Words and Music

Ekphrasis is the rendering of a visual work of art into words. I'm not sure what it's called when you render a musical work into words, but I do believe that this little passage by Whitney Balliett about Duke Ellington's "Ko-Ko" is the best example I've ever read.

Take a listen, and read along:

Here is “Ko-Ko,” a minor blues and no relation of Charlie Parker’s “Ko-Ko,” made five years later. It starts in media res. Sonny Greer gives a couple of quick timpani beats, and Carney goes immediately into a chuffing sustained note in his low register—his house-moving register—and is backed by the trombone section, possibly salted with one trumpet. The introduction lasts eight bars. In the first chorus, which is twelve bars, Juan Tizol plays a simple but ingenious six-note figure that is pursued closely by the reed section in such a way that it sounds like a continuation of Tizol’s figure. Tizol stars the sentence and the reeds finish it. In the next two choruses, twelve measures apiece, Tricky Sam Nanton, using a plunger mute, solos against offbeat muted trumpets and the reed section, which plays a sighing three-note figure. Greer punctuates on his tomtoms. In the fourth chorus, also twelve bars, the reeds come to the fore with the same figure they used in the first chorus, and the trumpet section supplies “ooh-wa”s. Ellington himself surfaces from behind, throwing runs and crazy note clusters into the air. The twelve-bar fifth chorus is intense and climactic. The trumpet section plays a repeated long-held note (one of the trumpets, probably Williams, uses a plunger mute) while the saxophone section, broken into two groups, plays accented figures and a melody parallel to the trumpets. The dissonance is almost overpowering. Then the reeds and trombones slide into an eight-bar interlude, pausing for several two-bar breaks by Blanton. In the seventh chorus, the trumpets again play long-held notes, and the saxophones play a countermelody. Carney returns in the final chorus with his very low chuffing note, backed by the trombones. The reeds climb abruptly into view and disappear into a closing full-band chord. The atmosphere of the number is rough and hustling and metallic. There are few treble sounds, and there is little delicacy. The piece bullies us. It sets out to be abrasive and lyrical, and it succeeds. It is also completely an ensemble piece—a kind of concerto for orchestra.

from the New Yorker, January 11, 1982

Tower Grove

This article about the Tower Grove area, and a new book about it, makes me proud to live where I live:

But before letting go of the property, Connecticut Mutual Life put in deed restrictions that required some properties to be houses and some to be apartments.

Different prices included in the restrictions allowed a mix of working people and professionals, Abbott said.

Unlike other areas, no race restrictions were included, he said.

"It allowed for balance. Balance sees you through good and bad times," Bonasch said.

Mayer on Drones

Some interesting snippets from Jane Mayer as she talks about the use of Predator drones in Pakistan:

Toward the end of the Bush Administration, the drone program in Pakistan ramped up, but when Obama became President, he accelerated it even faster. It’s surprising, but the Obama Administration has carried out as many unmanned drone strikes in its first ten months as the Bush Administration did in its final three years. It’s the favorite weapon of choice right now against Al Qaeda, and for good reason: It’s been effective in killing a lot of people the U.S. wants to see dead....

According to the C.I.A., they’ve killed more than half of the twenty most wanted Al Qaeda terrorist suspects. The bad news is that they’ve inflamed anti-American sentiment, because they’ve also killed hundreds of civilians....

Someone sitting at C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Virginia, can view and home in on a target on the other side of the world with tremendous precision, even at night, and destroy it. Peter Singer, who wrote a book on robotic warfare, said that cubicle warriors experience the same stress as regular warriors in a real war. Detached killing still takes a tremendous emotional toll inside our borders.

Autumn Leaves

Photos from our front porch, with musical accompaniment.

Roth on Obama

Philip Roth, in an interview with the London Times, on our president:

You know, if McCain were President, there would be no health bill to debate; there would be no policy in Afghanistan to reconsider; no economic stimulus package; there would be a deep Depression. So whatever happens is the best that can happen, given the circumstances, you know. So I am still rather high on [Obama]. He’s done remarkably, really. He’s fighting an entrenched army of ignoramuses. He’s not a magician.

(via Mark Athitakis)

DIY

I love this detail from this article about the upcoming auction of the typewriter Cormac McCarthy bought in the mid- to late-'50s and wrote all of his novels with:

McCarthy never had the machine repaired. The only problem he ever had occurred when a poorly designed lever wore out. McCarthy got a replacement part and installed it himself.

Monk

From an interesting review of a new biography of Thelonious Monk:

The brilliant pianist Mary Lou Williams, seven years Monk’s senior and working at the time for Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy orchestra, heard Monk play at a late-night jam session in Kansas City in 1935. Monk, born in 1917, would have been 18 or so at the time. When not playing to the faithful, he sought out the musical action in centers like Kansas City. Williams would later claim that even as a teenager, Monk “really used to blow on piano. . . . He was one of the original modernists all right, playing pretty much the same harmonies then that he’s playing now.”

It was those harmonies — with their radical, often dissonant chord voicings, along with the complex rhythms, “misplaced” accents, startling shifts in dynamics, hesitations and silences — that, even in embryonic form, Williams was hearing for the first time. It’s an angular, splintered sound, percussive in attack and asymmetrical, music that always manages to swing hard and respect the melody. Monk was big on melody.

More Than a Distant Land

In the liner notes to the 1998 Luaka Bop compilation album Beleza Tropical 2: Novo! Mais! Melhor!, David Byrne writes of Brazil as a kind of harbinger of what's to come for the rest of the world.

We're just catching up to what they've been doing for years, decades even.... Sadly, not only in the musical arena, but also in economic and social aspects, the Brazilians outpace us; they are the future.... the growing gap between the rich and poor ... the destruction and waste of natural resources, every politican up for sale ... these are all symptoms—soon we'll catch up to Brazil.

I thought of Byrne's comments while reading Jon Lee Anderson's New Yorker article (available only to subscribers, but here's an audio slide show in which Anderson talks through some photographs of the people and places he writes about) about gangs in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. A gripping piece of reportage, it reminded me of the world of The Wire, but multiplied by a hundred.

The favelas, slums rooted in the aftermath of slavery (abolished in Brazil in 1888), are controlled by druglords who act as virtual mayors while viciously killing their enemies. These enemies include journalists (Anderson writes about a reporter who was tortured to death after sneaking a hidden camera into a baile funk, a street party sponsored by a gang chief), policemen (some of whom have joined vigilante militias that are becoming gangs in their own right), and even those who would dare go to a baile funk sponsored by another gang chief. Like the drug organizations in The Wire, the drug gangs of Rio have "a hierarchical structure that mimics the corporate world," Anderson writes.

In an astounding section of the article that is nevertheless typical of Anderson's incredible access as a reporter, he gains entree into the home of a thirty-one-year-old kingpin called Fernandinho, who controls all but one of the favelas on Ilha do Governador, a large island on the bay of Guanabara. Fernandinho has "Jesus Cristo" tattooed on his forearm, cartoon characters on his bedspread, and he hasn't been out of his immediate neighborhood for two years because he's wanted by the police. He claims to be a Christian and working his way through the Bible, yet the evangelical pastor who was instrumental in his spiritual awakening feels betrayed because he and his lieutenant, Gil, have resumed the killings that they had temporarily suspended.

It's scary to contemplate these favelas as America's urban future, yet The Wire does indeed depict a world that is heading toward something like what's happening in them. Let's hope that, in this case, we don't catch up to Brazil.

Six or Nine

I like this, from Anthony Lane in the Oct. 5 New Yorker:

As a rough rule, cinema can be sundered into two halves: six-o'clock films and nine-o'clock films. Most movies are nine-o'clock affairs, and none the worse for it. You get home from work, grab something to eat, head to the theatre, and enjoy the show. And so to bed—alone or entwined, but, either way, with dreams whose sweetness will not be crumbled or soured by what you saw on-screen. A six-o'clock movie requires more organization: prebooked tickets, a restaurant table, the right friends. You're going to need them, because if all runs according to plan you will spend the second half of the evening tossing the movie—the impact and substance of it—back and forth. So "Persona" is a six-o'clock movie, though it won't leave you with much of an appetite. As is "The Deer Hunter," whereas "Platoon," for all its sound and fury, works fine for nine o'clock. "The Reader" is a nine-o'clock movie that thinks it's a six-o'clock. "Groundhog Day" is the opposite.

Fatherhood in One Hundred Words

Today I had my seniors write hundred-word stories. Here's the one I wrote:

Sing-Along, With Daughters

On the front porch one Saturday afternoon, my daughters were playing with dolls and singing Disney songs. I lay on the porch swing, swaying back and forth, looking out at the street and the late September leaves just starting to turn color.

I couldn’t resist joining in. Knitting my brows in mock earnesty, I belted out, “I can show you the world, shining, shiiiimmering, sple-endid…”

Alice, three years old, interrupted me.

“Daddy, you can’t sing that.”

“Why not? I can’t show you the world?”

“No. You’re not Aladdin. Not at all.”

A tough lesson, perhaps, but she had me there.

Dean R. Koontz Revisited

Back in eighth grade, almost twenty years ago, someone in my class discovered Dean R. Koontz. Soon we were all keeping his novels on the corner of our desks and cracking them open during spare moments.

Over the next few years, I read about twelve of his books. Mixing the thriller, horror, and sci-fi genres, they were just right for me from the ages of 13 to 15.

I recently came across this website devoted to Koontz, which contains images of first editions of all or nearly all of his works. Looking at the old covers got me thinking about the time I spent reading these books.

I read Watchers first. It was a fairly complex piece of work, actually, with multiple narrative strands—a love story between an introverted, sheltered woman and a more worldly but decent fellow; they eventually befriend a dog with human intelligence (the product of a laboratory experiment, he eventually learns to communicate with his owners via a device that dispenses Scrabble tiles); and they battle a homicidal monster created by the same laboratory.

There was some (marital) sex in the book, and a scene (eye-opening for a thirteen-year-old) in a strip club where the dancers explain secrets of their profession to the sheltered woman, but at base it was a rather wholesome, even moralistic, tale of good versus evil.

Koontz's plots could be ingenious, as in Lightning. In this novel, a woman has a time-traveling protector, who shows up to save her at crucial points over the course of her life. Throughout the beginning of the novel, he seems to be journeying to the present from some militarized, dystopic future. Eventually we learn that, instead of coming from the future, he's coming from the past: the Nazis, it turns out, had cracked the secret of time travel.

Koontz had his literary side, too: Midnight, about a brilliant but misguided inventor who experiments with the residents of a small California town, was a self-conscious updating of H. G. Wells's novel The Island of Dr. Moreau.

A couple years after I read The Voice of the Night, I realized that a central scene, in which a disturbed youngster prepares to cause a train wreck, mirrors a similar scene in Jerzy Kosinski's famous WWII novel The Painted Bird.

But my favorite Koontz novel has to be Strangers. This 600-pager, long for Koontz, assembles a large cast of characters, all of whom are haunted by a mysterious but only dimly remembered event in their not-too-distant past. I remember reading this book around the time that I finished eighth grade, and being quite convinced by the characters—particularly one who was a professional thief. Koontz's narration of one of his heists was a great set piece.

It turns out that all of the characters witnessed an alien landing in the desert of Nevada. The government tried to brainwash them to forget what they saw, fearing that widespread, verified knowledge of extraterrestrial life would bring about chaos and pandemonium. But the brainwashing didn't take. Eventually, the characters all converge on the secret facility where the aliens are being kept.

Sounds a little cheesy now, I guess, but at the time I was enraptured by it.

I had to wait a long time for The Bad Place to become available for me to check out at the public library, and it wasn't really worth it. As I recall, the plot turned on a character who had paranormal abilities because he was born with three testicles, but they were all undescended. That sounds ridiculous, I know, so maybe I'm misremembering. But how could I make up something like that?

I kept reading Koontz into my first couple years of high school. In my high school library, in fact, I came across a copy of Koontz's book Writing Popular Fiction. I flipped through it a bit. As a way to invent ideas for stories, Koontz recommended crafting evocative titles—like "the key to midnight," or "the house of thunder," or "the face of fear"—and then trying to devise a story that would fit that title. He also suggested getting maps of the cities that you set your stories in, to lend verisimilitude to your story's geography.

It was in that same library that I finally lost my taste for Koontz. I was in one of the carrels reading Cold Fire, which really wasn't that good anyway, when my sophomore history teacher walked by and picked the book up from my hands, curious about what I was reading. He looked at it for a second then handed it back with a scornful smirk and walked on without a word.

And that, for better or worse, was about it for me and Dean R. Koontz.

What Comes After Oil

This passage, from a review of Crude World: The Violent Twilight of Oil, by Peter Maass, sums up the message of that book:

Oil is the curse of the modern world; it is “the devil’s excrement,” in the words of the former Venezuelan oil minister Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo, who is considered to be the father of OPEC and should know. Our insatiable need for oil has brought us global warming, Islamic fundamentalism and environmental depredation. It has turned the United States and China, the world’s biggest consumers of petroleum, into greedy, irresponsible addicts that can’t see beyond their next fix. With a few exceptions, like Norway and the United Arab Emirates, oil doesn’t even benefit the nations from which it is extracted. On the contrary: Most oil-rich states have been doomed to a seemingly permanent condition of kleptocracy by a few, poverty for the rest, chronic backwardness and, worst of all, the loss of a national soul.

We can’t be rid of the stuff soon enough.

This point is echoed by Michael Specter, at the end of his fascinating but scary New Yorker piece about synthetic biology:

The hydrocarbons we burn for fuel are believed to be nothing more than concentrated sunlight that has been collected by leaves and trees. Organic matter rots, bacteria break it down, and it moves underground, where, after millions of years of pressure, it turns into oil and coal. At that point, we dig it up—at huge expense and with disastrous environmental consequences. Across the globe, on land and sea, we sink wells and lay pipe to ferry our energy to giant refineries. That has been the industrial model of development, and it worked for nearly two centuries. It won’t work any longer.

What's ahead, according to Specter and the scientists he talks to, is a world in which scientists, wielding DNA like Lego building blocks, wrest the reins of creation from God and evolution:

The industrial age is drawing to a close, eventually to be replaced by an era of biological engineering.... “We are going to start domesticating bacteria to process stuff inside enclosed reactors to produce energy in a far more clean and efficient manner. This is just the beginning stage of being able to program life.”

This all sounds eerily reminiscent of Margaret Atwood's dystopian Oryx and Crake and her new novel The Year of the Flood, neither of which I have read, but both of which imagine future worlds radically distorted by genetic engineering.

As Atwood puts it in this Times profile:

“We’ve just opened the biggest toy box in the world, which is the genetic code.... We can tinker and produce great things; we can tinker and produce horrible things.”

Like Atwood, I fear that what we come up with to replace oil will be even worse.

A Real Death Sentence

I apologize for the back-to-back Hendrik Hertzberg posts, but here's his powerful statement, part of a blog post about the botched execution in Ohio, about what an honest death sentence in America would look like:

You are hereby sentenced to death. Before you are killed, you will be taken a maximum security prison, there to be held in isolation for twenty-three hours of every day in conditions of solitary confinement. The length of this imprisonment is indeterminate but unlikely to be less than ten years. Though it may be as few as two or three years, it is more likely to be twenty or more. At intervals you will be told that you will be put to death on a certain date. Neither you nor your jailers nor anyone else will know which of these dates will prove to be the correct one. You will suffer depression, extreme anxiety, and, most probably, severe mental deterioration. On one of these dates, you will be strapped to a gurney and poisoned by intravenous injection of lethal chemicals. Your execution may take an hour or more. Your death is likely to be accompanied by unbearable pain, though this will not be apparent to witnesses because one of the chemicals will have paralyzed you, preventing you from crying out or moving.

A Paranoid Political Organism

This, from Hendrik Hertzberg's Comment in the current New Yorker, seems exactly right to me:

... lunatic paranoia—touched with populism, nativism, racism, and anti-intellectualism—has long been a feature of the fringe, especially during times of economic bewilderment. What is different now is the evolution of a new political organism, with paranoia as its animating principle. The town-meeting shouters may be the organism’s hands and feet, but its heart—also, Heaven help us, its brain—is a “conservative” media alliance built around talk radio and cable television, especially Fox News. The protesters do not look to politicians for leadership. They look to niche media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Michael Savage, and their scores of clones behind local and national microphones. Because these figures have no responsibilities, they cannot disappoint. Their sneers may be false and hateful—they all routinely liken the President and the “Democrat Party” to murderous totalitarians—but they are employed by large, nominally respectable corporations and supported by national advertisers, lending them a considerable measure of institutional prestige. The dominant wing of the Republican Party is increasingly an appendage of the organism—the tail, you might say, though it seems to wag more often from fear than from happiness.

Adventures at QT

I was just at QT picking up some fountain soda, and the guy in front of me put a huge stack of big Slim Jims on the counter.

"$27.63," said the clerk.

The guy looked stricken. He looked at the clerk, dumbfounded.

"They're $2.29 apiece, man," the clerk said, pointing to the price sticker.

The guy took a deep breath. "How much for two?"

"Five bucks."

The guy thought for a moment. "How many do you get for ten?"

The clerk, slowly: "Four."

Pause.

"I'll take three."

I Want Less Moore

Finally got around to reading "Childcare," the New Yorker excerpt from Lorrie Moore's new novel A Gate at the Stairs, which has been getting fairly positive reviews lately.

I liked it moment by moment, but I agree with Clifford Garstang that it doesn't stand alone very well. My other gripe is that at times the narrator's observations are way more sophisticated and worldly than this character, who grew up on a fairly isolated farm, could possibly be at this stage in her life. For instance, this description of her employer's restaurant:

It was one of those expensive restaurants downtown, every entrée freshly hairy with dill, every soup and dessert dripped upon as preciously as a Pollock, fillets and cutlets sprinkled with lavender dust once owned by pixies—restaurants to which students never went, unless newly pinned to a fraternity boy or dating an assistant dean or hosting a visit from concerned suburban parents. I knew that Petit Moulin served things that sounded like instruments—timbales, quenelles. God only knew what they were. I had once tried to study the menu in its lit case near the entrance, and as I stared at the words the sting of my own exile had moistened my eyes. The lowest price for an entrée was twenty-two dollars, the highest, forty-five. Forty-five! You could get a Taiwanese oil-and-water bra for that price!

Good writing, but Lorrie Moore's wit, intelligence, and eye are intruding far too much here. I don't believe in this character.

An Enormous Advance

From Nicholas Lemann's short piece about Ted Kennedy and the current health care reform debate:

If a health-care bill passes this fall, it will be full of compromises: departures from liberal ideals, and fudges about how much it will cost. But anybody who stops fighting for it now is going to spend years repenting. As long as Congress passes, and Obama signs, a law that embodies the principle of universal, government-guaranteed coverage, the country will have achieved an enormous, and previously elusive, advance.

Authors, Authors

In a previous post, I contemplated The Wire's development of the idea of the hero, moving from the solitary agents of police procedurals of the past to a sense of the teamwork that is necessarily involved in any real crime-fighting project.

In another post, I proposed that The Wire could usefully be viewed as a novel, a multilayered, multivocal, expansive work of fiction.

With that in mind, what occurs to me now is that, just as The Wire broadens our conception of the hero outward to encompass a whole team, it also broadens our conception of the author. David Simon and Ed Burns, of course, are the names most commonly associated with the show, but the individual episodes are written by a whole cadre of writers, including George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane. The show was not created by a single heroic novelist but rather by a team of artists that of course also includes the directors, crew, cast, and others.

What's remarkable is that this team was able to create this multifarious and massive work—one of my friends pointed out that it's the equivalent of about 30 feature films—while preserving such a consistent and coherent vision.

Omar Comin'

In How Fiction Works, James Wood discusses the evolution of character in fiction. In writers like Dickens and Fielding, he writes, "Character is essentially stable, has fixed attributes."

"But at the same time," he continues, "another kind of novel was developing, in which good and bad wars within a single character, and the self refuses to stay still. What the novel powerfully began to do was to explore characterological relativity."

I'm halfway through season four of The Wire, a TV show that is perhaps best imagined as a kind of novel, not least because of its exploration of exactly this type of characterological relativity. Such relativity is rare on TV shows, whose episodic nature lends itself to fixed and stable characters. The Norm you see on one episode of Cheers is the Norm you'll see on any other.

On The Wire, though, characters change: McNulty, Greggs, Bunk, Beadie, Carcetti, D'Angelo, Bodie, Daniels, Stringer. These characters, and others, evolve and surprise us over the course of the show.

The one character who comes closest to being a fixed, stable, traditional TV character is Omar Little, who is also Barack Obama's favorite as well as many others', I'm sure.

It may seem odd to view Omar as a traditional TV character, since in so many ways he defies stereotypes and easy judgments. A gay urban bandit who never turns his gun on a "citizen," stealing only from those who are in "the game," Omar is one of the most intelligent, perceptive, and funny characters on the show.

"A man must have a code," Bunk says sardonically to Omar in the first season, skeptical of this violent criminal's claims to ethical consistency.

"Oh, indeed," Omar replies, with utter sincerity. It's a great line, and one that the writers almost can't help themselves from repeating—and they do, as Omar says this line at least twice in later episodes. It's the closest the show gets to this classic TV device of giving characters tag lines ("What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?").

Omar does live by a code, though. He stays Omar (or has done so thus far, at least), and that sets him apart from many of the other major characters, who are less stable.

In the opening segment of one season four episode, Omar walks the streets one morning in search of a new box of his favorite breakfast, Honey Nut Cheerios. Kids along his path announce his approach: "Omar comin'!" It occurs to me now that this is a bit reminiscent of the welcome that Norm received each time he entered Cheers.

Understand: I'm not complaining. I love Omar as much as anyone. I just think it's interesting to consider that this unconventional character may constitute The Wire's closest connection to conventional TV shows.

Influence

In this post at Infinite Summer, Wallace honcho Matt Bucher delves into influences on Infinite Jest.

His first two examples are well-documented but not surprising: Mary Karr, sure—she dated DFW; Don DeLillo—no surprise there.

But then things get interesting: Thomas Harris! And Bucher backs it up with a passage-to-passage comparison between Red Dragon and IJ that is simply stunning. One might even be tempted to call DFW a plagiarist (if not for the fact that he re-writes Harris with such idiosyncratic brilliance).

For the sockdolager, though, Bucher draws a parallel to the oldest of old-school Nintendo games. And, I have to admit, it makes sense.

(He also argues, persuasively, that DFW was sincere in this list he submitted for a book that compiled the top ten favorite books of various writers. I always figured it was a joke, and a rather snarky one at that.)

Good stuff.