Various sources tell me I shouldn’t run the rehearsal photos. Sorry!
… My being the only white person in the choir… Last night, on our Orlando City Walk, they took a group photo and put me in the middle, ‘For contrast.'”
— La Kid, on her special status in the Springsteen choir.
…Springsteen talked a bit about his version of “The Rising” at “We Are One.”
“It was truly an experience to be on that stage,” he said. “There were people as far as I could see, and the choir behind me sang their hearts out for me. It was a beautiful feeling.”…
Listen to Wallace Stevens read his poem The Idea of Order at Key West.
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
The water never formed to mind or voice,
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves; and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone. But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town, tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
**********************************
Insanely slow. Slow poetry.
And why? So that we can attend to the world and what we make of it. Listen carefully. And remember my post about the Yvor Winters poem, The Slow Pacific Swell. Remember in particular this line:
The sea is but a sound.
This seems a theme of the Stevens poem too.
Listen. Listen because there’s something in the Stevens poem that isn’t in the Winters. And that thing is art itself. Winters is all about the mind struggling to impose order on the world. Our rationality, which seeks precision and stability, has to keep its distance from the enigmatic, undermining, powerful chaos that the sea represents. But Stevens introduces another element into our relationship with the world — one that enables us to remain close to sources of chaos and mystery. Listen.
*****************************************
The Idea of Order at Key West
She sang beyond the genius of the sea.
[The poet, walking along a beach, watches and listens to a woman also at the beach, singing. Her singing is brilliant – more brilliant than the singing of the sea.]
The water never formed to mind or voice,
[Why more brilliant? Because the sea is just a sound. It doesn’t have a mind, and it doesn’t have a voice. No words. Just sound. Same formless chaos Winters describes.]
Like a body wholly body, fluttering
Its empty sleeves;
[The sea is merely its physical reality on the globe. It is a body of water, and when its arms wave to us — when the water moves — its gesture is empty, without content.]
and yet its mimic motion
Made constant cry, caused constantly a cry,
That was not ours although we understood,
Inhuman, of the veritable ocean.
[See how he calls it “tragic-gestured” a few lines down? Although it’s empty of content, we do intuit, in the sound of the sea, the sad futility of human existence. Matthew Arnold in Dover Beach describes it as “the turbid ebb and flow of human misery.” We hear, writes Stevens, a constant cry — emanating from the alien inhuman sea, but nonetheless in some sense our own, because we understand it in a certain way as mimicking the truth of our being.]
The sea was not a mask. No more was she.
The song and water were not medleyed sound
Even if what she sang was what she heard.
Since what she sang was uttered word by word.
It may be that in all her phrases stirred
The grinding water and the gasping wind;
But it was she and not the sea we heard.
[Both human artist and inhuman sea, then, are authentic expressive realities. Yet they do not interact. Her song and the water do not, together, make a medley, even if the singer is trying to imitate the sound of the ocean with her voice. She’s using words, after all, and the ocean is speechless, empty gesture. Even if, in a fine low voice, she’s doing Elgar’s Sea Pictures, it’s the human artist we hear, not the ocean.]
For she was the maker of the song she sang.
[In the world of Winters, we are far less powerful than in the world of Stevens. With Stevens, the artist has dominion over the world — the world only has existence in the artist’s work, which shapes the world as something meaningful and beautiful. If we have any idea of order at all, we’ve gotten it from the artist.]
The ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea
Was merely a place by which she walked to sing.
[He agrees with Winters that the sea is a permanent and unsettling mystery – ever-hooded – and that it signals to us — or rather we respond to it as signaling to us — the truth of our tragic condition. But it’s not the threatening mystery it is for Winters; for Stevens, the sea is “merely” a location, merely a physical attribute of the world. It needs us – our formal artistic expressivity – to be anything more, really, than a place-holder.]
Whose spirit is this? we said, because we knew
It was the spirit that we sought and knew
That we should ask this often as she sang.
[To be human is to be unsatisfied with mere physicality. We seek meaning, beauty, spirit; and we seek it in art.]
If it was only the dark voice of the sea
That rose, or even colored by many waves;
If it was only the outer voice of sky
And cloud, of the sunken coral water-walled,
However clear, it would have been deep air,
The heaving speech of air, a summer sound
Repeated in a summer without end
And sound alone.
[We’ve been contemplating the level sea so far; now our view takes in what’s above and below it — takes in all of the world. And even if we do include all of the non-human, non-aesthetic world, we merely deepen the sense of nothingness – deep air, the “speech” of mere air. And there’s another feature of this physical world. It does not move forward in time; it does not, like our lives, make a narrative with a beginning, middle, and end. Rather it is a “summer without end,” a droning constancy that is therefore inhuman, alien to us and our experience. Only the artist can both interact with this atemporal world of nature and convey our temporal humanness to us.]
But it was more than that,
More even than her voice, and ours, among
The meaningless plungings of water and the wind,
Theatrical distances, bronze shadows heaped
On high horizons, mountainous atmospheres
Of sky and sea.
[The poet walks with a companion. He notes that the artist transcends herself – her singing is more “even than her voice,” and more than whatever the poet and his companion, in their speech, add to her song. Now we get a few lines amplifying the idea that the natural world is merely physical, and that while it can gesture to us in ways we interpret as meaningful, it is only the artist who can take that interpretation as it were back to the world, and vivify and order the world aesthetically. Without her, the world remains meaningless, a stage set.]
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
[As day ends and a spectacular Key West sunset of bronzes emerges, we need the singer to sharpen and clarify and order that sunset.]
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang.
[Again, the artist owns, lives inside, the temporality that makes the world something other than a grinding pointless redundancy. As she sings, she forms the world in which she sings.]
And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker. Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
Why, when the singing ended and we turned
Toward the town,
[The poet turns to his companion to ask a question as they walk away from the beach and toward town at the end of the day and as the singer concludes her song.]
tell why the glassy lights,
The lights in the fishing boats at anchor there,
As night descended, tilting in the air,
Mastered the night and portioned out the sea,
[We make songs, but we make other things too. Those lights in the boats also represent a form of ordering the world. They aren’t charged with artistic brilliance, like the singer’s song, but they are another powerful form of human creation — the lighting up of the dark world — and they have a similar effect: They master the night. They portion out the sea. They make the world. And they order the world. So even when the singing ends, we remain in a beautiful humanized world.]
Fixing emblazoned zones and fiery poles,
Arranging, deepening, enchanting night.
[Gorgeous writing. See how the word zone playfully inheres in the word that precedes it? We make of the otherwise undifferentiated world zones; we mark these zones with fiery poles, always arranging, deepening, clarifying darkness. This is a poem not merely about the triumphal powers of the artist; it is about the powers of all human makers.]
Oh! Blessed rage for order, pale Ramon,
The maker’s rage to order words of the sea,
Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred,
And of ourselves and of our origins,
In ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds.
[Our divine fever to be makers of a world whose vastest and most powerful attributes seem disorder — in this mania we discover that the “spirit” the poet sought in the singer is his own spirit, our collective human creativity. The world comes at us obliquely, fragrant with implicit meaning, dimly starred with significance. We are always, as with the boat’s lights, illuminating and setting in motion and speaking the dark mute lifeless stage set of the world. But aesthetic creation is the very best thing we do, for it confronts the sea, the sea that repels as much as it attracts Yvor Winters in his own slow poem.]
Technology can do much more than enable a woman with six children to have another eight.
Here at University Diaries, we tend to follow the amazing things classroom technology can do.
A student at Yale expresses his gratitude.
I’m willing to say that it’s a fact: Every day at Yale, someone’s cell phone goes off during class. That’s fine, it happens to all of us at some point. What boggles my mind is that nine times out of 10, the person a) has their cell phone in their bag, rather than perhaps in a pocket, thus putting it further out of reach, b) takes the phone out of their bag while it’s still ringing, or c) blankly stares at it, as if just too curious to avoid checking who’s calling at that moment. And all the while it is emitting that annoying Nokia descending ringtone even louder now because it’s not being suppressed by the bag, distracting just about everyone in class for upwards of 30 seconds, and deeply, deeply frustrating your humble correspondent. I mean, for God’s sake.
I understand the recent argument in the [Yale Daily] News that laptops should be banned from class. I’ll admit it; I take notes on my laptop sometimes, but only in classes in which I permit myself to be distracted, i.e. ones that I don’t care that much about. Not exactly the ideal student ethic, but certainly practical for the easily bored college student of the 21st century.
Overall, I somehow find it hard to imagine that most technological aids in the classroom truly take learning to new levels, somehow bestow Yale students with a far more profound understanding of the arts and sciences. Professors often use Powerpoint presentations that are completely worthless or simply jarring, that often pose more problems than they’re worth. Video clips in slides never open. Ever. They just bring up a picture of the Quicktime icon and leave the professor struggling to find the program on his or her desktop that is, meanwhile, projected to the whole class, who are all the while scanning it for anything moderately incriminating or embarrassing.
Transition effects like text (typically WordArt) bouncing like a basketball or shattering like glass, often paired with sound effects such as “ca-CHING” or “ahhhOOOOOgaaah” fail to grip the average Yale student, I think it’s safe to say. Students often download the Powerpoint presentation of a given lecture before class, taking notes on it while following along on their computers. This is like three steps away from the actual content of the lecture, each step making the student that much more passive and the professor that much more distant.
Nobody needs a slide in an introductory lecture that says “Introduction.” Nobody.
We don’t really need the expensive Smartboards in LC to learn about “Paradise Lost” or African-American history. We need the knowledge, and the newest gadgets don’t automatically deliver it any better or any faster, despite tech specs that may claim otherwise. If one were to add up all the minutes used in lectures over the course of a semester spent fiddling with, fixing and adjusting technological classroom aids, one would undoubtedly find that we lose a heck of a lot of valuable learning time. Ultimately, these innovations distract us, best intentions aside. Why do we use them? Well, because we can.
Take Mr. O’Callaghan, a hometown friend’s seventh-grade pre-algebra teacher. Word on the street was that he would look at porn on the Internet while students took tests. My friend didn’t believe it until he saw it with his own eyes. But hey, if the technology’s there, he might as well use it, right?
Mr. O’Callaghan seems to have moved on from junior high to the National Science Foundation…
UD‘s struck by the circularity of history…. From early man cranking his shank in a cave to Mr. O’Callaghan in his cubicle at the NSF…
This New York Times article (which will appear in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section) features a photo of La Kid and the choir with Springsteen at the inauguration concert. Click on the picture to enlarge it, and see UD’s daughter – the blond with glasses.
Notice how she’s smilingly looking to one side?
“I’m grinning at the President.”
She spoke with UD earlier today. She was on her way to a rehearsal in front of a couple of thousand people.
“I think I’m going to be on the far right of the screen for the actual performance,” she said. “You shouldn’t have any trouble finding me, since I’m the only white person in the choir… Bruce Springsteen and his wife are very, very friendly. He thinks highly of our group, and chats with us a lot, and leads us really well in the singing… I’m trying to keep up with schoolwork… I’ve been reading Othello. But I’m tired when I get back from Tampa in the evening… “
Were I to die, no one would say,
‘Oh, what a shame! So young, so full
Of promise – depths unplumbable!
Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes
Will greet my overdue demise;
The wide response will be, I know,
‘I thought he died a while ago.’
For life’s a shabby subterfuge,
And death is real, and dark, and huge.
The shock of it will register
Nowhere but where it will occur.
*************************
A nice unexciting final piece, which reminded me, in its last lines, of Harold Brodkey’s last lines in This Wild Darkness, written also just before his death. These lines, though prose, are more poetic than Updike’s:
One may be tired of the world — tired of the prayer-makers, the poem-makers, whose rituals are distracting and human and pleasant but worse than irritating because they have no reality — while reality itself remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real. God is an immensity, while this disease, this death, which is in me, this small, tightly defined pedestrian event, is merely and perfectly real, without miracle — or instruction. I am standing on an unmoored raft, a punt moving on the flexing, flowing face of a river. It is precarious. I don’t know what I am doing. The unknowing, the taut balance, the jolts and the instability spread in widening ripples through all my thoughts. Peace? There was never any in the world. But in the pliable water, under the sky, unmoored, I am traveling now and hearing myself laugh, at first with nerves and then with genuine amazement. It is all around me.
*************************************
Life’s a shabby subterfuge. Reality remains very dear. One wants glimpses of the real.
Death is real and dark and huge, writes Updike. Yet these vague words don’t work as powerfully as the precision — the gorgeous, bizarre precision — of Brodkey’s fevered mind, which finds, even as it shuts down, a glorious image through which to convey the gradual fading away of physical integrity as one floats off into death.
Both writers evoke the shabby subterfuge of life, the noontime show of reassurance we make; and our sense, as day lengthens, of our self-deceit.
… I’ve had to update my About Margaret Soltan page.
It’s an awkward way of putting it, to be sure, but this Harvard professor, representing a group of alumni calling for the refund of this year’s money managers’ bonuses — they earned $21 million for losing $8 billion of Harvard’s endowment — is certainly correct.
The bonuses – paid out over time and subject to so-called clawback provisions if future performance is below market benchmarks – reflect industry standards, said John Longbrake, university spokesman.
Actually, they don’t. The bonuses are lower than industry standards because this same group of alumni, a few years ago, generated so much outrage over the $35 million in bonuses sometimes earned by individual managers (that’s the industry standard) that Harvard lowered the amount its people could make.
But they still earn an awful lot, don’t they? Especially given the fact that they’re running the endowment into the ground?
The group of alumni has proposed that no employee should be paid in excess of what the university president earns; [Larry] Summers was paid $611,000 during his last year, the latest presidential salary available.
LOL. You expect money managers to work for less than, say, five million a year? Sure, we all have to tighten our belts. But these people need to eat…
… Backstreets.com. Glad you liked the photo from the Springsteen rehearsal today (scroll down).
Patti Scialfa (background) tries to concentrate while La Kid poses with a fellow singer.
La Kid shows any doubters among you exactly where she is.
She’s been in Tampa for a couple of days now, and has had her first rehearsal at the Raymond James Stadium.
She says the weather is warm and sunny.
She’s taken a cab to a mall and had her toes painted. UD doubts the 163 million people watching her sing with Springsteen will be able to see her toes, but who knows.
Meanwhile, as we await the big game with super anticipation, here’s a blast from the past. A photo taken by La Kid of Bono as various performers milled around during the inauguration concert.
… Sonata for Cello and Piano, a British scientist announced, a few years ago, a new syndrome called Cello Scrotum, in which the pressing of the instrument against the male instrumentalist promoted scrotal decomposition.
Her work on the condition was written up in a major medical journal, and for years has been cited respectfully.
She has now admitted that it was a hoax.
*******************************
Update: Two limericks thus far. The first is by Dave.
“My cello’s degrading my scrotum,”
Said Rostropovich unto his factotum.
“Yo-Yo Ma’s yo-yo
Has withered in toto,
Yet science refuses to note ‘em.”
**********************************
The second is by University Diaries:
Ever since I contracted c. scrotum
My f-hole’s become a mere totem.
Only thing I can play
Is Auber’s Bal Masqué.
I’ll have to begin to regrow them.
***********************************
UPDATE: More scrotum-tightening verse.
From Eric:
There once was a cellist named Zack,
Alarmed about losing his sac.
After vigorous chokehold,
He knew he’d been Sokaled,
So spicattoed and bowed his groove back.
*************************
From Dave:
Brahms lost his to a misapplied flute.
Gonorrhea shrank Mahler’s, to boot.
I’m blaming my cello
For the sickly and yellow
State of my forbidden fruit.
*************************
From Melanie:
A scrupulous cellist named Krupp
Bought a rockstop that came with a cup.
When asked, “Why the addition?”
He cited physicians
And said, “So my endpin stays up.”