Man Walks Into A Room, by Nicole Krauss

Somewhere many miles away, in the heart of the desert, a man was recording memories, preserving them as another desert air once preserved scrolls of parchment. Creating a vast library of human memory, and so that that library should not be lost – so that it should not combust in fire or vanish into dust and light – he was learning how to inscribe those memories in the one place they were ensured survival: in the minds of other people. A purely scientific project, but off the record he would say that he believed he had found the key to human compassion. To step into another man's skin. He would say he believed he had found a way to inspire empathy, a sense of cosmic belonging, that at some near point in the future human beings could be immunized against alienation as they were once vaccinated for smallpox, polio.
– page 236, Man Walks Into A Room by Nicole Krauss

Lately I've been obsessed with the idea of memory, of our struggles to remember and to forget, and how our memories determine the substance and the quality of our lives. Nicole Krauss' Man Walks Into A Room is a fascinating exploration of these topics, but more than that it is a beautiful and moving book. As Michael Silverblatt noted in a radio interview with Krauss, it is the kind of book that reminds you of the powerful sense of consolation that literature can offer.

I don't want to give away too much of the book, since I'm hoping everyone will be intrigued enough to read it themselves! Here is a bit from that radio interview, though, which gives some insight into Nicole Krauss' characters. She is speaking about her more recent novel, The History of Love:

MS: Both books in essence are about how you communicate unconquerable sorrow.... Do you feel that that kind of compassion finds a place in the world?

NK: I have to believe that it does and certainly it’s the thing that, whether I know it at the time when I’m writing or not, that I continue to write novels about. And I realized at the end of The History of Love, looking back on both novels that almost all of my characters are in some way either radically alienated or just very, very lonely, they fall somewhere on that spectrum. And yet all of them are desperate to connect to other people. They need to find some way to communicate in order to be understood.

There’s a wonderful quote by Cynthia Ozick which is in the introduction to a Saul Bellow novel which I just read very, very recently but which seems so right according to the things I was thinking about when I wrote The History of Love. She talks about the underground tunnel that is dug between the minds of two people who have read and been moved by the same book, and the unsuspected current that runs between them. And there is this sense in The History of Love that these people have all been in some way moved, their lives have all been changed by this book and it becomes the vehicle, the tunnel and the way out of their loneliness. And I suppose that’s been my experience in life; that has been my experience since I was a child with books.

In addition to the radio interview linked above, Nicole Krauss has a short essay "On Forgetting" and a long excerpt from The History of Love, "The Last Words on Earth", both published online and well worth reading!

but how much will it cost to shut me up?

Most people who have read hella frisch or spent any time talking with me will have noted my tendency to cite articles from The New Yorker magazine at the slightest provocation. This annoying habit may soon get worse.

As NPR's Morning Edition reports today, the magazine is about to publish 80 years of back issues on DVD. The asking price is $100, but I found it on sale at amazon.com for just $63 - not bad, since that works out to less than 1.6 cents per issue. How I expect to actually read those 4,000 issues, I'm not sure - maybe I'll quit sleeping.

For anyone not too familiar with The New Yorker, you can always read a sampling from the current issue on the magazine's website. I especially recommend Paul Rudnick's Shouts and Murmurs piece, "Intelligent Design".

There is a website offering a year's subscription to the magazine for just $18, which seems absurdly cheap: www.unitedmagazinedealers.com. I can't vouch for its legitimacy yet, but I'm hoping it's for real!

preparations for Hurricane Rita on Lincoln Road 

Internet 2 and a brave New World

Recently the New World Symphony has become increasingly involved in the technology of "Internet 2" - the new website features it prominently. The way I understand it, Internet 2 is mostly just like Internet 1, except faster, better, with lots more gizmos and much bigger screens. It's a shame, because I was just starting to get the hang of Internet 1. I'm not sure if I'll be able to produce enough content so that hella frisch will survive the changeover - it might end up with a lot of live footage of flossing and D major scales.

various Internet 2 gizmos which I'm not allowed to touch

Today I got to play over Internet 2 for the first time. They were doing a sound check for some cello lesson tomorrow, and the sound engineer asked if anyone would come and help them test the set-up. Most people here seem to affect an air of indifference, but I've secretly been an Internet 2 wanna-be for some time now, so I sort of leaped at the chance.

We were connected to Northwestern University in Evanston and some place in Wichita - apparently three-ways are the trendy thing to do on Internet 2. I set up facing two big screen monitors, each of which had a guy sitting around. It was kind of nerve-racking to realize that both of those guys were staring at me, though, and hearing me in digital sound! I went to school at Northwestern, so I found myself worrying that my old teacher would wander past while I was playing. I played the exposition of a concerto by Vanhal, and it did feel pretty weird. The engineer, Jacques, told me that later in the week they'd be connecting to 8,000 people at a conference in Philadelphia, in case I wanted to come back and play for that. I'm kind of thrilled, but at the same time horrified at what an internet exhibitionist I'm threatening to become.

Last week I sat in on a cello masterclass that was being taught over Internet 2 by Steven Doane, a professor at Eastman in Rochester. It was pretty much like any masterclass with a live and present teacher, except there were some speeches beforehand and an occasional thwack when a microphone got attacked by a cello bow. Once they got going, it was easy to forget about all those gigabits of data racing through the ether and concentrate on what Mr. Doane was communicating, which was a lot of great stuff: the beginning of the fugue in the 5th Suite Prelude by Bach should sound "like Rumplestiltskin walking around", he said, while in Don Quixote the bow arm should be "the marriage of a 100-lb. jellyfish and an eagle, or maybe some seaweed". It might sound like a bunch of non-sequiturs, but it made perfect sense if you were there - wherever 'there' was!

I was particularly impressed how Mr. Doane was able to help a cellist working on the Schumann concerto to open up his gestures and his sound. Playing a string instrument is such a physical act, and no matter how crisp the audio and video I wondered if an internet broadcast would capture the pure kinesthetic sense of a performer. Mr. Doane seemed to hone right in on what was constricting this cellist's playing, though, asking him to lean back and expand his lungs all the way from the diaphragm at the high point of a phrase. He also had some nuanced ideas about bow speed and distribution which were very helpful.

The idea I was left with, though, was that no matter how vast the distances we can propel our gigabits, the most meaningful and challenging span will always be those two inches between the ear and the part of the mind where habits are formed. Some of the things Mr. Doane was demonstrating and talking about seemed so clear and achievable - and yet the cellist just couldn't seem to change his habit, and adapt under pressure. I don't mean to slight his talent, since being adaptable and flexible to new ideas is one of the most difficult things in music. I guess it's a reminder that we still carry some of the most sophisticated and most mysterious technology around in our skulls every day. No Internet 2 breakthroughs are likely to change that.

If there's anything you've always wanted to tell 8,000 people in Philadelphia, though, please let me know before Wednesday.

Sunday evening on South Beach

Second Viennese soap opera

With the start of the fall TV season, we once again have a dearth of compelling drama which does not concern people being forced to eat live insects or marry repulsive strangers. Why not borrow from the real-life exploits of one of the hottest, raciest bunches of all time? I am of course referring to the Second Viennese School of composers: acolytes, rivals, friends (and lovers) of the dodecaphonic heartthrob Arnold Schoenberg.

To introduce you to the show, which I'm calling "Twelve Tones of Passion," here is a list of the main characters (also twelve in number, appropriately). I have taken some dramatic liberties with the actual history of the Second Viennese School; most notably, rather than Vienna, Austria, the soap takes place in a small town somewhere in California, Vienna Hills.

Arnold Schoenberg

The brilliant, haunted, and astonishingly handsome genius at the center of it all. Arnold has a troubled, mysterious past, but from the moment he arrives in Vienna Hills, all the most talented composers (and the most beautiful women) flock to him. He invents the Twelve Tone Method and founds the Society for Private Musical Performances to present his darkly disturbing expressions of loneliness and passion before a uniformly educated (and shockingly attractive) audience. However, most of the perfomances are interrupted within the first few minutes by screaming, gun-shots, revelations of infidelity, the return of a supposedly dead nephew, or all of the above. He alternates between prolific bouts of theorizing, composing, and obsessing over Alma Mahler.

Alexander Zemlinsky

Arnold's oldest friend and teacher - until a family member and a love affair come between them! Zemlinsky writes emotionally wrought tone poems about love, adultery, and murder, and tries to woo Alma Mahler, who before her marriage to Gustav "taunted him with his diminutive stature and unattractive appearance" (New Grove Dictionary); after extensive plastic surgery, however, he is now drop-dead gorgeous.

Mathilde Schoenberg (née Zemlinsky)

This passionate and sultry sister of Alexander impulsively marries Arnold, but later has an affair with Arnold's art teacher, Richard Gerstl. She is torn between the man she loves and the man whose children she bore; eventually, though, she returns to Arnold, with tragic consequences....

Richard Gerstl

Talented, artistic, and gorgeous, he introduces Arnold to expressionist painting before seducing Arnold's wife Mathilde! When Mathilde leaves him to return to Arnold, he takes his own life. Or did he? No signs of his body were ever found where he leaped from Erwartung Cliff....

Richard Dehmel

Brilliant, handsome, and romantic poet whose work is marked by the “pathos of a new, anti-bourgeois sexual morality [and] the idea of an all-conquering Eros that shuns every convention” (Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt). He lives the same way he writes, falling in love intensely and obsessively with the likes of Alma Mahler and Ida Auerbach.

Ida Auerbach

Beautiful and pregnant wife of Colonel Auerbach, she falls in love with Richard Dehmel, inspiring his poem "Verklaerte Nacht" - the tale of a woman shamedly confessing to her great new love that she is pregnant by another man; whereupon he absolves her of her guilt and promises to raise the child as his own, thus transfiguring the night, and their lives!

Alban Berg

Brilliant and incorrigibly handsome composition student of Arnold, but their relationship soon turns thorny. He insists on writing gorgeously lyrical operatic depictions of madness and death, which stretch Arnold's twelve-tone method in unimagined directions! He marries Helene Nahowski, but their relationship is soon strained by Alban's preoccupations with Arnold and with Alma Mahler, before he dies tragically (and mysteriously) of an insect bite.

Gertrud Schoenberg (née Kolisch)

After Mathilde's untimely death, Arnold quickly remarried this alluring beauty, the sister of Rudolf Kolisch, first violinist of the Kolisch Quartet. Some in Vienna Hills would say too quickly...

Anton Webern

Arnold's most devoted pupil, who regards the classy serialist with "an esteem the fervour of which at times resembled that of a love affair" (New Grove). A composer of miraculously perfect miniatures, he married his cousin Wilhelmine Mörtl but later had a fling with the poetess Hildegard Jone, and never got over his infatuation with Arnold - until his untimely shooting death on the porch of his daughter's house, perhaps the victim of some enemy of his black-marketeer son-in-law, leading to the climactic question at the culmination of season 14: Who Shot Anton?

Alma Mahler (née Schindler)

The ravishingly beautiful widow of Gustav, she holds all the men enthralled (and all the women in a jealous rage!) as she recounts her seduction of the reclusively brilliant symphonist Mahler at her weekly kaffee klatsches. She was herself a talented composer before retiring her gifts to marry Mahler; now she composes serial heartbreak for love triangles! All of Vienna Hills is in suspense about her next passion; will it be architect Walter Gropius? poet Franz Werfel? And who is that darkly handsome, hooded stranger who begins arriving uninvited at Alma's kaffee klatsches in season 4? Could it possibly be....?

Gustav Mahler

Manic depressive, unfailingly brilliant, strikingly handsome, but (supposedly) dead since 1911, Gustav's ghost seems to haunt the residents of Vienna Hills. No one can quite forget the way he seemed to prophesize his own daughter's death in his Kindertotenlieder, or the way he brought a new expressive depth and complexity to the symphonic form. Also he had those really irresistible high cheekbones.

Igor Stravinsky

A brilliant composer of ballets and a pesky long-time rival, this short, somewhat geeky (but still devilishly handsome) Russian wastes no opportunity to poke fun at Arnold's twelve-tone method and all his supposedly pretentious theorizing. Everyone in Vienna Hills knows, though, it's just because he's jealous. He'll probably even start writing using serial techniques himself, as soon as he can get Arnold out of the way.... That might demand a spinoff, though.


Will the residents of Vienna Hills ever find true love and happiness? Will Arnold get the recognition he deserves, or will he decide to just say screw it all and move to Hollywood to become a film composer? Who did shoot Anton, and will Helene ever let Berg's final unfinished masterpiece Lulu be completed and performed? All these questions may take several seasons to answer, but one thing you can be sure: all your expectations will be retrogradely inverted each week on "Twelve Tones of Passion"!

This weekend the New World Symphony performs Arnold Schoenberg's masterpiece Verklaerte Nacht, based on a poem by Richard Dehmel. The performance will feature stunning revelations about love and paternity, but will probably not be interrupted by gunshots or screaming. Unless another damn cell phone goes off.

The Blame Game: Home Edition

Ever since Pres. Bush proposed last week that we not play "the blame game," that phrase has gotten tossed around a lot. What bothers me is not so much that the Bush administration has come up with one more cynical catch-phrase to deflect justified criticism of its policies; or that it has been opportunistically blaming everyone it could at the same time; but that the "blame game," at least in the case of Hurricane Katrina, seems not to be much of a game at all.

Any game worth playing needs to present some sort of challenge - but the Bush administration's policies seem perversely designed to create just such a disaster: from their disregard for the poor, to the shortsighted energy policy, to the underfunding and mismanagement of emergency services. Playing the blame game against the Bush administration on Katrina seems a little like playing one-on-one basketball against your cat - it might put up a fight, but it won't score many points.

I was thinking that if I did want to play the blame game, and have an actual challenge, I should play it against myself - which is why I decided to think back on some of the biggest disasters of the last 27 years, and try to figure out how I may have been personally responsible.


1980 Eruption of Mount St. Helens

It is difficult to pinpoint with any precision the causes of the geothermic disturbance which triggered this massive volcanic eruption in southwest Washington state - could it have been the overly rambunctious playing of two-year-old twins Daniel and Matthew in nearby Tacoma?


1989 San Francisco earthquake

Now known by their shortened names, Dan and Matt were rabid Oakland A's baseball fans who would have readily sold their souls to ensure victory over the San Francisco Giants in the '89 World Series. Did they somehow repeat their seismic voodoo to cause a 6.9 earthquake on October 17th, right as game 3 was scheduled to begin? The world will never know, but the A's did win in 4.


Florida recount of Nov. 2000

At the time of the 2000 presidential election, I was living in Chicago, and my vote for Al Gore was utterly meaningless. Had I practiced more diligently for my New World Symphony audition earlier that year, though, and gotten my Bach Prelude more reliably in tune, I might have had a chance of moving to Florida. Had I been here in Miami, I might have cast one of the 537 votes that determined the election outcome; I might even have volunteered for the Gore campaign, and persuaded another 536 people to vote as well, and who knows what could have happened? We might now have a president who could actually pronounce 'nuclear'....


9/11

In June of 2001, I took a taxi from New York's Penn Station to the JFK airport - I had to find a station wagon cab, since I had an enormous bass trunk. My cab driver was a Middle Eastern man who seemed to take the size of my luggage as a personal affront. At least that was how it seemed at first - he spent most of the ride scolding me for my American complacency and ignorance, informing me of the wretched conditions of his countrymen, and predicting a quickly approaching disaster. I finally figured out that all this was not just surliness about having to put his back seats down; and I started asking him more questions about what he had seen, and why he had become so angry.

It was a really fascinating conversation, and before dropping me off the taxi driver wrote down the name of an influential Islamic guy in Chicago, telling me I should look him up and give him a call. Of course, I never did, and I never told anyone else about that conversation; on Sept. 11, 2001, though, I suddenly remembered everything the taxi driver told me, and I wished I had done something. Or at least tipped him a little better.


2004 Indonesian Tsunami

On Christmas day, 2004, I was visiting my family in Las Vegas, including my twin brother Dan. We decided to go out to an Indonesian restaurant that evening. I had never had Indonesian, but I definitely enjoyed all the satay, padang, and rijstaffel - I think we even left a pretty good-sized tip. Nothing seems to have provoked us to use our psychic powers to trigger any natural disasters on this occasion. However, a powerful earthquake struck in the Indian Ocean just hours later, early on December 26th, causing a horrific tsunami. I can't help thinking I was somehow to blame.


If you are aware of any other disasters I may have caused, please let me know - this is just a short list off the top of my head. And I'll do my best not to think any more geothermically disruptive thoughts in the future. And play Bach better in tune.