. ‘What’s up, Jack?’ he asked Fitch.

“‘We’re going to take the hill at first light.’

“‘Matterhorn?’”

“‘No. Helicopter hill.’

Goodwin whistled. ‘Just like in the movies,’ he said.

“‘Let’s hope so, Fitch replied, spreading his map.”

And this: “Something ahead snapped, and Mellas’ heartbeat accelerated as the shadow of Vancouver sank quickly to the mud. Mellas went down on one knee, eyes straining. The wind moved softly through the jungle, bringing the smell of damp rot. It also rustled the trees, filling the air with a steady hiss. Trying to hear anything was maddening. The failure to hear could mean his death. The fear made his heart pound and his breathing shallow and more rapid, all in turn making it more difficult to hear. No one moved. Everyone was waiting for an order...”

According to the jacket flap, it took Karl Marlantes thirty-five years to write this novel. I would guess that no matter when he started it, he could not have let it go until many years after the war.

Too bad, because I found myself wishing I could have read this book back in the day, when some were fighting in the jungle and others back home, like myself, were fighting against the war. And struggling to keep ourselves out of it, to be honest.

I was one of many college students who by and large did not end up on a plane to Vietnam. We swapped stories about swallowing blood to simulate bleeding ulcers. We attended college, graduate school, whatever it took to stay out of the wartime draft.

Some patriotic suckers actually enlisted. Others went because they were poor, or black, or poor and black. All of us – fighters and protestors alike – knew little about the war. We thought we understood the politics, but we didn’t. We thought we knew the war, but we didn’t know about the mistakes that killed people, or the luck that saved them during the war and long after.

Back then we would not have wanted to read a book like this, but I wish we had it in our hands in those days.

You are not likely to come across a better told tale of this now almost mythical war, nor one more universal in its suffering and redemption. We are fortunate that Karl Marlantes survived the Marines, medals and all, and lived to write about it. This is a harrowing, important book.



NOTES:

“Matterhorn” by Karl Marlantes. Atlantic Monthly Press hard cover $24.95. ISBN 9780802119285.

The publisher Grove Atlantic has an interview with the author, and links to reviews.

The Lemuria Books blog reprints an essay by Karl Marlantes.  He starts with this: “Having read a galley of my novel, Matterhorn, about Marines in Vietnam, a somewhat embarrassed woman came up to me and said, “I didn’t even know you guys slept outside.” She was college educated and had been an active protester against the war. I felt that my novel had built a small bridge.”

Karl Marlantes was awarded the Navy Cross, the Bronze Star, two Navy Commendation Medals for valor, two Purple Hearts, and ten air medals. You can read the Navy Cross presentation here.

09 April 2010

Getting All Thoughty on You

We watch TV, I admit it, and we watch the CBS news, I admit that, and we have noticed that news makers brought in to the studio for interviews are sat in front of the same fake books on fake bookshelves.

The books themselves never move or change. (Come to think of it, neither do most of my own books.) The CBS books glow softly in shades of violet, green, gold and red. They set off  the sallow skin or disappearing hair of the guests quite effectively.

We may be the only viewers in the country who have noticed this. Does anyone else still watch network news every night of the week? Hey... we watch it on our Digital Video Recorder – no commercials. The half hour show is over in 20 minutes.

What backdrop will CBS use in future years? Some say books made of paper (remember paper?) now inhabit an historical realm strewn with buggy whips and ox carts, bronze swords, typewriters and telegraph keys. Soon enough, CBS will display rows of Kindles lined up in black and white, or pods of IPads showing off in full color; Nooks, Pocket Pros, a queue of Ques...

John Updike wrote in his sixth collection of essays, “Due Considerations,” “Books externalize our brains, and turn our homes into thinking bodies...

“My mother's college texts, I remember, sat untouched in a corner of our country bookcase, radiating the glories of Renaissance poetry and Greek drama while being slowly hollowed by silverfish. The bulk of my own college books are still with me, rarely consulted but always there... Such books... form an infinite resource of potential rereading, of new angles and insights on terrain where our footprints have all but vanished.”

From my parents I inherited many cartons of books. I kept the most unusual or interesting ones, judging them mostly by their covers. I have half a shelf in cracked red leather, other books in navy blue boards with gilt letters on their spines. From my father a collection of theater magazines from the 1930s. From my mother paperback volumes from The Britannica Home University, faded yellow stapled paperbacks dating from the 1920s.

On page four there is an Underwood & Underwood photo of a lawn tennis doubles match at Wimbledon, the players in white shirts and pants, audience in straw hats. On page 54, a photo depicts “A Quiet Game of Draughts” between two elderly, bearded gentlemen with the caption, “Edgar Allen Poe used to argue that checkers was an even more intellectual game than chess.”

I did not know that.

Updike writes, “Books hold our beams down; they act as counterweight to our fickle and flighty natures. In comparison, any electronic text-delivery device lacks substance. Further, speaking of obsolescence, it would be outdated in a year and within 15 as inoperable as my formerly cutting-edge Wang word-processor from the mid-Eighties... Without books, we might melt into the airwaves, and be just another set of blips.”

Updike wrote before the birth of Kindle and variously named I-Things. But like the poet William Butler Yeats he had a sure sense for the Second Coming:

“The blood-dimmed tide is loosed... and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity...” William Butler Yeats, 1919

Holding on to my own collection of physical books feels more and more like a rear-guard action, protecting civilized old things from the onslaught of the relentlessly new.

“The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world...”

It reassures me to play three hundred year-old music on a wooden instrument invented in the 17th century. My particular cello was carved, shaped and fitted together in Italy during the toughest years of World War II. It’s a fine old thing, a mere baby at 70 years of age. These days there are fiberglass cellos available and purely electronic ones. Yet wood-and-glue versions have never been bettered. This gives me hope and comfort and a fair amount of joy.

My paper books and my wooden cello carry me across any chasm. I like to imagine ink-on-paper books and wooden instruments will continue forever, while at the same time, I hope and expect that books in electronic form and musical instruments made of ever more exotic materials will flourish alongside.

NOTES:

Updike’s essay is published in “Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism” by John Updike. Ballantine Books paperback $20. ISBN  034549900X.

From the publisher: “‘A drop of truth, of lived experience, glistens in each.’ This is how (the late) John Updike, one of the world's most acclaimed novelists, modestly described his nonfiction work, the brilliant and graceful essays and criticism he has written for more than five decades. ‘Due Considerations’ is his sixth collection, and perhaps the most moving, stylish, and personal...”

Quotations from “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats (1865-1939). It is one of the most frequently anthologized poems.

01 April 2010

A Romance on Three Legs

You fiction readers, with your emotional epiphanies and family sagas and all. I prefer mostly non-fiction, and I still get quite a lot of feeling out of my favorite books, especially the one I read this week: “A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano” by Katie Hafner.

I shed a tear on page 222 when Gould died of a stroke at age 50. I felt for him when he couldn’t find a Steinway anywhere to suit his particular pianistic needs, and ached with him when the one piano he really did like was broken to pieces on a loading dock. I rooted for his blind piano tuner, who rose from poverty to the heights of that somewhat esoteric profession.

What I’m trying to say is “A Romance on Three Legs” is not only well researched on a topic of great interest, but it’s as well written as any book I’ve read in a long time, fiction or non. It’s simply a glorious work of craft, start to finish.

“A Romance on Three Legs” was Gould’s own term for his love affair with his personal piano. The book concerns Glenn Gould’s search over many years for a piano that somehow could deliver the music he heard in his imagination.

He needed a piano with a delicate touch, not one set up for the bomb shell-like effects of composers such as Rachmaninoff or Liszt. “From an early age,” the author notes, “Gould adopted an unusual and intimately physical relationship with his instrument. Sometimes he lowered his face so close to the keyboard that it looked as if he was playing the piano with his nose. And it often seemed that he was hugging the instrument... Yet Gould’s ‘rather hunchbacked’ technique gave him ‘finger clarity, better definition and feeling’ for the composers he preferred, especially Bach.

Gould “sometimes said that he hummed while playing in order to compensate for the shortcomings of an unfamiliar or inferior piano... it represented wishful thinking, the perfect, ideal phrasing he had in his head that he could never quite achieve in real life.”

“Fans noticed,” Hafner writes. “A woman once sent a letter to Columbia Records from the Midwest to say she had just bought a recording of Bach’s French Suites. ‘Now, you’re not going to believe this, she wrote, ‘but someone is singing in the background as Mr. Gould is playing!’”

Gould also “stomped, swayed in time to the music, and conducted himself whenever he had a free hand. He sat sidesaddle much of the time, with one knee almost on the floor.” He invariably sat low to the keyboard, in an adjustable chair his father had modified for him. That same chair now sits in a museum in Gould’s native Toronto, along with his fabled Steinway CD 318, the piano he used for most of his career.

In 1946 at age 14 Glenn Gould performed with the Toronto Symphony. He quickly built a Canadian reputation, and became internationally acclaimed after New York concerts and the success of his first recording, the Goldberg Variations of Johann Sebastian Bach, released in 1956. This recording has been in print ever since, and it is one of the best-selling classical recordings of all time.

Gould gave up performing in public midway through his career, preferring the silence and concentration of a recording studio, where he would often edit and re-edit himself both on the piano and in the editing room. His recordings were technical masterpieces like no others.

Author Katie Hafner creates a deep and rich portrait of an unusual musical genius. She traces the full history of Steinway pianos, details the art of piano tuning and piano manufacture, and follows the stories of several people crucial to Gould’s life and career.

Along the way she tells every funny story, recounts every eccentricity, every dispute, love affair, grand achievement and petty annoyance. The author narrates the life of this most difficult artist with grace and honesty.

Truly this is a book to savor: “A Romance on Three Legs” by Bay Area writer Katie Hafner.


NOTES:

“A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould’s Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Piano” by Katie Harper. Bloomsbury paperback $16. ISBN 1596915250.


Notes on the Gould’s Goldberg Variations from the book:

p. 25... “Gould’s recording of the Goldberg Variations became the best-selling classical recording of 1956. By 1960, it had sold forty thousand copies, which was, Joseph Roddy noted that year in the New Yorker, ‘just about as astonishing in the record business as a big run on a new edition of the Enneads of Plotinus would be in the book trade.’ Gould outsold the soundtrack for The Pajama Game... it would eventually become the best selling classical solo instrumental album of all time, with sales topping 1.8 million copies... “

P 223... Gould’s funeral (age 50, 1982).. “At the end of the service, the closing aria from the recent recording of the Goldberg Variations was piped into the cathedral (in Toronto)... His grave is marked by a simple granite stone into which the outline of a piano is etched, along with his name, years of birth and death, and the first three measures of the same aria.”

p. 20... “There were many reasons for Oppenheim’s objection (the producer for Columbia Records tried to talk him out of performing the Goldberg Variations). The Goldberg Variations was notoriously challenging; it was a work more often associated with the harpsichord than the piano; it had been recorded on piano by only two musicians, and one, Rosalyn Tureck, was the established authority. But Gould stood his ground and Columbia gave in.”

P. 22... “But in Gould’s agile hands the music became eye-opening, fresh, and brazen... When Gould played Bach, the music became sparse, abstract, and mysterious. (David) Dubal wrote, ‘It was a process that went far beyond quibbling about the correct instrument. Indeed, the timbre of the piano under Gould’s hands became new and unexpected.’”

p.22... “Gould... argued that the harpsichord purists were suffering from ‘musicological overkill’ and that Bach was comparatively indifferent on the question of which instrument a piece of music was best suited to When it came to Bach, he argued that in certain circumstances ‘the piano can get you a lot closer to Bach’s conceptual notions that the harpsichord ever can.’”