Reading Between the Lives (The War on Like)

It's no longer enough to be compassionate, for love is now a zero sum game.

Or is it that our compassion has grown so limited... in these boxes we call home?

Black lives. Blue lives. Queer lives. All.

Choosing one is choosing against the others (or so the story goes).

Sitting at home the other night so paralyzed that I could no longer turn away, I sought refuge where I have so many times before... in books.

But standing once again before a bookshelf that has often been my altar, it struck me:

My compassion has been replaced by my passions.

What if the things I love have taken the place of my interest in what others hold dear?

So I've decided to read more of what others call their own. 

I (re)turned first to an autobiography which I've always found troubling.

Truth be told it troubles me still.

I don't LIKE it. But finally I see the value in that.

For it's things I've LIKED that have kept me warm in a world which is shrinking by the day.

I'm of an age where that phrase - the shrinking world - used to mean progress.

It no longer means any such thing. Not to me. 

My world has contracted because I failed to continue to expand it. 

In surrounding myself with only things I LIKED, I lost the ability to see how other things (and those who loved these things) were actually LIKE me.

I need to reconnect.

If it's for me to tell the story, then I can no longer ignore the greater narrative.

Black. Blue. Queer. All.

It's time to read more of what I haven't LIKED before.

For if I don't, I'll never learn just how LIKE me the many I'm yet to meet truly are.

Euripides, Chopin and the Slingshot of Celebrity.

Yesterday was a good day. Two months removed from eye surgery, I was able to finally read an actual printed book for the first time in what has seemed like forever. I need to quickly acknowledge my gratitude to my e-reader and its adjustable font for not leaving me totally out in the cold during my recovery, but still… There is something about the feel of a book.

For whatever reason–it would take a blog twice this length to discuss how I arrived at the starting line–I decided to read a collection of Euripides which included Andromache. This play, not one of his best known, was attractive to me for its connection to Hektor, the actual hero of the Iliad (but there IS another blog theme entirely).

Within Andromache, I discovered this delightfully searing line:

Celebrity, celebrity: you inflate the lives of countless good-for-nothing mortals.

Immediately, I knew this was a line to which I could write, but still I wondered exactly what such a post would focus on. Might I wish to discuss the celebrity that exists within the publishing industry? Might I wish instead to ruminate on Reality TV or even on the coming election?

As much as the quote had inspired me, I felt that a potential rant, often more an aside than a truly thoughtful contribution, wasn’t quite where I hoped to go. Content with the good start, though displeased by the lack of conclusion, I turned in for the evening.

It was here, as it so often is, that something truly special happened.

My mind often roams from Classics to Classical and so I decided to relax to a TED Talk I’d watched once before by Classical conductor Benjamin Zander. Zander’s talk, an exposition on the “transformative power of classical music” dissects the power of Frederic Chopin’s Prelude 4 in E Minor. Hearing Zander describe Chopin’s use of certain notes to change the emotional value of others (“C’s job is to make B sad”) and his use of ‘deceptive cadence,’ a kind of false ending, one could see the parallels between Classical composition and the writing of a play or novel.

By the time Chopin arrives at E–a moment Zander labels ‘coming home’–the listener has undertaken an emotional journey, one for which the modern conductor often receives adulation and fame.

So moved was I by Zander’s talk that I felt immediately drawn to consider the following:

•          Sharing the TED Talk on my Facebook page
•          Writing this blog post entirely on Zander
•          Writing this blog post entirely on Chopin
•          Going online to buy a book on Zander
•          Going online to buy a book on Chopin
•          … I think you get the point

It was then that I returned to Andromache. Might the enthusiasm I felt as I finished Zander’s talk have been an example of one of the other dangers of Celebrity? Though the talk in question had featured two men–one a composer, one a conductor–who were both deserving of praise, wouldn’t worshiping one or both of them cut me off from the greater discovery which was being born in that moment?

Zander’s talk, again, was meant to show the transformative power of Classical music. Was his goal for his audience to go from indifference towards a genre to feeling obsessed with one three-minute morsel? Hardly. In this way, his great charisma and the power of this piece of music both ran the risk of becoming the endpoint for the listener’s journey, not its point of departure.

So then, is Celebrity evil because it promotes the unworthy or is its true danger the way that any stimulus, no matter how worthy, can seem like the end and not the beginning?

To his credit, Zander seems to have recognized this same danger when he observed that he, the conductor, doesn’t actually make a sound. The conductor, he continued, has his picture on the CD case, but his power comes from his ability to make other people (those that play the music) powerful.

Zander is a celebrity. He has earned his fame (or kleos if we want to return to this blog’s Greek beginnings).

Should I therefore have avoided Zander and his dangerous Celebrity from the start? Of course not. I could not have learned the truths which this blog has flowed from without his lecture. However, to stop learning at the end of his talk, to stop listening to Classical at the conclusion of Chopin’s three minute journey from B to E, would have been a tragedy.

So we should acknowledge Celebrity. Perhaps, we should even celebrate it. What we should never do, however, is view Celebrity as the destination. Instead, we can use Celebrity to push us on our way. For an example, let’s consider the piano-sized space probe which has recently been in our newsfeeds.

On its way to Pluto, the New Horizons probe gained invaluable momentum by way of a gravitational slingshot around Jupiter. This is precisely how we can use Celebrity as we move along our journey.

So travel towards Celebrity, enter its orbit for a time, and then use the power of Celebrity’s enormity to propel you to that next place… wherever that next place may be.

Old, Old, Old

Striving to remain relevant is the aim of many artists, but it isn’t a burden only to them. Beyond the difficulties faced by writers, musicians, filmmakers and their ilk, missteps along the Pathway to Cool harm friends, family and most of all, fans like you and me.

How many times have you read a book or listened to a new release from an artist you’d grown to trust only to shake your head in disappointment? “It just didn’t ring true.” “I knew where it was going from the first page.” “I just don’t feel like I needed to read/hear/see that like I used to.” We’ve all had such reactions, such disappointments.

Now, listen, I accept that a lot of this is down to my expectations, but I’ll leave that another blog(ger). What I’m mostly interested in when I give my time or money to something is what I get out of it. Furthermore, I’m interested in how I can use this experience to bolster myself in the future.

This is kinda the secret about consumption. We consume so we can make someone else feel inferior at a later date for our having gotten there first. Hours spent watching a movie or days spent reading a book that no one else wants to hear about are essentially wasted hours – if one adheres to the aforementioned philosophy.

To all of this, I’ve found a solution. Being at one with who I am? No. Enjoying things for what they are in that moment? Better. The way not to get disappointed by all which was meant to be fresh is to intentionally shop in a more, well, aged aisle.*

In the past week, I’ve started to read a 30 year old novel, listen to a 65+ year old jazz record and re-watch a 25 year old TV sitcom. The results have been marvelous.

The Novel: I’ll admit I was fortunate to have a favorite novelist’s early work only become available very recently. I’ve read, and become disillusioned with, many of this author’s recent works. However, the innocence in his early work is intoxicating. Areas of inspiration seem richer for his having been so young, and his missteps seem to imply a path with which he would become more confident as his career developed. The best thing about this book is that I opened it with no expectation of being able to share it with others. It has little to do with the today's headlines, but then at the same time it did. What this book has offered me is a release from the NEED for it to be relevant, but what has actually happened is something quite the opposite. On each page, I find something which I can apply to my current life. Far more significant, I find something which seems little like everything else I’m seeing on Facebook, etc. at that moment.

The Jazz Record: In many ways, this blog applies the most to musical consumption. For me, listening to new music is often an exercise in cynicism. It’s all well and good until I get even a sniff of where that artist gained their influence. From that moment forth, I’m far more an investigator taking notes on plagiarism than I am a casual fan. It becomes tedious. Working the process backwards is awesome. First off, old music - that made without a music video, ad campaign, myspace/YouTube launch, etc - tends to be fairly reliable as to its production quality. This is not to say you will like every record you buy, but there is, within a world that knew little of the dreaded Single, a complete story that will make you long for the days before the Random button. Additionally, when listening to old music, one will encounter the sounds that would eventually lead to many of today’s standards. For some reason, discovering the inspiration can be done in a far more curious way than the example described earlier, which often feels more like catching a thief. It’s hard to explain, but while hearing Oasis take from the Beatles is painful, hearing that one line in Springsteen’s The River that would lead to two Bon Jovi albums (or the awesome influence that the E-Street Band had on Snow Patrol) makes one smile.  

The TV Sitcom: Last, and perhaps least, is the TV Sitcom. The charm of TV is that it really rarely ages well. The jokes are funny, but they are often dated. In some cases, the fashion is almost funnier than the punch lines, and often, perhaps more so than in other mediums, there is the sadness of a young upstart that never quite made it. Still – Zen moment approaching – if something (a topic, a characterization, a stereotype) that an entire country took so seriously can become so dated in only 25 years, doesn’t that give us hope that the crap we’re suffering through on Facebook today will, someday, I promise, disappear as well?

So, if you’re feeling lost among the stunning aisles of New, join me in the nostalgia of Old, won’t you? I swear you’ll be happy you did.

*Note: The strategy described in this blog has NOT proven as effective in the discipline of cooking. Sadly, I would not recommend looking for expired ingredients in search of nostalgia – unless those ingredients were grapes, I hear that can work sometimes. 

Yes, I have. Yes. (A postmortem on Joyce's Ulysses)

So this is how it ends… What started as a dream, a dare, a joke even… Through Hamlet (again), Dubliners (again), Portrait and, of course, the Odyssey, and finally, finally onto the Show. In the end one is left with the following (in no apparent order): relief, revulsion, insight, questions, appreciation, awe, discouragement, enthusiasm, nostalgia, homesickness, inspiration, and the need to take a shower. Was it overrated? Yes. Is it worthy of every ounce of praise heaped upon it? Yes. Was it in need of an editor? Yes. Was it, perhaps, the one time that an author has ever properly reproduced that hush-inducing awe that is usually reserved for painted masterpieces? Yes. There were moments where the text wouldn’t speak to me (no matter how much I begged it to). Setting it down, I’m filled with the desire to both burn it and begin again at page one. In the end, Ulysses was……. It was. In that, Joyce succeeded. Did Joyce wish for the reader to experience A, B or C? Did he instead simply wish for the reader to experience something? It is, counter intuitively, only a fantastic book which makes a writer wish to sit down and write immediately upon its completion. Finishing a crappy book fills one with disdain for the entire profession, while many good books lead to a kind of self-evaluation… the kind which every author is predestined to fail. The truly great however, those books which should be even more daunting, even more intimidating, make a writer wish to write the way we all drive home from a concert just dying to sing along with something. Yes, I have written. Yes, I will write again. Yes, I have read before. Yes I will read again. Yes, I have finished Ulysses. Yes, I have. Yes.