I Have Opinions On The Pope? - A Followup Guest Post from a Reader

Of course it was a quick conclave. Here I was in the midst of a very busy week, assuming that the new Pope would be chosen after approximately 267 ballots on a nice quiet weekend day. But nooooo...they had to be quick. So I haven't had a ton of time to give it the full weight of thought that the matter deserves. 

In order for this post to be worth reading, I will dispense with the mass media cliches now: South America, Pope cooks his own meals and rides the bus, Francis of Asissi, Jesuit, surprise choice, blah blah blah. All are fine points to mention, but they have been beaten to death in short order. Here are my thoughts so far on Pope Francis based on the points I made shortly after Benedict XVI's retirement announcement:

1) Did true self-examination through a collective exercise of the Sacrament of Reconciliation take place? In some ways we will never know. The conclave is the ultimate executive session. In some ways it appears as though the Church wanted the appearance of a change, which at least shows more savvy PR skills than they have displayed since John Paul II was riding high. The pre-selection reports indicated that the Curia's choice was a Brazilian (change!) while the primary Italian contender was the reformers' pick (more change!), and this report indicates that the Italian, Angelo Scola, sent his votes to Cardinal Bergoglio to send the Argentinian to a quick victory. 

If this choice is indeed nothing but a PR move, it is movement, because it indicates that enough of the Cardinals (all of whom appointed by either Benedict or John Paul II) recognized that change was needed, in particular a change to make the leity feel closer to the Vatican. Francis has a great narrative of a humble priest who tends to the poor and forgoes the trappings of power, with a holy name that symbolizes humility and reform. But much remains to be seen in terms of how much change he will actually create.

2) Sexual Abuse: The Greatest Crisis the Church FacesBased on what I have read, Pope Francis does not have much of a record in this regard. Much like many others, victims advocates are slightly optimistic because of the symbolism this selection is sending - hope and change and whatnot. But plenty of social justice-oriented clerics have failed this vital test. Cardinal Óscar Andrés Rodríguez Maradiaga of Honduras is one of the more left-leaning Cardinals there is, but in 2002 he claimed that attention paid to sex abuse was caused by Jews influencing the media to gin up outrage. Yikes. Cardinal Godfried Danneels of Belgium (now retired) was the great hope of liberals during the past conclave, and in 2010 he was revealed to have concealed the exposure of a Bishop's guilt in sexual abuse from public view. And most recently, Cardinal Roger Mahony was seen as more moderate, and advocated on behalf of liberal causes like immigration reform. But he also was exposed for having covered up abuse from priests and for that cover-up resulting in ongoing abuse - in other words, as bad as Bernard Law. And now his conservative Opus Dei successor is trying to clean up the mess. 

So the divisions on this matter do not fall according to traditional ideologies. It just came out that Francis was meeting with Cardinal Law (now holding a cushy gig in the Roman Curia). This is his first test on the issue. If he is sincere about addressing abuse head-on, he will strip Law of any power he currently has. And from there, he must subject all inquiries about abuse to civil authorities, with whom priests and any employees of the Church must cooperate with fully. He must declare - as Jesus did on the subject of taxes to Rome - that clergy and lay Catholics are all bound by civil law, and that zero tolerance will be the official policy from here on. 

He is a conservative, so I do not expect him to address the deeper foundations of abuse, such as sexual subjugation and the asinine vow of celibacy. But he can at least stand for the rule of law. 

3) The Benedict PrincipleIn some ways, the biggest hope we can hold out is that he will adhere to the precedent set by Benedict XVI, the radical admission of papal fallibility that led to resignation. Francis is 76, and by all indications is in good health. But if in 10 years he is 86 and in poor control of his mental and physical wherewithal, will he have the courage of character to step aside? If he does, in the spirit of Francis of Asissi, then he will leave behind a more humble Church. 

And that is progress. 

P.S. As an addendum, two points of view from prominent Catholic writers:

First, an optimistic take from Andrew Sullivan. 

Second, a pessimistic take from Garry Wills. 

Both are well worth reading and ring true in their own way.

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800 Words: To My 19 and 24 Year Old Political Selves, Part III

At my birthday party a few years ago, a friend from Hyde came to the party whom I hadn’t seen in a while. We came to Hyde at roughly the same time, left with the same graduating class, and ended up going to college for four years in the same city. During college we became pretty firm friends, but during our time at the Hyde Hilton, our attempts at friendship with one another had been extremely ill-tempered. On-and-off friendships at Hyde were an all too common thing as each student tried to ascertain the likelihood of which friend would use the blunt weaponry of the school’s psychological apparatus as a means to turn a personal disagreement into an accusation of a character flaw that needed to be ‘corrected.’

And during all those years of our proximity, he and I clearly developed extremely different feelings about our experiences. There are many people who look back upon Hyde with fondness. I won’t pretend that part of me still wants to view anyone from those years who ever held his opinion as a ‘collaborator’, willing to throw the dignity of peers under the bus to feel better about themselves. But there is one crucial thought which stops me from playing such blame games: to yield to such bitterness would be no different than stooping to the level of that shitty place. The most crucial lesson which every long-term Hyde student must unlearn is that standing firm at all costs for what you believe against those who feel differently is a recipe for the highest possible disaster. Hyde would have had us know that the self-glamorizing feeling one gets from sticking to one’s principles through all trials is life’s highest goal, and that the ability to tell truths at the expense of a harmonious existence is something to which we all should do regardless of cost. But it is precisely that ability to compromise, the ability to adapt, the ability to settle for whatever life endows you, the ability to agree to disagree and to live within a harmonious existence as best we can with one another which enables life to go on. Without that crucial ability to compromise our principles, the world would only be a place of fanaticism, cataclysm, and death.

Like any pre-existing system imposed on other people, the Hyde ‘philosophy’ was not a thought through system, it was a substitute for a thought-through system which was supposed to do our thinking for us. ‘Trust the process’ was another of their favorite maxims, and on a 2-dimensional level, they were exactly right to repeat it. If only their students did everything within their power to submit themselves to their exacting standards - or those of Opus Dei Catholicism, or Orthodox Judaism, or the Muslim Brotherhood, or International Communism - humankind would live a happier, more fulfilling existence. But then, human beings wouldn’t be human, would they? And because humans are human, there are some humans who resent the messiness of being human especially badly. And they invent all sorts of systems which are supposed to correct human nature. But rather than correct it, they contort it.

Furthermore, my own behavior in those years was hardly perfect. Not in terms of the screwups which landed me at Hyde, the imperfections of those go without saying - and those screwups continued long into my stay at Hyde (more on that another time...). In this case, my greater regret is for the behavior of the person I became after those screwups were corrected. After two years at Hyde of... for lack of a better description … suffering and cowering, I joined up and did what I could against panic attacks and revulsion to appear ‘with the program’ and distribute the misery to others which for two full years before before had consistently been distributed to me. And I can’t lie, at times, there was a feeling not unlike pleasure which accompanied the administration of such cruel punishment and the ability to say such cruel things to others. I did what I could to convince myself that I was doing the right thing, but you can’t square a circle. We all have our inner monsters, and should we choose to let them out, the results will, and should, haunt us unto our dying hour.  

I don’t doubt that many people really believed in the virtue of the coercion which they partook in at Hyde, but any impartial witness to the school who saw those things they conceal from everyone who is not on campus would be horrified. Not that they ever would see it: Hyde went to comically great lengths to conceal their real methods from visiting families, from school accreditors, sometimes even from the parents themselves.But we still ought to answer the question: would these impartial observers be right to be horrified?

Well... probably, but we should not be quite so quick to judge. Hyde provided a service which many families desperately require to save their children from addiction, violence, and predators. We should automatically grant that the methods with which the school dispels these terrible influences happen to be at a slight remove from the medieval. But has anyone found a more reliable method?

I did not read George Orwell’s essay: Such, Such Were The Joys, until years after leaving Hyde. And while I certainly saw many parallels between his experience of English boarding school and my experience of American 'character education', I had to admit, in many ways, Orwell got it worse; occasionally a lot worse. At least there was a fig-leaf on Hyde’s corporal punishment in which they’d find loopholes in the law to let charges experience as much physical pain as they could possibly find - no doubt with some grateful parent/lawyer going over the details of their proposed legal and physical contortions with the same fine-tooth comb his son once used to cut cocaine. But so far as I know, no one was ever beaten outright (at least not by the school), we had three daily meals of which were never deprived, and the school never used sleep deprivation as a weapon (though I did stay up three nights in a row from stress many times).  Moreover, Orwell went to St. Cyprian as the reward for being a gifted lower-middle-class scholarship student, whereas most of us went to Hyde because we were upper-middle-class to wealthy children of privilege who found a way to abuse freedom on a level about which the most upper-class children of Orwell’s generation could never dream.

At the very least, this is progress at work. What happens in today’s most disciplined boarding schools is not the torture of Imperial England in which the very acts of savagery were still legalized. Instead, it is the torture of Bush-era Imperious America, in which torture is technically illegal, but the law itself is used to resurrect it in more insidious ways. What happens to the most severely disciplined students in today’s America is torture-ish, but certainly not torture by the standards of Torquemada or Saddam.

In some sense, we all judge from privilege’s vantage. I revile torture as much as any well-meaning liberal should. But were I on the front lines of intelligence gathering, were I subjected to the no doubt unbearable knowledge of what it takes to prevent the proliferation of weapons throughout the world, would I feel the same way? And even if I did, would I feel like I had any ability within my power to convince others of my  belief when they’ve seen all the same terrible things as I have and came to the opposite conclusion?

Thankfully, I’m not the father up all night, waiting to see if my kid survives the drive home after another night of heroin use, or waiting to see if the policeman will call me to post bail after my son was positively ID’d as an accomplice in a gang beating, or waiting helpless as my daughter comes home to reveal another black eye clearly administered by a boyfriend she claims she loves. Maybe I’d feel differently if I were that father. I’m lucky enough that I don’t deal with these people anymore. Am I in a position to judge those people who do deal with them and feel differently from me?

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800 Words: To My 19 and 24 Year Old Political Selves (Part II)

January 2001. I co-led a group of students down from Hyde School in Woodstock Connecticut to Washington DC to protest the Bush inauguration. I moved heaven and earth to get the school to allow the students to go, and somehow was the one who ended up doing all the legwork to get them there and attracting all the firepower from teachers who wanted nothing more than to see this effort of ours fail. I sent a letter to the entire faculty of the school telling them in no uncertain terms that they were hypocrites for demanding higher levels of moral character from students while not doing what it took to help their students when they took the initiative to act morally. And if you understood anything about the climate of that place, you’d know that sending a letter like that is roughly as dangerous to your future as walking into machine gun fire.

The defining realization may have come from college, but the need for a defining realization came from Hyde School: the defining three years of my life to this day, and I expect for many decades more.

I don’t know what the Hyde School has become, it’s an experience that is more than ten years in the past. But at the time, Hyde School was a place which bred unreality. It prayed on desperate families and provided them with a ready-made doctrine for life as rigid as any religious or totalitarian dogma - and once those families were ensnared, it proved just as hard for them to escape. Like with any religion, there should be no doubt that there are many people whose lives were made better by its ministrations. But, like religion, the improvement of those lives was almost always effected at the cost of worsening the lives of others. Like all totalitarian regimes, it encouraged friends to turn against friends, contorted language so words would mean precisely their opposite, and weaponized fear as a means of conditioning students to love their tormentors. It was a feasting ground for sexual predators, both teacher and student, and was a place where bullies could stretch the full plumage of their inner sadists in ways that were completely sanctioned by the school. It utilized interrogation techniques that made the techniques which the Bush Administration approved at Guantanamo seem all too familiar, and used them far more liberally than the Bush Administration ever did. Hyde was a school, one of many in America for wayward youth, whose entire apparatus is built for the reconditioning of kids’ brains to alter their sense of reality. Now, before you accuse me of sounding like a raving conspiracy theorist, let’s put some things about Hyde in proper perspective.

There is no one in the world who needs their perceptions of reality altered more than teenagers, and particularly badly behaved teenagers. So for all its problems, let’s not exaggerate, and let’s give the devil it’s due. The majority of kids who ended up at Hyde were those whose conduct was so beyond redemption that a proliferant measure of the harshest possible discipline might have done some of them good - and a few of them probably needed still harsher discipline than Hyde afforded. Furthermore, it gave some children with a bent toward fanaticism and sadism (sentiments which, for the sake of argument, let’s admit might be used to advance virtuous causes so long as there are proper and ironclad restraints on how it is used...) the self-assurance they needed to face adulthood with a confidence they otherwise would never have developed, even if that confidence came at the expense of students who were less willing to give their critical faculties over to other people. But against the gains accorded these students must come the losses of the students who were more withdrawn, more isolated, more uncertain, and less self-confident, than their extraverted peers. No amount of public shaming, or barely disguised corporal punishment, or extreme mental pressure to confess to bad acts (often acts which never happened), will raise their sense of self - it will only destroy what little self-possession they have. If such students had fragile mental faculties to begin with, their ability to adequately process reality in any context would have been utterly demolished by a school which puts such stock in destroying a person’s previously held sense of self. So no, Hyde is not the Soviet Union. It may have ruined lives, but Hyde never killed anybody. Though if laws had permitted them...

This is not a post to document its various crimes and abuses Hyde committed, though I’m sure that post will one day come. I’ve already written about those years in certain ways before, though never in great detail. Hyde is like the proverbial elephant in the room of this blog, the experience of which stalks every post in ways I probably still can’t even imagine. Doubtless, had it been about any other subject, Hyde would have told me to document every single abuse, and denounce them all in the most humiliating and public possible voice (“The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable” was one of the most oft-repeated, and most terrifying, cliches which they parroted ad nauseum at their students. When I was a student, they even had it printed on a banner in the senior lecture hall.). But most of what happened there is so much stranger than fiction, so utterly bizarre and often in the most disturbing ways, that I couldn’t possibly do it justice unless I am operating at the very peak of my ability as a writer - something I’m sure I’m still a long way from achieving, if I ever do.

But the point of bringing Hyde into this post is to talk about one, particularly strange, facet of its culture - no stranger than any other of its many strange aspects: the radicalism of its views toward the outside world. Because Hyde School was a place which viewed the outside world as a beef stew of disgustingly corrupt influences, it naturally attracted people who agreed with their view of the world to work there. And because there were so many disagreements among the teachers about what was responsible for the corruption of the world, there was a seemingly unique agreement among adults who numbered themselves as members of both the Hard Right and the Hard Left to leave each other’s political disagreements alone in the classroom (at least we never saw them). English classes would be routinely interrupted by a teacher’s discursion about the plight of the Chilean minor against American imperialism, speakers would be brought in from local progressive organizations (and there are many in Rural New England) to talk about the existential importance of pacifism, history classes would be interrupted by a teacher’s frustrated digression that the contemporary world seems so intent upon oppressing Catholics, and our German-educated civics teacher would find nothing creepy or ironic about the innocuous fun of of beginning his class by calling role and making every student stand up and shout confidently “ICH BIN HIER UND BEREIT!”

Hyde was like a magnet for fanaticism of every stripe and every breed. And because it found something so admirable in fanaticism, it (rather amazingly to me now) tolerated fanaticism in its students, including some times when the fanaticism went against the ethos of the school. But then again, did it?...

There were two strands of high school teacher who found a perfect outlet for their convictions at Hyde. One was a typical right-wing fanatic: intellectually lazy, temperamentally belligerent, unthinkingly cruel and authoritarian - and they made up the lion's share of the long-term faculty. They believed in institutions, they believed in tradition, and attributed everything wrong with the students who came to Hyde as a case of a decadent world that granted them too many rights, too little responsibility, not enough discipline, and not enough punishment.  

But there was a second strand of fanatic, a left-wing fanatic, that was attracted to Hyde as well. At the time, these were my absolute heroes, and I worshipped the ground every one of them walked on even if they couldn’t (wouldn’t?) do much to protect me and others from the cruelty to which their smartest students were routinely subject. They were everything these other teachers weren’t; intellectually glamorous, rebelliously thoughtful, willing to see that some students needed a simple confidence boost and an ear to bend, and - most importantly - willing to concede that the methods of the school were extreme and unproductive, no matter how good the intentions of their administration.

And, clearly, these teachers gave something important to the school that none of the other teachers could have, or else they’d have been fired on the spot for their public disagreements with school policy. What they gave the school was intellectual credibility - miles of it considering just how dumb some of the other teachers were. These were bookish men and women who were intimidatingly well-read and often amazingly charismatic. Some of us often wondered what the hell they were doing teaching at Hyde when they should have been running for public office or writing books. And because Hyde didn’t have enough good teachers to oversee a real curriculum, the school gave these teachers the lattitude to teach in whatever manner they liked. Against all Hyde’s efforts to subvert it, students ended up receiving bits and pieces of a real education. Compared to the red tape they had to cut through in public school, a Hyde classroom must have seemed like paradise itself for those teachers. At least for a time...

These teachers tolerated the methods of the school, at least for a couple years, because they believed one and all in Hyde’s basic mission - which was, allegedly, the teaching of moral character. And like all fanatics, these teachers believed in themselves enough to believe that they could change the school’s entire ethos, an ethos which, with just a few tweaks could be a light unto all other schools in America (and make no mistake, when I was there, Hyde had extremely national ambitions). To teachers like them, a school like Hyde is corrupt only in its methods. But every one of them seemed to leave the school in a huff, completely disillusioned by years of their best efforts to reform the school into something more ethical coming to absolutely nothing. Somehow, these teachers could teach at Hyde for years, or even decades, without it occurring to them that the belief in the specialness of Hyde’s mission was precisely what sanctioned its teachers and ‘best’ students to act as cruelly as they did.

And the longer these teachers stayed there, the more appetite for fanaticism they clearly had. By staying at Hyde for years or decades, they’d made an unthinking, Faustian pact to sell out all the principles of tolerance and open-mindedness they claimed to hold dear, thinking that only by compromising on those standards could they receive their investments back in spades.

And the radicalism of those teachers absolutely rubbed off on their brightest students. Most of the students at Hyde were as dumb as their dumbest teachers. But the smartest among the students, we prized ourselves like an elect who, having been through hellfire, had scores of wisdom beyond our years and understand the world in a way nobody else did (though how wrong we were...). It was not unlike the bond of soldiers.

Radicalism was the one outlet we had - moderation, apathy, uncertainty, were banished from our lives. At Hyde, skepticism was virtually synonymous with weakness, so better to be lauded for having causes to unthinkingly believe in with our whole hearts than to take the time required to think through what we believe. It is a dangerous, slippery slope, and many people who start young down the path to radicalism can never expand intellectually beyond the person they were at 17. Once you’re taught to disbelieve impartial facts, facts which hundreds of thousands of people in every generation devote their lives to collecting as best they can, you can invent whatever facts you like. If you read no books, you can still be a member of the Hard Right. If you read one book, you can still be a member of the Hard Left.

And so many of these students started down the path to radicalism, some of whom formed a political discussion club with us. Woe would have been the right-winger who’d have joined the club, because even I was often shouted down for having beliefs that weren’t sufficiently extreme. But fortunately, the political right wing students at our school were usually so uncurious and so dumb that that never happened. I’ve often wondered what happened to those other politically active students in the in the intervening years. Did their minds ever get past the infantile rebellion stage? Did they ever realize that the extremity of our beliefs set back the very causes we claimed to struggle for? Did they ever reach a point when the anger subsided and rational discourse found a home in their minds? I can’t imagine it did for too many of them, because Hyde created yet another obstacle in that all-important process.

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800 Words: To My 19 Year Old and 24 Year Old Political Selves Part 1

I had the great luck of going to the most political college in America during the most political time in America since the sixties. And it was pure luck: I applied to eight colleges and was accepted to two. I had a choice between being a hippie philosophy student at Earlham College in Bumblefuck, Indiana, or going to American University in DC and trying my hand at the nation’s capital. I was slightly, though not particularly, enthused about Earlham, but I had no enthusiasm whatsoever about going to AU. But I thank my lucky stars I ended up at AU, because I’m convinced I’d have failed out of Earlham and would currently be in year three of living in an Occupy Wall Street tent.

In retrospect, I can’t lie to myself. I chose AU for one and only reason. I found out, to my shock, that the female friend who will forever dwell in my mind as the ultimate unrequited high school love would enroll at AU, and I chose AU to be closer to her. But by the second day of class, I’d nearly forgotten her and rarely ever saw her again. I think she’s somewhere in Cleveland now, no doubt playing Manic Pixie Dream Girl to some other nerdy man in need of saving.  

WIthin three weeks of beginning classes, planes had hit New York and DC, and I remember watching the billowing smokestacks of the Pentagon from our dorm’s top floor with a very pretty girl with whom I had a brief fling. I have no idea what happened to her either, but what I do know is that I was only beginning down a path I could never have guessed a mere month before.

I was supposed to be a humanities kid. I spent my high school years dreaming of thinking big thoughts and reading Great Books by the pile. In my mind, I was going to be Wittgenstein, Sartre, Samuel Beckett, Ezra Pound, Pierre Boulez, and Noam Chomsky wrapped into one brilliant mind who would set the world alight like an intellectual messiah. There was nothing that could break my confidence in my brain - I might have been a drooling nerd with too few friends, I might have been a nuclear disaster with women, I might even have had to repeat my junior year of high school, but the day was fast approaching when all that adolescent angst would be vindicated. I was not stupid, and nobody was ever going to show me that I was.

But then I arrived at college, and the realization that defined my life ever since dawned on me all too quickly - I was not going to be the profoundest thinker since Plato, but I’m not dumb, and it didn’t take me long to realize that college classes were. Any idiot could see that the university setting was where ideas went to die. My classroom experience was little but teachers teaching inconsequential specialties to even their freshmen undergraduates, most of whom were bored beyond description and watching the clock tick towards the weekend when we could drink ourselves into oblivion or smoke a bowl - and in the meantime, the smartest among us could converse with each other on a level to which our classes never approached. Our intellectual conversations might have been quarter-informed and stupefyingly pretentious (and none moreso than my end of the conversation), but at least we had passion for what we were learning, something that died a long time ago in most of our professors. Our professors’ highest hopes for their students, the professors who made tenure anyway, was was that one of us would regurgitate their useless knowledge back to them, go to school with their (usually unfounded) hope of having their own cushy, useless career in academia - where they would pass on the same theoretical jargon to another generation; jargon that has neither done a thing to advance human knowledge or humankind; jargon whose entire reason for existence is to intimidate all but those who are initiated in the cult. “If you can’t understand it, how can you criticize it?” And therefore, because nobody understands it, it can mean anything its writer or reader desires.

Academia has always been a place for cultish behavior. When Hitler came to power, academics were one of the first and most willing professions to weed out their Jewish and dissenting members (let it never be said that the majority of intellectuals always gravitate towards the left). The true minorities, discriminated against by quotas and without avenues open to them for academic careers, ended up in places like magazines, newspapers, pamphlets, the theater, the opera, literary fiction, art galleries, and the concert hall  - places where the humanities live and breathe because they’re discussed and debated like the life and death issues that they are and not embalmed in the sterilized environment of a guarded tower, where students and teachers alike are sheltered from the implications of the real world. In today’s world, newspapers are nearly as sterilized as their academic counterparts - dumbed down by decades of formulaic convention that makes the op-ed board the last place a reader should look for dynamic writing or revelatory insight. The concert hall, the theater, the opera house, and all but the most local and downscale galleries priced themselves out of the working man’s range for so many decades that they’ve lost nearly all their ability to speak to him (at least in America). Even magazines are required to put their material online for free if they want any hope of staying in contact with a real audience. To find real revelation, you have to look to blogs and long form webzine writing, rock clubs and television shows, public radio, graphic novels, web comics, standup comics, and movies with narrow circulation. Much of what passes for 'art' in these places is disgraceful, but it is only in an environment where the risk of failure is overwhelming that success can be achieved in any meaningful way. And it is only the people for whom their happiness is dependent on such a dangerous outlet for success who develop requisite desperation to communicate which cultural vitality demands.

It was a website that gave me my first outlet for precisely that desperation, and all the anger and frustration of a youth more filled with trials than any other kid I knew in my sheltered upper-middle class existence finally found its proper outlet. I don’t know how it felt to others, but as I wrote for a website so pathetic I don’t dare mention its name any longer, I felt a decade’s worth of adolescent anger scorch from my fingers onto the computer screen. I was royally pissed with a world I felt had left me behind, and finally, no one was going to leave me behind any longer. I had a 1000 readers who watched me bloviate to my heart’s content about matters national enough for world events, and local enough to tear my next-door dorm neighbor’s published book to shreds; I was a terrible bully, repaying what was given to me in spades. And I don’t regret a moment of it. For the first time since I was a child, I had a measure of self-respect.

At 31, I’m now writing for my own blog, one that’s lucky to get 200 hits a day. Life’s left me behind as much as it ever did, but perhaps I’ve mellowed in my ‘dotage.’ But even if nobody reads what I write here, I read it. And give or take some syntactical mistakes, I’m proud of what I do. So whether you read it or you don’t, I don’t really care. I suppose that’s not entirely true, I’d much rather have a larger audience, but I don’t care nearly as much as I should. I write what I want, nobody tells me how to write it, and what I write pleases me. Is there anything more which a writer has any right to expect?

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International Women's Day Playlist: A Sampling of Women Composers

Lili Boulanger: Psalm 24 (had she not died at 25, she'd have been one of the great composers of the 20th century)

Lili Boulanger: Faust et Helene

Lili Boulanger: Psalm 130

Nadia Boulanger: Fantasie for Piano and Orchestra (similarly gifted to her sister, but she stifled her gift to teach many of the greatest musicians of the century: including George Antheil, Burt Bacharach, Daniel Barenboim, Marc Blitztein, Elliott Carter, Aaron Copland, Clifford Curzon, Irving Fine, John Eliot Gardiner, Philip Glass, Adolphus Hailstork, Roy Harris, Ralph Kirkpatrick, Robert Levin, Dinu Lipatti, Igor Markevitch, Gian Carlo Menotti, Ginette Neveu, Astor Piazzola, Roger Sessions, Elie Siegmeister, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Henryk Szeryng, Virgil Thomson, and Antoni Wit. Both Stravinsky and Boulez would consult her for suggestions about their compositions)

Amy Beach: Gaelic Symphony

Ruth Crawford Seeger: Suite no. 2 for Four Stringed Instruments and Piano (yes, related to Pete and Bob, She was also more gifted than either :) )

Ruth Crawford Seeger: Three Chants for Female Chorus

Ruth Crawford Seeger: The Music for Small Orchestra

Ellen Taafe Zwillich: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra (one of my favorite contemporary American composers)

Ellen Taafe Zwillich: Septet for Piano Trio and String Quartet

Kaija Saariaho: Stilleben (she's probably the most hailed contemporary composer who's a woman. However, she's not my favorite. For that, see Zwillich and Ustvolskaya, who technically died in 2006, but ultimately I prefer her to Gubaidulina)

Meredith Monk: Dolmen Music (a composer whose great music is great and whose other music is... well... not)

Meredith Monk: Turtle Dreams

Libby Larsen: Mephisto Rag (more light-hearted, but extremely enjoyable)

Libby Larsen: Barn Dance

Sarah Kirkland Snider: Penelope (an extremely promising up and comer)

Shulamit Ran: Vessels of Courage and Hope

Sofia Gubaidulina: Viola Concerto (by common consensus, she will probably be the first composer who is a woman in nine-hundred years to enter the 'canon' of great composers)

Sofia Gubaidulina: Seven Last Words

Sofia Gubaidulina: Two Paths

Sofia Gubaidulina: Light at the End

Galina Ustvolskaya: Symphony no. 5 "Amen" (The Twentieth Century belongs to Russian music, and Galina Ustvolskaya was a composer to whom the great Dimitri Shostakovich wrote "people will say that your music is influenced by mine, but that is not true. My music is influenced by yours.")

Galina Ustvolskaya: Grand Duet for Cello and Piano

Galina Ustvolskaya: Fifth Piano Sonata

Barbara Strozzi: Che si puo fare (a Renaissance composer who wrote gorgeous music)

Barbara Strozzi: Sino alla morte

And of course...

Hildegard von Bingen

Voice of the Living Light

11,000 Virgins, Chant for the Feast of St. Ursula

Heaven and Earth

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800 Words: The Best Songwriter There Is (part 1)

Around this time last year, I wrote a series of posts called ‘The ABC’s of The Marriage of Figaro,’ inspired by my 30^th birthday present from my grandmother. On the day of my 30^th, I sat spellbound  at the Lyric Opera Theater in Baltimore – listening to my favorite opera. It wasn’t the greatest production I’d ever seen, but it was good enough to magnetize me more than I’ve been by any other artistic experience all year. It was the absolutely perfect way to spend your 30^th birthday. To savor the moment, I was planning on writing a huge series of posts, detailing Figaro’s place in history, it’s musical form, it’s dramatic innovations, and everything else about why The Marriage of Figaro is one of those artistic miracles that’s happened perhaps half a dozen times in history.

But I got carried away…

It was by my own introduction, in which I ranked my favorite pieces of art in any form. I got to revisit many of my favorites, from Jean Renoir to The Simpsons to Chekhov to Sondheim to, of course, Mozart. There was ample time to talk about my bottomless reservoir of operas and movies I’ll take with me to my Pharaonic tomb, along with a slightly more limited reservoir of books and plays. But when I hit more popular music, I hit a snag.

It’s not like I don’t know any of it. That might have been by and large true at 15, but at 30, my working knowledge of popular art music is pretty decent by any standard. But my problem went deeper – even now, there’s too little of it for which I have an honest and deep passion. Perhaps it’s my classical background, but there’s a lot of music which many knowledgeable music lovers wax poetically for that simply doesn’t do anything for me. In my defense, there’s an increasing amount of classical music that does very little for me. Some of the great composers write lots of music that provokes outright dislike in me (though never everything by them, that’s another list…): the Bach cantatas are boring, Wagner operas make me nauseous, Prokofiev and Hindemith are mechanical, Messiaen is pretentious, Philip Glass deserves a beatdown after the 236345734567^th repetition of the same motif, and how can Webern be considered a great composer when he wrote three hours of music? But even among the composers I know I love passionately, their music has moments which nag at me – why isn’t there more to this music than there is? Why don’t Schubert or Tchaikovsky get over themselves? Why can’t Berlioz or Verdi or John Adams dive into more ordinary experiences? Why can’t Handel and Bruckner and Elgar stop before their music becomes too much of a good thing? Why can’t Chopin or Grieg write anything great that’s more than a few minutes long (rather like some more recent musicians we know…)? Why can’t Mendelssohn and Ligeti stop playing games with their techniques? Why can’t Brahms and Schoenberg paint in any color but gray? Why can’t the music of Debussy and Bartok express more than just their amazingly cool chords? And why is so much of Stravinsky and Steve Reich as dry as overcooked toast?

I came to what we generally call the canon of popular music because there were vitamins in the classical canon which I clearly wasn’t getting. And yet, for all the investigation, I can’t deny that I feel lots of the same disappointments living in this house as I did when living in the other. I often feel like I’ve sold out a canon that puts too much emphasis on profundity for a canon that puts too much emphasis on frivolity. Both of them have resulted in the same disaffectedness as ever before – with the same nagging questions about whether there is all that much music in the world that gives back to the listener as much as it demands. 

Other people see Bob Dylan as a sage, perhaps even a Beethoven-like figure for America who liberated musicians once and for all from the confines of pleasing sounds to create an output that's as challenging as the musician wishes. Yet the more I listen to Dylan, the more I see him as nothing more than decent songwriter who managed to con the American intelligentsia with lyrics that inevitably mean less than they seem to into proclaiming him our greatest musician. Hell, Dylan would probably say the same thing about himself, and has said variations on it many times – maybe, just maybe, he’s telling the truth. Dylan seems to write the same three songs 300 times, and I often can’t tell one Dylan song from another. But the  output of Beethoven, the European classical equivalent, is infinitely diverse, as though a  different composer wrote every piece of his.

Perhaps Neil Young is our Schubert, and the comparison is far more apt than Dylan to Beethoven. His music is profoundly beautiful, it’s also profoundly fragile and oversensitive. How much tragic beauty can you take in one sitting? I adore the optimism, the energy, the humanism, the excitement and yes, the grandeur, of Bruce Springsteen, but the lack of cynicism, the lack of anything resembling a mean-spirited sentiment, eventually wears as much as it does in any other great music. I love a lot of what Tom Waits writes, he’s more loveable than Dylan, but the bizarre clown in a dive bar seems to me as much a ‘role’ he puts on as Bob Dylan’s pose as a seer.. Like Dylan, he’s more than his image, but not enough. Otis Redding was only 26 when he died, and is the most tragic what-if of American music, but as it stands, there simply isn’t enough of his material to love the way you should a cosmic master whose music gets you through your many moods of life.  I love the old Lieber and Stoller songs, but they’re pure junk food. James Brown’s material was simply not as great as his performances. The Who performed songs  that expressed militant attitude that’s almost creepy,  Leonard Cohen’s too spiritual, Van Morrison too new-agey and romantic, Smokey Robinson too sex-crazed, Stevie Wunder’s a better musician than songwriter, Brian Wilson is too unremittingly sunny (no wonder he had a breakdown), I simply don’t get The Rolling Stones’ continued appeal, Joni Mitchell is too earnest (maybe it’s a Canadian thing), David Bowie’s irritating, and don’t get me started on Elvis Costello…

I have less complaints about Soul Music than any other genre of the popular ‘masters’, but when you come down to it, much as I may have sometimes tried to convince myself otherwise, there are only a very few artists I know (with my extremely imperfect knowledge) whose work is so personal and masterful that I would take with me to the Desert Island, and even then, it probably won’t be anywhere close to all the work other music-lovers deem important: Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Frank Sinatra, Ray Charles, Chuck Berry, Johnny Cash, The Beatles… but now there’s maybe one above all. One whose music I’ve formed a desperate attachment to beyond anything I’ve ever experienced in non-classical music – a songwriter who combines the best of popular idioms with all the elements of classical music that are still worth mining.  A songwriter who speaks to the experience of life as I’ve lived it (which, admittedly, is perhaps not the way others have), and one who never gets enough credit and often condescended to as a skilled hack has-been while less talented, more pretentious songwriters seem poised to walk away with posterity’s honors. He is, simply, the very best there is, even if I’m the only person in the world who feels that way.

(Admittedly, this is f-cking hysterical)

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800 Words: The Productivity of Suffering - Part 3

III.

Alfred Hitchcock had his well-coiffed blondes, Orson Welles had his tragic figures of wasted brilliance, Howard Hawks had his quick-witted innuendo-laden battle of the sexes, John Ford had his masculinity code, Kurosawa had his samurai code, Ozu had his families, Bergman had his alienation, Oliver Stone has the Sixties, Stanley Kubrick had his machines, Fellini had his carnivals, Jean Renoir had his theater productions, Scorsese has his tragic violence, Tarantino has his comic violence, Walt Disney had his orphaned princesses who grew up to find a prince, Spielberg has his boys and their toys, Reubens had his fat ladies and so did Auguste Renoir, Cezanne had his fruit, Monet had his gardens, Georgia O’Keefe had her flowers, Degas and Toulouse-Lautrec had their whores, Rembrandt had his tradesmen, Picasso had his weird faces and so did Modigliani, Turner had his sea, El Greco had his elongated bodies, Velazquez had his little girls, Kandinsky had his shapes, Mondrian had his primary colors, Caravaggio had his darkness, Jackson Pollack had his squiggly lines, Van Gogh had his enhanced colors, Goya had his grotesques, Michelangelo had his writhing bodies, Verdi had his fathers and daughters, Wagner had his women who die to redeem their haunted men, Berlioz had his romantic literature, Schubert had his melodies dedicated to the women whom he loved in secret, Britten had his operas dedicated to the underage boys whom he loved too openly, Bruckner had his Beethoven’s Ninth, Schumann had his dotted rhythms, Bach had his counterpoint, Brahms had his classical forms, Bartok had his folk music, Mahler had the sounds he remembered from his provincial childhood, Rachmaninov had the Dies Irae theme, Charles Ives had his American Hymns, Schoenberg had his musical theories to prove, Stravinsky had music history, Prokofiev had his motor rhythms, Shostakovich had his ambiguously ironic expressions, Dostoevsky had his tortured souls prime to express their deepest anguish to anonymous strangers, Balzac had his money mad social climbers, Shakespeare had his great men undone by a single bad idea, Moliere had his exposures of hypocrisy, Ibsen had his idealists kept down by society, Sondheim has his middle-aged upper-middle-class figures beset by ennui, Proust had his memories, Frost had his New England landscapes, Willa Cather had her prairie hardships, Voltaire had his contempt for belief, Montaigne had himself, Emily Dickinson had her loneliness, Whitman had the mythical properties of America, Rabelais had his vulgarity, Dickens had his street urchins who survived to be taken in by kindly old rich men, James Joyce had his Dublin, Kafka had his persecuted little man, Bob Dylan has his old American folk music, Miles Davis had the contemporary American music of the moment, Randy Newman has the entirety of world history, Bruce Springsteen has his blue collar working class, Neal Young has his pathetic figures, Leonard Cohen has his spiritual seeking, Lennon had his psychedelic experiences, McCartney has his mid-century music halls, Johnny Cash had his machismo, Lieber and Stoller had their badly behaved teenagers, Brian Wilson has the California sun, Smokey Robinson has unrequited love, Van Morrison has requited love, Chuck Berry has/had upending the expectations of older adults,  and James Brown had the physical sensations of his body. 

You may like or hate the work of many of these figures – I certainly have my preferences – but what can’t be denied is that each of these creators has a specific obsession, an obsession which they sought to capture in work after work – arriving ever closer to some ivory ideal in their head which never leaves them be; and as their audience, you either respond positively to their particular obsession or you respond negatively. I don’t know if possession of a single great subject makes a creator a candidate for the ‘genius’ label, but what I do know is that talent does not have a single subject. Talent is flexible. Talent is talent because it can master things so easily, and talented people can master their subjects because there is so little mental clutter to get in their way. And if a particularly talented person is able to master a single subject, there are usually a dozen more that are within their grasp. But genius is not hard-wired to have easy fluency. A genius’s fluency is not easy, it’s superhuman, and usually confined to a single subject. But whatever extremity of ability the genius possesses within his scope, his brain usually compensates by a severe deficiency of ability in a different area. All the frustration of that mental clutter in every other part of the brain is channeled into developing that one part of the brain which operates with pristine divinity to its maximum potential. In this way, artistic creators are no different from scientific ones. All creation is a process of trial and error, involving endless experimentation until the right formula finally emerges. To immerse oneself in that endlessly boring process requires a bottomless capacity for obsession, fascination, and monomania.

It’s often been observed, perhaps to the point of cliché, that the line between genius and madness is invisible enough to be unrecognizable. In recent years, it’s been more common to poo-pooh such a statement. We see that the successful writer, composer, and painter of today lives a far more ordinary life than his predecessors; contenting himself with regular work hours, a full academic course load at the  college or high school where she teaches, and marketing themselves with the same savvy that any realtor would have.  A person attracted to older arts like literary fiction, classical music, painting and sculpting, is a different person today than ever before in world history – more easygoing, more flexible, and duller. Meanwhile, the great flights of mania and ego among today’s artistic world are usually to be found on movie and TV lots, in restaurant kitchens, and in the hotel rooms of touring bands. Without the danger that the lid will fall of the id, what is there about artistic creation which compels people’s attention? The difference between the arts in 1913 to the arts in 2013 is as gapingly large as at any hundred year point in human history, but the rules for how art is made which changes the course of history is still the same. And it’s usually made by the same breed of brilliant lunatic as ever before.  

I’ve met enough brilliant people in my life to realize that they are, for the most part, not the best adjusted people. I’ve also met enough lunatics to realize that all which seems to separate them from the neuroses of brilliant people is pure luck. I’ve known brilliant people in my thirty-plus years who yielded to lunacy, yet seemed too little different from before; and I’ve known lunatics whom I never thought could do much with their lives who then displayed a heretofore unnoticed, yet unmistakable, capacity for brilliance. From what I can tell, the only separation between true brilliance and true madness is the luck which enables some crazy people to organize their craziness in such a way that they see real things which no one else sees. A genius and a madman perceive things which no one else does, but the genius has the good luck of his perceptions being correct.

It’s entirely possible that great creations can be made by men and women who work from 9 to 5, and then return home to a loving family with no real problems. But it doesn’t seem likely that such a person would trade the stability of a predictable life for the endless pains and sacrifices which must be made for the possibility of creating something greater.  

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