No Trouble in Bubbleland

Photo by Drew Beamer on Unsplash

Here’s a writer you’ll not only probably enjoy but who will make you feel a little bit better.

I learned of R. Eric Thomas through our mutual friend (just kidding) Ann Patchett, the novelist, who featured his new book in a little promotion for her Nashville bookstore, Parnassus Books. I requested Congratulations! The Best Is Over! immediately after viewing that video. I can’t re-access the Tik Tok video but you can read Eric’s giddy account of a joint appearance by the two of them here.

Both writers are funny and humane.

Congratulations largely concerns Eric’s reluctant move from Philadelphia to Baltimore, where, he says, “all the ghosts of the unhappy person I used to be still lived.” He and his husband eventually buy a house and build a pond, where noisy frogs drive Eric to distraction. He’s able to describe frog-induced insomnia hilariously.

I’m currently reading his earlier book, Here for It, or, How to Save Your Soul in America, which I may like even better. One essay, “There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland,” directed me to a Mister Rogers episode called “Mister Rogers Makes an Opera,” for which I will feel eternal gratitude to R. Eric Thomas. I love and respect Mister Rogers as much as the next person, but, really, the word unhinged sometimes comes to mind. Thomas says affectionately that Mister R. was “relentless in his pursuit of eccentricity.” Watch the opera and see.

One of the episode’s songs, “There’s Never Any Trouble Here in Bubbleland,” gave Thomas’s working-class Black family a catch phrase:

[This] became my mother’s frequent ironic refrain, a sardonic way of expressing frustration at a situation that was set up for my parents to fail. Our neglected neighborhood was rumbling around us; my parents worked tirelessly but still struggled financially their parents were ailing. When the weight of it all threatened to overtake her, my mother, with a lightness, would sigh, ‘There’s never any trouble here in Bubbleland.’ It became a relief valve, a code word, a cry for help. It also served as a guiding metaphor. The world outside was troublesome, but the house and the world my parents built for us within it was a bubble. A delicate, permeable utopia.

Which gives you a taste of Thomas’s graceful writing. Check him out.

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A Scottish Play on Words

A red herring (Photo by Tomas Martinez on Unsplash)

As the credits rolled, I leaned toward my companion. “Is the Maltese falcon a MacGuffin?” I asked.

“Um,” he replied, “I always sort of forget what a MacGuffin is.”

That evening, referring the question to Mr. Wikipedia, we learned that a MacGuffin is an object or person needed to move the plot forward, but insignificant in and of itself. In the renowned 1941 film, the Maltese falcon could have just as easily been a ring or a fleece or a chalice (all arguably MacGuffins in other works) and is therefore often cited as an example of a MacGuffin. The point is not that it’s a falcon. The point is that the characters are after it, relentlessly.

I guess by this definition Moby-Dick is not a MacGuffin, even though Ahab’s pursuit of him drives the plot. The white whale has significance in and of himself. So much significance! I submit in evidence the chapter entitled “The Whiteness of the Whale” and the copious scholarship examining Moby’s meaning.

(On second thought, maybe for all those desperate Ph.D. candidates, Moby-Dick perfectly embodies the MacGuffin–the meaningless object of a futile chase.)

Some websites help draw distinctions among other common, similar devices. A red herring, for example, distracts you from the heart of the matter. At the beginning of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, Marian (Janet Leigh) has a pile of cash. On first viewing, you think the cash is consequential, but it disappears along with Marian’s body, never to be seen again. Hitchcock is a tricky dick.

Red herring‘s history is murky. It has something to do with the smell of a smoked fish used to distract (or possibly train) hounds going after a fox. Or horses. It’s not entirely clear.

Another term: Chekhov’s gun represents perhaps the exact opposite of a MacGuffin–an item appearing early in the story and exploding (eventually) with significance by the end. It’s full of meaning, and you’re supposed to pay attention to it. Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya famously reveals a gun in the first scene, which you worry about the whole play. It turns out you’re right to worry about it.

A screenwriter named Angus McPhail, who worked on Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much and The Wrong Man, among other films, originated the term MacGuffin. Hitchcock adopted it enthusiastically, and it’s most commonly associated with him.

In an interview with the director Francois Truffaut, Hitchcock offered a puckish alternative etymology for MacGuffin:

It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men in a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh that’s a MacGuffin.’ The first one asks ‘What’s a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well’ the other man says, ‘It’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers ‘Well, then that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see, a MacGuffin is nothing at all.

Which is either a red herring or a shaggy dog story. Or both.

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A Christmas Carol in January

Photo by Taha on Unsplash

It’s no longer the holiday season, but, because I’d been thinking for a while about rereading Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, I finally did it today.

Like (I imagine) many people, I supposed I knew the story. I recalled the outlines, of course, and remembered parts vividly. The ominous atmosphere surrounding the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come has stuck with me best: Scrooge foreseeing the future, including the death of Tiny Tim and a vision of his own grave. I retained the spookiness.

But that’s only ten pages of a fifty-page novella and only one-third of the ghostly visitations. I had forgotten how varied the other experiences are, how joyful some of the visions, and how essentially compassionate the Ghosts. Too many dramatizations on stage and on screen (and in cartoons!) have come between my last reading some decades ago and this one.

Someone recently commented to me that the story really doesn’t have much to do with Christmas, except for the time that it takes place. I didn’t feel I could contradict the person, but I do now. The story is filled with Christmas sounds, smells, sights and family gatherings as we know them and as Dickens largely created them. Here’s Scrooge’s walk in London with the Ghost of Christmas Present:

By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets, the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlors, and all sorts of rooms, was wonderful. Here, the flickering of the blaze showed preparations for a cozy dinner with hot plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep red curtains, ready to be drawn, to shut out cold and darkness. There, all the children of the house were running out into the snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins, uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them. . . But if you had judged from the numbers of people on their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought that no one was at home to give them welcome when they got there, instead of every house expecting company, and piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it, how the Ghost exulted!

Aside from sensory and sentimental associations, the lessons of Christmas and of Christianity, in its best sense, imbue the whole novella. Christmas and Christianity, in their ideal manifestation, are about love, generosity, compassion, and redemption. After the Ghosts’ tutelage, Scrooge, “a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,” has transformed into “as good a friend, as good a master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old world.” When people laughed at Scrooge, his “own heart laughed, and that was quite enough for him.” Dickens is conveying the hope essential to the Christmas story.

Of course, I’m not insisting that A Christmas Carol has to be read as a religious text. It has truths and pleasures for everyone. I will politely object, however, the next time anyone asserts in my presence that it has nothing to do with Christmas.


							
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Thrown a Curve

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YmJuBia6cWY

Lots of delightful reading the past few weeks, and some interesting turns of phrase therein.

The Uncommon Reader (2007), an entertaining novel by Alan Bennett, is veddy, veddy English, concerning, as it does, the Queen herself. An expression struck me (so to speak), and, sure enough, it’s thoroughly British, deriving from the game of cricket.

The story’s partially fictionalized Queen takes up reading late in life, and her new obsession throws her courtiers and family off balance. Bennett, who starred with Jonathan Miller, Dudley Moore, and Peter Cook in the comedy ensemble Beyond the Fringe, and who wrote The Madness of King George and The History Boys, gets off lots of droll commentary on Brit lit and current events. His language is waggishly clever.

Because of her job, the Queen has always been adept at small talk. Meeting so many strangers, she’s developed the social skill of saying nothing but putting people at ease. Reading evokes a more curious side in her: she begins asking her subjects what they’re reading.

What? Is the Queen going to judge me if I’m reading the latest Sophie Kinsella? What if I’m not reading at all?’ Her interlocutors are tongue-tied. In their embarrassment, they resentfully suspect that the Queen has bowled them a wobbly.

“Bowling,” as it turns out, is what our baseball pitchers do, i.e., throwing. A “wobbly” is a pitch that wobbles as it approaches the batsman. Like baseball’s curveball or screwball, the wobbly confounds the batsman. The pitch’s physics is quite a science and quite a hot topic. See here to learn more.

I’m way behind the wicket, of course. Cricket is big everywhere, even in America, as this PBS Newshour story makes clear. At first, as I was reading, I bobbled Bennett’s wobbly and resorted to Google, but have now volubly cobbled some twaddle here to toggle your noggins.

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Combo (Words and Music)

My friend Leanne sent me an article about frisson as the word applies to musical enjoyment. In French, it means “shiver,” and its Latin root, frigere, means “to become cold,” as in the food in your Frigidaire.

Every now and then, English has to borrow a word in order to communicate a concept. Ennui, for example, is not exactly boredom and not exactly dissatisfaction. It conveys instead a world-weariness, or what the poet Charles Lloyd termed “pale unrest.” It’s a feeling of jadedness, like, you know, French people. Instead of using all those words to describe the experience, we borrowed ennui from France, and it does the trick.

Frisson is almost the opposite of ennui. It describes the feeling of surprised delight–chills or goosebumps–we can feel upon hearing a piece of music or having some other aesthetic experience. Back in the day, we could move the needle on a record (over and over again) to repeat “the good parts,” as my husband used to call them. Now we have to ask Alexa to play the whole song again.

Before now, I knew the word to mean a little thrill but had never heard it used in the context of music. The article links to a Spotify list (you can find many of the pieces on YouTube instead) of 715 pieces of music that give many people a frisson. The list’s diversity is cool, from Metallica to Mozart to Johnny Cash to a bunch of people I never heard of.

This afternoon as I baked cookies I was frisson-ing over several pieces of music I associate with the Christmas season, even though they’re not technically Christmas music. I first heard Respighi’s Ancient Airs and Dances at a December concert years ago with the late lamented Red, An Orchestra and have associated it with the holiday ever since. I love it so much that I sometimes have to sit down during my cookie baking to regain my composure. The Bergamasca movement in Suite No. 2 is one of many good parts. Turn it up loud.

I also listened to soprano Kathleen Battle’s version of Pie Iesu on one of our Christmas cds. It’s from Gabriel Faure’s Requiem, so it’s not specifically a Christmas piece, but it’s about Jesus, so there you go. I’m sure other singers’ renditions are just fine, but I’m partial to this one. I don’t use the word sublime very often, but it applies here. I wonder how often a frisson occurs not only because of the music but because of the performance. I note for instance that some commenters on the article cite not Simon and Garfunkel’s version of “The Sound of Silence,” but the band Disturbed’s performance, which is indeed awesome. Watch it to the end.

Finally, I connect Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings to Christmas, because my husband played it at Christmas time in our first apartment on Fulton Road in Canton. Because he associated it with Christmas, I do too. It brings back our first Christmases together in that top floor place with our little Christmas trees and our old furniture and meager decorations. Also cookies. A nostalgic frisson.

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From Me to You

I didn’t write about books over the weekend, because I’m still reading the Mozart biography and don’t have much to add to what I’ve said. Only about 200 pages to go.

The best thing about the experience is pausing now and then to watch and listen to a performance of a piece Mr. Swafford so beautifully describes. Yesterday I watched The Marriage of Figaro, which I had never seen, with the book alongside to untangle the twisty plot. What a treat that was.

So as we enter the gift-giving season, I bestow upon you one of the gems I’ve experienced, the Piano Concerto in D Minor, K. 466, performed by Mitsuko Uchida in Salzburg (Mozart’s hometown), no less. Curl up with a hot cup of tea or cocoa, snuggle under a blanket with your kitty cat, and watch her fingers fly.

You’re welcome.

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Five Things I Didn’t Know about Mozart*

*and I’m only on page 370

Photo by Free Walking Tour Salzburg on Un

I mentioned last week that I’m reading Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford. I hope you didn’t expect me to have finished reading its 750+ pages by now. But I’m almost halfway! Time to share a few things I’ve learned so far.

One. Wolfgang’s father Leopold, a musician and composer, wrote and published a successful handbook for teachers and students in 1756, called Treatise on the Fundamental Principles of Violin Playing.

Two. Leopold, as many people know, was a hard taskmaster. He pinned his hopes on his brilliant son’s supporting him and the family, but Wolfgang as he matured had some bad luck with patrons and was not always practical or diplomatic. Despite his hectoring, Leopold in fact had saved up a nice nest egg from his travels with Wolfgang and his precocious sister Nannerl, a sizeable fund he kept secret from the children who had earned it for him.

Three. Wolfgang’s prodigious talents are well known, but the actual facts are always startling. In 1761, at the age of four, he began playing the clavier, his family’s keyboard instrument, mimicking the pieces he was hearing Nannerl play. Later that year, he began playing a piece his sister had never played; he began composing. He never stopped creating new music to the end of his life.

Four. In 1781, Wolfgang created a violin concerto (G Major, K. 379) between 11:00 pm and midnight the night before he performed it for the first time. He wrote out the violin part for a soloist and accompanied on keyboard from memory.

Five. Before Mozart, an opera’s libretto (the story and lyrics) was considered the salient aspect of an opera. The music was secondary. Wolfgang revised and collaborated on libretti more than previous composers, but after him–that is, after Ideomeneo, The Abduction from the Seraglio, Don Giovanni, The Magic Flute, and the rest–music, partnered gracefully with the libretto, superseded the story in importance.

I’ll close by quoting a chapter’s ending I particularly liked. It ushers in the massive changes in Mozart’s life as he moved to Vienna from Salzburg in 1781 at the age of 25.

[Mozart’s new friends] came to know an inexplicable force of nature who could rise from a luminous improvisation at the clavier for a round of meowing like a cat and leaping over the furniture. They would remember the myriad fancies and gaieties of the little man with an overlarge heard and a pale pockmarked face who was forever drumming on things, tapping his feet, jabbering away, but who might also grasp your hand and look at you with something profound, searching, and melancholy in his eyes. Even in company there was often an air about Mozart of being in his mind not quite there. At table he might sit silently and unseeing in the hubbub, clutching a napkin to his face and grimacing. In Vienna it was as if he lived onstage and off at the same time, a character in life’s tragicomedy but also outside it, watching, studying, gathering material from the world around him for the fabric of his art.

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Kiss on Our List

Photo by Tim Mossholder on Unsplash

Some mysterious algorithm recently offered me a post about inosculation (in-ahs-cue-lay-shun), a naturally occurring grafting of trees. One tree seeming reaches out to another, and they grow into each other. They become conjoined organisms sharing nutrients and circulation.

All very interesting natural science, of course, but what you, as a reader of this blog, are no doubt wondering is, “Where does that word come from?” Inosculation derives from osculum, the Latin noun meaning “kiss.”

This history leads, as happens so often, to other interesting facts. Previous posts have explored linguistic diminutives, that is, words modified to express smallness or endearment. For example, a drum major struts in front of the band authoritatively, while a majorette, though skilled and athletic, is usually pretty and feminine. The –ette makes her so. We may dislike a cat, but a kitty? Not so much. Certain suffixes serve to make the ordinary noun small, unthreatening, and even charming.

So it is for osculum. It builds on the Roman word for “mouth,” that is, os. The -culum suffix makes the mouth small and cute and pursed. A kiss, in other words, is a “little mouth.” (Analogously, a homunculus is a “little man.”) In addition, I learned that sponges breathe through their oscula, their little mouths.

This article from the University of New Hampshire shows lovely images of tree osculation. It explains that when branches rub against each other, the bark wears away and then grows scar tissue, which can form a bond between the trees. This connection can even occur between trees of different species.

To my delight, this source also recounts the mythological story of Baucis and Philemon, one of my favorites told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses. The devoted elderly couple shared their meager resources with the gods Jupiter and Mercury, visiting in disguise. As a reward, the gods granted them the gift of dying together and spending eternity as two connected trees. Reading this beautiful tale, I have always imagined two trees with their trunks intertwined, but now I love imagining a deeper dependent connection. Inosculated trees share resources and support one another, as Baucis and Philemon would lovingly do throughout time.

The article also cites Rembrandt’s painting of the couple hosting the gods, which resides in the National Gallery in Washington, and works by the artist Arthur Rackham and the poet Thom Gunn, who calls the couple’s embrace a “wooden hug.” Wrong etymology, but lovely image nonetheless.

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Miscellany

I recently realized that my current reading is a very weird mix. I’ll describe the books I’m reading in order–from the sublime to the ridiculous, literally.

The most ponderous is a 700+ page biography called Mozart: The Reign of Love by Jan Swafford, a musician and composer who’s also written biographies of Beethoven and Brahms. A few weeks ago we saw Milos Forman’s 1984 film Amadeus at Severance Hall, with the stunning soundtrack provided by the Cleveland Orchestra. Realizing that the film was fictionalized–poor Salieri, a contemporary composer did not actually murder Mozart–I wondered about Mozart’s childlike (not to say sophomoric) sense of fun, as well as the real story behind his father’s exploitation of his talent.

After a couple of weeks, I’m only about 250 pages in. Mozart in real life was even sillier and more scatological than Tom Hulce’s movie performance. Now and then I take a YouTube break to listen to whatever Mozart piece Swafford is describing. As you no doubt know, there’s a lot to listen to. Though Mozart died at age 35, he began composing music when he was five years old, and he could turn out a symphony in an afternoon. He and his music deserve all 750 pages.

In contrast to sunny Mozart, Edouard Leve’s novel Suicide is also in my current reading rotation. At only a little over 100 pages long, it’s also a contrast to Swafford’s tome. Leve, an author and photographer, born in 1965, committed suicide about ten days after he submitted the Suicide manuscript to his publisher in 2007. As you can imagine, a novelistic suicide note, essentially, appeals to readers’ morbid interest.

But I didn’t know this background when I requested the book. My book group was recently discussing Julie Otsuka’s novel The Swimmers, whose last chapter is written in second person; that is, it’s addressed to a you, ostensibly the daughter of the earlier chapters’ main character, an older woman with dementia. This narrative choice is very unusual. It happens that one of my favorite books, Winter Birds (1994) by Jim Grimsley, also has a second-person narration, where it represents the adult narrator addressing himself as a young boy. When I looked up second person narrators, I found Suicide, and that’s how it made it to my bookshelf. Suicide is as somber as you might imagine, well observed and powerful, but not exactly entertaining.

For occasional relief, I pick up Tears of the Giraffe, the second in a mystery series by Alexander McCall Smith. I recently enjoyed the first installment, The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency. recommended by a YouTube influencer. These popular books feature a wise and charming Botswanan sleuth named Precious Ramotswe. Smith’s series runs to 23 volumes, which might become a more ambitious reading project even than Mozart.

On an even lighter note, I’m also reading Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of “Airplane” by the movie’s goofball creators Jerry Zucker, Jim Abrahams, and David Zucker, a recommendation from our friend Tim. I was attracted by the David Letterman quote on the back cover praising the movie and the prevalence of Letterman quotes inside as well. I like David Letterman. It seems Dave auditioned for the movie and didn’t get a part, which he, like the filmmakers, finds very amusing. Dave kept telling them, “I can’t act. I can’t act. I can’t act.” After his audition, they told him, “You’re right. You can’t act.” Dave says, “I was right, and we all ended up parting as friends. So it was a good time.”

An eclectic mix, to be sure. I usually don’t read four books at a time, but I’m liking them all.

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Connecting (Again)

He did send his beautiful book.

I looked up this old post, which first appeared in 2014, because my niece Frances is working at the Dallas Museum of Art, which features an outdoor sculpture called “Ave” by Mark di Suvero. I wanted to share our family connection to the artist with her. Here’s the old post, updated a little, featuring di Suvero’s Dreambook as our Weekend Edition.

I’ve written here before about my dad’s experiences at the Rusk Institute of Rehabilitation Medicine in New York City. Brush-Moore Newspapers, the company that owned the Canton Repository, where my dad worked, sent him to the Institute a number of times for surgeries and rehab, after he became a paraplegic in the early fifties.

I’ve noted in other writing his close encounters with Roy Campanella, the Dodgers shortstop who, injured in a 1958 auto accident, became a paraplegic, and his relationship with Alger Hiss, who visited him regularly when he was in New York for a long stint. Dad entertained us in his letters and after he got home in person with stories about these people, as well as Dr. Howard Rusk, the pioneering doctor who founded the hospital, and also other doctors, nurses, aides, and regular folk he encountered there. One of the people he met at the Institute, as we called it, was the artist Mark di Suvero, who had been seriously injured in a construction accident.

My dad would have been in his fifties by the time they met, when di Suvero was a thirty-something young artist. I remember that his real name was Marco Polo di Suvero and that he was born in Shanghai to Italian parents. He had a beard and apparently wore turtleneck sweaters and was already part of the counter-culture as it was then developing. My dad had educated, liberal sensibilities, but was a straightforward Middle American who eschewed affectation and regarded most eccentricities suspiciously. So, he was bemused and intrigued by di Suvero and liked him, too, all at the same time. They continued to exchange letters after my dad returned home. As far as I know, they’ve been lost.

At some point, a couple of decades ago, my sisters and I checked into di Suvero and discovered that he was a prominent artist, with sculptures at museums and public places all around the world, including the nearby (to us) Akron Museum of Art, who owns his Eagle Wheel. A couple of weeks ago, I was thinking about Mark di Suvero and realized that in 2014 he probably had a website. Which he does, here.

I ferreted out the contact information and sent Mr. di Suvero a short email, wondering if he remembered my dad and expressed our appreciation to him as someone who befriended (and was befriended by) my dad in far-off New York. Soon after, I received a message, passed along by an assistant.

It begins, “I remember your father from more than 50 years ago. I liked him because he was a good man, intelligent, and he brought something positive to the climate of the room at Rusk.” He goes on to say that he’s still in touch with another roommate, a quadriplegic named Lenny, a name I recall, who played chess with my dad. Lenny recalls that he and my dad continued to play chess after they had graduated from Rusk. It’s true that my dad maintained chess games long-distance. He had a cool cardboard book with little cardboard chess pieces you could fit into slots; you communicated your plays to your antagonist via postcards. Those games, perforce, went on for months.

The message goes on: “I was forced by political conviction (anti-war) to leave the country so I lost contact with your father.” Interesting, this little division caused by the Vietnam War. My dad, too, opposed the war and disagreed with some friends and family and co-workers in doing so. He even grew a modest beard in the late sixties, but soon shaved it off, worried about those affectations I mentioned before. My dad read I.F. Stone’s Weekly and The New Republic and was way ahead of many college students, including me, in opposing the war.

Mr. di Suvero’s email message ends like this: “I am sure that he was one of the bright citizens and has made me think in a deeply positive sense of Canton, Ohio.” It’s a great thing to encounter someone who knew my dad, who was born in 1911 and died in 1971. Not many such people left.

At the end of his message, Mark di Suvero offers to send me a Dreambook, a collection of photos of his work, which I’m waiting for, with great anticipation, now.

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