On Ken Burns's "Jazz"

Last night the wife and I watched an episode from Ken Burns's Jazz that happened to be on our local PBS channel. The episode spanned the period from 1929 to 1935, the first years of the Depression and the rise of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington as superstars.

Two moments struck me. First is something Stanley Crouch says. Unfortunately I don't have TiVO, so I don't have the exact quote. He asks us to imagine a man fed up with his life. He wants to get away, to rush off, make something of himself. His wife says, Yes, if you want to go, I'll go with you. Then he asks us to imagine that man hearing Louis Armstrong playing the solo in "Dinah." Crouch's idea is that Armstrong's freedom in playing is what the pioneer spirit is all about, that jazz improvisation done by the greats is the embodiment of the freedom we seek in our lives. I would extrapolate that and say that any artistic performance might embody that, and that it's not just about freedom, but authenticity.

Another moment that stuck with me was the story Burns tells of Charlie Black, a 16-year-old freshman at the University of Texas who hears Louis Armstrong playing in an Austin theater and then writes that all his ideas about black people were shaken--if black people, to that young southerner, were meant to be servants, how can you account for Armstrong's genius (and freedom, presumably)? Later, Charles Black became part of the legal team that fought on the side of Brown v. Board of Education in the early 50s. The glaring implication is that art does have the power to change minds.

Ken Burns's movies on the Civil War, baseball, and jazz, all of which I've seen, are heavily idealistic and shellacked with nostalgia, but I wonder if that's their value. Certainly baseball and jazz do provoke these emotions, and each has been instrumental (along with the civil war, of course) in changing race relations. Why is my cynical side fighting my idealism?

My Year in Books 2007

This year I read 38 books, seven of which were nonfiction, 28 of which were text-based fiction, and 3 of which were graphic novels.

It's always amazing to me how what I read, especially the nonfiction, tends to mesh well together in terms of subject matter. The three nonfiction books that impacted me the most this year were Matthew Stewart's The Courtier and the Heretic, Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, and Robert Richardson's biography of William James. Each of these books is concerned with basic existential problems of how to live in the world, and they together present a fairly consistent view. Of the three, Stewart's book is the most fun to read. In many ways it's more ambitious than even Becker's book (which is too stuck in psychoanalysis). Stewart tries to explain how Spinoza is the fountainhead of modernism and how Leibniz's reaction to Spinoza's thought amounted to a anxious counterrevolutionary project. The book made me want to go back to Spinoza's Ethics, which made such a huge impression on me when I was in my early twenties. Stewart's is a valuable book, and does a hell of a lot more to combat fundamentalism than a thousand Harris/Dennett/Hitchens/Dawkins tomes.

The most fun book, hands down, that I read in 2007 was Bill Buford's account of learning to cook, Heat.

This past year I tackled two major reading peaks, War and Peace and Beckett's trilogy of novels, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. Do I need to say I loved both? Again, Beckett's books dovetail with my existential concerns this year. Reading Beckett was the most profound reading experience I've had in a long time. I don't see anyone surpassing Beckett, because nobody but Beckett (maybe Shakespeare in Hamlet?) has combined such raw talent with an ability to see the human creature for what he or she is.

Of the other fiction I read, including the graphic novels, some standouts are Emily Barton's Brookland. I wasn't blown away by this, but Barton is mightily talented, and this book has stayed with me while a lot of the fiction I've read this year hasn't. Other books that have stayed with me are Mariette in Ecstasy, by Ron Hansen and The Road, by Cormac McCarthy. The latter is horrifying, and maybe for that reason it's tough to shake. I loved Black Swan Green, by David Mitchell. I think he might be one of our most talented writers. I was also taken by Harvey Pekar's graphic novel The Quitter, which is actually a memoir, but who's counting?

The Last Word on Waterboarding?

This post by a Straight Dope member who waterboarded himself got my heart racing. Wow. [via]

El Corazon

This is a music video by a comedic musical group called Hard 'N Phirm (so called because the two comedians are named Chris Hardwick and Mike Phirman). Also check out their very funny bluegrass medley of Radiohead songs called "Rodeohead."

Seesaw Change?

I listen to a lot of podcasts. I don't spend much time in the car, so I get my radio the twenty-first-century way. I was listening to On Point, a radio show out of Boston, and a caller used the expression "seesaw change," as in, a major change, a shift in thinking.

I've never heard this before. Of course, the caller meant "sea change." That expression comes from Shakespeare, from the Tempest (Act I, scene ii):

Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

But "seesaw change"? I can understand why someone would use that expression--a seesaw goes up and down, but please, do we have to? So I googled it, and it turns out there are a handful of people using the expression, but not that many. Can we all agree that "sea change" isn't a metaphor so dead we need to mistake our way into a new dead metaphor?

NaNoWriMo, over

I hesitate to brag about something like writing a novel in a month. I don't think art is created like that, necessarily. I ended up writing more than 45,000 words this month, which is quite a bit. It's the first draft of a novel, and I'm proud I wrote those words only because in November I have written differently than I have in the recent past. Usually I agonize and end up losing my nerve or my faith in my story. Not to say that hasn't happened here, but I'm already embarked on the third act of my story, and it's all downhill from here on my way to what will probably be another 10,000 words or so in the first draft. There are obvious charms to writing the first draft of a novel--there is great excitement in creating characters and discovering who these people are. But for me, the great joy of writing is rewriting.

Tennessee Williams wrote in his journals somewhere, as a pep talk to himself, "Don't maul, don't suffer, don't groan--until the first draft is finished. Then--Calvary--but not till then. Doubt and be lost--until the first draft is finished." I love that so much it's up on my wall and I have it memorized. I need that advice in my head, and November's exercise in uncrucified composition has shown me something I have always known and not practiced.

Crash Pt. 2

Okay, now this is just cool. It seems to be a commercial for some German American-Inventor-Idol thing, but who knows?

via wastered