tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-31897247908799856692024-02-20T19:25:25.118-08:00CREATIVITY VIA SOCIOLOGYWRITINGS BY THE SOCIOLOGIST RANDALL COLLINSUnknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger21125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-90520250173411238852023-12-06T10:47:00.000-08:002023-12-06T10:47:58.034-08:00CAT CHESS<p><br /></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">cat
game, chess game</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">one
makes this move (the silky gray)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the
other makes that move (the black fluff-ball)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">stalking,
reversing, wrestling, leaping--</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">take
position, crouch unseen (she thinks, she seems)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">ready
to pounce, stalking prey</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">then
squeals of combat, paws grabbing,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">hind
legs kicking--</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a
deadlock -- a kitten shriek-- a jump apart--?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a
cat game, a chess board</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">where
the chess team are all played by one player,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the
silky gray, the black fluff-ball,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">chess-pieces
whose grappling flows</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">instinctively
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">into
licking the other's fur,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">or
licking one's own</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">the
one you grapple with transforms</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">into
the mother cat</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-38990882574474948932023-11-06T09:10:00.002-08:002023-11-06T09:10:35.680-08:00Balboa Park Picaresque<p> <span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> <br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">---
suddenly looking up,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">dancing
dryads,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">waving
their naked arms</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">white
trunks swaying gracefully</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">against
the blue sky,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">frozen
motion upon the</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>receding </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>green </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>lawn</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">next,
the land of needle-pines:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">golden
graham-cracker giant teddy bears</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">shaggy
with green brushes,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>while your feet sink</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">into
a soft caramel carpet</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-28433932046036461892023-10-21T10:59:00.004-07:002023-10-21T10:59:31.473-07:00San Diego Fog<br /><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Street
lights through fog and mist:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">is
this San Diego or London with palm trees?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">from
canyon top, tree silhouettes foreground</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">a
cauldron of mist like a black-and-white horror film</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">heavy
splatter of rain drops, no--</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">it's
fog-drops droppping from fog-wet trees</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">sidewalk
wet with run-off</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">walking
in early morning fog</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">over-familiar
streets new and mysterious...</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">row
of tall cypresses,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Böcklin's
Island of the Dead.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">street
disappears in foggy distance</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">within
two blocks, 200 yards, two football fields</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">no
goal-posts in sight</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">no
dogwalkers, no leafblowers</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">only
the sea-shore rumble of distant highways</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and
throaty echoes of train-crossings.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dawn
whitening the eastward sky-fog</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">crows
caw-calling to gather</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">on
telephone wires</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">crowing
clusters of eighth-notes:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>urh! urh! urh! urh!</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and
answering half notes:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>cawww, cawww</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and
on south-east horizon</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">golden
orange breaks through,</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">while
Catholic steeple still veiled in mist</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Now
dazzing disk of sunrise</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">over
distant skyscrapers</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and
steeple turns back-lit pastel</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">while
overhead mist drifts into patches </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">of
Blessed Virgin Mary blue</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">and
bells peal, daybreak-synchronized.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Walking
west, sun at my back</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">ordinary
house colours </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">glow
in the low rays of rising sun</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Methodist
church in honey white</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">graced
with dome-arched windows</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">dog-people
are out taking their</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">cell-phones
for a walk</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">on
Sunset Boulevard, an honor guard of tall palms</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">march
in diminishing perspective</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">toward
the distant sea</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">London
fog fades and</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">San
Diego is San Diego again.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14.0pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p><style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-20369379116437049162023-04-16T14:28:00.014-07:002023-04-16T14:52:47.632-07:00MILITARY COMPUTER GAMERS BLUR BOUNDARY WITH REAL WAR<p class="MsoNormal"> <span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
21-year-old airman arrested in Massachusetts April 13 for leaking Top Secret
documents was at the nexus of two huge networks: military communications, and
on-line games. Similar scenarios circulate on both, and the same demographic—young
men who grew up in the on-line era—run both of them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The arrested
airman worked in an Intelligence Support Squadron, maintaining Air Force
communications networks. And since all the armed forces and intelligence agencies
are linked, to share information and avoid the comparmentalization that failed
to detect the 9/11/01 attacks, he could access anything. What hit the headlines
first were revelations that arms deliveries to the Ukraine were held up in the
logistics chain. The documents surfaced on the Minecraft computer game, where
players compete with enemies in building up logistics. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">From an
early age, millions of boys spend most of their time in on-line fantasy worlds
of adventure, violence, war, espionage and crime. Many acquire advanced skills,
ranging from computer technology to hacking; valuable alike in the dark side
and in today’s cyber-tech military. The arrested airman played games such as an
apocalyptic zombie game, and a tactical shooter game; and took part in chat
groups on technical advice for computer glitches as wsell as military history
and geopolitics. His real-life war information was leaked by other participants
to popular game communities, and eventually through Russian intelligence into
the real world. [WSJ; NYT; April 10-14, 2023]<br /></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Or what
is the real world, and what is a fantasy version of it? The blurring
between the two has become inevitable: high-tech soldiers who are gamers; and
gamers who mimic high-tech war.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Fiction
sometimes anticipates reality. Five years ago, I published a novel, <i>Civil War
Two. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is a thought experiment
about what would happen if the U.S. Civil War of 1861-1865 were fought again
today, with high-tech weapons. An excerpt:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">**********************</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Three
a.m.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Forward Operating Base, Utah
National Guard, outside Malad City, Idaho.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Warning,
warning</i>,” said the voice inside Specialist Jared Smith’s earbud. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Unidentified helicopter traffic, twelve
o’clock, 13 miles. Closing fast. Enemy armored vehicles, eleven o’clock to one
o’clock, multiple columns, 11 miles</i>.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The handheld screen flashed the same
message. Jared touched the screen. A map came up: a filigree of roads amid dark
spots for hills: bright yellow dots of traffic speeding down the roads; other
dots in red, representing air traffic, approaching more rapidly. He touched
again, brought up a visual image, zoomed for a close-up: armored personnel
carriers, heavy tanks rolling across the fields. Zooming still closer: the
mouth of a cannon became visible,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>emitting flame as a shell departed in his direction. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Warning,
warning, enemy tanks opening fire</i>,” the computer voice said. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Closing to three miles. Take evasive action.
Recommend counter-attack with all available weapons</i>.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Counter-attack!” Jared said aloud.
“Fire anti-tank guns. Launch Apache helicopters!”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Smith!” Sergeant Page’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>voice broke in. “Get off that video game and
pay attention to the UAV feed.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Reality filtered into Jared’s
consciousness. Heavy sweat ran down the back of his neck, under his battle
dress. The Ground Command Station felt hot and clammy, even though the air
conditioning was pumping, dripping condensation from the vents overhead. He and
Sgt. Page were seated side by side with barely inches between, inside a square
windowless box on the back of an army truck. Electronic equipment crammed
the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>drab beige space. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Three monitor screens filled the
wall in front of them, along with dozens of instrument dials and control
switches. One monitor showed a map display that traced the flight path of their
pair of Hunter Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A second monitor gave video feed from the UAV’s on-board TV camera, a
real-time view that would have been full life-like color if this were daytime.
Another monitor was switched to infrared night surveillance, picking up heat
sources on the ground, which could be computer enhanced and compared with
templates of possible sources, then turned into identification messages.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Just now the monitors were showing nothing
interesting, as far as Spec. Jared Smith could see.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sgt. Hiram Page was the remote
control pilot of their pair of oversized toy model planes. But just now the
UAVs were on automatic pilot,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as usual
when nothing was happening, programmed to patrol systematically over the
terrain between I-15 and the diagonal spur of I-84 cutting through the mountain
ranges of the Sawtooth National Forest fifty miles to the northwest.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There were many threads of little roads and
unpaved tracks between the Ground Command Station and the outer fringes of the
UAV’s patrol territory, crossing the grasslands and the mountain valleys that
became steadily more barren further west, where southern Idaho turned into the
fringes of the Utah desert. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Shit, there’s a lot of roads to
cover, considering there’s nothing there,” Jared complained. “And why are there
so many people driving around, at this time of night?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sgt. Page put down his book. “Watch
your language. Truckers like to drive at night. Especially when it’s a hundred
degrees in the daytime. And I’d say not much cooler in here right now.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Don’t they know better than to
drive in a war zone?” Jared said.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His
hands moved habitually back to the video game, then stopped under Page’s
disapproving stare.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The three weeks they had been encamped
at Malad City had not been what Jared expected. Instead of rushing into combat,
blasting away, escaping death, maybe getting wounded, coming home to show off
his bandages and tell his friends about it-- instead of the wonderful story he
was getting ready to tell, it was nothing so far but sitting in this hot little
room being bored.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Even the Idaho locals seemed to know
nothing was going to happen-- they went right on driving around in their pickup
trucks, going to work, shopping, going to parties, whatever they did for fun
out here in the farm country. While he and his unit were on combat alert, no
leaves allowed, full combat dress all the time. It was getting old. Everybody
knew nothing was going to happen. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Eventually new orders would come
down, the Utah National Guard brigades and the rest of the Idaho expeditionary
force would move somewhere else. Maybe we’ll find the enemy then, Jared
thought, reaching for his video game. Or maybe we’ll be sitting around
somewhere else being bored.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Hey, look at that!” Jared said. The
infrared display showed a green blob on a road 20 miles away, the thick
penumbra glow of a ghostly balloon. “Something really big. A tank, or a tank on
a HET, by the speed it’s moving.” A heavy-equipment transporter moved tanks on
a giant truck-bed with a lot less fuel.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“That’s probably just construction
equipment. Somebody getting ready to work on the highways soon as it gets
light,” Sgt. Page said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Don’t you think we ought to call
Captain Squires?”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sgt. Page swiveled in his chair
towards the closed door at the back of the command station, then shook his
head. “Squires about bit my head off last time I went to him in the middle of
the night with one of your false alarms.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“We could blast that tank-hauler
right now,” Jared said. “Our Hunter has a laser-guided munition on each wing.
I’d sure like to see what that looks like hitting its target.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Grow up,” Page said. “This is no
video game. Those munitions aren't cheap, and this is the only Hunter team on this
front. This is valuable property.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You
talk Captain Squires into wasting one of those on a useless target and they’ll
take it out of your hide-- and mine too.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Look,” said Jared.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“There’s another one. That’s a lot of traffic
on that road. Could be a whole enemy battalion.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sgt. Page peered at the screen.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“A battalion is much bigger than that. And
that reminds me,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>that’s the second time
you got me in trouble. Two weeks ago, when our reinforcements from Fort Carson
arrived at night, you thought it was an enemy attack because they were driving
around on the west side of I-15 looking for places to park.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That alert went all the way to General Cruz,
and the Captain was definitely not happy about what came back down.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Page looked at the screen again,
shook his head definitely.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“See, they’re
coming from the south. Probably the reinforcements from the Utah National Guard
that everybody’s been waiting for.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He opened the door, reached back to
pick up his book, and started outside. “That AC unit sounds like it’s about to
break down. I’m going to get the tech to work on it. Keep your eyes on those
monitors, Smith, and stay away from that video game.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There was definitely traffic out
there, Jared could see. Some of it was coming up the little roads from Utah,
and some of it was looping almost due east now, on highway 37, heading toward
Malad City. He’d like to see what the IR feed looked like for the roads closer
in, all those little back roads in the farm country and in the mountain valleys
on the west side of I-15; some of them coming out of the Indian reservation
outside of Pocatello. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But the Hunters were on autopilot,
and they were sweeping the area further west, cruising quietly at 110 knots,
methodically sending in strip after strip of video of a aerial view several
miles wide. If Sgt. Page were here, he could take over manual control and bring
the UAVs nearer their own positions, to see what could be coming up on them in
the dark.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jared was tempted to climb over to
Page’s seat and take the remote pilot controls; he had seen him operate them
often enough, how different could it be from a video flight simulator? But if
Page caught him, there really would be hell to pay.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jared picked up his video game.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was almost brand new, called “Civil War
Two.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was the most realistic war game
Jared had ever seen, and he had been playing war games ever since he was four
years old. Not just monsters or unrealistic icons, it had the sight and sound
of real war, from the monitors and map displays on down to the video feed as
you actually experienced it. At least, how Jared expected to experience it,
since he had never yet been in combat. The voice in his earbud started up
again, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Warning, warning</i>--”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Smith, what did I tell you?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sgt. Page was back. The AC units were working
no better, and a blast of hot air had entered the command station while the
door was open. “Give me that video game.” </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jared resisted having the book-sized
game tugged from his hands. “Listen, Sergeant, it’s no worse than that religious
crap you’re always reading.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Watch your language!” Page put the
Book down hurriedly on his seat and ripped the video game away from Jared. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The command station monitors were
bright and full of green glowing shapes, moving rapidly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Hunters had gone on methodically covering
their swath of territory, scanning nearer and nearer to the USA Army front
along I-15, and the volume of traffic heading their direction was now plain to
see. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“That’s disobeying a direct order,
Smith,” the Sgt. said. “I’m putting you on report, as soon as this shift is
over.”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Why don’t you put me on report
right now?” Jared tried to stand up in the cramped space. There were scarcely
room to swing a punch. Jared landed a glancing blow and Page pushed him back
into his chair.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The command monitors were now
flashing bright red messages:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">WARNING,
ENEMY TROOP VEHICLES IDENTIFIED, TEN O’CLOCK TO TWO O’CLOCK, CLOSING TO THREE
MILES. WARNING--</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In their jostling, a switch had been
hit. The Ground Control station computer had switched to audible mode. The
computer voice rang out: </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Warning,
warning, alert, alert!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Enemy fire
incoming!</i>”</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>An explosion shattered the wall of
the Ground Control Station. The monitors went out and then everything in Jared
Smith’s consciousness was dark.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 3;"> </span>**********************</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Most of the troops were asleep in
their windowless pods, the portable quarters of the well-equipped modern army,
with air conditioning on and doors shut.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Soldiers who weren’t asleep were listening to music on headphones or
playing video games, sealed off from the hot night.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Chattering of helicopters came near.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soldiers shrugged, swore, turned over to
burrow their heads deeper into bedding. The military was always moving
something day or night, among bases strung out over 50 miles with mountains in
between, commanders flying in and out, shifting reinforcements and logistics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The helicopters persisted overhead.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Then--</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoGnPoU1O15AWSs-BvrD61HXu6DVPaEH7LHZHFgXL1WjWRsz56TkAp2gDizIas1aJ41xbpE0LMW0PAksXVw8sjB1o3KQheihWK5CnUxmV8kGZQDZTvkwYEMzVY-Aqhy0_wS-_9pft5E8-qIRoUuBV9xeSJMB4t_VTCKWJqDMGqzxrJgQV9Ijys6lW6/s572/MaladCity-CSSA-attack.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="448" data-original-width="572" height="502" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoGnPoU1O15AWSs-BvrD61HXu6DVPaEH7LHZHFgXL1WjWRsz56TkAp2gDizIas1aJ41xbpE0LMW0PAksXVw8sjB1o3KQheihWK5CnUxmV8kGZQDZTvkwYEMzVY-Aqhy0_wS-_9pft5E8-qIRoUuBV9xeSJMB4t_VTCKWJqDMGqzxrJgQV9Ijys6lW6/w640-h502/MaladCity-CSSA-attack.jpg" width="640" /></a></div><br /> <p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"> </p>
<p class="MsoNormal">Excerpt from “Year Two: Technowar.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Randall Collins. <i>Civil War Two.</i> 2018. San
Diego: Maren Ink. </p>
<p><style>@font-face
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-15993731937696089862022-03-22T11:20:00.004-07:002022-03-27T14:32:12.087-07:00SIMPLE DECLARATIVE SENTENCES<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The endlessly repeated Hemingway-cliché
is that he wrote simple declarative sentences.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: left;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Did he really?</span></div>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He didn’t write declamations like
Dickens, if that’s what you mean. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Declamatory, exclamatory: Oh pioneers! </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Call me Ishmael. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The greatest opening line in American
literature, followed by an ocean of Melvillean oratory.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What else is there but declarative
sentences?</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Questions interrogative</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Commands imperative</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Exclamations expletive</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Orations orotund (with rounded mouth)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Odes, Oh-you-there listener-- </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Every newspaper is full of declarative
sentences; every academic treatise, most novels. Much of how we talk-- not so
grammatically if you record it and play it back, but cleaned-up, declarative
enough.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Take a look at the opening lines of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sun Also Rises </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(1927).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Robert
Cohen was once middle-weight champion of Princeton. Do not think that I am very
much impressed by that as a boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohen. He cared
nothing for boxing, in fact he disliked it, but he learned it painfully and
thoroughly to counteract the feeling of inferiority and shyness he had felt on
being treated as a Jew at Princeton.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The first sentence qualifies as simple
declarative. The punch is in the following lines, which aren’t.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Or this, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For Whom the Bell Tolls </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(1941).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>El
Sordo was making his fight on a hilltop. He did not like this hill and when he
saw it he thought it had the shape of a chancre. But he had no other choice
except this hill and he had picked it as far away as he could see it and
galloped for it, the automatic rifle heavy on his back, the horse labouring,
barrel heaving between his thighs, the sack of grenades swinging against one
side, the sack of automatic rifle pans banging against the other, and Joaquin
and Ignacio halting and firing, halting and firing to give him time to get the
gun in place.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Perhaps Hemingway got the reputation as a
simple declarative writer from the short stories in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Our
Time</i> (1926) with their vignettes from his newspaper days in the early 20s:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>They
shot the six cabinet members at half past six in the morning against the wall
of a hospital. There were pools of water in the courtyard. There were wet dead
leaves in the paving of the courtyard. It rained hard. All the shutters of the
hospital were nailed shut. One of the ministers was sick with typhoid. Two
soldiers carried him downstairs and out into the rain. They tried to hold him
up against the wall but he sat down in a puddle of water. The other five stood
very quietly against the wall. Finally the officer told the soldiers it was no
good trying to make him stand up. When they fired the first volley he was
sitting down in the water with his head on his knees.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Or this, tell-it-like-it-is about a
bullfight in Spain:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
first matador got the horn through his sword hand and the crowd hooted him out.
The second matador slipped, and the bull caught him through the belly and he
hung on to the horn with one hand and held the other tight against the place,
and the bull rammed him wham against the barrier and the horn came out, and he
lay in the sand, and then got up like crazy drunk and he tried to slug the men
carrying him away, and yelled for his sword but he fainted. The kid came on and
had to kill five bulls because you can’t have more than three matadors, and the
last bull he was so tired he could hardly get the sword in. He could hardly
lift his arm. He tried five times and the crowd was quiet because it was a good
bull and it looked like him or the bull and then he finally made it. He sat
down on the sand and puked and they held a cape over him while the crowd
hollered and threw things down into the bullring.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is not exactly Dick and Jane: Jump,
Dick, jump. See Jane jump too. Something else is going on besides simple and
declarative. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some of it is sarcasm:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
was a frightfully hot day. We’d jammed an absolutely perfect barricade across a
bridge. It was simply priceless. A big old wrought-iron grating from the front
of a house. Too heavy to lift and you could shoot through it and they would
have to climb over it. It was absolutely topping. They tried to go over it, and
we potted them from forty yards. They rushed it, and officers came out alone
and worked on it. It was an absolutely perfect obstacle. Their officers were
very fine. We were frightfully put out when we heard the flank had gone, and we
had to fall back.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Some of the simple declarative comes from
Hemingway’s ear for uncomplicated people’s dialogue. (from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Killers, </i>1928):</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
wore a derby hat and a black overcoat buttoned across the chest. His face was
small and white and he had tight lips. He wore a silk muffler and gloves. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Give
me bacon and eggs,’ said the other man. He was about the same size as Al. Their
faces were different, but they were dressed like twins. Both wore overcoats too
tight for them. They sat leaning forward, their elbows on the counter. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Got
anything to drink?’ Al asked.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Silver
beer, bevo, ginger-ale,’ George said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘I
mean you got anything to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">drink</i>?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Just
those I said.’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘This
is a hot town,’ said the other. ‘What do they call it?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Summit.’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Ever
hear of it?’ Al asked his friend.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘No,’
said the friend.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘What
do you do here nights?” Al asked.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘They
eat the dinner,’ his friend said. ‘They all come here and eat the big dinner.’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘That’s
right,’ George said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘So
you think that’s right?’ Al asked George.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Sure.’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘You’re
a pretty bright boy, aren’t you?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Sure,’
said George. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Well,
you’re not,’ said the other little man.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>‘Is he, Al?’ </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘He’s
dumb,’ said Al. He turned to Nick. ‘What’s your name?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Adams.’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘Another
bright boy,’ Al said. ‘Ain’t he a bright boy, Max?’</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>‘The
town’s full of bright boys,’ Max said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hemingway is expert at capturing tones of
voices. Simple and declarative doesn’t begin to capture what it’s about.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Another thing going on is Hemingway being
economical, especially when he wants to describe a scene without repeating a
lot of unnecessary grammar. (from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Way
You’ll Never Be</i>, 1934)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
attack had gone across the field, been held up by machine-gun fire from the
sunken road and the group of farmhouses, encountered no resistance in the town,
and reached the banks of the river. Coming along the road on a bicycle, getting
off to push the machine when the road became too broken, [he] saw what had
happened by the position of the dead...</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
the grass and the grain, beside the road, there was much material: a field
kitchen, it must have come over when things were going well; many of the
calfskin-covered haversacks, stick bombs, helmets, rifles, sometimes one
butt-up, the bayonet stuck in the dirt, they had dug quite a little at the
last; stick bombs, rifles, entrenching tools, ammunition boxes, star-shell
pistols, their shells scattered about, medical kits, gas masks, empty gas-mask
cans, a squat, tripodded machine-gun in a nest of empty shells, full belts
protruding from the boxes, the water-cooling can empty and on its side, the
breech block gone, the crew in odd positions, and around them, in the grass,
more of the typical papers.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
were mass prayer books, group postcards showing the machine-gun unit in ranked
and ruddy cheerfulness as in a football picture for a college annual; now they
were humped and swollen in the grass; propaganda postcards showing a soldier in
Austrian uniform bending a woman backwards over a bed; the figures were impressionistically
drawn; very attractively depicted and had nothing in common with actual rape in
which the woman’s skirts are pulled over her head to smother her, one comrade
sometimes sitting on her head. There were many of these inciting cards which
had evidently just been issued before the offensive. Now they were scattered
with the smutty postcards, photographic; the small photographs of village girls
by village photographers, the occasional pictures of children, and the letters,
letters, letters. There was always much paper about the dead and the debris of
this attack was no exception.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Snows<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of Kilimanjaro</i> (1933) a dying
man’s memories:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>There
was a log house, chinked white with mortar, on a hill above the lake... Then
that log house was burned down and all the guns that had been on deer-foot
racks above the open fire-place were burned and afterwards their barrels, with
the lead melted in the magazines, and the stocks burned away, lay out on the
heap of ashes that were used to make lye for the big iron soap kettles, and you
asked Grandfather if you could have them to play with, and he said, no. You see
they were his guns still and he never bought any others. Nor did he hunt any
more. The house was rebuilt in the same place out of timber now and painted
white and from the porch you see the poplars and the lake beyond; but there
were never any more guns. The barrels of the guns that had hung on the deer
feet on the wall lay out there on the heap of ashes and no one ever touched
them.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Death
in the Afternoon </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(1932) ends with a peroration about being
a writer of one’s own life:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>If
I could have made this enough of a book it would have had everything in it. The
Prado, looking like some big American college building, with sprinklers
watering the grass early in the bright Madrid summer morning; the bare white
mud hills looking across towards Carabanchel; days on the train in August with
the blinds pulled down on the side against the sun and the wind blowing them;
chaff blown against the car in the wind from the hard earthen threshing floors;
the odour of grain and the stone windmills... </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>...the
cafe where you got your education learning who owed who money and who chiseled
this from who and why he told him he could kiss his what and who had children
by who and who married who before and after what and how long it took for this
and that and what the doctor said. Who was so pleased because the bulls were
delayed, being unloaded only the day of the fight, naturally weak in the legs,
just two passes, poom, and it is all over, he said, and then it rained and the
fight postponed a week and that was when he got it. Who wouldn’t fight with who
and when and why and does she, of course she does, you fool, don’t you know she
does? Absolutely and that’s all and in no other fashion, she gobbles them alive
and all such valuable news you learn in cafes. In cafes where the boys are
never wrong; in cafes where they are all brave; in cafes where the saucers pile
and drinks are figured in pencil on the marble tops among the shucked shrimps
of seasons lost and feeling good because there are no other triumphs so secure
and every man a success by eight o’clock if somebody can pay the score in
cafes. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>What
else should it contain about a country you love so much? ... We’ve seen it all
go and we’ll watch it go again. The great thing is to last and get your work
done and see and hear and learn and understand; and write when there is
something that you know; and not before; and not too damned much after. Let
those who want to save the world if you can get to see it clear and as a whole.
Then any part you make will represent the whole if it’s made truly. The thing
to do is work and learn to make it. No. It is not enough of a book, but still
there were a few things to be said. There were a few practical things to be
said.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Hemingway is a master of repetition for
the sake of rhythm; prose that approaches poetry without trying to be poetic.
And master of punctuation, bearing in mind that a period means full stop;
semi-colon, half-stop; comma, brief pause; just plain ‘and’ means no pause at
all, just keep the rhythm rolling and whatever you’re describing too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bits of simple declarative, the building
blocks.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span></p>
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{page:WordSection1;}</style></p>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-31110146111395109912021-07-11T16:37:00.000-07:002021-07-11T16:37:54.290-07:00NETWORK OF CREATIVITY: COMPOSERS AND PHILOSOPHERS<p>
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</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Networks
are the actors on the stage of intellectual history.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Creativity is not an attribute of individual persons
standing alone. Creativity happens in chains of individuals. They pass along
skills and techniques. They extend each other's work. They build on rivalries to
find new niches in the attention space of the field. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sociology of Philosophies</i> , I
traced the careers and networks of 3000 philosphers and mathematicians, from
all the major world civilizations, from about 500 B.C. to 1950 A.D. These are
my main conclusions:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Major
philosophers never appear alone; there are always 2 or 3 (or slightly more) of
them in the same place and the same generation. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
most important philosophers are connected to others in two dimensions:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>vertically across generations, from
mentors to pupils or protégés; and horizontally among acquaintances, friends,
and rivals. Often they begin as a small clique of rebels against the older
generation, then split apart into rival positions once they achieve fame.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFpPdEoeyn1_hZU2mSqz5VbBQlpjQiiOg8zJr_hvW8TOnjzjEv8mcBxBS4lolTLXCPZR5H3IXvlcQOcQiT4HfNpJxq4PTCQF-fBXjkeeeNCLjVlf_WmO3fi0IdVdPW9lXqbwqlR7iRA_w/s1484/0-NET-20C-PHL-Wittgentstein%2526.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1320" data-original-width="1484" height="356" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFpPdEoeyn1_hZU2mSqz5VbBQlpjQiiOg8zJr_hvW8TOnjzjEv8mcBxBS4lolTLXCPZR5H3IXvlcQOcQiT4HfNpJxq4PTCQF-fBXjkeeeNCLjVlf_WmO3fi0IdVdPW9lXqbwqlR7iRA_w/w400-h356/0-NET-20C-PHL-Wittgentstein%2526.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><br /><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Look
at the European network at the turn of the 20<sup>th</sup> century. In this
simplified network, we see Wittgenstein is a pupil of both Russell and Frege (and
in close contact with G.E. Moore, where he acquired an interest in ordinary
language). And Wittgenstein shares the same teacher—Frege —with <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carnap. Surprisingly, Carnap has a Neo-Kantian
teacher in common with Heidegger, who was taught also by Husserl. Husserl in
turn is only a few links from the mathematicians preceding the Vienna Circle—the
two major opposing schools branch off from the same point. Wittgenstein and
Heidegger are network cousins, so to speak.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What
we can infer from these network patterns about the process of creativity? What
is it that the younger generation learns from master-pupil chains? It cannot be
simply imitation, since creativity means doing something new.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Great thinkers have many pupils, but
the ones who loyally repeat their teachers do not become famous in their own
right. Close contact with the creators of the previous generation is the way to
acquire their methods of being innovative: not so much specific ideas as their
way of positioning oneself in the field so as to do something distinctive. Creativity
is a process of recombining concepts to find new combinations, such as those we
see in the networks around Wittgenstein, Carnap, Heidegger, and Husserl. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Newcomers
who become creative internalize a sense of the field. Concepts and the persons
who create them become synonymous in their minds. The sense of who are ones
allies and one’s enemies becomes automatic; such persons think and create
faster than others. They appear to think intuitively, but this is not a
lifelong individual attribute; it arises by experience in the centers of
creative networks. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
same process happens in horizontal circles of "Young Turks" rebelling
together: intense discussions and arguments within the group produce a strong
sense of where the action is,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and
what are the new niches they can create in moving beyond what has already been
done. The Vienna Circle is another such example.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Do
these patterns apply to all fields of creativity?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, with some exceptions (I find it applies to painters, but
novelists are different). But this has to be shown empirically for each field.
I am now applying the network method to music composers in Europe from 1600
to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1930. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We
will look at two of the networks: the German-speaking area from 1700 to 1900;
and Russia from 1830-1930. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There
are also networks for Italy, France, and elsewhere that I will not discuss. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">My
method is to assemble a large number of names of musicians: those in large
CAPITALS<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are major (such as Handel);
small capitals are secondary (such as C.P.E. Bach); and small print are minor (such
as Pachelbel). Rank is based on their long-term reputation, which I measure by
number of performances and recordings of their music, music scores for piano, and
by the amount that has been written about them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
checked their biographies, looking for details of who they took lessons from,
or worked with as an apprentice or accompanist [these are network links <i>with
an arrow</i>]. Network lines <i>without</i> arrows indicate persons who are
friends and acquaintances. I limit these to contacts which happen early in the younger<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>musician’s career, preceding their major
creativity. Lines with <i>arrows at both ends</i> indicate rivals, such as the
famous rivalry between Wagner and Brahms. Links consisting of <i>double lines</i>
indicate collaboration: these persons both worked on producing the same composition.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF20MVwyPtLf-lIhuHQE1T9w-RR2zXpetWg9TUd_XFJ5V0PQfa2WhA2MszeMw4o7qaVDvmML40iu0cJnyCwulsD1_GnPedB6mClbiwLNiOs4mvs-cABXNbBLDAHe-ZI8bIKf-yvSWKhb0/s573/1700-1900-GermanNET.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="573" data-original-width="447" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiF20MVwyPtLf-lIhuHQE1T9w-RR2zXpetWg9TUd_XFJ5V0PQfa2WhA2MszeMw4o7qaVDvmML40iu0cJnyCwulsD1_GnPedB6mClbiwLNiOs4mvs-cABXNbBLDAHe-ZI8bIKf-yvSWKhb0/w501-h640/1700-1900-GermanNET.jpg" width="501" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Look
now at the German network. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
major composers are linked to each other, both vertically and horizontally.
Many are direct contacts; some are mediated by secondary or minor figures in a
two-link connection. Johann Sebastian Bach is connected to Mozart downstream,
via of two of his sons, including the secondary figure<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>C.P.E. Bach (who for a time was more
famous than his father). Mozart and Haydn have personal contact and exchanged
mutual influences. Beethoven is a pupil of Haydn and possibly of Mozart. Also
very important is the mediating link, Baron van Swieten, the leading music
patron in Vienna—who was the early patron of both Mozart and Beethoven. Van
Swieten, who had known C.P.E. Bach in Berlin, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>also <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>revived
Bach's music and propagated the idea that some music is perennial classics, not
just ephemeral music for the present occasion, and that some composers are
living classics in our midst. Beethoven was the first to benefit from this new
status; Mozart came a little too early.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Via
direct or 2-link connections, we can trace the network of important composers
for 8 generations, from Bach and Handel down to Schoenberg and John Cage. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Patrons
are an important part of the network. Haydn began his career as accompanist to
a traveling opera singer, thus learning the current repertory; he then became
the house composer for the palace orchestra of Prince Esterhazy. It was just at
this time when orchestras in the modern sense developed, with large number of
string players and other instruments; and the time of the shift from polyphonic
counterpoint (characteristic of Bach and Handel) to homophonic compositions of
melody line and supporting chords. Haydn was the first to have the opportunity
to experiment with the melody-and-chord style, with his own orchestra; and to
lay down the chief forms of orchestral music still popular to the present time.
Liszt's father was a musician in this same orchestra, and the Esterhazy family
sponsored the early training of Franz Liszt, who became the first big pop star,
in the era when the modern piano spread into middle-class households, resulting
in a big outburst of amateur music fans.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
will note two more ways of lauching a career. Schubert struggled in poverty,
but (besides some lessons from Mozart's enemy, Salieri), he had the great
advantage of being a choir singer in a school in Vienna that had its own student
orchestra; this enabled Schubert in his teens to learn the scores of Mozart and
Beethoven by conducting them. Schubert also could use this orchestra to try out
symphonies of his own-- the earliest ones were imitative, but the later ones a
distinctive blend of his own. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Wagner
illustrates another way to acquire a network link that launches one's creative
fame. His early career is in a theatre family, without direct contacts with
important musicians. His early compositions are unsuccessful, until he reaches
Paris around 1840, where he has contact with a conventional opera composer,
Meyerbeer. More importantly, Wagner has to eke out a living working for
publishers by writing out orchestra parts for opera composers like Donizetti. Wagner
generates a revolution in opera by reacting against the operatic style in which
the solo singer is the center and all the rest of the instruments are background--
a formula that Wagner reverses: the orchestra <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>carries the musical themes, and the singers provide accent
marks. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
is creativity by negation: Wagner reverses one central element in the traditional
style, while keeping other techniques such as chordal harmonies. This is
similar to the development of non-Euclidean geometries, by rejecting the
parallel lines postulate, then reworking the rest of traditional geometry on
that basis. It became a technique of innovation in mathematics, such as
creating non-commutative algebras, and then a variety of non-Euclidean geometries
once the pathway was opened. This method of axiomatizing and then reorganizing the
philosophical field was taken up by Wittgenstein two generations later, after
Russell and Whitehead attempted it in the foundations of mathematics.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Wagner
learned his technique, and formulated his distinctive style, by several years
of grinding work at the heart of the opposing camp. Knowing the techniques of
your enemies in detail is the crucial resource for those who want to establish
a new direction. Reading and copying music scores gives a strong sense of how
existing music is put together, and how it can be done differently. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDTPe34mkl6_40zFeLvtAj3jp4EVKXpxIu95OcKj-YDp7WFxeCf34205qKNRLKQ93Tn13FA3Imh8r_hrm65-v_un8lY45Q6by-WARPdE53H9PGqvGX2ZoNNiFTesijRg9LNY_xrqGZI3c/s472/1830-1920-RussianComposers-jpg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="472" data-original-width="433" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiDTPe34mkl6_40zFeLvtAj3jp4EVKXpxIu95OcKj-YDp7WFxeCf34205qKNRLKQ93Tn13FA3Imh8r_hrm65-v_un8lY45Q6by-WARPdE53H9PGqvGX2ZoNNiFTesijRg9LNY_xrqGZI3c/w588-h640/1830-1920-RussianComposers-jpg.jpg" width="588" /></a></span></div><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /> </span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; font-weight: normal; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-bidi-font-weight: bold;">Turn now to the Russian network.
The most prominent pattern is the group of "Young Turks" –the <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>young composers who set out to create a
distinctively Russian national music. They were famously called the
"mighty five" or "mighty handful" because they were featured
in an early concert together, but only four of them are important. Balakirev is
the earliest, the first to bring European techniques of orchestral composition
into Russia in the 1850s and 60s. His network comes from several Russians who
had gone to Germany and France: Glinka who introduced opera into Russia, and the
Rubinstein brothers who founded the music conservatories at St. Petersburg and
Moscow. The network connections are to European composers Donizetti and
Berlioz, on one side, and Chopin and Liszt on the other. </span>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
great Russian composers had to learn their orchestral techniques for themselves,
since none of them attended conservatories (which did not yet exist). They are
all from families of rich landowners, and they attend government schools for
officials and military officers. Two of the most important, Tchaikovsky and
Rimsky-Korsakov, are the first professors of composition at the Moscow and St.
Petersburg conservatories—and they got their posts before they had composed anything
notable, learning on the job. Both of them published books on orchestration--
creating the lush Russian sound of full instrumentation, going beyond the
string-dominated European orchestras.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In effect, the Russians had a musical version of the "advantage of
comparative backwardness", jumping over the forming generations of
European music into the late 19th century phase when the classical melody-plus-chords
formula was being transcended.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
most radical of the Russian composers, Mussorgsky, was rather like a hippie--
full of radical ideas at the time of the freeing of the serfs, living on a
commune, drinking heavily. He composes a nationalist Russian opera, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boris Godunov</i>, full of the sounds of
monk's chants and booming church bells. He has trouble getting it performed; at
first he does not know enough about opera to have a part for a soprano.
Rimsky-Korsakov becomes a mentor to the rest of the group, helping the others with
orchestration.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boris Godunov </i>became known to the world
in a posthumous version reworked by Rimsky-Korsakov, who also helped with the
orchestration of <i>Night on Bald Mountain</i>, and Mussorgsky's unfinished
opera, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Khovanshchina</i>. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
habit of collaborating and reworking each other's scores continued into the
following generation. With the exception of Tchaikovsky, who I will discuss in
a minute, Russian music was unknown to the world until Diaghilev produced <i>Boris
Godunov</i> in 1907 in Paris, and the Ballets Russes between 1909 and 1913,
introducing the work of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and above all Mussorgsky to
the western world. Debussy and other modernist composers collaborated with
Stravinsky in the <i>Sacre du printemps</i> / <i>The</i> <i>Rite of Spring</i>
that caused a sensation and a riot on its debut in 1913.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another French modernist, Ravel, orchestrated
Mussorgsky's <i>Pictures at an Exhibition</i>, which originally existed only in
a piano version.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The "mighty
handful" became a movement, stretching across two generations, with a
self-conscious program to create a distinctive non-Western music-- initially
Russian nationalist, but soon the leading edge of modernist music.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Against
all this, Tchaikovsky was a hold-out. In the network, we see the heavy two-headed
arrow between him and Mussorgsky: they criticized and insulted each other's
music. Tchaikovsky continued to hold to the European path, lush romantic music
with full touches of Russian orchestration, but still in the melody-and-chord
tradition; he also creates the modern ballet repertoire, which had been stifled
in old forms. Tchaikovsky was the one important Russian composer who had good
contacts to the West during his career; he travelled widely in Europe in the
1880s, conducting his own works, meeting von Bulow in the Wagner network, and
bringing back the latest European techniques to Russia. He and Mussorgsky had opposing
niches. Here we see that niches in the music world are not merely vertical, not
just the old generation against the new, but opposing ways to innovate.
Tchaikovsky's niche is continued by his protégé Rachmaninoff (who also has network
links to Rimsky-Korsakov and to the virtuoso pianist Liszt); the resulting
combination in Rachmaninoff brings together spectacular piano technique,
beautiful romantic melodies, and lush orchestration with overtones of Russian
church bells.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To
summarize: the networks contain more musicians than innovators. Many of them
imitate their masters; Beethoven had many pupils, but chiefly they were flashy
piano players rather than innovators. I have argued that creativity begins by
internalizing a sense of the field, of what has already been done and who are
the rival positions. Mozart had a tremendous memory for music that he had
heard; he got this from so many different sources, as his father paraded the
child around Europe, that he was able to blend many elements into his distinctly
fluid style. And persons who internalize the field and sense the combinations
can compose swiftly; they develop huge emotional energy, the sense of
initiative and trajectory that enables them to produce large amounts of new work.
Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven are all energy demons, workaholics, one might say,
except that the modern cliché does not capture the delight they feel in their
work. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And
innovators tend to be closely tied to innovations in instruments: Bach began
his career as a teenager repairing and building organs, becoming a virtuoso of
what could be played on the big new instrument with both hands and feet. He
grew up at the time when the grand organ was perfected, and this grandeur
pervades his work. Beethoven from an early age spent much time with piano-makers,
pushing the field of what can be done as pianos became stronger, louder and
more resonant—creating his distinctive brand of dramatic music which he later
transferred to the symphony. Musicians, like laboratory scientists, develop in
a hybrid network of humans and their instruments, experimenting with the
technical possibilities to find what can be discovered—in this case in the
realm of sound.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Let
me close with an example of innovative technique in the career of Descartes.
Medieval mathematicians understood many of the concepts and operations of
algebra, but they had to work them out verbally. Some abbreviations were
developed, but solving a problem was still mind-fatiguing, until Descartes
mechanized the proess. He set up basic procedures: Organize every mathematical
statement of knowns and unknowns by lining them up to the left and right of an
equals sign. If more than one equation applies, line them up one above the
other. Rearrange the terms by performing the same operations, such as adding or
multiplying, to both sides of the equation. Substitute terms from one equation
into another, until we get an equation for the term we are looking for. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rearranging the equations on paper
becomes a mechanical process. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Today
any school-child can do what the greatest minds before Descartes found
difficult.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And it opened up the path
to seeking new techniques in mathematics: Descartes himself did it again with
analytical geometry, and in applying the axiomatic method to philosophy.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .1pt; margin-left: 0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: .1pt; margin: 0.1pt 0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .01gd; mso-para-margin-left: 0in; mso-para-margin-right: 0in; mso-para-margin-top: .01gd;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sophistication
in math and philosophy came with the recognition that innovations in technique
are the path to further discoveries. This also happened in music. Unlike
amateurs who merely enjoy the music, creative composers look for the techniques
previously used in their network, and construct new music by innovating in
technique. Similarly, creativity in philosophy comes from acquiring the techniques—or
should we say meta-techniques—of constructing new philosophies.</span></p>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-67109806486920832642020-12-11T21:54:00.006-08:002020-12-15T12:29:35.478-08:00CHILD PRODIGIES IN TIME AND SPACE<p class="MsoNormal"> <span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Child prodigies are often regarded as
inborn talent. But there are other things they can mean-- long years of
training by starting early; or having a family already in the business. We need
to beware of confusing different things: a child who can play piano at 3 years
old, or compose something at age 6 or 9, does not necessarily mean that child
will become a great composer, or already is one. </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If we look at the age when composers
first produce a great piece of music, it is surprising how few do it before the
age of 20, let alone 16. By a strict criterion, there are a few teen prodigies
as composers, but there are no child prodigies at all. We need to avoid going
gaga about stories that strike us as amazing, and to make comparisons across
the careers of a number of musicians. As we will see, “child prodigies” clump
together in a particular period of history, and not before or after.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Here are the things we need to
distinguish:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Famous
childhoods. </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Which musicians were famous as children? This
particularly means children whose parents took them on tours or had them
perform for big public audiences. It does not mean just learning to play an
instrument well; the number of children who have done that<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>must number in the hundreds of thousands at
least.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Famous
adolescents.</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Which musicians became famous before
their late teens? Again we have to distinguish between those who were famous
performers, and those who became composers-- being careful to assess whether
what they composed entered the permanent repertoire, or merely was taken as
another amazing sign of what they could do at their age.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Competent
teen musicians.</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Here we can list those who were
professional musicians before they were adults, employed as church organist,
instrumentalist in an orchestra, etc. These are not regarded as “prodigies”,
but this kind of early start is extremely common among major composers, and is
part of what makes them so capable.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Early
age of success as composer. </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here “success” means composing a piece of
music, a song, a symphony, an opera, that is recognized in the music world of
its day. It doesn’t have to be a big blow-out success; just stepping firmly
into the adult arena. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Early
age of outstanding success as composer. </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This means composing a
“great” work, one that enters the long-term musical repertoire. For this
category, as well as the previous one, I will list the ages when famous
composers had their big break-out and their peak performances. We will see
there are early, average, and late-arriving composers: this means early 20s
(early), late 20s-early 30s (average), late 30s-40s-50s (late). I will also
list such ages for prominent composers of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>20th century popular music-- the pattern is surprisingly similar.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Famous
Childhoods</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mozart is the paradigm, of course. But
for extreme adulation of a child prodigy, we start with Mendelssohn. The
concept of a child prodigy now existed. When Leopold Mozart toured his son
around the courts of Europe, it was as a freak of nature. No one thought of
little Wolfgang as a great composer; that idea was still in the future. The
concept of the great composer had not yet been invented in the 1760s-- that
would come with Beethoven 1800. When Mendelssohn is born in 1809, Beethoven is
still alive, but the following years are clearly an end phase, his greatest
compositions mostly behind him. Little Felix is playing the piano at 3 years
old, coached by the most expensive tutors his father can hire, and soon
starting to become a sensation. In the cultural elite who gather at the famous
banker’s salon in Berlin, it is on everyone’s mind who will become the new
Beethoven. Or the new Mozart, whose music now epitomizes the newly created
concept of a classical repertoire: in England as in Germany, everyone goes
around singing airs from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don Giovanni</i>,
or playing them on drawing-room pianos. [Peacock] By age 9 Mendelssohn is
performing in public; a few years later he is touring Europe; he meets and is
admired by Goethe, then at the height of his fame, and everyone else who is anyone.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Coinciding with the early years of
Mendelssohn’s life, Germany is in a time of national enthusiasm and liberal
reform. The new-style University of Berlin is founded in 1810, on the
principles of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lehrfreiheit</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lernfreiheit</i>-- freedom to teach, freedom
to learn, with the stated obligation of professors to produce new knowledge. It
is the birth of the research university, that would be emulated by other
countries through the 19th century. The relics of feudalism are overthrown by
legal reforms; Jews are emancipated and become full citizens. The most famous
Jew in Germany was Moses Mendelssohn, an Enlightenment philosopher who wrote on
the higher unity of all religions in Deism. His son, the banker, converts to
Christianity and takes the name Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Adulation for young Felix
Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is an emblem of the new Germany, now uniting into a
powerful entity around Prussia-- at that time Prussians were the liberal
leaders of Germany, the conservatives being in the Catholic south.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charming young Mendelssohn is admired
everywhere. He is especially welcome in England (Prussia’s ally in the war
against Napoleon), where he is adulated by the liberal intelligensia, the same
people who admire Byron and Shelley. Mendelssohn becomes in effect the national
composer of England. It is in England that he produces the works that first
enter the permanent repertoire and confirm his premature reputation. His works
so far are juvenalia (including an opera and a string quarter), but at 17 he
composes theatre music to accompany Shakepeare’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Midsummer Night’s Dream. </i>At age 20, in London he conducts a
symphony he had already completed some 5 years earlier. He tours the Scottish
islands and writes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fingal’s Cave </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and sketches a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scottish Symphony. </i>All this is greeted with enthusiasm and acclaim
that Mozart never received in his teens-- Mozart only became widely popular in
his late 20s.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mendelssohn goes on to create further
works, none more popular than his early triumphs. He also creates a new
starring role: the famous conductor. We take it for granted that some
conductors are famous, whoever’s music they are conducting; but this concept
did not exist before Mendelssohn. Previously, composers conducted their own
works. The conductor was usually just the harpsichord player, who cued
entrances for instrumentalists and singers. The conducting star system was
institutionalized in mid-19th century, exemplified by von Bülow, Wagner’s
favorite conductor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the 1890s, Mahler
was famous as a conductor before he was famous as a composer.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mendelssohn is acutely aware of the new
concept of classic music-- a perenniel repertoire-- and he promotes revivals of
past composers like Handel (still popular in England but half-forgotten in
Germany). He takes the lead in the Bach revival, producing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">St. Mathew’s Passion</i> and staging Bach festivals. Touring as a
famous conductor has another benefit for Mendelssohn: he doesn’t have to
produce one boffo, over-the-top triumph after another of his own music like
Beethoven did in the 15 years between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonata
Pathetique</i> and his 5th, 6th, and 7th symphonies. Mendelssohn’s music was
never that intense, more like easy listening, but he could knock your socks off
with the best of Handel and Bach, especially if you had never heard it before.
When Schubert’s Great Symphony was rediscovered after his death, it was
Mendelssohn who conducted its premiere.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To top it off, he is young and good-looking, the matinee idol that
rumpled Beethoven never was. He epitomizes the second coming of Mozart, only
this time we are aware of it.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mozart (born 1756): to recall the dates
of his first permanent works and his creative peaks: plays piano age 4; tours
with father age 6-13. Numerous early compositions, including a symphony at age
8,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>an opera age 14. His earliest works
“to hold a place in the repertory” / “regularly played today” are from age
17-18. First successful symphony No. 31 (“Paris”), age 22; peak symphonies
No.38 (“Prague”) through No.41 (“Jupiter”) age 30-32. First popularity, age
28-30, when Vienna audiences flock to his piano concertos. His super-popular <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eine kleine Nachtmusik</i> is from age 32.
He composes 7 unimportant operas prior to his first success with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Idomeneo, </i>age 25. His greatest operas (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Figaro, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutti, Magic
Flute</i>) are age 30-35.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Who can match his early start? The race
is on. Not everyone who tries makes it. Beethoven’s father took him on tour at
age 7, but it didn’t work out. Beethoven (born a few days before the end of
1770) became a very competent teen professional musician; he didn’t start
winning piano duels in Vienna until age 22, and he was 27 when he had his
breakout into immortality.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">César Franck (born 1822) was a child
prodigy, admitted to conservatories in Belgium and Paris at an early age. At
age 11, encouraged by his father (a banker), he went on tours as a virtuoso
pianist. (This was in 1833, in the midst of the Liszt craze and the example of
Mendelssohn.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the rest was a
disappointment. His piano trios (age 20-21) were promoted in Germany by Liszt
but ignored in France. At age 26 he settled down in Paris as a church organist,
and at 50 became organ professor at the Conservatoire. His important works had
to wait until age 56 and into his 60s. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Camille Saint-Saëns (born 1835) was the
most precocious child prodigy of them all. He could read and write at age 2,
composing at 3,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>performing public
recitals at 5, writing music criticism at 7. He had perfect pitch, and like
Mozart, he could store music in his head upon hearing it once. He could
sight-read and remember anyone’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>music
no matter how complicated, astounding Wagner when they met. As a soloist in
Paris at age 10, he offered to play any of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas as an
encore-- from memory. He was a prolific composer, producing symphonies, concertos,
and much more from his late teens onward. None of this was particularly
successful (perhaps too imitative of the works of others he had internalized in
his perfect memory). From age 23 to 42 he made his living as organist of a
famous Paris church; and thereafter by touring and writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">He wrote 12 operas, one of which (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Samson et Delila</i>) became popular when he
was 42. His first real success, at age 39, was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Danse Macabre</i> in the vein of Berlioz’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Symphonie Fantastique.</i> What are most remembered are his organ
symphony, and his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Carnival of the Animals</i>
(both age 51). The latter is a parody of the styles of other composers; among
the program notes are segments called “Pianists” and “Fossils”, playing
conventional exercize-scales at breakneck speed. Saint-Saëns was apparently
embarrassed by this piece, written for a student orchestra, since he prohibited
publication until after his death. Ironically, Saint-Saëns and Franck, both
jumping the gun as child prodigies, lived in relative obscurity as church
organists for most of their lives. In the 1880s, when both of them were
peaking, younger French composers divided into rival movements over whose style
should be followed. Franck, the more avant-garde, won out just before he died.
Saint-Saëns, the admirer of Beethoven, became increasingly bitter in the 1890s
and onwards, especially towards the new standard-bearer, Debussy. Having
tremendous talent at an early age is not enough to reach the top.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin (born 1810) we have already viewed
at length. LINK Just to recall a few dates: plays piano by age 5; composes age
7; tours Poland in early teens. At first, he is treated as a kind of mini-Liszt
for Polish nationalists; but he is ignored in Vienna. He becomes creative when
he meets the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>avant-garde network in Paris
at age 21, and hits his stride about age 25. As we will see, this is still
impressively on the early side.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One more child prodigy to mention is
Prokofiev (born 1891). By now, Russian music is on the map, coming out of
nowhere in the 1870s. None of the founding generation-- Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin-- are child prodigies. They have to work their way up
from scratch, learn the new techniques of orchestration, establish music
schools and staff<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>them with teachers.
But now there is a second generation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Prokofiev is composing at age 5, encouraged by his mother; he writes an
opera at age 9. He enters St. Petersburg conservatory, is taught by
Rimsky-Korsakov, and goes on to produce important works, starting at age 25 and
hitting his stride at 30. No one’s compositions from age 5 or anywhere close to
it ever made the repertory.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Famous
Teenagers</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Liszt (born 1811): his father, an estate
manager for the Esterhazy family (Haydn’s old patrons),* took him to Vienna,
where he gave his first concert at age 10. The father gave up his post to
promote his son’s career. Liszt was touring as a virtuoso pianist, from 10 to
36, with some interruptions while he pursued his love affairs. In Paris in
1823, he was “Le petit Litz”; in 1824 he gave a command performance in London
for George IV. In the 1830s and 40s he was mobbed in the streets, greeted by
processions of nobles, and even told the Czar to stop talking while he was
playing. He made piano-playing a ripple of sounds, accompanied by expressions
of face and posture ranging from agony to beatific joy that threw his
sentimental audiences into ecstacy. Women cut snippets from his hair and
clothes as keepsakes. His compositions dated from age 13 or earlier, but his
innovative work did not take off until 22-6. He also improvized fantasias on
themes from popular operas, and piano transcriptions of orchestral works by
classics from Beethoven to Schubert as well as new stars like Berlioz and
Wagner.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Always a performer and promoter,
he made elite music accessible to anyone with a piano. From his early teens,
his fame dominated the music world for almost half a century, more as an emblem
of the new phase after Beethoven than for his own compositions.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">* Liszt’s father had even played in the
Esterhazy orchestra.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Clara Wieck (Schumann) (born 1819): her
father, a famous piano teacher, trained her from an early age, and took her
touring from 11 onwards. By 16, she was creating a furor at her concerts. Her
marriage at age 21 to Robert Schumann boosted his career, but she eclipsed him
in performance so much he gave up touring with her.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She had 8 children by age 35, returning to
her concert career when she could, and when her husband sickened and died, to
support her family. Her musical compositions were created before age 20, but
performed after her marriage. How good she could have been on her own is a
matter for conjecture.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Richard Strauss (born 1864): played piano
age 4; composed from age 6. By his teens, he had composed in all genres,
chamber music, concertos, symphonies. He never attended a conservatory,
learning directly from players in the orchestra where his father was a leading
instrumentalist; at age 16, he writes cheeky letters to publishers to promote
his own music. At age 20, his new symphony wins Brahms’ approval, indeed he is
“recognized as a budding Brahms.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Two
years later he converts to the Wagner camp, and begins a series of tone poems
from age 26 onwards that push the envelope of the avant-garde. He dominates the
years between 1890 and 1911, when Strauss is the most famous living composer in
Germany and perhaps in the world. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rachmaninoff (born 1873) enters the St.
Petersburg conservatory at age 9. At 19, he composes the ever-popular piano <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prelude in C-sharp minor</i>. After a long
gap, at age 28 he launches into a series of piano concertos and other works
that were enormous public favorites through the first half of the 20th century,
fueling his career as celebrity pianist. Rachmaninoff makes the list of teen
stars, but just barely; he hits his stride in his late 20s, about average age
for important composers.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Great
composers in their early 20s</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bach (born 1685): by age 15, he has a
career as choir singer, orchestra violinist, and town organist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the late 1600s, the organ had evolved from
the medieval instrument with a dozen or so pipes set on a small table, to the
massive multi-layer keyboard with pipes of all sizes (hence an enormous range
from low rumbling bass to reedy high notes), taking up the entire wall of a
church. Bach is the first to take full advantage of the big organ; his earliest
compositions are for that instrument. His <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tocatta
and Fugue in D minor</i> is composed in his 20s (the dates are obscure): the
grandest and most impressive of all organ music, it is the first in Bach’s
string of all-time favorites, extending through age 65.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rossini (born 1792): father a trumpeter,
mother an opera singer of secondary parts. Teenage singer in minor opera roles;
attended Bologna conservatory age 14-18; harpsichord player and opera conductor
at age 17; composes a long string of successful operas from age 19 onwards. His
one big international hit, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Barber of
Seville,</i> is age 24.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He retires from
opera composing age 37, rich and famous. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Schubert (born 1797): performer,
conductor and composer for his choir school orchestra, age 11-16; local
Viennese reputation for coffee-house art-song evenings in his early 20s, with
some subsequently famous songs composed in his teens (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gretchen am Spinnrad, </i>17; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Erlkönig,</i>
18-- both based on literary sources). * “Unfinished” Symphony is composed age
25; “Great” Symphony, finished age 27.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">* An American equivalent would be Stephen
Foster (born 1826), composing sentimental favorites <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Old Folks at Home</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Old
Kentucky Home</i> at age 25 and 27. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Arthur Sullivan (born 1842), son of a
military bandleader; soloist in boys choir at the Chapel Royal; published a
church anthem age 14; attended Leipzig Conservatory. Incidental music for
Shakespeare’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tempest</i> made him
famous at age 20. His <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In Memorium</i>
overture, age 24 put him “in the first rank of contemporary British composers.”
Produced many cantatas, Shakespeare music, and hymns (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Onward Christian Soldiers,</i> age 29). His serious music did not last:
it was “...at best, highly watered Mendelssohn. It is not surprising that an
England whose musical god was Mendelssohn should have been enthusiastic over
his disciple.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[Deems Taylor] Worked as
a church organist, until collaborating on light operas with W.S. Gilbert from
age 33, building to peak creativity when Sullivan was 36-43. Sullivan starts as
a teen prodigy, is lionized in his early 20s; but is remembered for music
composed in the late-success bracket.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The early-20s bracket is the real
baseline for youthful success in the big leagues. Mozart, whose important work
is from 22 onwards, belongs here; so does Rossini at 24; Chopin (about age 25);
and arguably Liszt (from 22-26). Bach’s great organ works are in this
neighbourhood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only earlier great
creations are from Schubert and Mendelssohn at 17, and Rachmaninoff at 19.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We will take up the question below why
ultra-talented youths can keep getting better, with their best works 10-15
years or more after their first breakthroughs. Neither “talent” nor
“inspiration” explains the timing; what does?</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Typical
Age of Success: Late 20s--early 30s</span></i></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This is the normal or average age for
first great musical success, containing more composers than any other bracket.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Berlioz (born 1803) has no musical
background and never learns to play the piano. About age 12 he reads Rameau’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Treatise on Harmony</i> (written a century
earlier) and decides to compose music, a purely intellectual approach. His
father sends him to Paris to study medicine, but he drops out after two years,
and eventually gets into the Conservatoire at age 23. This provided great advantages,
since conservatory students formed their own orchestra, playing the new music
imported from Germany as well as their own.* At age 27 Berlioz produces <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Symphonie Fantastique,</i> a symphony in
name only; in fact a series of melodramatic scenes, explained in a long printed
program to be distributed to the audience -- hence, “program music”. For its
first performance (in the Conservatoire concert hall), Berlioz assembled a
huge, very loud orchestra, ridiculed by critics. Liszt and Wagner supported
him, and Berlioz gained recognition as the avant-garde of French music by his
late 30s, although initially in Germany. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">* This was also the set-up at Schubert’s
choir school in Vienna that launched his career as a symphony composer.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Stravinsky (born 1882): son of an opera
singer; after a long apprenticeship, becomes famous at 28 for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Firebird</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Petrushka </i>(29), and above all <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rite
of Spring </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(31). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mussorgsky (born 1839) writes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Night on Bald Mountain</i> at 28 (but first
performed in 1886, 5 years after his death); finishes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boris Godunov</i> at 35; and the piano suite <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pictures at an Exhibition</i> at 35 (made famous by Ravel’s
orchestration in 1922).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Wagner (born 1813) breaks through with
his third opera, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rienzi</i>, at age 29;
finds his own style with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Flying
Dutchman</i> (30), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tannhauser</i>
(32). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Verdi (born 1813) starts producing operas
at age 25; has his first hit, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nabucco</i>,
at 29; and his peak fame with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rigoletto</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La Traviata</i> (38), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Il Trovatore</i> (41).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Schumann (born 1810) son of a book-seller
and music publisher, is better known as a music journalist from age 24; begins
publishing songs in his late 20s, and produces important symphonies age 31-35.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Handel (born 1685) son of a court
surgeon; studies with the cathedral organist, substituting for him at age 17;
plays violin and harpsichord in the Hamburg opera at 18, composing several
operas at 20. By 24 he<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is a famous
keyboard player, acquiring patrons in Italy, Germany, and England, giving him a
choice of positions. He produces successful operas since 26 (though subsequently
forgotten); his famous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Water Music</i> is
age 32; his great organ concertos are from age 50 onwards; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Messiah</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>age 57.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Grieg (born 1843) attended Leipzing
conservatory; has his first important composition age 25; theatre music for
Ibsen’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Peer Gynt</i> makes him famous
age 32. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dvorak (born 1841) attends Prague organ
school; is a violin player in the Prague theatre orchestra from age 22 until
success with his Third Symphony at 33; international recognition for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Slavonic Dances</i> (37); and peak success with
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New World Symphony</i> (51).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Debussy (born 1862), spends 12 years at
the Paris Conservatoire (from age 10); his first important work is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’apres-midi d’une faune</i> (32), becoming
famous for his opera <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pelléas et Mélisande
</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(40), and above all <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La mer </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(43).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Donizetti (born 1797), studied at Bologna
Conservatory. Begins writing operas at age 18 -- a very rapid worker, he can
turn out an opera in a few weeks (similar to Rossini in both respects). His
first success is age 25; his big hits are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anna
Bolena </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(33), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’elisir d’amor</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(35), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La fille du régiment</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(43), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don
Pasquale</i> (46).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Vivaldi (born 1678): son of violinist at
St. Mark’s Cathedral, Venice. From age 26 he is a prolific composer with his
own built-in orchestra at a Venice orphanage for girls (having become a priest
primarily for access to this kind of church position). His notable compositions
are the collection <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’estro armonico </i>[harmonic
inspiration or fantasy]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>age 34 and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Four Seasons</i> (47). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mahler (born 1860): attends Vienna
Conservatory; a flamboyant conductor in his early 20s, he produces a series of
notable symphonies from age 33 onwards, famous for unprecedented length (over
an hour) and big sounds of a huge orchestra, sometimes with chorus.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Siberlius (born 1865) attended Finnish
music academy, then studied in Berlin and Vienna. Became successful locally at
age 27 with a choral symphony on the Finnish national epic; world-famous with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Finlandia</i> at age 34.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">John Philip Sousa (born 1854) was son
of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a musician in the U.S. Marine Band.
Played violin in his father’s band age 13-18, eventually became bandmaster age
26-38; in between he played in theatre orchestras, including operettas under
visiting Offenbach. Marches were becoming the most popular musical
entertainment, and Sousa had his first hit at 32, followed by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Semper Fidelis </i>(34), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Washington Post</i> (35), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Stars and Stripes Forever </i>(43). At
38, he formed his own band, as famous in its day as the jazz bands that
succeeded it in the 1920s: played by similar instruments (horns and drums),
band marches preceded jazz in lively syncopated music.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">To this group we could add composers
already notable in their teens or early twenties but whose most famous
compositions begin later:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Richard Strauss age 26, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death and Transfiguration.</i></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Beethoven age 27, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonata Pathetique.</i> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rachmaninoff age 28, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Second Piano Concerto</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Prokofiev age 30, opera <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love of
Three Oranges.</i></span></p><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">For all their fame, their age of hitting
peak productivity is typical.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Harder to place is Arnold Schoenberg
(born 1874). Learned violin as a child; worked as a bank clerk in Vienna until
21; played string quartets with friends and had a composition performed
professionally at 24. Moved to Berlin at 27, arranging and conducting cabaret
songs and operettas until Richard Strauss got him a post teaching at a
conservatory. At age 30-31 several works were performed, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Verklärte Nacht</i> (still conventional in form, with Wagnerian
chromaticism) and the tone poem <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pelleas
und Melisande</i>. He began to abandon tonality in 1908; by 1910 his work was
so controversial that a concert by Schoenberg and his pupils Berg and Webern
was halted by the outraged audience. He now had patrons, a Europe-wide
reputation, and his own school of followers; the twelve-tone system was
exhibited in the early 1920s, at age 46. We can put his success as dating from age
30-36.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Another one hard to date is Henry Purcell
(born 1659). He was a child singer in the Chapel Royal; in charge of repairing
royal instruments at 14; organ tuner and organist at Westminster Abbey at 20;
organ maker and keeper of the King’s instruments age 26. He produced numerous
court songs, church anthems, theatre music and semi-operas (the latter from age
30). Unfamed during his lifetime, in retrospect elevated to England’s greatest
composer. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Late
bloomers: 30s-40s-50s</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Carl Maria von Weber (born 1786) sang and
acted bit parts in his parents’ troupe; wrote an unproduced opera age 14, and
conducted orchestras at 20. He is a professional musician early, but finds fame
only at age 35 with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Der Freischutz</i>.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Johann Strauss, Jr. (born 1825), son
of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Johann Strauss, Sr. (who himself
started as a violinist in his father’s saloon and became leader and composer
for a successful dance orchestra). Johann Sr. wanted Jr. to go into business,
but he took secret lessons from a violinist in his father’s orchestra; and at
19 (father having left the family for another woman) started his own dance
orchestra, which combined with his father’s after the elder’s death. By 28 he
was conducting at court balls in Vienna; by 35 he had published over 200 dance
tunes. His most famous orchestral waltzes date from the 1860s (age 35-45),
shifting thereafter to composing operettas, his most famous (out of 15), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Die Fledermaus, </i>is at age 49.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Brahms (born 1833) son of a cafe
musician; played piano in red-light saloons from age 10; at 20, toured as
accompanist to a famous violinist. Scraped by in a series of minor positions
until fame at age 35 for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">German Requiem. </i>His
famous symphonies, piano and violin concertos date from age 43-54. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Tchaikovsky (born 1840): early
compositions age 26; first success at age 36 with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Swan Lake</i> ballet; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eugene
Onegin </i>(his 5th opera of an eventual 11) age 38; and great popularity
with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">1812
Overture</i> age 40.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Leoncavallo (born 1857) attended Naples
conservatory age 9-17, then took a degree in literature at Bologna University;
free-lanced for years as a cafe musician until producing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I pagliacci</i> at age 35. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Puccini (born 1858) in a family of
choirmasters and organists; had a late start at Milan Conservatory age 22.
First big hit <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Manon Lescaut</i> age 35;
followed by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">La Bohème </i>(38); <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tosca </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Madama
Butterfly </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(42). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Franz Lehar (born 1870): father was a
military bandmaster who sent his son to study violin at the Prague Conservatory
at age 12. From age 20 young Lehar was a military bandmaster, composing popular
waltzes and marches, eventually moving to Vienna. An early opera and several
operettas were unsuccessful, but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Merry Widow</i> (35) became a perennial favourite.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bizet (born 1838) was the son of a
singing teacher. Entered the Paris Conservatory age 10. Wrote a series of
unsuccessful operas; on his 9th try, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Carmen</i>
is performed in 1875, just before Bizet dies of an illness at age 37.
Tchaikovsky traveled to Paris to hear it; Nietzsche rated its exciting music
above Wagner.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Ravel (born 1874) studied at the Paris
Conservatory from 14 to 24, finally gaining recognition for his brief <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pavane pour une infante défunte. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A meticulous orchestrator, he spent 3 years
composing the music of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daphnis et Chloê </i>for
Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, making him famous at age 37. His biggest hits were
his orchestration of Mussorgsky’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pictures
at an Exhibition </i>(48), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bolero</i>
(54). In the 1930s he wrote: “I have failed all my life. I was not one of the
great composers.” [Goulding 385]</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We can insert here Saint-Saëns, whose
first successes were age 39 and 42. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Also in this bracket belongs Arthur
Sullivan (born 1842), famous when young for ephemeral works, but remembered for
Gilbert and Sullivan operas<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> H.M.S.
Pinafore </i>(36), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pirates of Penzance</i>
(37), and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mikado </i>(43). Even in their collaboration, success did not come
automatically; these were their 4th, 5th, and 9th collaborations respectively.
Outside the Gilbert and Sullivan series of 14, another 8 collaborations with
different librettists were unsuccessful; Sullivan’s one grand opera (age 49)
was an initial success but a financial failure, and subsequently forgotten.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Monteverdi (born 1567) in a musical
family. A violinist, cathedral and court musician, he published books of
secular madrigals from age 20; composed the first notable opera, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Orfeo </i>at age 40 while employed by the
Duke of Mantua. Became music master at St. Mark’s cathedral, and after public
opera houses opened in Venice in 1637, composed several more operas including
another classic at age 71. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Rimsky-Korsakov (born 1844). Trained as a
naval officer in St. Petersburg, active in the circle of young nationalist
composers; became professor of orchestration at the Conservatory at 27, and
Inspector of Naval Bands, a post newly created for him. Composed 13 operas,
none very successful; but re-orchestrated and produced Mussorgsky’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Boris Godunov</i> after his death, as well
as completing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Khovanshchina</i>; and
after Borodin’s death in 1887, his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prince
Igor</i>. Rimsky-Korsokov was responsible for the success of most of the other
Russian composers (except Tchaikovsky), including the first performance of
Mussorgsky’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Night on Bald Mountain.</i>
His own<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>compositions were famous mainly
for the symphonic suite <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scheherazade</i>
(44) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Russian Easter Overture</i>
(45). Rimsky-Korsakov was the ultimate team player, rarely in the spot-light,
but moving Russian technique of orchestration to the forefront of Europe. It
was his style that set the tone for Hollywood background music, carried by
foreign-born composers since the 1930s.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Gluck (born 1714) wrote about 50 operas,
but his one famous opera, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Orfeo ed
Euridice,</i> was at age 48. Why so late? He was the servant (and son of a
servant) of several Princes and Queens; had a youthful stint as choir singer,
violinist at village fairs, and opera singer; traveled with a patron to Italy
where he began composing; knocked about the capitals of Europe; settled in
Vienna in the orchestra of his original employer at age 34 (resembling the
early career of Haydn). At 40 he is Court Composer, writing conventional operas
for an Italian librettist (the Court Poet), costly productions with lavish
scenery, costumes and plots of complicated intrigue and disguise. But the
finances of Austrian court theatre are precarious and fluctuating, official
sponsorship alternates with leased commercial companies, and shifting among
Italian, French, and German lyricists, actors and singers. In an economy phase,
Gluck is instructed to compose for a thinned-down French-style drama, matching
the emotional intonation of the actors. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Orfeo</i>
(1762) sets a new style, with fewer and shorter arias, more compelling plot and
more recitatives to carry it, plus more orchestration than typical French
theatre ensembles. He takes the new style to Paris in the 1770s when he follows
Marie Antoinette who has married young Louis XIV. In Vienna he paved the way
for Mozart; in France he has the fortune of dying in 1787, before his patroness
is beheaded. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Haydn (born 1732) was a child
choir-singer; then street-musician, accompanist to a famous singing teacher,
and at age 30 violinist and then leader of Prince Esterhazy’s private
orchestra. His first notable composition is age 49, with increasing fame into
his 50s and 60s.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Domenico Scarlatti (born 1685), trained
by his father Alessandro Scarlatti (a court composer of over 120 operas, none
famous); first opera at age 24; choirmaster for the Pope at age 29-35. He
became royal music master in Portugal and Spain for the rest of his life,
entertaining the royal family by composing 550 sonatas for harpsichord, the
earliest published when he was 53. His stunning rhythms, sudden chord changes,
and abrupt phrase endings imitate guitar strumming and castanets of Spanish
dancers. Though isolated, his change from the Italian milieu provided the
ingredients for his success. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Would-be child prodigy César Franck (born
1822) comes in last, with his first serious notice at age 56, 60, and his
famous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Symphony in D minor</i> at age 65.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Notice that composers whose success is
earliest typically wrote short pieces -- songs, piano preludes and nocturnes,
etc. Late arrivals are concentrated among opera composers-- the most difficult
genre in which to make a success. As I have noted elsewhere LINK, even the
greatest opera composers, with rare exceptions, had far more failures than
successes. A lot of planets have to align for a great opera to happen.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Age
of success in popular music</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We see this pattern again in the careers
of 20th century popular composers and musicians. Hit songs come earliest;
Broadway musicals later. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Irving Berlin (born 1888): a newspaper
vender and street singer at age 8, then singing waiter, he has a long
apprenticeship learning all the popular songs before becoming a lyricist at 21.
His first hit, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alexander’s Ragtime Band, </i>is
at age 23. It is 1911, just when music records are starting to be sold, a
popular industry that would eclipse creativity in classical music in the 1920s,
at least in America. Berlin writes over 1500 songs in 40 years (about 1 per
week); composing for numerous musicals and films, the most successful are in
his 40s and 50s-- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Top Hat </i>(1935, age
47);<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Holiday Inn </i>(1942, age 54);<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
Annie Get Your Gun<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>(1946, age 58);<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Call Me Madam<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>(1950, age 62).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Jerome Kern (born 1885): wrote
European-style operettas; first show 1912 (age 27); first big hit <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Showboat </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ol
Man River</i>) (1927, age 42). Film hits <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Swing
Time </i>(1936, age 51, including <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Way
You Look Tonight</i>) through 1944 (age 59). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Cole Porter (1891) writes the Yale Fight
Song (“Bulldog, bulldog, bow-wow-wow, Ee-lyy Yale!”)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>while an undergraduate at age 20. After some
classical music training, he starts writing songs for musicals at 24. His first
Broadway success is not until age 38 (1929); his most popular songs are from
the 1930s; his most successful musicals <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Anything
Goes</i> (43), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kiss Me, Kate</i> (57),
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Can-Can </i>(62).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">George Gershwin (1898): at age 18 he
works for a Tin Pan Alley publisher of sheet music, singing new releases for
shop customers (like Berlin, learning the competition by performing it). At 20,
he is a Broadway rehearsal pianist. His first hit song is age 22 (for Al
Jolson, who 5 years<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>later would sing in
the first “talkie”). Next year he is accompanying an opera soprano in concert
hall performances of both pop and art songs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>In 1924 (age 26) he composes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rhapsody
in Blue</i>, a fusion of jazz blue-notes with classical orchestra; at age 38, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Porgy and Bess</i>, the first and most
enduring jazz opera. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Frederick Loewe (born 1901): son of a
German opera singer, immigrated to New York 1924. His first broadway hit is <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brigadoon</i> (1947, age 46) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My Fair Lady</i> (1956, age 55).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Richard Rodgers (born 1902): collaborates
in college with lyricist Lorenz Hart from 1918 (age 16); first Broadway hit age
25. Writes film scores in early 1930s; plus intermittent, but unsuccessful
symphonies. After Hart’s death, collaborates with Oscar Hammerstein in a string
of big hits: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oklahoma</i> (1943); <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">South Pacific </i>(1949); <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The King and I </i>(1951); <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sound of Music</i> (1959). His big hits
are from age 41 to 57. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Frank Loesser (born 1910): big hit <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Guys and Dolls </i>(1950, age 40).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Leonard Bernstein (born 1918): from age
25, wrote symphonies, ballet, and musicals, none very notable until <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">West Side Story </i>(1957, age 39). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">On
the jazz, pop and rock side:</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Scott Joplin (born 1868):
African-American, developed ragtime piano; famous since 1899 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maple Leaf Rag</i> (age 31). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Louis Armstrong (born 1901): jazz
trumpeter and singer; first big hits 1926-29 (age 25-28).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bing Crosby (born 1901): sang in Paul
Whiteman orchestra, 1926-30, one of first bands to broadcast nation-wide on
radio. (This is the same band that premiered <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rhapsody in Blue</i> in 1924.) Film actor from 1930 to early 1960s,
with his most famous songs from musical comedies in the early 1940s (age
40-plus). Crosby was among the first to adapt his voice to singing into a
microphone, shifting from the loud operatic style to mellow crooning. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Frank Sinatra (born 1915): sang in clubs
and on radio; first hits are band recordings age 25-27, making him a teen idol
in the 1940s; biggest song hits were night-club style in the 1950s and 60s (age
40s-50s).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bill Haley (born 1925): began as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>country/ western singer. Recorded the first
rock-and-roll hits, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shake, Rattle, and
Roll,</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rock Around the Clock,</i>
1954 (age 29) (hence the term, rock-and-roll).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chuck Berry (born 1926): big hits age
29-32; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maybelline </i>(1955)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, Roll Over Beethoven </i>(1956)<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, Johnny B. Goode</i> (1958) were the first
rock-and-roll songs to top the pop, country, and rhythm-and-blues sales charts
simultaneously.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fats Domino (born 1928): began as
barrelhouse pianist in rhythm-and-blues and jazz bands; after changing styles,
rock-and-roll hits 1955-56 (age 27-28). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Carl Perkins (born 1932): country/rock
cross-over 1956, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blue Suede Shoes </i>(age
24); toured with Johnny Cash.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Johnny Cash (born 1932): country music
with rock backup; big hit <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I Walk the
Line,</i> 1956 (24).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">From here on, the age of success becomes
lower, dipping to the early 20s and occasionally the late teens.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Jerry Lee Lewis (born 1935): country and
gospel background; hyper piano-playing hits 1956-7 (age 21-2). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Elvis Presley (born 1935): religious
family, choir boy; first record 1953 (age 18); first big hits <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Heartbreak Hotel; Love Me Tender, </i>both
1956 (21).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Everly Brothers, Don and Phil (born 1937,
1939): began in parents’ country music shows in Iowa; big hits singing duets
with country-style guitars with electric amplifiers and rock-and-roll beat
1957-60 (ages 18-21, 20-23).</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Beatles: John Lennon (born 1940),
Ringo Star (1940), Paul McCartney (1942), George Harrison (1943). Band formed
1960 (when they were age 20, 20, 18, and 17) playing American rock-and-roll.
Began composing their own songs and developed their own style (backed by
sophisticated studio electronics)* 1963 (at age 23, 23, 21, and 20).</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">* We could add George Martin (born 1926),
the Beatles’ record producer and sound engineer. His background was in
classical orchestration; he had never recorded rock-and-roll, but supplied
string quartet segments for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yesterday</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Eleanor Rigby.</i> When Beatlemania
hit in 1964, Martin was slowing down some taped tracks and combining them with
others speeded up, using techniques he had previously experimented with in
avant-garde music. The 38-year-old was creating studio effects for Beatles
records that could not be heard in their live concerts. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The Rolling Stones: Bill Wyman (born
1941), Charlie Watts (1941), Mick Jagger (1943), Keith Richard (1943).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The band formed 1962 (ages 21, 21, 19 and 19)
and became famous 1965 (ages 24, 24, 22, and 22), also with heavily engineered
electronic effects.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bob Dylan (born 1941): conventional
folk-song acoustical guitar player until 1963-5, when his music morphed into
political protests (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Hard Rain Gonna
Fall; Times They are a-Changing</i>) in electrically amplified rock (age
22-24). </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the rock-and-roll era and into
electric rock, the musicians became younger, but remained about 5-to-8 years
older than their core teen fans. The most successful -- Elvis, the Beatles--
are baby-faced, looking younger than they are. Expensive electronic studios
were not available to the very young.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Altogether, it is rare to become a pop
star before age 21 or 22, or to produce a great musical before 40. Fastest to
the top was Gerschwin; if we take <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rhapsody
in Blue</i> as an orchestral suite, age 24 is impressively early for an
all-time classic. Timing has a lot to do with it. In the 1920s, blue-note jazz
was just starting to reach a mass audience as yet mostly familiar with
classical music. Aaron Copland (born 1900), an American trained in the European
avant-garde, was approaching the same blend of jazz and classical from the
other side and at the same time. Working out of the same mix, Duke Ellington
(born 1899) in a prosperous black family in Washington D.C., composed smooth
chromatic harmonies for his big band; since he wrote for the 3-minute span of 78-rpm
records, his larger classical compositions had to wait until later in life. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the 1920s, the atonal music of the
classical avant-garde would leave most listeners behind. Jazz was poised to
fill the gap: it opened up new rhythms and chord sequences, while remaining
understandable in its conventional sonata-like repetitions, variations and
resolutions to the tonic key. As classical composers shifted increasingly from
light operetta to musicals, jazz musicians created most of their sounds by
improvising on a repertoire of Broadway show tunes, the jazzier music using
more conventional songs as a platform. The equivalent of Schoenberg and his
followers’ atonal music did not hit jazz until late 1940s be-bop. This also
became too esoteric for most listeners, leaving the field open for the simplified,
hard-driving mini-sonatas of rock-and-roll in the 1950s and its electronic
successors in the 60s. *</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>*
The sonata form that became standard for orchestra and piano music in the 1700s
had three movements in related keys (typically fast-slow-fast or
major-minor-major); within each movement consisting of a first theme, second
theme, and return. Twentieth century popular songs used a short version of this
form, repeating the principal melody phrase of a few bars twice, varying it the
third time, and returning to the original phrase the fourth time; sometimes
embedded in a repeated chorus-and-verse form with related melodies. There is
nothing in rock-and-roll that Beethoven would have found unfamiliar except the
instruments and some of the rhythm.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Classical music now became “classic” in
the additional sense of “great music from the past.” The divide from popular
music opened up as never before. The field was left for youthful musicians to
become successful song-writers; but long complex compositions no longer
commanded attention. The excited audiences essential to the phonomenon of
touring child prodigies had other things to enthuse about. The era of musical
child prodigies was over.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It
is genes?</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Genetic talent may exist, but it is not
the over-riding influence on creative success. The examples of Franck and
Saint-Saëns show an abundance of early talent but their success came late. The
eidetic memory of Saint-Saëns for music he had heard inhibited him from
composing music that was more than imitative. This implies that Mozart’s
similar capacity for storing music in his head was not the factor that made him
so successful as an innovator.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If musical talent is hereditary, we would
expect a high correlation between parent and child creativity. But there are
very few cases where both generations were well-known musicians, and the levels
of creativity from one generation to the next are not closely matched. Johann
Sebastian Bach far eclipsed his journeyman ancestors; of his 11 children, 3
became well-known as performers; a 4th, C.P.E. Bach, was temporarily a notable
composer but of the second rank, his works no longer heard. Those closest in
level of success were Alessandro and Domenico Scarlatti, but Domenico became
famous while his father is forgotten; and Domenico’s talent did not blossom
until very late, after he moved out of his father’s milieu. The pattern is
similar with Johann Strauss Sr. and Jr., except that the younger effectively
takes over his father’s enterprise and composes much more memorable music.
Since heredity comes from both father and mother, we would expect the children
of Robert and Clara Schumann would be eminent; but none of the eight were heard
of since. Genes must be been good for the children of Wagner and Liszt’s
daughter Cosima; but at best they become curators of the Bayreuth shrine. Among
pop musicians, Bob Dylan had 6 children but none of them famous musicians.
There are some brother pairs; Franz Joseph Haydn’s younger brother Michael
Haydn was a well-known music teacher, but nowhere close in creativity.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In sum, among the 78 high-creativity
careers analyzed here, including both classical and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>popular, there are only 3 parent-child links:
J.S. Bach-C.P.E. Bach; the Scarlattis; and J. Strauss Sr. and Jr.; nowhere does
truly high creativity get transmitted by heredity.*</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">* We could add Andrea and Giovanni
Gabrieli, uncle and nephew (1500s), both composers and organists at St. Mark’s,
Venice. The pattern is similar among famous artists. Among hundreds of
important artists in the lst 600 years, the only well-known family connections
are: the brothers Gentile and Giovanni Bellini (late 1400s), the latter far
more famous and influential, plus their father Jacobo, a minor painter; the
Breughel family (mid-1500s-early 1600s, Pieter (the most famous), and his sons
Pieter and Jan (the latter also well known, the other less so). Child prodigies
in the musical sense are unheard of among famous artists.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Following
the family music trade</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Nevertheless, a large proportion of top
composers had parents who were professional musicians. Mostly these parents
were unremarkable, but they did provide exposure to professional life from an
early age; and a head start on the first 15 years or so of training in the
craft. Also the network contacts they provided, that steered their children
towards the centers of musical production. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Father
and/or mother were musicians: </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">(listed in
chronological order and age of first success)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1600s: Monteverdi, Vivaldi</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1700s: Bach, D. Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1800s-early1900s: Rossini, von Weber,
Schumann, Liszt, Clara Wieck, Johann Strauss Sr. and Jr, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Brahms, Bizet, Sullivan, Sousa, Lehar, Richard
Strauss, Puccini, Stravinsky</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This group includes most of the leading
composers, with the exception of the first generation of Russia composers
(Mussorgsky, Tchaikovsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov), who were building a music
industry from scratch. They did have the advantage of being a strongly linked
network, acting as a self-conscious social movement.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Other
kinds of family head-start:</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Four important creators were
launched by family connections: Liszt, whose father was employed by the same
noble family that supported Haydn, and which gave young Franz an enthusiastic
send-off at age 8 to study in its music network in Vienna. Mendelssohn, whose
family was famous in cultural circles, and aggressively used them to promote
his reputation as a child prodigy. Chopin, whose father’s connections as French
tutor in a wealthy exile family in Poland promoted young Frederic as a child
prodigy. All these families hired expensive music tutors, providing
professional training at an early age. Wagner, whose mother, sisters and
brothers were actresses and theatre managers, providing connections to
institutions that were simultaneously venues for musical productions. Wagner
began as a theatre manager, a job that included producing and directing operas;
he learned the scores for all the instruments by directing them in rehearsals
and performances.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Child
choir singers:*</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1600s: Purcell</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1700s: Gluck, Haydn (also Bach)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1800s: Schubert (also Sullivan)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This was an alternative to having a
family in the music business. Boy sopranos could start as young as 8, and
remain until their voice broke at 14 or 15. Since these establishments were
residential and provided practical training in other instruments and ensembles,
it was the equivalent of an early start as a professional.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">* (parentheses) indicate overlap with
list of musician parents</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Formal
conservatory education:*</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1800s: (Rossini), Donizetti, Berlioz,
Franck, Saint-Saëns, (Bizet), Grieg, Dvorak, (Sullivan), Leoncavallo,
(Puccini), Mahler, Debussy, Sibelius, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, (Stravinsky),
Prokofiev</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">No one before 1800 attends a
conservatory. The earliest conservatories are in Italy (Bologna, Naples,
Milan). The Paris conservatory dates from 1795; thereafter all the French
musicians (except those who are foreigners) go that route. Germany starts
establishing conservatories in 1843 (Leipzig; later Vienna, Berlin and
elsewhere)-- it doesn’t need them earlier, since its networks are so creative
already. Scandinavian, central European, and English composers (Grieg, Dvorak,
Sibelius, Sullivan) go to Germany to train; so do Russians who establish the
St. Petersburg and later Moscow conservatories in the 1860s. They are all in
the business of catching up. American composers (Aaron Copland, Cole Porter) do
the same thing in the early 1900s.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The main effect of conservatories is that
it slows down creativity; it takes longer to get through the requirements, and
in general it seems to inhibit early success. The main exception here is
Rossini, who spent only a few years at the Bologna conservatory, and he was
already experienced in all aspects of opera. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">None
of the above:</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This leaves us with a short list of major
composers who had neither musical families, child choir, nor conservatory
education.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1700s: Handel</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1800s: Verdi</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1900s: Schoenberg</span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Handel is from the era before music
schools. His father was a distinguished court physician (his memorial portrait
has the ceremonial trappings of an honored member of the elite), and he opposed
his son’s interest in music as too low-status. But a palace aristocrat
intervened, allowing Handel to learn music by apprenticeship and as a teen
professional musician. The early 1700s are when aristocrats are beginning to
compete for prestige through the musicians in their palaces. Handel is
sponsored by a series of patrons who take him on the grand tour (much as Mozart
was taken by his father 50 years later), where he encounters the leading
network and launches his own creativity. In personal style, Handel is always
the grand gentleman, and his connections in England-- even his business
ventures-- are among the high aristocracy.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Verdi is rejected from the Milan
conservatory; nevertheless he uses the visit to take private lessons from a La
Scala musician, and makes connections with the Ricordi music publishing house
(literally next door), which signs up a stable of budding opera composers.
Verdi manages to get into the Milan conservatory network without actually attending
officially.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Schoenberg is the most-outside outsider
of any influential composer. He is also the most radical. He does have the
advantage of growing up in Vienna, where musical networks were plentiful; and
to work in Berlin (in low-level commercial music, to be sure), when Richard
Strauss was director of the court opera and supportive leader of the
avant-garde.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">American and English pop composers and
jazz musicians are like Schoenberg in this respect: rarely from musical
families, often without formal training, but getting a start in the commercial
music industries. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sheer
inspiration?</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If not hereditary genius, how about the
flash of genius that music journalists like to talk about in explaining
musicians who pop up anywhere? This begs two questions.
</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Why do flashes of genius cluster at
particular times and places? (Vienna; Paris; Milan; St. Petersburg; New York
music theatres and Tin Pan Alley record companies)</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> And why is there a pattern of individual
careers, such that inspiration strikes at a particular age? </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The surprising thing is that composers
don’t use up their best ideas, their best melodies first. If genius is
self-contained, why is it that Mozart has better tunes at age 32 than he does
at 18? That Verdi is better at 38 than at 25? That Puccini is at his peak at
42, and Sullivan at 43? Haydn at 60 and Franck at 65?</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This points to another use for our lists
of creativity at different ages and career paths. It allows us to zoom in on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">what kind of skill is musical creativity?</i>
Partly, it is discovering what are the innovative possibilities in the field,
how to tweak existing work, or recombine materials, or take a drastically new
direction; and this requires familiarity with the leading edge of the network.
In world philosophy, science, and art, this is done almost without exception by
personal contact, either with the previous generation of creators, or with a
contemporaneous network of rebellious “Young Turks”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[Collins, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Sociology of Philosophies</i>]. In music, it is possible (and indeed essential)
to get this familiarity by reading the scores of other publishers’ music; by
experiencing how they play out in practice by conducting them; even through
grunt-work like Wagner performed in Paris copying out instrument scores of his
operatic competitors. American pop composers largely got it by demonstrating
songs in record stores and playing accompanyments at rehearsals. Part of the
skill is internalizing the existing techniques of the field.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And partly it is the skill of connecting
what you hear with what you can do with your body and its instruments: whether
it be voice, fingers on a violin or piano, mouth on a horn; and also-- eyes
reading a score and fingers writing out the notes, connected by a brain that
hears the sounds on paper and their rhythms and harmonies and tensions that
move the music along or bring it to an expected climax. This is a skill that
all composers develop, even if Mozart stands out for his easy facility and
Beethoven for being able to do it when deaf. The age of creativity in a musical
career depends on how long it takes to read music in your head; and on where the
best places are to get these skills, and turn them loose of making<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>high-speed recombinations of the music
already internalized.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There is currently a lot of publicity
about “muscle memory” and taking 10,000 hours of repetition to become good at
anything. Whatever the number is, getting an early start from the family
business, or its various substitutes, is how this skill at musical creativity
builds up. The striking thing in music (though perhaps not among athletes) is
that the skill keeps on getting better over time, even after what seem to be
the most obvious musical combinations have already been tried. This is not just
a matter of a certain number of hours of individual brain-and-muscle training;
it is the hours engaging with the advanced network that counts.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Being
a musician shifts from low status to high status career</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">And one must want to innovate. Many
composers-- all the lesser ones, and some of the major ones in early career--
are satisfied to use the same professional techniques that already exist; this
is how individual opera composers in the 1600s and 1700s could turn out
hundreds of operas, all in the same mold, and generally to be forgotten.
Creativity-- the search for innovations-- is a collective mood of the musical
networks at a particular period in history. It was at its peak when the craze
for child prodigies happened. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One major obstacle was that for centuries
musicians were regarded as servants, carrying out the wishes of their masters,
entirely ruled by their audiences. There was considerable opposition to
innovation. Traditionalists were particularly strong in the church, the major
employer of musicians. There was even some controversy over whether music
should be allowed at all in church services, lest it be too beautiful and
distracting. Music outside the church was widely regarded as evil, the work of
the devil, or at least of drunkenness and debauchery. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In the centuries of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Western art up through the 1400s, musicians
were depicted only as angels. </span></p><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3KfxDHhZ3jLdsOzXl4Yj5gSiWlEt-EfQuiVx-bwC4kRDwImp0T6nHNxXTRNPfTlb5KAuGuAZ2wbQiUPbhZ59FW6OlgEFqncpWppJ8Fk-mdH6N86E8MJ1DSNGUFIsJdgg6SJZ8uZeT66o/s1172/A-1450-Fouquet-angelMusic.jpg" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="870" data-original-width="1172" height="475" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj3KfxDHhZ3jLdsOzXl4Yj5gSiWlEt-EfQuiVx-bwC4kRDwImp0T6nHNxXTRNPfTlb5KAuGuAZ2wbQiUPbhZ59FW6OlgEFqncpWppJ8Fk-mdH6N86E8MJ1DSNGUFIsJdgg6SJZ8uZeT66o/w640-h475/A-1450-Fouquet-angelMusic.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>1450 Fouquet, angel choir</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /></span><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Around 1500, we start seeing paintings of
music in secular settings, but the connotation is strongly negative.
Hieronymous Bosch, in his famous tryptich <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Garden of Earthly Delights</i> (about 1500), has a section depicting Hell: it
is full of devils tormenting naked sinners with the musical instruments they
had enjoyed in taverns and brothels.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR5dwIaMK23us4Jl7BDUSdsKT0xoOGOHHVo9xXgmYNOVMJ9hB1doPMRCzeABQIcC8sVV7nYa1fwR6-QGu5SLTXnD_J1eVmWFMtD8TYTRh1TrNyHTYee5qKmuXQ3jbJpLOyuCmn1Ztq0Nk/s2002/B-1500-Bosch-Hell.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1387" data-original-width="2002" height="444" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjR5dwIaMK23us4Jl7BDUSdsKT0xoOGOHHVo9xXgmYNOVMJ9hB1doPMRCzeABQIcC8sVV7nYa1fwR6-QGu5SLTXnD_J1eVmWFMtD8TYTRh1TrNyHTYee5qKmuXQ3jbJpLOyuCmn1Ztq0Nk/w640-h444/B-1500-Bosch-Hell.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1500 Bosch, Hell</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /> </span><p></p>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWUaxXDscWoAOdksmzUpWEpGcS1QK7Qq0RfUlvqLb_Z8yH7SyKO0rKTBeZp0fT76hiWQSO4WkuUx2OnKvhNdYsHzXEX-mUxaQ61ISs4liVAWGRSQYl_XjXtMiseKwUCyBzyywpLjgDN4g/s1892/C-1470.bathhouse.lute.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1554" data-original-width="1892" height="526" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiWUaxXDscWoAOdksmzUpWEpGcS1QK7Qq0RfUlvqLb_Z8yH7SyKO0rKTBeZp0fT76hiWQSO4WkuUx2OnKvhNdYsHzXEX-mUxaQ61ISs4liVAWGRSQYl_XjXtMiseKwUCyBzyywpLjgDN4g/w640-h526/C-1470.bathhouse.lute.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1470 German bathhouse</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This attitude persisted during the
struggles between Protestants and Catholics down through the 1600s:</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzGmZGNNkYQQvKue_0orH0Kn0aRFmBA711EmBzo2pTZYQkr9GwrsGNxtPcuIxIrXGSvJqRDEJ5QZDja5hvsKaNVi8Eyeu1SEPZbFHCKTE2FBhXURn8HfjSJm6KKCNJXH7MFP5ZfqCiEcg/s1011/D-1620Buytewech-fiddler%252Ccarousers.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="771" data-original-width="1011" height="488" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjzGmZGNNkYQQvKue_0orH0Kn0aRFmBA711EmBzo2pTZYQkr9GwrsGNxtPcuIxIrXGSvJqRDEJ5QZDja5hvsKaNVi8Eyeu1SEPZbFHCKTE2FBhXURn8HfjSJm6KKCNJXH7MFP5ZfqCiEcg/w640-h488/D-1620Buytewech-fiddler%252Ccarousers.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1620<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Buytewech, carousers</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The fiddle in particular had a bad
reputation. In the era when musicians often played alone or in very small
ensembles, the “strolling fiddler” was synonymous with a wandering vagrant and
low-lif</span><span style="font-size: medium;">e. The term “violinist” did not replace it until orchestral music (which
required much bigger funding) developed and concert soloists like Paganini
became famous in the 1820s.</span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">There also existed wealthy and
high-status supporters of music, chiefly in the aristocratic courts:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixykdolRLugudPWX46IzkzANZW99Dh4h8fpogFA8BPXnEisyklJbkVJDUmakIZDYezle7KgXv8jpP8mlgk6-S4MyehGYl-k_WWTD_YDQj72Dt-XHMOmEBceesxs0AZ49N9urZGnRq5I6w/s1200/E-1710-Pellegrini-court-musicians.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="847" data-original-width="1200" height="452" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEixykdolRLugudPWX46IzkzANZW99Dh4h8fpogFA8BPXnEisyklJbkVJDUmakIZDYezle7KgXv8jpP8mlgk6-S4MyehGYl-k_WWTD_YDQj72Dt-XHMOmEBceesxs0AZ49N9urZGnRq5I6w/w640-h452/E-1710-Pellegrini-court-musicians.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1710<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Pelligrini, court musicians</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But courts also had the reputation of
being scandalously secular, even atheist, and for low sexual morality among
courtiers with their dancing and affairs. The development of theatres,
performing plays and operas, created another profession of actors, ballet
dancers and musicians, sometimes admired on stage, but always suspect for
immorality. Thus the growth of venues for musical creativity went along with
widespread opposition from moralists and traditionalists; professional
musicians were tainted with low status. It was not a career for a gentleman, or
even a serious artisan.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7uoaedL2sMUFhUvZjE4TWJs_q40BSVAGRNipgzOJ3MxhLTlvYM6QdRWexp6fQIK4W0VodWo91S1II91t5ZIPYetHMf0RQaQjGIpZE6LQ5DwqtXABTzh46Xdxkv24EPABoKXrJUmRjxWM/s900/F-1580-QEliz.dancing.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="498" data-original-width="900" height="354" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7uoaedL2sMUFhUvZjE4TWJs_q40BSVAGRNipgzOJ3MxhLTlvYM6QdRWexp6fQIK4W0VodWo91S1II91t5ZIPYetHMf0RQaQjGIpZE6LQ5DwqtXABTzh46Xdxkv24EPABoKXrJUmRjxWM/w640-h354/F-1580-QEliz.dancing.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Queen Elizabeth dancing with courtier</span></td></tr></tbody></table><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We see this in the autobiography of
Benvenuto Cellini, who became a famous goldsmith in Italy in the early 1500s.
His father was an architect and engineer in Florence; he also was an amateur
musician, who loved to play the flute for his own enjoyment. There was
apparently a growing number of such private amateurs among the respectable
classes. The elder Cellini belonged to a town band of fifers composed of
members of important guilds; but the Medici family who ruled the city forced
him to resign because he was spending too much time on music instead of his own
craft. The father wanted young Benvenuto to become one of the palace musicians,
and refused to teach him any other craft: “I don’t want him to learn anything
except playing and composing, because if God lets him live I hope to turn him
into the greatest musician in the whole world.” But the town officials warned
him off: “Will he never be anything other than a good musician?” “Your
Benvenuto will get much more honor and profit if he studies how to be a goldsmith
than he will out of all this fifing nonsense.” [pp. 18-27] </span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc64vGDhm7QRrGZxkjaQF9KaNePHDiRV3dW9qpOWaxbBm6L3ZnLjXij66lbTs-MRJTZcwDrICifmG-86gmLlxIfuIkLQuCQiAR5HGvLoGGEoN3Bu3JmE1YX_BHEoIS2li_55qlcT88pY8/s1172/G-1650-Steen-lute.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1172" data-original-width="1062" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhc64vGDhm7QRrGZxkjaQF9KaNePHDiRV3dW9qpOWaxbBm6L3ZnLjXij66lbTs-MRJTZcwDrICifmG-86gmLlxIfuIkLQuCQiAR5HGvLoGGEoN3Bu3JmE1YX_BHEoIS2li_55qlcT88pY8/w363-h400/G-1650-Steen-lute.jpg" width="363" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1650 Steen, amateur musician</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The same attitudes persist in the
mid-1700s. Casanova’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Memoirs</i> says
his parents were actors in a Venice theatre. After they died, he attended a
school run by a Catholic priest who taught him the violin. Trained as a priest,
he became secretary to various officials, then soldier and adventurer. In 1745
(age 20), he returned to Venice, making a living “scraping my violin in the
orchestra of a theatre for one crown (about $10) a day... I grant that my
profession was not a brilliant one, but I did not mind it for I was not long in
sharing all the habits of my degraded companions. When the play was over, I
went with them to the drinking booth, which we often left, intoxicated, to
spend the night in houses of ill-fame. Or we rambled about the city, inventing
the most impertinent practical jokes... unmooring the patricians’ gondolas,
letting them float at random among the canals, enjoying the curses of the
gondoliers...”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Playing fiddle at a
noble’s wedding, he rescued a Senator from an apoplectic stroke using amateur
medicine, and was rewarded by “taking me from the vile profession of a fiddler,
raised me to the rank of a grandee.” [pp. 86-91]</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Jean-Jacques Rousseau had a
similar peripatetic life in Switzerland, Italy, and southern France by charming
patrons and acting as servant and secretary. Many of them were amateur
musicians playing for the own enjoyment, or promoting little concerts in their
homes where Rousseau played the flute; he picked up a knowledge of music at a
Catholic choir school, and supplemented his livelihood giving music lessons to
daughters of wealthy families. Musicians of his acquaintance were generally
poor, and their private concerts were “protested by the ultra-devout”, but
Rousseau with his usual enthusiasm took the lead in “collecting the music, the
performers, the instruments, writing out the parts, and conducting with a
baton.” [pp. 178-79]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He read Rameau’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Treatise on Harmony</i> and decided to
emulate him in a career as opera composer. At age 29 (1741) he went to Paris,
carrying his theatre piece and “counting on my system of musical notation as a
sure means to fortune” [p.263] -- he had invented a system of writing down
music quickly by means of numbers instead of labouriously drawing notes on
a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>5-line stave. In Paris, his notation
was rejected as impractical, but he found enough interest in music theory to be
asked to write articles on it for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Encyclopédie</i>.
By charming aristocrats and impressing literary circles, Rousseau managed to
get a hearing for some of his opera work, but never was able to overcome
financial obstacles to a full production.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>He eked out a living by secretarial work and copying music, until 1750
(age 38) his essays in social philosophy won him fame in another direction. </span>
</p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Altogether, the keyholes of Rousseau’s
and Casanova’s experiences show that by the 1740s-50s music had become
fashionable among cosmopolitan aristocrats and the intellectual avant-garde,
while plenty of traditionalist opposition still existed. Musicians were
starting to be noticed, but were treated as servants unless they acquired
intellectual fame as writers (hence advancing composers over performers) or had
particularly powerful patrons. Attending theatre or opera (usually in the same
building) was the nightly entertainment in urban centers like Vienna, Paris and
Venice; while musicians themselves were of ambiguous respectability. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">As the business of printing musical
scores spread, composer’s names were becoming well-known. Ladies of the house
are now portrayed at their keyboard.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCCSBO_sZ3zclKevk8WhT3szyytY8lwgKWclMG88tab90CT9R6JVelGK4_kanUvBC1Gzq3tu8C1xGR3sjlOE1EnbKxK5aeRBQtiu4_QM5MdvgbMrpOsF0XyNxloNpqzAaoMGTyK3aB_6A/s898/H-1762-Nattier-keyboardF.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="799" data-original-width="898" height="570" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgCCSBO_sZ3zclKevk8WhT3szyytY8lwgKWclMG88tab90CT9R6JVelGK4_kanUvBC1Gzq3tu8C1xGR3sjlOE1EnbKxK5aeRBQtiu4_QM5MdvgbMrpOsF0XyNxloNpqzAaoMGTyK3aB_6A/w640-h570/H-1762-Nattier-keyboardF.jpg" width="640" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1762<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Nattier, lady pianist</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><br /> </span></p><p><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span>And taking music out of the realm of
feminine domesticity, we see in 1800 a portrait of a Spanish nobleman, standing
beside his piano, holding up a Haydn score.</span></span></p><p><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="font-size: small;"> </span> </span></p><p></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></p><table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><tbody><tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQP08fy953s-NY1M0dxUZKyk0E3S1RWpZ9T7UbsTnnZ4qi3U7hkdD29GM5K1cc-BTQMEhnA-m9DbuklCKwzOF6ZlSnIq2EpTpOpphQgv8L2KDsaeeMiq7kVLv-Cw13LqSiCN87QHHiIU0/s2048/I-1795-Goya%252CMarquis-printmusic%253DHaydn+copy.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="2048" data-original-width="1264" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiQP08fy953s-NY1M0dxUZKyk0E3S1RWpZ9T7UbsTnnZ4qi3U7hkdD29GM5K1cc-BTQMEhnA-m9DbuklCKwzOF6ZlSnIq2EpTpOpphQgv8L2KDsaeeMiq7kVLv-Cw13LqSiCN87QHHiIU0/w397-h640/I-1795-Goya%252CMarquis-printmusic%253DHaydn+copy.jpg" width="397" /></a></td></tr><tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1795<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Goya, Spanish marquis</span></td></tr></tbody></table><p></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The age of the big star-- the
performer/composer-- Beethoven! was about to arrive.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
when and where of child prodigies</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: small; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Child prodigies are not a biological
phenomenon, but an historical one. They are not a sudden outburst of
genetically-determined talent.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: medium; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Look at the dates when parents tout their
children as geniuses of the keyboard and tour them around as would-be
celebrities:</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">First wave: Mozart and Beethoven in the
1760s-70s.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Second wave: Mendelssohn, Chopin, Liszt,
Clara Wieck/Schumann, Franck in the 1820s-30s. (We could add young Schubert in
the 1810s, although he is never toured or touted; but learns music in the midst
of the Beethoven adulation in Vienna.)</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Why the gap between the first two waves?
In network terms, the launching of Mozart and Beethoven are the same
phenomenon. Mozart’s father in the household orchestra of the Prince-Archbishop
of Salzburg, and Beethoven’s father in the household orchestra of the Elector
of Cologne are in satellites to the Emperor’s court at Vienna. Travel to the
center was common, so was musical gossip from there, and both Mozart and
Beethoven made several trips to Vienna before settling there. (When they
arrived, both had the same musical patron, Baron von Swieten.) Beethoven’s
father touring young Ludwig as a prodigy in 1778 is a direct imitation of
Mozart’s tours between 1762 and 1775. </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But Mozart was too early to be adulated
as a great musician, and Beethoven did not become the first of that status
until the early 1800s. The best-connected musical patronage network of the late
1700s energized its most promising youths, but the cultural concept of a child
prodigy who was a living Greatest-of-All-Time was not created until they were
mature.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The second wave in the 1820s and 30s is
the peak era the child prodigy phenomenon. Crowds now adulate great musicians,
even above the level of aristocracy-on-its-way-down; matching and exceeding the
fame that Renaissance artists achieved around 1500 in the generation of
Leonardo, Raphael, and Michaelangelo. It fact, much bigger and more widespread
crowds, since paintings hardly traveled; but now concerts halls were spreading
beyond the courts to cities all over Europe. Touring music stars became the
normal practice in this era. Given the enormous success of Liszt, and the
considerable fame of Mendelssohn and Chopin, there was a huge emotional
attraction (and financial as well) for parents to launch their piano-playing
children as early as possible. Indeed, they overloaded the market; there were
undoubtably more failed child-tours than the ones we know about because they
later became successful composers.</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Not quite a third wave, but a couple of
notable stragglers are: Saint-Saëns in the mid-1840s, Sullivan in the late
1850s. By this time, conservatory education had taken over from tutors and
apprenticeship networks; and formal education always lengthens rather than
shortens the career take-off.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What
Saint-Saëns and Sullivan can do at an early age is no longer quite so amazing
(now that it had been done many times). England has the last famous
child-composer, probably because it was dominated by imported continental
musicians for so long that it made too much over its first home-grown one. (And
not really that home-grown, since Sullivan is sent to study at Leipzig.)
England would get its music schools and its notable composers (Elgar, Holst,
Vaughn Williams) by the end of the century, but they would no longer be child
prodigies.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Our take-away message is not merely negative.
Creativity requires both learning advanced professional skills and strong
motivation for fame as an innovator. These come from networks, and the child
prodigy phase of history points up two ways these ingredients are generated:
either through families or formal institutions. Child prodigies belong to the
first type, since it is parents who launch a child prodigy career. This
happened at the tail end of an era when musicians learned their trade from
parents and relatives from an early age. Being a good young musician means
getting an early start; in that period almost all great musicians began as
child musicians, but were not singled out as child prodigies. </span>
</p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The second type, formal institutions such
as music conservatories, became substitutes for musical parents. They also
provided steady employment for mature composers, and a reliable way to pass
sophisticated skills to the next generation. But institutional training starts
later and lasts longer. That is the significance of the passing away of child
prodigies.</span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span></i></p><p class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">Appendix</span></i><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;">The popular German cartoonist Wilhelm
Busch depicted the star performer and his audience in the 1840s:</span></p><p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span></p>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC7JyqNTWqw6ZvNbjNQJjP0HXc4xuPcrP3au4P9xCkG-gWvJXP_Ic7MPOWxOu4J3nIjKgN7oxEKmK5txcTsSbYgaqOlL6fjX8F50cfZImTgnI00DDfaNNlL_L3b6Ms9RFRwok8-Pp3b8k/s888/J-1840.DerVirtuoso-W.Busch1a.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="888" data-original-width="549" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhC7JyqNTWqw6ZvNbjNQJjP0HXc4xuPcrP3au4P9xCkG-gWvJXP_Ic7MPOWxOu4J3nIjKgN7oxEKmK5txcTsSbYgaqOlL6fjX8F50cfZImTgnI00DDfaNNlL_L3b6Ms9RFRwok8-Pp3b8k/w396-h640/J-1840.DerVirtuoso-W.Busch1a.jpg" width="396" /></a></div><br /><p class="MsoNormal"><br /></p>
<p class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman",serif; font-size: 14pt; mso-bidi-font-size: 10.0pt;"> </span></p>
<p><style>
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</span><style>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Overview: <br /></span></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Does trauma correlate
with a distinctive kind of music? </span></i></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"><span> </span>-- Tchaikovsky, Beethoven</span></i></span></div>
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</span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Traumas that don’t show
up in music -- Handel, Schubert</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Serious breakdowns--
Schumann, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff</span></i></span></div>
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</span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Professionals who ride
it out-- Bach, Haydn, Brahms, Debussy</span></i></span></div>
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</span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Smooth sailing all the
way-- Liszt, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky</span></i></span></div>
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</span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Opera composers: the
plot sets the music</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> -- troubled: Mozart,
von Weber, Wagner</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> -- smooth: Rossini,
Verdi, Puccini</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> -- I Pagliacci: the
crying clown</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> -- opera failures</span></i></span></div>
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</span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Bottom line</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">: <i>writing program music about oneself -- Richard Strauss</i></span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">It is widely believed that music reflects life. Intensely
traumatic events and life crises inspired such-and-such piece of music.
Tchaikovsky writes his <i>Symphony
Pathétique</i> transmuting his anguish over homosexual scandal and collapsing
relationships into a beautiful testimonial before he kills himself. Beethoven
battles through deafness to create his ringing notes of musical heroism.
Chopin, the romantic sufferer, distills bitter experience into delicate flowers
of musical sensitivity. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Does this really explain how music composers work? Do moments of
inspiration come from the emotional peaks and troughs of one’s extra-musical
life? To answer such questions, we need comparisons: comparisons of what individual composers composed at
different points in their lives; and comparisons among different composers to
see if they all reacted to crises in the same way. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Perhaps we will find that some types of composers-- the most
inspired of all? were those who
built their greatest compositions out of their strongest personal emotions. Or
perhaps, musicians live most intensely inside their profession, their metier of
techniques for making new music within their network of predecessors, peers and
rivals. In this case, we may find great musicians are those who have the
techniques for riding out whatever befalls them in their personal life. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Does trauma correlate
with a distinctive kind of music? Tchaikovsky</span></i></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Line up the life-traumas with the dates they happened, vis-à-vis
when the music was created. Tchaikovsky was sent off to boarding school when he
was 10, and stayed 9 years in an all-boys atmosphere. One should not judge this
experience by 21st-century standards; children often left home for training and
career (Napoleon was sent off to military academy when he was 10.) He was happy
and popular with the other boys, entertaining them with music. Tchaikovsky’s
mother died when he was 14, reducing still further feminine presence in his
life. As in English boarding schools of the same time, male friendships
flowered into homosexual affairs. Although commentators have considered this a
long-festering social conflict and the fundamental trauma in Tchaikovsky’s
life, recently discovered letters show he got over whatever personal and public
uneasiness he had about his homosexuality. When he was 37, an infatuated
student declared her love and he agreed to marry her -- perhaps to change his
bachelor lifestyle to a conventionally respectable home as he became
professionally successful. The
marriage was a disaster and lasted only a few weeks. Tchaikovsky was
temporarily very upset, but his music creation soon picked up where he left
off. Tchaikovsky left his wife and embarked on a series of European sojourns;
as a result he became very up-to-date with European concert music, and
well-known to its audiences. Fame came to Tchaikovsky as much from Europe as in
Russia. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Tchaikovsky’s music career was a mix of successes and failures. He
produced his first opus at age 26-- no child prodigy-- and had his first big
success at 36. He wrote 11 operas, starting early and continuing late; only 2
of them successful, starting with <i>Eugene
Onegin</i> (from Pushkin’s famous poem) at age 38. As his reputation grew, he
got commissions for the Czar’s ceremonies, including the instantly popular <i>1812 Overture</i> (age 40). His biggest
success was in ballet, which Tchaikovsky elevated to a field for major musical
compositions by writing longer, thematically-connected scores with modern
orchestration. <i>Swan Lake</i> came first, in
1876 (although early performances were not well received because of poor
settings and choreography); <i>Sleeping Beauty</i> (1889) and <i>The Nutcracker</i> (1892) near the end of
his life. By that time, Russian ballet dancers were becoming the hot thing in
Europe, and Diaghilev (Tchaikovsky’s young admirer) would soon launch Russian
ballet and Russian music in Paris on their pizzaz. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Tchaikovsky was an all-round professional, writing every kind of
music. He was a hard worker, revizing pieces sometimes over a period of 20
years. Much was large-scale: six symphonies (the successful ones were the last
three, after his career take-off around age 37); three piano concertos,
similarly spaced across the decades. Like many composers, he started by
transcribing famous works (from piano into orchestration or vice versa); it was
his apprenticeship with dozens of composers, starting with Beethoven, Schumann,
and Liszt in his early 20s, and he was still at it with Mozart transcriptions
in his late 40s, perhaps to get himself in the mood for his greatest ballets.
If we want the main traits of his personality, it would be dedication,
incessant hard work, and ambition. He became a loner, traveling in the music
world, and withdrawing to compose in solitude. Like those who produce a large
amount of work, some of it was repetitive, hurriedly written, and un-memorable.
Perhaps he discovered, as he went along, that thorough working-over makes
inspirational sound exquisite. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Tchaikovsky’s music is famously sweet, but in person he was irascible.
His reviews and correspondence are full of caustic evaluations of other composers (harsh swipes at
Liszt, Wagner, and even Brahms) as well as ideological tussles with the Russian
nationalist composers. Tchaikovsky is almost exactly the same age as Mussorgsky,
and they criticized each other’s work. Tchaikovsky wrote: “Mussorgsky’s music I
whole-heartedly send to the Devil; it is the cheapest, the vilest of parodies
of music!” Mussorgsky’s break-out came just before Tchaikovsky’s, although the
latter would quickly take the lead with his larger and more successful output. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In fact, Tchaikovsky was very well sponsored in the Russian music
establishment, just then coming into being. He was in the first cohort of
students when a Music Conservatory was established in St. Petersburg (1862-5),
and he was one of the first teachers when the Moscow Conservatory was created
(Tchaikovsky taught there 12 years, until age 38). His caustic comments express
his professional ambition, measuring himself against the European greats, and
sucessfully struggling with the Russian nationalist movement to blend European
techniques of instrumentation and complex chordal harmonies with Russian
literature and folklore. Despite the image of Tchaikovsky as a precious wimp,
he was a fighter for his creative trajectory, unintimidated by rivals. There is
a seeming contradiction between his sharp tongue and the sweetness and sheer
pleasure of his music; but he is far from the only creative talent (or stage
performer) whose frontstage performance has a different tone than their
backstage professional life.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Tchaikovsky went through a period of stage-fright, when he avoided
conducting. But after an last-minute fill-in for a colleague at the Bolshoi in
Moscow, Tchaikovsky found he could conduct successfully, and at age 47 began a
series of conducting tours in Europe, England, and the U.S. that continued
until he died. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Now for the “tragic” ending. Did his life end in a culmination of
traumas? He premiered his alleged open-heart emotional surgery, <i>Symphony Pathétique,</i> in October 1893;
got a mixed reaction from the audience; drank tainted water and died in a
cholera epidemic 9 days later. Suicide was rumored. What was the trauma? On the
negative side, a few years earlier a rich widow who had long supported him with
a monthly allowance went bankrupt, cutting off the stipend. Nevertheless,
Tchaikovsky was an international concert star, composing at the top of his
game. His most successful ballets, <i>Sleeping
Beauty</i> and <i>The Nutcracker</i> were
produced in 1889 and 1892; his most successful opera, <i>Queen of Spades</i> (another Pushkin adaptation) in 1890. His greatest
symphony (no. 6, <i>Pathétique</i>) was
begun in February 1893 and premiered 8 months later. Any retrospective
melodrama making him into a Russian Oscar Wilde (whose downfall would come in
1895) is biographical fiction. Tchaikovsky was 53 when he died, only 3 years
younger than Beethoven; for that historic period, it was not an early death. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Do times of anguish produce the most poignantly emotional music?
Not in Tchaikovsky’s case. Take a look at some characteristic passages, first <i>“The Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy” </i>from
<i>The Nutcracker,</i> bars 1-12; then <i>Symphony Pathétique</i> bars 1-16.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Dance of the Sugar-Plum
Fairy</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> begins with a
plunking drone-- E in double octaves in the bass clef, alternating with a
series of chromatic chords above. It is a bouncy tune: mostly
tonic/subdominant, with lush-sounding minor 6th and diminished chords.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">(Bars 1-4): E minor - A minor 6th - E diminished - A diminished - E minor - A minor
diminished - E minor - A minor 6.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzhFDSA4y3BEB-87ZF06ONDF8o4m8W0by7ptCs-qHjMehyua7_AfybvjCSFWvLZTG1-31roUMsFrnL9S46QodaHhUQ4pEu2zaf0GofoOa7Z-nYcEKatqfTrlBEsOFEXNkVTRWbZxN7cro/s1600/Tchai-SugarPlum%252C1-6.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="914" data-original-width="1600" height="363" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgzhFDSA4y3BEB-87ZF06ONDF8o4m8W0by7ptCs-qHjMehyua7_AfybvjCSFWvLZTG1-31roUMsFrnL9S46QodaHhUQ4pEu2zaf0GofoOa7Z-nYcEKatqfTrlBEsOFEXNkVTRWbZxN7cro/s640/Tchai-SugarPlum%252C1-6.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Similarly when the tune starts on E minor in the high treble
octave (bars 5-8, repeated in bars 9-12). The chords become increasingly
complicated: E 7th with a flatted 9th in bar 6; D sharp diminished chord over a
dissonant bass E (bar 7), the dissonance less painful because separated by 2
octaves; similarly with widely spaced dissonances in bars 10 and 12. The effect is a slightly weird sound,
but light, a melodic pattern for little fairy feet. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS44jI5g49jsF7eDyY2G-dVbveELemmAUDh_u2mW6lq_bvEE1_N-fHBOiQ5tochYEdEUZnwH8t5QGZSjJL5c6AWVuy66TzDiu5qhlaY9_68MhhVoeNeZfU8ryMhYxKPBpIKQZ2_zdI5K4/s1600/Tchai-SugarPlum%252C7-12.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="892" data-original-width="1600" height="355" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjS44jI5g49jsF7eDyY2G-dVbveELemmAUDh_u2mW6lq_bvEE1_N-fHBOiQ5tochYEdEUZnwH8t5QGZSjJL5c6AWVuy66TzDiu5qhlaY9_68MhhVoeNeZfU8ryMhYxKPBpIKQZ2_zdI5K4/s640/Tchai-SugarPlum%252C7-12.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Symphony Pathétique</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> has a more continously flowing melody,
but similar kinds of chords. It it titled in B Minor but it starts in the
related major key. The tone center is mostly in D, varied chromatically with D
diminished, D 7th with flatted 9th; the subdominant G is often given as lush G
6th but also dissonant G 6-4 and G augmented 5+ (low B over high B sharp); such
chords are found in bars 5-8 and increasingly in bars 13-16. The result is a
pleasant high-soaring melody with picquant chords underneath, quickly resolving
and ephemerally clashing again. The same technique used to depict the
children’s Christmas fairy is put to use for a more yearning tone. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisSFLqNKmvEPTomTeMkgEUDYhxgmycPLt8KLk51un6GQJZIPqjN3KGV15reIPv3SWMRtdOJpLRZ8nggHBsgvUWvMaZJ1zxOAnJqu72zp4_5wT35qCtyW7Ti_sxDYdLwxxHuYYOn9n8nFE/s1600/Tchai-SymPathetique%252C1-8.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="866" data-original-width="1600" height="345" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEisSFLqNKmvEPTomTeMkgEUDYhxgmycPLt8KLk51un6GQJZIPqjN3KGV15reIPv3SWMRtdOJpLRZ8nggHBsgvUWvMaZJ1zxOAnJqu72zp4_5wT35qCtyW7Ti_sxDYdLwxxHuYYOn9n8nFE/s640/Tchai-SymPathetique%252C1-8.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5jOhMPCAoogdGSUZGD6271e0EccDOvWLsNdh_p1BSIJBXK6cS1A7OeuxYqRp4vQt8Gi129PHDWE3Hr2P33Fau0-cSsBom_Ls9NxtDbt3lHvGZYieiaInvFvSBlCo5AilWU-e0n7b8u1w/s1600/Tchai-SymPathetique13-16.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="508" data-original-width="1600" height="201" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh5jOhMPCAoogdGSUZGD6271e0EccDOvWLsNdh_p1BSIJBXK6cS1A7OeuxYqRp4vQt8Gi129PHDWE3Hr2P33Fau0-cSsBom_Ls9NxtDbt3lHvGZYieiaInvFvSBlCo5AilWU-e0n7b8u1w/s640/Tchai-SymPathetique13-16.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Before he began this symphony, Tchaikovsky had abandoned another
symphony, fearing he had dried up; but after a few months break, he wrote the
first movement of his new symphony in 4 days. The last movement takes a
different tone, and the finale trails off into silence-- what alarmed his
audience and gave it the name <i>Pathétique</i>.
The pathos was not in Tchaikovsky’s life; if anything, it was a musical worry
about his music.</span></span><br />
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Beethoven</span></i></span></div>
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</span><br />
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Lining up Beethoven’s life problems with the sequence of his
music, we get: First, childhood stress. His father, a court musician in Bonn at
the Archbishop’s court (similar to Mozart’s father in Salzburg), touts Ludwig
as a child prodigy and takes him on tours for several years from age 7, none
too successfully. The father was apparently harsh and a drunkard. Ludwig quickly becomes expert at the
organ, harpsichord, piano, and viola and plays in the court orchestra by age 11. At any rate, young Beethoven has
Mozart as an ambitious model, and makes several trips to Vienna to meet him and
Haydn and take lessons. He grows up wild and uncouth: stocky, pock-marked,
hairy in an era of curled wigs, untidy. Viennese society puts up with him for
his music, but his romantic life suffers: he pursued a number of his female
pupils, but was repeatedly rejected and never married. (<i>Für Elise</i> was written for one of them.) Perhaps because his way of
life was too well-known: unable to keep servants, he changed lodgings 44 times
during his 35 years in Vienna. A workaholic, he would stay up for nights on end
while composing, leaving meals untouched outside his door. We can add sexual
frustration to his problems. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Moving permanently to Vienna at age 21 (1792), he quickly makes
his reputation and acquires aristocratic patrons playing in their palaces.
Within a year, he demolishes a local favourite in a piano duel, astounding him
with high-speed ranging across the keyboard and dazzling improvisations.
Beethoven comes along at just the time the piano is being made a bigger and
heavier instrument, allowing resonances in the low notes that become one of his
trademark sounds. Even before arriving in Vienna, at 18 Beethoven was
frequenting piano makers and eagerly encouraging their improvements. He and the
new technology of music production drive each other. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">From 1792 to 1802 (age 21-31) Beethoven produces some of his most
famous piano music (<i>Sonata Pathétique</i>
1798, <i>Moonlight Sonata</i> 1801), and his
first two symphonies (1800, 1802). His music is published since age 24; at 25
he makes a concert tour of German cities. It is also the time when Viennese
connoiseurs are promoting repertory concerts-- instead of the existing custom
of writing new music for each occasion, now music lovers revive the work of
Bach and Handel. For the first time, the concept arises that composers can be a
“genius” -- painters held that esteem since Michaelangelo -- and Beethoven was
the first to be tagged with that label. Composers of immortal music that will
join the “classics” are among us right now-- (poor Mozart, he came along a
little too soon). Concert halls developed rivaling the previously dominant
opera house. Beethoven’s reputation expands from aristocratic salons to a new,
middle-class audience who treats music with awed respect; gone are the days
when audiences gossiped and strolled during the performance. Perhaps
Beethoven’s reputation for wildness and eccentricity grew in tandem with the
new cult of the living genius: where older musicians like Haydn still wore wigs
and knee-breeches, Beethoven lets his hair grow long and wild (his early portraits
show it shorter). Beethoven resembles the rock star of the 1960s.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Nor should we overlook the political events of this period. The
French Revolution broke out in 1789 and turned violent by 1793-4, guillotining
aristocrats and dissidents. Austria and the German states were at war with
France repeatedly through 1800,
the French reaching the gates of Vienna in that year before a treaty was made.
Again in 1805 and 1809 the Austrian army was beaten by Napoleon. After
Napoleon’s retreat from Russia in 1812, the Austrians were in the coalition
that ended his rule in 1814 and again in 1815. Like many others, Beethoven was
an early enthusiast for the French Revolution, and some of the styles he
adopted-- wearing your own hair, dressing in trousers-- came from revolutionary
France. But he had the good sense to get along with his aristocratic Austrian
patrons. One could add that the cult of music in Vienna was a way to rise above
the (for them) disastrous political situation-- not too dissimilar to hunkering
down at home listening to music during the coronavirus epidemic. And Vienna became the undisputed center
of musical innovation, Paris and Italy knocked out temporarily by political
upheavals and war. At any rate, Beethoven’s radical sympathies played into his
pride as a living genius. A characteristic incident: in 1812 Beethoven and
Goethe were walking in a park when the Austrian Empress surrounded by Dukes
approached. Goethe was the idol of the literary world, but he took off his hat,
moved out of the way and bowed, while Beethoven kept walking straight ahead--
the royals greeting him cordially and dividing to let him through. Afterwards,
he told Goethe: They should make way for us, not us for them. [Goulding 132]
The new era of celebrities was at hand; and Beethoven knew it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The big catastrophe was his deafness. By 1798 he was having
trouble hearing, and in 1801 he was very alarmed. In 1802 he was totally deaf
and doctors told him there was no chance of recovery. Beethoven wrote that he
expected to die soon. Nevertheless, he was soon back at work. From now on,
people had to communicate with him by written notes, to which he would reply
vocally. How could he compose music if he couldn’t hear it? One can hear inner
sounds, in the same way that everyone can have a silent conversation with
oneself; you can sing a favorite tune to yourself inside your throat and head.
In addition, professional musicians learn to read music-- not just the way a
piano player can read the score while playing it, but without any instrument at
all: if you look at a piece of sheet music and are familiar with the notation,
you can in effect “play the music in your head.” *</span></span><br />
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{page:Section1;} </style><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">* Germans call this "<i>Augenmusik</i>" ["eye-music"]. Some music is said to be
better on the page than hearing it (e.g. Schoenberg); sometimes vice versa.</span></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">A couple of incidents illustrate the point. A pupil (Ferdinand
Ries) recalled a summer day in 1804 when they were walking in the countryside.
Beethoven was “all the time humming and sometimes howling, always up and down,
without singing any definite notes.” When they returned, he went immediately to
the piano and spent an hour working out the fingering, for what would be his
“Appassionata” sonata. On the
whole, Beethoven did not compose at the piano, but always at his writing desk;
thus after he stopped performing in public (in 1814-- after playing while deaf
for many years) he could still write music. His manuscripts also show a lot of
crossing-out and corrections: he could see and mentally hear what he wanted and
didn’t want. Beethoven was not
alone in this; most composers were capable of it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In 1823, Beethoven met Carl Maria von Weber, who had recently had
a resounding success with his opera, <i>Der
Freischütz.</i> Beethoven greeted him effusively, shaking his hand repeatedly,
“So you’re the very devil of a fellow I’ve been hearing about..” Hearing about? He certainly kept up on
the music news, and if he hadn’t seen Weber’s score he knew what innovations
were making such a furor (considered to be the breakthrough to what became
called “Romanticism”). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">To recap: Since 1798 Beethoven was going deaf, and he was totally
deaf by his traumatic moment in 1802.
What happened to his music during this time? Bear in mind that during
the period of growing deafness he composed some of his most famous sonatas
(including the fluidly beautiful “Moonlight sonata”). From 1802-1812 is
considered his greatest creativity, including the 3rd symphony (“Eroica”) in
1803 -- notable for doubling the length of previous symphonies in the Haydn/
Mozart era (and his own 1st and 2nd symphonies), as well as for its deep,
pounding beat and resonant sounds. All of his great symphonies (except the 9th)
were composed in these years. Did
his deafness drive him to noise, thunderous strokes, and a new kind of
emotion-laden music? But other things were at work; in the new concert halls
and with the income of big audiences, the size of the orchestra could be bigger;
Beethoven set in motion a trend that would be successively expanded by Berlioz,
Wagner, and Richard Strauss. Beethoven evolved a symphonic style that took
advantage of the big sound-- the counterpart, actually, to the deep resonances
he was already exploiting with the new pianos. At the same time, he retained
his light and graceful touch when he wanted it; the premiere of his 5th
symphony, with its da-da-da-DUM! hammer-of-doom motif, was the same night in
December 1808 as the premiere of his 6th, Pastoral Symphony, the happiest and
most lilting of any composer’s. Did he personally feel happy while doing this?
It is irrelevant; he knew how to do it. His 7th and 8th symphonies, short,
light and exuberant, came in 1811. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The distinction between Beethoven’s music of the 1790s and the
early 1800s can be overdone. To a considerable extent, he transferred his piano
technique to orchestra composition, as we can see by comparing motifs from the
5th symphony [bars 1-24] with the <i>Sonata
Pathétique</i>. [bars 1-6]</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The 5th Symphony starts with a loud but ambiguous chord-- is it E
flat or C minor? (bars 1-2) Next, is it D minor or G 7th? At bar 7, we are in C
minor and the previous chord was G 7th-- wait a minute, briefly it’s A flat,
but (bars 8-10) definitely C minor. This is confirmed after a brief ambiguity
at bar 11: the A flat is really the top note of a G 7-flatted-9th chord,
becoming the dominant G 7th leading back to C minor at bar 15.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Then we alternate C minor and G 7th down to bar 18; modulating
conventionally from D 7th to G, held for emphasis at bar 21. Then it’s off
again, the hammer-of-doom transposed to A flat - F minor, and on through the
same sequence of chords.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Sonata Pathétique</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> is likewise in the key
of C minor and modulates through a similar chord sequence. Both have the same
syncopated stop-and-start rhythm-- although faster in the Sonata; both use a
lot of parallel octaves, giving a heavy resonance. Both like to anchor their
7th chords in inverted position (the 3rd or 7th note at the bottom instead of
the usual walking bass on the chord’s fundamental 1st note). The Sonata
modulates farther and faster; both like to modulate through ambiguous-sounding
diminished chords (in the 5th Symphony, these come later than the excerpt
above). Both start loud, go suddenly soft-- with dramatic cresendos and
diminuendos. Composers get a lot
of mileage (AKA sustained creativity) by recycling the techniques that worked
well in the past into a new medium. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Biographers describe the period from 1813 onwards as Beethoven’s
most personally troubled, with health, business and family problems. He spent
years in litigation with relatives over custody of his dying brother’s son,
Karl. Beethoven finally was awarded the boy in 1818 (perhaps feeling
himself in his 40s ready to take
on the role if not of husband at least head of family). More trouble followed;
Karl was rebellious (surprise!) failed his university exams, and attempted
suicide. A dispute with a brother while staying at his home in the country led
to Beethoven leaving in a huff in winter weather, catching a chill, and dying
at age 56. He bequeathed
everything to Karl.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">What effect did these down times have on his creativity? For the
most part, they inhibited it; he didn’t write more fiery emotional pieces, he
just didn’t get much done. In the late 1810s, he was commissioned by a favorite
patron to write a choral mass for his installation as Archbishop. Beethoven
didn’t get it done on time, but he decided to combine the choral music with a
grand symphony -- more instruments than ever, complete with pounding kettle
drums, a reversion to the style of the 5th when he was at the peak of his
popularity. This was the 9th, which audiences in 1823 immediately took as
Beethoven’s last testament. Still, he was getting commissions to write string
quartets, a form he had not worked in since 1810. In practical terms, this was easy, only a few parts to
write, and Beethoven was himself a skilled viola player. In his deafness, did
he try out sounds that it would take a century to recognize, the forebears of
modern abstract music? His last quartet, finished during his terminal illness,
is sometimes interpreted as a last cry of anguish and transcendence. It is hard
to disentangle this from the experimenting in unknown territory Beethoven did
in his waning years.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Traumas that don’t show
up in music -- Handel, Schubert</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">At first glance, Handel seems to exemplify the trouble-free life.
He produced grand and glorious music from youth to old age. Trained in north
German church-style organ playing, in his early 20s he was invited to Italy
where he charmed patrons with his keyboard virtuosity; out-dueling Domenico
Scarlatti; meeting and collaborating with top composers such as Corelli and
Vivaldi. Handel was hosted everywhere by Princes and Cardinals, and when he
returned to Germany he had an abundance of offers. He took a position with the
Elector of Hannover (soon to become King George I of England); while in the
meantime accepted offers from London, where his reputation had preceded
him. The story that his <i>Water Music</i> (for a 1717 summer party on
the Thames) was composed to get back into the King’s good graces, turns out to
be false; he was never in disfavor and the King had the entire hour-long
concert replayed three times before the night was over. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">What could go wrong? In London, Handel resided with aristocratic patrons and wrote Italian
operas for the lively commercial music scene. Handel became a music
entrepreneur, joining with his elite connections and other impresarios from the
Continent in a series of opera companies. As music director, he hired theatres,
players, singers and composers; he traveled around the courts of Europe luring
away the best singers to London, where the pay was better. But England was
awash in financial speculation, and in 1728 his company collapsed, its backers
destroyed in the aftermath of the South Sea Bubble. Handel organized a new
company for Italian opera, but now there was competition from another,
producing operas in English. Both suffered financially from the competition,
and both companies failed, deeply in debt, in 1737. Handel had a physical breakdown and was paralyzed by a
stroke.[<i>Harvard; Chambers</i>]
Nevertheless, he resumed his intense round of composing, revising and playing. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Did his music change with this life-threatening event? There is no
discernable break. A few years earlier, Handel had already started a new line
of work: producing oratorios based on biblical themes, cheaper than opera since
it needed no stage sets, costumes, actors and supernumeraries. Since he already
had an orchestra on hand, Handel decided to keep them playing during the
intermissions, while he entertained the crowd with his famously popular organ
playing. These organ concertos, produced from 1735 to 1751, were to become
perennial favourites, outlasting his operas as their traditional formality came
to sound stilted. (The best of Handel’s opera music is probably not lost, since
he recycled earlier passages into his organ concertos.) The oratorio business
continued up-and-down, some hits, some financial failures on until the time
Handel went blind (at age 66), strained from incessant work by candle-light. Nevetheless, the tone does not change.
In 1742 (age 57) came his greatest hit, <i>The
Messiah</i> (which includes music from love duets in his operas). [<i>Cambridge</i>] Handel continued to conduct
it through his years of blindness, dying the day after his last performance in
1759, at age 74. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In good times and bad, Handel produced the kind of music his
audiences wanted: glorious, up-beat, magnificent. They resemble Handel’s own
portrait, painted in 1727 at the height of prosperity: beautifully dressed, a
long flowing wig, stout and happy at his keyboard. Beethoven, another expert at
big, impressive sounds, said Handel was the greatest composer who ever lived.
They had very different emotional lives, but their kinship was in their music.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Schubert</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Schubert is a another story, much further down the social class
ladder. His father ran a small elementary school. But young Franz (born
1797) happens to live in Vienna at
the height of Beethoven’s fame. He
spends five years in a boarding school for choir singers-- age 11-16. The
school has its own orchestra, the students performing every night the works of
Beethoven, Haydn, and Mozart. Schubert plays violin in the orchestra, conducts,
and starts composing: his first symphonies are performed by his classmates. It
is a professional apprenticeship of the most intimate kind: learning the
masters’ music from every angle, and internalizing their techniques. But
Schubert is no dazzling piano player and cannot follow that path to success. He
teaches at his father’s school (age 16-19-- adult life started much younger in
that era). Finally he quits and launches out on a life of Bohemian poverty,
sponging off his circle of friends, artists and opera singers. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Schubert has been composing hundreds of songs, some of which
become very popular. His friends organize coffee house evening “Schubertiades”
devoted to his performances. Schubert invents the “art song,” composed in the
fashion of serious music, to be sung with piano accompanyment. It becomes a
very popular German specialty for middle-class home entertainment. Schubert’s
ambition is higher, and he produces in many genres, including several
unsuccessful attempts at opera. During this period (in 1822) he starts and
abandons two movements of a new symphony (later called “the Unfinished”) where
he attempts a new style. In 1824, full of enthusiasm over Beethoven’s newly
performed 9th, Schubert writes his own “Great” symphony, i.e. in Beethoven’s
grand style. But other than his songs, he is ignored, and after much ill health
he dies in 1828 of typhus, age 31. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Schubert had a tough life, but you wouldn’t know it from his
music. His songs are pretty, and as sentimental as the famous poems they are
based on; there is no personal complaint in them. He rides out his troubles;
his musical evenings keep him energized.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The popularity of his songs leads to retrieving his posthumous
works. His “Great” Symphony is discovered by Schumann (zealous advocate of new
music) and performed in 1839-- star treatment, conducted by Mendelssohn. Still
later, in 1865 -- the era of Wagner’s <i>Tristan
und Isolde</i>-- the Viennese court conductor finds out an old friend of
Schubert has an unfinished symphony. The famous critic Hanslick described its
premiere: “When after a few introductory bars clarinet and oboe begin their
sweet song in unison above the quiet murmuring of violins... the
half-suppressed exclamation ‘Schubert!’ runs round the hall in a whisper.” The secret of rediscovery is being
famous in one genre, leading to searches for other work after you’ve become a
classic.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Serious breakdowns--
Schumann, Mussorgsky, Rachmaninoff</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Schumann had a lifetime of emotional problems, possibly congenital
mental illness. But his melancholy (now called depression) didn’t start until
age 15. Robert’s childhood was full of enthusiasms: he formed a home orchestra
at age 12; he loved literature
even more, reading at his father’s bookstore (which also sold music). He
particularly admired Byron, who set the fashion of the disillusioned wanderer
and lover for the generation after 1815. After a year studying law at Leipzig
University, he turned to a career in music. From age 22 he boarded in the house
of a famous piano teacher, Wieck. Schumann was already showing signs of
depression. At age 16, his older
sister drowned herself in a lake, following illness and mental problems; then
his father died with a nervous disorder. At age 23, Schumann was sick, then
after learning his sister-in-law had died, tried to kill himself by jumping
from a fourth-floor window. Around this time he injured his left hand from a
finger-strengthening device-- young pianists were trying to stretch their hands
to match the keyboard feats of Liszt-- and had to give up his ambition to be a
great pianist, turning instead to composition and music journalism. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">At age 24, he had a new enthusiasm, launching a public-relations
campaign for new music, an explicit revolution against classical forms and
rules. Young composers had already decided that Beethoven had done everything
possible in his style, and other lines had to be opened up. Schumann called his
twice-weekly journal <i>Neue Zeitschift fur
Musik-- </i>New Music Newspaper-- and edited it for years, along with frequent
contributions to other newspapers. Leipzig was a good location, being a center
of the publishing industry as well as Germany’s largest and traditionally most
prestigious university. Schumann became the first modern music intellectual. He
publicized his new favorites-- Schubert, Mendelssohn, Chopin, Berlioz-- while lambasting some, especially Wagner
and Liszt. *</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">* Which is to say, his most immediate rivals. Though 3 years
younger than Schumann, Wagner at age 19 was already having overtures performed
in Leipzig by Schumann’s music teacher. Later when both were living in Dresden
in the 1840s, Wagner again overshadowed him as Court Music Director, while
starting to produce his famous operas. Schumann also attempted operas, like
Wagner breaking with the Italian tradition of recitatives and arias. But
Schumann, trying to be different, went in the direction of choral dramas,
somewhat like Handel’s oratorios, again to be overshadowed by Wagner. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">All this time, his teacher and landlord Wieck was mainly concerned
with his daughter, Clara. A brilliant pianist and composer in her own right,
she gave her first public concert at age 11, and her father took her on
frequent tours during her teen years. Schumann, 9 years older, fell in love
with Clara, but her father separated them when she was 17 and Schumann 26. It
wouldn’t have been an unusual age or age difference for marriage, but Wieck
clearly thought Schumann was unsuitable for his brilliant daughter-- too
unstable, maybe just too crazy; perhaps he didn’t like his fanaticism about new
music. Nevertheless, they became secretly engaged; and after a lawsuit lasting
3 years, Schumann was able to marry her at age 21, without her father’s
consent. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Now age 30, Schumann had made a reputation publishing art songs in
the vein of Schubert; many of them short pieces for the home market; piano
books for children, uncomplicated but beautiful, as parents rushed to make their
child another Beethoven, another Liszt, another Mendelssohn. In effect,
Schumann was continuing his father’s business, as writer, bookseller, and music
publisher. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">After their marriage, Robert and Clara toured together; then Clara
toured alone, a much better performer than her husband. Perhaps in
compensation, she encouraged him to compose in a more ambitious form. At age
31, his First Symphony was successfully introduced by Mendelssohn, now
conducting at Leipzig. At 33 (1843), Schumann was appointed professor at the
newly founded Leipzig conservatory. At age 35, he produced his famous Piano
Concerto in A minor. It had taken 4 years to complete; Clara played its
premiere in the great hall of Leipzig on New Years Day 1846. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The years following marriage were some of his most creative. Clara
shelved her composing career in favor of his (this couldn’t have made her
entirely happy), and promoted Robert’s work at her concerts-- she would
continue doing so for years after his death. He composed in concentrated bursts
of work, then was exhausted from nights without sleep. Bouts of depression
increased over time. They moved to quieter German cities than Leipzig, the
center of musical action, and eventually fled from Wagner at Dresden. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Schumann took to occultism, seeking spiritual contacts in
table-turning seances. He had periods of ringing in his ears. At times he heard “alternately sublime
and hellish” music in his head-- the negative counterpart of the composing in
their heads Mozard and Beethoven were famous for. At age 44, fearing he was going insane, he attempted
suicide by throwing himself in the Rhine during a rainstorm, but was saved by
fishermen. He spent his last 2 years in an asylum, having voluntarily admitted
himself, and died there at 46.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In his music journal, Schumann wrote: “music is the state of the
composer’s soul.” It is a statement of Romantic spiritualism, and a claim that
one’s total personality drives the music. We could reverse the proposition:
music creates the soul-- what we experience as soul. Music creates moods, even
more than it expresses them. This is one of the things composers are good at,
if they and their audiences want emotional-sounding music. That was certainly
true of Schumann’s era, and his crusade for new music. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Do his personal crises drive the kind of music he wrote? His music
is not particularly melancholy or anguished; listening or playing it on the
piano doesn’t make you depressed. His life crises, mostly self-caused, were
chronic, but his musical creativity grows as he mastered one genre after
another. Reviewers were even starting to call him the successor to Beethoven.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mussorgsky</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mussorgsky is the most innovative of composers. He also is the
most poorly prepared in the techniques of writing music. He has long difficulties
in getting his works finished and performed. He becomes a heavy drinker and
eventually drinks himself to death at age 42.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Is this reflected in the sounds of his music? Or the other way
around-- the strange sounds of his music cause his career troubles, hence his
drinking and his death?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">How was he able to write music at all? He lives in St. Petersburg,
the administrative and cultural center of Russia, where he attends military
Cadet school, and has an off-and-on career as a minor official in various
government ministries. These institutions housed networks of other young and/or
amateur musicians in other training schools and government bureaucracies (for
instance, Rimsky-Korsakov, a navy officer who becomes an opera composer and
teacher of composition). At just this time (the 1860s-- when Mussorgsky is in
his early 20s) a movement is formed to create Russian music, against the
previous generation of Westernizers importing “modernity”. It is the musical
counterpart of the Slavophile movement in politics, when nationalism spread in
eastern Europe. The Russians are the equivalents of Grieg in Norway, Dvorak in Bohemia (Czech), and Sibelius in
Finland, but much more radical and innovative (the above being offshoots of
German music training). How do we explain this? Mussorgsky’s career is a key to
understanding the explosion of Russian music on the world scene. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">His music training consists of learning piano from his mother and
singing in the Cadet school choir. He starts to compose songs on his own, based
on Russian folk stories and children’s songs. After 2 years in his regiment, he
resigns his commission (1858, age 19), following a “nervous crisis.” Perhaps
this had something to do with meeting, the previous year, the core of what
would become the movement for Russian national music. One of them, Balakirev,
has some network connections to training in the West, and teaches Mussorgsky
rudiments of composition in the style of Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. It
would take 10 years before he and the others do enough work to get the nickname
the “mighty handful” (or Five
Fingers) for a concert they did together. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Meanwhile, Mussorgsky has reacted to the emancipation of the serfs
in 1862 (the equivalent of Lincoln freeing the slaves in 1863) by joining a
commune-- while still working in a St. Petersburg ministry. It is reminiscent
of American hippies in the mid-1960s, living in communes but also holding a day
job (weekend hippies). Like all communes, it is short-lived. Within 2 years,
Mussorgsky has his first serious alcohol problem; he leaves the commune to live
for a while on his brother’s country estate. His song-writing changes to a more
naturalistic-satirical vein, with a song called “You Drunken Sot!” (1866) </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mussorgsky starts many projects, most of them neither performed
nor published. He has made abortive attempts at writing operas since his late
teens. He spends 3 years writing one based on Flaubert’s novel <i>Salammbo,</i> an exotic Carthaginian
setting. He abandons this and begins <i>Boris
Godunov</i>, based on a historic Czar who gains his position by murder, then
falls through guilty remorse and peasant rebellion (good theme for a would-be
revolutionist). The opera is
rejected, among other reasons because it has no roles for a soprano. He
rewrites it, and it is finally produced
in 1874, after 6 years of work. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Meanwhile he has two other eventual successes. During 1860-67 (age
22-29), he completed an orchestra piece, <i>Night
on Bald Mountain</i>, a dramatic and terrifying evocation of a Russian <i>Walpurgisnacht</i> with demons flying
through the air until they are finally dispersed at dawn by the tones of church
bells. It was premiered posthumously in 1886 by Rimsky-Korsakov, after revising
the orchestration. In 1874, following the death of a painter friend, Mussorgsky
writes a piano piece, <i>Pictures at an
Exhibition</i>, where the viewer acoustically walks from one picture to
another, scenes of Russian folklore or magnificant views like “The Great Gate
of Kiev.” It became famous after Ravel orchestrated it in 1923. The sounds are so powerful that this
last part was chosen for a debut demonstration album in the mid-1950s, when an
American record company introduced “high fidelity”. There would be nothing like it until Richard Strauss wrote <i>Thus Spake Zarathustra</i>, later used as
the grand opening for the 1968 epic film, <i>2001.
</i> At the time, however, almost
everyone rejected it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mussorgsky spends 8 years writing a follow-up opera, <i>Khovanshchina</i>, another historic
Russian-peasant spectacular, but his heavy drinking makes him increasingly
unable to work, and he leaves it unfinished. He dies in 1881 of alcoholic
epilepsy in a military hospital. <i>Khovanshchina
</i> is completed by others. The
bare-bones orchestration of <i>Boris Godunov
</i> is re-orchestrated by the far
more professional Rimsky-Korsakov, and through this revival enters the world
repertoire during the Russian music invasion of Paris, 30 years after
Mussorgsky’s death. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Why the self-destructive drinking? Career frustration, certainly;
though he is admired and supported in his immediate circle. He is a fervent,
even revolutionary nationalist-- which in this case means an
anti-internationalist, trying to break free musically from the West (like the
back-to-the-soil movement of Narodniks who would lead to terrorist
assassinations and eventual displacement by the internationalist
Bolsheviks). At the same time, he
works for the government and depends on musical colleagues more skilled in
Western techniques and better connected to the West. And he is a weekend
composer, slowed by his day job. The contradictions crush him personally; but
they do not crush his music. The combination, in fact, is what made Russian
music such a powerful force in world history.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Rachmaninoff</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">By the 1890s, Russian orchestration had become world-leading,
through the Conservatories at St. Petersburg and Moscow under Rimsky-Korsakov
and Tchaikovsky. Rachmaninoff
connected with both of them. By age 19 (1892) he had published the perennially
favorite Prelude in C-sharp minor (AKA “The Bells of Moscow”). But in 1897 (age
24), the premiere of his First Symphony was a disaster. The conductor was
unprepared, the orchestra was not well-rehearsed and played badly. Both
audience and critics thought it was awful. Rachmaninoff is described as
hunkering down in a stairwell with his fists clenched against his head (already
a noted player of piano concertos, he was not on stage). He was so upset that
he destroyed the score, and it was never played again. Rachmaninoff lost all
self-confidence. For three years he composed nothing, until his family arranged
for him to be treated by a psychiatrist through hypnosis. By 1900, he was back
in form, composing his Second Piano Concerto, to great success in Moscow, and
everywhere. He went on to a career of fame as composer and flamboyant pianist,
touring world-wide and settling in the U.S. after the 1917 Russian Revolution.
He had huge hands and could play rippling chords all up and down the keyboard
of a concert grand. He became a great conductor as well. All that was left of
his 3-year trauma, perhaps, was his demeanour: Stravinsky called him “a
six-and-a-half-foot-scowl.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Is there trauma in his music? Compare his work of the early 1890s
with his work from 1901 onwards: it is all of a piece. The dramatic melancholy
was a style, perhap a bigger and more pianistic version of Tchaikovsky. They
are two of the most popularly
loved of all composers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Professionals who ride
it out-- Bach, Haydn, Brahms, Debussy</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Johann Sebastian Bach is as about as professional as you can get.
He is surrounded by a family of musicians. There are several dozen Bachs who
are organists, town and court musicians all over north Germany, going back to
the 1550s. He is born in Eisenach, near the medieval castle where Martin
Luther, hiding out from his enemies, wrote <i>A
Mighty Fortress is our God.</i> When his father dies at age ten, he is brought
up by an older brother, an organist who teaches him the profession. By 15 he is
making a living as a choir singer, then as violinist in a Duke’s orchestra,
then town organist when his brother leaves to become a musician in the
Emperor’s army. He goes on to have 11 surviving children (9 others died in
infancy). When his first wife died, a Bach cousin who sang in the same choir,
he married a woman (another singer, and daughter of a court trumpeter) 20 years
younger than himself and writes a <i>Notebook
for Anna Magdalena Bach</i> to teach her the harpsichord; it becomes a favorite
for teaching children down through the present. Four of his sons become notable
musicians; one of them (Wilhelm Friedemann) like his father was considered the
greatest organ player of his time; another (Johann Christian) goes to London,
collaborates in the opera-producing circle of Handel, and teaches young Mozart
on a visit; another (Carl Philipp Emanuel), plays in the house orchestra of
Frederick the Great, and goes beyond his father to make the transition from
Baroque counterpoint to the homophonic (tonic/dominant) style that would become
standard in the age of Haydn. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">J.S.Bach in his own lifetime never reaches his son’s fame. He has
plenty of troubles. Deaths of wife and children; but it was a time of high
infant mortality, an atmosphere that fed the always-present tones of church
services for the living and the dead. There were a lot of jobs to be had in a
region where music gave prestige and the church organ was the grandest venue in
town, and there were numerous courts of the small states in still-feudal
Germany. Job-switching got Bach in trouble repeatedly; trying to break with a
Duke to go work for a Prince got him thrown in jail for a month before he was
able to leave. He was often at odds with authorities, such as the town fathers
in Leipzig, where he finally settled down for his last 27 years. His job
entailed writing new church music every week, plus special occasions. He
wrangled with town authorities over his pay and what he was composing; but he
knew how to play politics, got himself the additional title of court composer
to the Duke of Saxony, and stuck to his course. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">His troubles leave no discernable trace in his music. Not that it
is always the same; but it varies by what kind of employer he has. When he was
church organist, he composed hymns, cantatas, organ preludes and fugues; in the
strict Calvinist style where that was prescribed; in more florid anthems where
that was appreciated. For a 7-year stint with a secular-minded Prince and his
own orchestra, Bach composed dignified, up-beat overtures and concertos,
including the famous Brandenburg Concertos. At Leipzig he was in charge of
church music as well as everything else. One cannot say there is no emotion in
his music; some of his church hymns are extremely touching in a quiet way: the
soothing effect church music is supposed to have. Bach also gets grand and
awe-inspiring sounds out of the big organ with its harsh rumbling bass tubes
below the flute-like figurations floating above from the smaller tubes. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">He never runs out of things to do. His job demanded a continuous
stream of new music-- the concept of a repertoire was still 75 years in the
future. He has a professional interest in how to get everything you can out of
the forms that are available. Ironically, during this same time, the French
composer and music theorist Rameau writes that the possibilities of variations
from the 12-note musical scale are not infinite, and would soon be exhausted.
Bach proves him wrong-- of course, so would the next two centuries of
composers.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Bach creates by systematic exploration. In 1722 he wrote <i>The Well-tempered Clavier</i>, containing
preludes and fugues in every major and minor key; it would be a model for
Mozart and Chopin. At the end of his life (he died in 1750 at age 65), he was
engaged in <i>The Art of the Fugue</i>, a
massive working through the possible architecture of musical sound
combinations. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Bach is the epitome of the Baroque. More crucially, he works at
the time when polyphonic church music reaches its highest complexity, in the
mingling of separate voices whose combinations make unexpected effects on the
ear, and for which the huge church organ is the perfect instrument. But also it
is the time when, elsewhere in the music world of Europe, the homophonic,
melody-with-chords style-- tonic key center and dominant chord transitions--is
taking over as the standard; it spreads with the popularity of opera arias with
harpsichord accompanyment, and Haydn would make it the standard for the newly
created symphony orchestra. Bach is expert at both organ and harpsichord; he
has diverse experience with the audiences for church and court music. Thus his
musical technique is rich with both the Baroque and the coming “Classical”
tonic/dominant form; the combination makes his work so appealing. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">It is also why Bach never expresses personal emotions in music;
listening to the combinations he generates, one can read all sorts of things
into it (though his contemporaries would never have thought of music in that
way). Music is a world of its own that Bach shows how to explore.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Three of the most popular pieces of music of all time were
composed within 8 years of each other: Handel’s <i>Water Music</i> (1717);
Bach’s <i>Brandenburg Concertos</i>
(1722); Vivaldi’s <i>The Four Seasons</i>
(1725). There is a reason for
their coincidence. There are all at the cusp, when Baroque is showing signs of
the inner transformation into the tonic/dominant style that would become so
natural to our ears up through the present. Baroque is pure music, and it makes
us happy, whatever else is going on in our lives. It is the music of
professionals.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Haydn</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Haydn’s problems are small ones. Most of his life, he is a servant.
He wears the livery of his master, Prince Esterhazy, amidst a small army of
uniformed domestics in a palace. But it is a grand palace with its own
orchestra, and Haydn is given free rein to compose what he wants. His life
trajectory is continuously upwards. He comes from a modest background, and
learned music by singing in a Vienna cathedral choir school. When his voice
broke (it was the era of boy-sopranos) he played in street orchestras, until
becoming valet and accompanist to an Italian opera singing teacher and
composer. Learning by informal apprenticeship, his master’s connections led him
to the Esterhazy palace outside Vienna. There he spent 30 years (1760-90),
rising to become not only music director but eventually a famous composer--
rivalry between Viennese aristocrats over who has the greatest house orchestra
was taking off. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Haydn progressed slowly. He himself said that, since the Prince
approved of everything he did, he could experiment with the orchestra, adding
and cutting, seeing what effects it could achieve with his captive
audience. He composed 104
symphonies, most of them short, along with string quartets (one of them would
provide the tune for the German national anthem), oratorios, hymns, and much
more. Haydn invented the symphony as we know it: four movements, varying slow
and fast in different keys, one of them (usually the third movement) a dance
rhythm (scherzo or minuet in 3/4 time); leading up to a brisk finale and
signing off with the emphatic chord sequence that every concert-goer is so
familiar with: tonic-dominant-tonic (repeat as long as you think the audience
will take), or going up and down the tonic chord by 3rds until ending on the
tonic note. Baroque polyphony was definitively replaced by the melody-and-chord
system that would hold on down through Brahms. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Finally, at age 58, his Prince dies, and Haydn is free to take a
commercial offer from London to produce a series of symphonies. These are Numbers 93-104, his longest and best;
and they are received with great acclaim. He had been corresponding back and
forth with Mozart, and both learned from each other.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">All up-and-up? His main problem was domestic. He married at age
28; his wife turned out to be sharp-tempered. He complained that she invited
too many clergy to dinner, had too many Masses said (since on-demand Masses had
to be paid for), and gave more money to charity than he could afford on his
salary. [Goulding 161] It sounds like they quarreled about money; he himself
was religious but apparently thought she was showing off, making a bigger
splash than he felt was appropriate to his position. Nevertheless, his music
was famously cheerful. It is what his audiences wanted, and what he wanted to
give them. In his public life, he was content. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Brahms</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">I used to think, if I could choose to be anyone, I would be
Brahms. His music was so wonderful, it must have been a wonderful life creating
it. Well, maybe so, if you ignore the rest of his life. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The first shock is his personality, depicted in his years of
success in Vienna. He is rude, dresses sloppily, he is abrupt and insulting. He
is sardonic. He is remembered as saying, taking his leave from an evening gathering, “If there is anyone here I
haven’t insulted, my apologies.” [Goulding 172] <i>Habe ich jehmand hier nicht beleidigen.., entschuldigen Sie bitte.</i>
How did this come about?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">His father had a light orchestra in Hamburg, just scraping by, but
he was able to provide piano lessons for young Johannes and give him experience
making musical arrangements. By age 10, he was playing piano in tough
waterfront bars in the red-light district. At age 20, he met a wandering
Hungarian violinist and went on the road with him. This led to meeting a more
famous violinist, who gave him letters of introduction to Liszt and Schumann.
Brahms, who one gathers was something of a roughneck, was unimpressed with
Liszt or at least his adoring entourage; although Liszt was very friendly,
Brahms was ill at ease (rumour has it he fell asleep while the maestro was
playing), and got no further with that connection. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">He did better with Robert and Clara Schumann, who by this time
were in the anti-Liszt camp. They loved Brahms’ lyrical piano playing and his
new songs, and hosted him for several months. Schumann wrote an article called
“New Paths” extolling Brahms as the one who would lead music into the promised
land. This was true, in a way, except that the movement for New Music had
split: Schumann vs. Liszt would foreshadow Wagner vs. Brahms. Unfortunately,
the year is 1854; Schumann soon attempts suicide and goes into an asylum for
the rest of his life. This connection, too, had no practical results; but
Brahms fell in love with Clara, helped tend to her husband, kept in touch with
her ever after, and never married. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The next 15 years are an ordeal. He gets a minor appointment
conducting a town choral society and a few local Court concerts. He is passed
over for the post of conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic. He struggles to get
his compositions performed. The premiere of his First Piano Concerto arouses no
enthusiasm, and its second performance in Leipzig ends with faint applause
drowned out by hissing. This was probably musical politics, since he signs a
manifesto against “the new German School” of Liszt and Wagner, and Leipzig is
one of their strongholds. Finally, in 1872, when Brahms is 39 years old, he is
appointed conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic. This was politics too, since
Brahms is now adopted as the standard-bearer of the anti-Wagner faction;
audiences become enthusiasts divided between the two, sometimes rabidly. His
four magnificent symphonies followed, along with his widely popular piano
concertos and violin concertos, all written between the age of 43 and 54. He
did large-scale choral music, his own <i>German
Requiem</i> (which first made him famous in 1868, age 35), and revivals of
Bach’s <i>St. Mathew Passion</i> and
Beethoven’s <i>Missa Solemnis.</i> When his First Symphony appeared, it so
clearly continued the grand classic style that it was nicknamed “Beethoven’s
Tenth.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">There was a real difference behind the faction fight.
Rimsky-Korsakov, who taught orchestration to the innovative Russian composers,
said this in his 1891 textbook: “A work is thought out in terms of the
orchestra, certain tone-colours [of the instruments] being inseparable from it
in the mind of its creator... Could the essence of Wagner’s music be divorced
from its orchestration? ...Was Brahms ignorant of orchestration? And yet,
nowhere in his works do we find evidence of brilliant tone or picturesque
fancy. The truth is that his thoughts did not turn towards colour; his mind did
not exact it.” [p.2] Wagner triumphed by making instruments like horns carry
the melody as never before; Brahms’ instrumentation is the same as
Beethoven’s. He had internalized
Beethoven’s music by playing it throughout his youth.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Brahms’ music is so smooth and flowing that it seems inspired. But
in fact Brahms did not work by inspiration; he toiled over his compositions,
sometimes many years, polishing them, ruthlessly pruning what he thought was
imperfect. He dies at 64, not long after his beloved Clara Schumann. In his
later years he would sign his letters, “<i>Frei
aber einsam</i>,” “Free but
lonely.” Nevertheless, his work is not melancholy. He is a tough guy and a professional, soldiering through.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Debussy</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Debussy is essentially a gentleman of leisure. As a child, he is
tutored at home in a comfortably well-off family. He never holds a salaried
position, nor makes music for money until he became well-known around age 40
when he conducted and performed his compositions across Europe. He enters the
elite Paris Conservatory at age 10 (1872) --not an unusual age at that time--
and spends 12 years there. He is critical of his teachers for their old
fashioned musical traditions, and receives poor marks in most classes.
Nevertheless, he wins the Prix de Rome and spends 2 years there, traveling also
to the Bayreuth Festival to hear Wagner operas. His network of friends are the
avant-garde literary world (Mallarmé, Pierre Louÿs) whose writings he sets to music,
along with Verlaine and Baudelaire. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">At age 32 (1894), his breakthrough orchestral piece <i>Prélude à l’après-midi d’une faune</i> is
performed; at 37 (1895), <i>Noctures: Nuages</i>
(Fog), <i>Fêtes </i>(Festivals)<i>, Sirènes</i> (Sirens); in 1905, <i>La mer </i>(The Sea);<i> </i> all dispensing with a
unitary tone center, like his innovative piano music, creating new techniques
for nuance and atmosphere. In 1902, after 10 years of leisurely preparation,
appears his only opera, <i>Pelléas et
Mélisande</i>. It is anti-Wagnerian, sound-painting instead of drama, message,
or ringing emotional pitch; thereby contrasting as well with the intense
melodramas of Puccini, another modernist in orchestration. Debussy could be a
sharp-tongued critic of rivals, a forceful stance which is exactly what we do
not find in his music. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Debussy’s life is pretty much without problems, let alone traumas.
There are his contests of will with his teachers, but he just blows them off
and goes his way. The only occasion he is at all emotionally stressed is
entirely social. Debussy had numerous love affairs, often adulterous. In 1899
he married a dress-maker (one can picture something out of <i>La Bohème</i>), then divorced her in 1904 for the wife of a wealthy
banker. His former wife attempted suicide, which lost Debussy some friends. He
blamed his friends for causing him pain: “I have never seen so many desertions
in my life.” [Goulding 335] Two
years later, his new wife was disinherited, and Debussy had to do some work for
a living by writing music criticism. None of these events constituted turning
points, or show up in his music. Whatever we think of him personally, he was
living in his art and that was all that really mattered. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">We can count Chopin among the professionals who ride it out, as I
have shown elsewhere. </span></span><a href="http://creativity-via-sociology.blogspot.com/2020/04/chopins-anti-network-creativity.html">CHOPIN'S ANTI-NETWORK CREATIVITY</a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Smooth sailing all the
way: Liszt, Mendelssohn, Stravinsky</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Liszt is the Elvis Presley of classical music. Then he becomes the
God-father, the facilitator, and the self-effacing saint. It is questionable
how great his music really is in the overall picture. But Liszt was quite
possibly the greatest and certainly the most influential pianist of all time.
And he was the network center of music, just when modern music was being
socially organized on a new basis. The end of wigs and aristocratic courts; the
era when musicians no longer depend on patrons or the church for a living;
instead becoming free-lancers in the world of ticket-selling concerts and
sheet-music sales. Also the era when musicians are trained in conservatories
rather than by apprenticeship, thereby creating teaching positions where
composers can shelter from the commercial world. This is the world we have
lived in ever since, even as the ways of making money off of music have shifted
(different ways recordings are propagated; different venues for live music;
different amateur markets to cater to); and alongside this, teaching
institutions where esoteric, non-commercial music too can support careers-- in
short, the split between popular and high-brow music that did not previously
exist. Liszt is at the transition and he thrives on its possibilities.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">A very few musicians made a bigger splash-- Beethoven and Wagner
splashed deeper, so to speak, and made bigger and longer lasting waves. But in
his day-- the late 1820s through the 1840s-- Liszt was <i>IT </i>-- <i>the big thing</i>. This
was the opening era of big concert halls and big publicity-driven tours, the
era of <i>fans</i>. Elvis or the Beatles are
a weak analogy because they lasted less than 10 years; most of the big-hit
stars of the 1950s and 60s lasted 2-3 years. Liszt did it for 20. And yes-- there were teenage girls,
weeping with joy, screaming to be near him, throwing themselves at him, mobbing
him to cut a lock of his trademark long, long hair. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Liszt was probably the first real sex-object celebrity. He was
famous for his love affairs, and the situations it sometimes got him into with
aristocratic fathers and husbands. But he was more true love-romantic than
one-night hookups; his affairs were like the staple of Hollywood fan magazines
since the 1920s. With one of his early lovers, a French Countess, he spent
several idyllic years in Switzerland, composing music and fathering three
illegitimate children. It was a
generation of rebellion against marriage as a constraining institution (for
women too, a theme of early feminists); a view shared by Friedrich Engels on
down to James Joyce, who as a matter of principle did not marry the women they
lived with. Liszt carried the belief that jealousy-is-property to great
lengths. One of his illegitimate daughters married the conductor von Bülow;
then she left him for Wagner-- while von Bülow went on conducting Wagner and
remained part of his intimate circle. It was not exactly free-love communal
orgies, but another way that Liszt and his circle epitomized the cultural avant-garde.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">God-father and facilitator: Liszt liked to help fellow musicians.
Some people thought he over-did it. Schumann wrote about him: “...he gives me
the impression of being a sploilt child. He is good, over-bearing, amiable,
arrogant, noble and generous, often hard with others.” [Goulding 192] And Schumann didn’t like his taste or
his work as a composer. Certainly Liszt liked being in the center of attention;
it was natural to him, a big star since age 14. When Chopin, in his years of
ill-health, gave a public concert to raise money and nearly fainted at the end,
it was Liszt who leaped up and carried him in his arms. (Liszt was 6 feet tall,
and Chopin was tiny.) And he believed in New Music (his name was always
associated with it by both its friends and its enemies). He encouraged and
promoted Mendelssohn, Chopin and Schumann; he championed Berlioz when no one
else did, and arranged concert performances of his music; later in his life he
encouraged Grieg, Smetana, Cesar Franck, Saint-Saëns, Rubinstein and the
Russians. Liszt was not into rivalries. He was there first, anyway; and he was
the trend-setter in piano technique. The myth went around that he had extra
fingers on each hand, which fans tried to spy with their opera glasses. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">He would become even more the facilitator of others’ careers as he
got older. In 1848, tired of constantly being on the road, and perhaps of all
his high-class (and sometimes overly possessive) mistresses and patrons, he
quit touring and took a position as music director at Weimar. It was famous as
the cultural center of Germany in the literary heyday of Goethe, Schiller, et
al. Now Lizst had an orchestra to promote new music. He has Wagner’s early
operas performed. He offers asylum to Wagner when he is on the run from the police
for taking part in the violent revolutionary uprising in Dresden in 1849. (Wagner came temporarily, then moved on
to a villa in Switzerland offered by a wealthy admirer). </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Tchaikovsky wrote: “Liszt...is an old hypocrite who replies to any
piece submitted to his august judgment with the most exaggerated flattery. By
nature he is kind; indeed he is one of the few famous artists who has never
been touched by jealousy or the temptation to impede the success of his fellow
man... But he is too much the hypocrite to be trusted for sincere criticism.”
[Goulding 211] This tells us as much about Tchaikovsky as it does about Liszt. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Self-abnegating saint: This is a weird one. After 10 years at
Weimar, Liszt decides to become a Catholic priest. That doesn’t quite work out
with the Pope, but he moves to Rome, and for the rest of his life dresses in
clerical gowns and is addressed as Abbé. He turns to writing smoothly beautiful
music on religious themes, rather different from his cascades of piano notes
that created sounds heard never before and left his audiences gasping. Perhaps
Liszt was attracted by a composing niche that no one else of his calibre was
filling, in an era when religion was becoming passé. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The transition from Liszt the super-star to loyal admirer of
Wagner the super-star is sort of unbelievable, if we weren’t so familiar with
it. How often does one public idol retire into the cheerleader role for the one
who takes their place? I can’t think of any others. Perhaps Liszt, whose ego
was completely self-secure, felt his days were fading. He was greater as a
performer than as a composer. He preached New Music, as did Schumann and
Mendelssohn, but none of them really delivered it in a convincing way. He
genuinely saw Wagner as doing what he advocated: creating totally memorable new
music. After Wagner, of course, there was Debussy, Stravinsky, and others, but
by that time Liszt was dead. To be a saint, says the religious tradition, you
have to genuinely live it, without wanting to be a saint. I think that was
Liszt.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Smooth sailing all the way? Nothing bad ever happened to Liszt. He
had a few scrapes with his mistresses, but he always got out, with no hard
feelings. In my mind, Liszt was the most likeable of all composers. (Who would
be second-- Handel?) His music varied across his career, from early flashy
piano to late religious music. But there are no traumas in it, nor any peak
celebrations. Liszt was always up, and he shared it.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mendelssohn</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mendelssohn is from a rich and famous family. Trained by expensive
tutors from age 3, by 9 he is performing for celebrities in Berlin, by 10
making tours as a pianist in Europe and England. By 17 (1826) he is famous for
theatre music to accompany Shakespeare’s <i>Midsummer
Night’s Dream;</i> at 20 he conducts his own symphony in London. A trip to
Scotland’s Hebrides results in a famous tone poem, <i>Fingal’s Cave</i>, inventing program music. He becomes Europe’s most
famous conductor, taking the lead in establishing the classic repertoire,
conducting festivals, reviving Bach’s <i>St.
Matthew Passion</i> and regularly performing the classics from Handel to
Beethoven as well as his own work. In his early 20s, the Berlin government
commissions him to write a
Reformation Symphony for an anniversary celebration of Martin Luther. Like
other prominent Jewish families of the period-- the parents of Karl Marx and
Benjamin D’Israeli-- Mendelssohn’s father had converted to liberal
Christianity. He is involved in everything and invited everywhere. He writes
the now-customary wedding recessional -- Wagner would add “Here Comes the
Bride” -- and a very popular violin solo, a dancing swirl of happy notes. He is
invited to establish an Academy of Arts (i.e. a music conservatory to train
composers) in Berlin, and another in Leipzig, where he becomes director of a
great orchestra. All goes swimmingly, music bright and entertaining. He is a
great favorite in England, where he often premieres his new works. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">A sudden end: a favorite sister dies. Mendelssohn is hit with
depression, has a series of strokes, and dies in 1847, age 38. Dying young, but
he had been performing non-stop as an adult for almost 30 years. His music
never suffered. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Stravinsky</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Few composers had better network sponsorship than Stravinsky. His
father was the leading bass singer at the St. Petersburg Opera, a friend of the
important composers including Mussorgsky, Borodin, and Rimsky-Korsakov. After
studying with Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky was recruited by Diaghilev, just then
(1909) launching the Ballets Russes in Paris. The previous year Diaghilev had
presented Mussorgsky’s great opera <i>Boris
Godunov</i>, gloriously fleshed out in Rimsky-Korsakov’s instrumentation. Now
he assembled the greatest ballet-production team ever, the top choreographers,
scene-designers, and dancers. Stravinsky was given a tryout turning Chopin
piano music into ballet orchestration (orchestrating other composers’ music was
a specialty of Rimsky-Korsakov, and French composers like Ravel followed suite,
including making Mussorgsky’s piano music famous in the orchestra repertoire).
In short, Stravinsky was in the heart of a multi-skilled collaborative network.
Debussy himself helped him play a four-hand piano arrangement of <i>The Rite of Spring</i> during its early
tryouts. For his Paris ballets based on Russian folklore, Stravinsky consulted
with the leading Russian expert on myths and rituals, and they sketched out the
ballet together. He spent almost two years working over the score. The music
was unusually difficult for orchestra players to comprehend, but unlike some
other composers whose works failed at first for lack of adequatelly skilled
performers and rehearsals, Stravinsky had a huge orchestra at his disposal,
with the full backing of Diaghilev, already flushed with success. There were
over 20 rehearsals (most orchestras have four or so for a new piece).
Stravinsky was no self-absorbed prima donna; he took the conductor’s
suggestions as to how instruments drowned each other out and fixed problems. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Stravinsky’s ballet music in this period (1910-13), <i>The Firebird, Petrushka, The Rite of Spring,</i>
was the most forcefully innovative yet-- the unmistakable break into “modern
music”-- and it aroused a storm of controversy. This is not necessary bad for
one’s reputation, rather the opposite, since he had the most famous composers
on his side, and the Ballets Russes was a great financial success. It is
probable that no other great innovative work of music was so well-supported and
publicized at its debut.
Stravinsky was for ever after world-famous, welcomed and sponsored
everywhere, and he had a lifetime of producing music in a variety of innovative
styles. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Does it make any sense to relate his music to his personality, his
extra-musical life? Stravinsky was known as a rather sardonic personality,
making cutting remarks about other composers, and in retrospect, some of his
collaborators. But although he became an exile from the 1917 Russian
Revolution, he was already established abroad, and this life-event had no
effect on his musical style, nor did his flight from Nazi Europe to America in
1939. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">What about the harsh passages in <i>The Rite of Spring,</i> the ferocious drum-beats, clashing trumpets and
horns, as the sacrificial maiden dances herself to death on stage? (In the
climax of <i>Petrushka</i> the lead
character is also crushed to death.) But these were produced in Stravinsky’s
most glorious period. <i>The Rite of Spring,</i>
the most dissonant of these works, nevertheless has plenty of smooth,
Debussy-like sections with sweetly floating melodic phrases. It is not all
non-stop clashing horns and pounding drums. Like all musicians since Vivaldi
and Haydn, Stravinsky can alternate loud and soft, fast and slow, dissonant and
harmonic; he just does all this in a much more extreme way-- and with hugely
amplified wind and percussion sections, and long dramatic crescendos. Bits
of Stravinsky sound like <i>Boris Godunov, </i>the pioneering work of
Slavic/Asiatic folk tunes turned into dramatic rhythms and orchestrated by the
Russian masters of instrumentation. Stravinsky is much more professional than
Mussorgsky: deliberately creating tunes played in clashing keys at once;
playing different rhythms simultaneously against each other. But he also has
the sense, which all good composers have, of when the dissonance has driven the
musical tension as far as it can, and when it needs to end-- although instead
of resolving back to a home key, he produces some of his most striking effects
with abrupt stops and moments of silence. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Stravinsky was no spontaneous-inspiration type of composer; he
worked hard over his ballets (almost 2 years for 35 minutes of music), and kept
on tinkering and revising. He himself said he was dissatisfied with the harsh
noise that is the death-end of <i>Rite of
Spring,</i> but he never came up with a revision he fully liked. No, it would
be silly to assume that the harsh and deadly parts of Stravinsky’s ballets have
anything to do with how he was feeling. He was a professional, and creating
moments of utmost musical trauma was one of the things he could do.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Opera composers: the
plot sets the music</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Opera is a special case, as the nature of the opera dictates the
particular emotions. As before, I will divide composers into those with serious
troubles and those without.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Troubled: Mozart, von
Weber, Wagner</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mozart’s problems are legendary. They are fairly accurately
portrayed in the film <i>Amadeus</i>, itself
based on a Russian play by Pushkin in 1832, <i>Mozart
and Salieri</i>. Except the plot to kill him is romantic fiction, based on
rumours circulating after his death that he was poisoned. Briefly put, Mozart’s
problems are money and independence. His father’s employer, the Prince Archbishop of Salzburg, is
liberal about allowing Leopold to show off young Wolfgang on tours. But later
he wants him working at his palace in the prestige game such people are now playing.
Mozart has to insult him to get free.
But now that he is free he has to hustle for money, in the world of
commercial opera just opening up.
And it is a risky business; having sponsors underwrite the cost, then as
now, is helpful if not absolutely essential. It also involves him in court
politics in Vienna, where Italian vs. German opera styles are beginning to be
fought out. The fight would go on for 75 years before Wagner throws the balance
definitively, at least in central Europe. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">So Mozart is caught on the horns of a dilemma between independence
and money. In the end, he quite literally works himself to death. Do any signs
of this struggle show up in his music? </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Here we have to put the question in larger perspective. Opera is
not just music; it is also theatre. It has characters, costumes, scenes, a
plot. Sometimes not much of a plot; until Mozart’s time, everything was
sacrificed to one segment: the aria, where famous singers got to show off their
voices. Holding the high notes; how much quaver and resonance you could
generate out of the sounding chambers of your body; what trills and scales you
could run up and down-- really, how long and how well you could sing without
taking a breath. The opera singer’s body was the only important instrument, and
a composer’s job was to provide tunes for the soloist to improvise upon.
Between arias, the pretence of a plot was sung in rather monotonous recitatives
accompanied by harpsichord chords. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Opera, in the 150 years it had been in existence, had little in
the way of actual emotion; it was just actors striking postures from mythical
themes and heroic histories of Greece and Rome, histrionics not to be seen in
the real world. Mozart, in his early operas, produced this kind of thing too: <i>Mithradates, King of Pontus; </i> <i>Idomeneo,
King of Crete</i>; etc. (he wrote 16 operas, most of them rarely heard since).
But in the 1780s, opera became more interested in plots. Contemporary plays
were being set to music. Playwrights like Beaumarchais in pre-Revolutionary
Paris used the theatre to push political boundaries. Theatres and opera houses
were virtually the only places where public crowds could gather; here began to
stir the sentiments for reform that boiled over in the Revolution.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mozart picked the most controversial. <i>The Marriage of Figaro</i> [1786] is about a servant at odds with his
master-- the Count wants to exercize the traditional feudal right of <i>jus primae noctis</i>-- the right to
deflower the virgin bride when one of his servants marries. Mozart and his
librettist lighten it up with the standard devices of theatre comedy, disguises
and substitutions, so that the Count ends up making love to his own wife. <i>Don Giovanni</i> (1787) takes the attack on
aristocrats even further: a serial rapist, who in the end is sent to Hell; again
Mozart and Da Ponte play it with plenty of comedy, provided by his uncouth
valet. This takes some of the edge off the class conflict theme; most of Don
Giovanni’s targets are upper-class women, but the most famous song is a duet, <i>La ci darem la mano</i>, where the Don
breaks up a peasant girl’s marriage by offering to marry her himself-- a twist
on <i>jus primae noctis</i>. It is an
unanswered question why this scene should produce Mozart’s most famously
beautiful music.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mozart may have been attracted to these plots because he himself
had been a servant, trying to get out from under the thumb of the aristocracy
and live his own life and loves. But we come back to the general point: each
opera plot demands its particular emotions. Whether the composer feels the same
emotions or not is irrelevant; he needs to create the emotion in the audience
by musical techniques. What techniques? When Mozart was an 8-year-old touring
England with his father, the English naturalist Daines Barrington put him to
the test: Compose a love song for an opera. Mozart immediately plays a
recitative and a “symphony” (multi-part accompaniment with a song line) in the
operatic style. Play a song of anger: Mozart does it again, this time strumming
heavily on the bass keys and “working himself up to such a pitch that he beat
on his harpsichord like a person possessed, rising sometimes in his chair.”
(Barrington goes on to say that otherwise little Mozart acts like a child; when
a cat comes in, he leaves his instrument to play with it; he runs around the
room with a stick pretending to ride a horse.)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mozart already knows how to simulate emotions; it is part of the
musician’s repertoire. He has as yet no traumas in his life; he composes the
kind of music he hears from others, he just grasps it more quickly,
internalizes it, and as he gets older, improves it. In opera, he puts his
orchestra skills to work writing overtures and setting scenes; the recitatives
and arias are still there, but the whole becomes better integrated, like the
full-scale symphonies he is also writing. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Do the events of Mozart’s life come out in his music, operas or
otherwise? It is said that his nagging landlady is parodied in <i>The Magic Flute</i>; it is conjectured that
the murdered man’s statue who comes to drag Don Giovanni to Hell is Mozart’s
dead father (but that was already in the story). Such examples are trivial;
they are like Wagner recalling the storm he sailed through when traveling from
the Baltic to France, and the song of the sailors as they made shelter in a
Norwegian port, which provides a brief moment at the beginning of <i>The Flying Dutchman</i>. What is important
is the emotions, in life and in the opera music. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Again, in Mozart’s <i>Requium
Mass,</i> there is an anguished section of dissonant chord-leaps with
kettle-drums and thundering orchestra alternating with aetherial high voices of
the choir. But this is where the sinner faces the Last Judgment. Try reading
the Latin words out loud:</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Confutatis maledictis, </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Flammis acribus addictis:</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Voca me cum benedictis.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">[When the wicked are counfounded,</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Doomed to flames of woe unbounded,</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Call me, with Thy Saints surrounded!]</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Lacrimosa dies illa,</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Qua resurget ex favilla,</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Judicandus homo reus.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Huic ergo parce, Deus:</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Dona eis requiem.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">[Oh! that day of tears and mourning!</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">From the dust of earth returning,</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Man for judgment must prepare him.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Spare, O God, in mercy spare him!</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Grant them Thine eternal rest.]</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mozart was paid to write music to accompany these traditional
words, and the fact that he was sick and dying in financial straits at the time
cannot be distinguished from his professional skill in creating the appropriate
sounds. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">On the whole, Mozart’s music sounds just like it should for the
setting at hand-- theatrical or otherwise. If anything, his beautiful music
makes the listener happy, even when it is depicting distraught scenes on the
stage: Don Giovanni’s outraged ladies sound more melodious than real persons in
these circumstances would be. Mozart has been living in music since he was
little; nothing brings him down.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">von Weber</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The father of Carl Maria von Weber was a impoverished minor
nobleman; he has an itinerant theatre troupe, with his wife, a singer, while he
plays violin. Young Carl played whatever role was needed, learned the piano,
and composed several operas by age 14. The family was always in debt and
frequently on the run. At age 20 Carl was not only a conductor but secretary to
a German Prince; his father’s manipulations got him charged with embezzlement
and both were ordered to leave the country (Württemberg-- Germany being not yet
unified). These were the years of the Napoleonic wars when Germany was
conquered, rose in rebellion, and liberated itself in a wave of national
patriotism. von Weber now got opera appointments, was encouraged to create
German operas, and wrote popular
patriotic songs. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In 1821 (age 35), he finally has an opera hit. <i>Der Freischütz</i> -- which means the sharpshooter, or free-lance shooter--
almost literally what in American comics and radio entertainment became the
Lone Ranger. The hero sells his soul to a demon in return for magic silver
bullets that always hit their target. (If you don’t remember, the Lone Ranger
fired silver bullets from his six-guns.) The opera was a terrific success when
it premiered in Berlin, and had fifty performances all over Germany in its
first year. The music continued a
lot of classical elements, but it did integrate the recitatives into the
orchestra music; introduced the repeating <i>leitmotif</i>
for the main themes that Wagner would make his trademark; and scored musical
thunderstorms, hunters’ horns, and various occult horrors. The power of the
opera was more in the effects of its stage setting: a Wolf’s glen deep in the
forest, skulls and corpses strewn about, the kind of Romantic setting that
would be featured in Edgar Allen Poe’s stories a decade later. Young Wagner loved it as a teenager,
and so did the French would-be rebel, Berlioz. Weber went on to produce another
successful opera in London, <i>Oberon</i>
(based on Shakespeare’s magic comedy). He died soon after (age 39), worn out
from working at a furious pace-- he too had been hustling non-stop for over 30
years. Do his hard times show up
in his music? Not really. He could produce all sorts of effects; he was known for
making the clarinet a solo instrument. <i>Der
Freischütz</i>, for all its <i>Sturm und
Drang,</i> ends with a happy ballroom dance tune out of the previous century.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Wagner</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The first thing to know about Richard Wagner is that he comes from
a theatre family. His mother was formerly the mistress of a German prince (i.e.
a beauty), who married several men, one of them an actor/playwright whose
illegitimate child Richard may have been.
Two older sisters were actresses, and his mother moved from city to city
following their careers. Wagner gets his start when his brother, a theatre
singer, got him a job as chorusmaster. He takes a job as music director of a
failing theatre company because he falls in love with its leading actress,
Minna; after the company folded, she moves to another theatre and charms the
management into hiring Wagner as conductor. They marry, but Minna has gentlemen
“admirers” and Wagner, hustling for a living, has to put up with her
infidelities, including deserting him to live with one of them. They make a
trek across north Germany from one bankrupt company to another. In Riga (then
part of Russia, now Latvia) Wagner makes her reject the advances of the theatre
director, who retaliates by telling the authorities about the debts he had fled
from in Germany. Wagner’s passport is confiscated, but he has a wealthy friend
who smuggles them across the Russian border-- running past the rifles of the
Cossack sentries; reaching a port, they evaded the harbour police in a small
boat, hid from the customs inspectors, and finally sailed-- into a series of storms
and near shipwrecks, before they finally arrive in France and make their way to
Paris. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Meanwhile Wagner has been learning his trade. He has been writing librettos and
operas since age 20 (1833); he learns the existing repertoire by conducting
dozens of operas. He learns their scores even more thoroughly when he arrives
in Paris; unable to get his own operas produced, he is reduced to working for a
music publisher, copying out parts for every instrument in the orchestra,
arranging famous arias for piano and home vocals. Popular composers like
Donizetti and Meyerbeer were just what Wagner would avoid sounding like; but he
knew his rivals’ music as intimately as if he had composed it himself. His
three years in Paris (1839-42) are the low point of his life. He does meet
Berlioz (10 years his senior) and hears his <i>Symphonie
Fantastique</i>, from which he learns how new combinations of instruments and
an oversize orchestra can make entirely new sounds. Wagner pawns everything,
down to Minna’s costumes and jewels; they stay afloat by borrowing from friends
who are beginning to recognize his music; his furniture is confiscated by
creditors and he finishes <i>Rienzi</i> in
prison. Finally, he sends it to Dresden, where he grew up and had contacts at
the theatre; <i>Rienzi</i> is accepted, is
performed to great success, and Wagner is appointed music director to the
Duke’s court. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Age 29, his fortunes have turned. He completes several
to-be-famous operas, starts many more, but is interrupted by politics: the
great revolutionary years 1848-49 have uprisings all over Europe, twice in
Paris, where the monarchy is overthrown and a socialist commune is put down. In
Dresden, Wagner joins the revolution, supplying it with hand grenades; when
Prussian troops intervene, he has to flee into exile. It would be 12 years
before he was allowed back onto German territory, by which time he would be 48.
His operas were being performed, by friends like Liszt, but it would be years
before he could hear them in person.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">What makes his music so different? His first efforts at opera are
conventional. <i>Die Feen</i> (The Fairies)
is like von Weber’s <i>Oberon </i>; <i>Das Liebesverbot</i> (Love Forbidden), is a
version of Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure; <i>Rienzi</i> is a historical
drama in Donizetti’s manner, about a rebel in the 1300s who briefly drives the
nobles out of Rome. By the end of his Paris ordeal, Wagner is creating a new
style, eliminating recitatives -- although <i>The
Flying Dutchman</i> still has beautiful songs-- and unifying the entire opera
into one musical mood. Eventually the arias disappear too, the voices
completely integrated into the orchestra, which now carries the themes. From
now on, Wagner would write his own librettos, unlike almost all other
composers.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Wagner is not atonal or dissident-- that kind of modernist would
come later. He works in the tonic/dominant form; differing only that his chords
are often carried by the resonant sounds of horns instead of the usual strings,
making his operas sound like echo chambers (the equivalent of the studio
electronic revolution that separated the Beatles and Rolling Stones from the
rock ‘n roll that went before). Wagner also makes great use of empty fifths and
leaping octaves (as in the famous <i>Ride of
the Valkyries</i>), as well as modulating through numerous and remote chord
changes and inventing chromatic effects and complex lush-sounding chords (like
the famous love scene in <i>Tristan und
Isolde</i>). This is why so many of his orchestral excerpts would become
universally familiar: the overtures to <i>Tannhäuser</i>,
<i>Die Meistersinger</i>, the Bridal
Procession from <i>Lohengrin</i> played at
every wedding. Eventually, as audiences got over the absence of Italian opera
conventions, his operas acquired a fanatical following. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">His later operas, especially <i>The
Ring</i> cycle, can be hard to get used to. But there is a secret to hearing
them: listen to the orchestra, not to the soloists. Reversing the gestalt,
Wagner uses voices as accent marks against the harmonious flow of orchestral
music. George Bernard Shaw pointed out another feature: Wagner’s music builds
up a tremendous amount of tension, as it modulates far from the original key
center (this is especially true of the singers). Since his rhythm is often slow, the resolution back into a
familiar chordal cadence is a prolonged build-up, heading towards home with an
increasingly pounding beat. This gives his music a yearning quality. When it finally arrives, the climax is
like a sexual orgasm. No wonder he had such adoring fans, many of them women.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Wagner is the most erotic of all composers. It is easy to see this
by comparing him with Beethoven, who can reproduce all kinds of emotions but
none of them sexual. Of course conventional operas are full love/sex plots; but
<i>Cosi Fan Tutti</i> and <i>Don Giovanni</i> just make sex a game; no
one is deeply, yearningly in love with anybody and the music certainly never
sounds sexual. Even Verdi, whose melodramatic plots often center around
sexually-motivated violence, never gets beyond an artificial theatrical tone.
The main exceptions are Puccini and Richard Strauss (<i>Salomé</i>, <i>Der Rosenkavalier</i>)
at the turn of the 20th century, but they are Wagner’s followers and use his
musical techniques. (<i>Rosenkavalier</i> is
an eroticized version of <i>Marriage of
Figaro</i>, which points up the difference.)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Where does Wagner get it from? Is he reflecting his own affairs
into his music? <i>Tristan and Isolde </i>parallels
Wagner’s adulterous relationship with Mathilde, wife of his friend Wesendonck;
this devoted patron financed him during the 1850s while writing <i>The Ring</i>, even providing a house next door
to his own, where Wagner and Mathilde carried on until Minna finally grew so
hostile to her rival that they had to move to Venice. The scenario would repeat
again 10 years later. <i>Tristan</i> wasn’t
performed until 1865 in Munich, where Wagner had a new patron, the youthful
King Ludwig of Bavaria. The
conductor was Hans von Bülow, married to Liszt’s daughter Cosima; she and
Wagner fell for each other, a scandal that caused him to withdraw to his villa
in Switzerland; Cosima left her husband and joined him there; eventually they
married (she got divorced, his wife Minna died) in 1868: Cosima was 27, Wagner
55. Von Bülow kept on conducting loyally-- it was the mores of the theatre. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">But there is more to consider here. Love and/or sex by themselves
are not enough to create a narrative. If two people meet, fall in love, desire
each other, have sex, and lay back happily, what drives the plot? There has to
be some tension, some obstacle to overcome; light comedies do it with mix-ups
and misunderstandings in the early part of the sequence; the accompanying music
usually conveys the lightness, the don’t-take-it-seriously of the stage. One
could write music to simulate sexual build-up to orgasm; Ravel’s <i>Bolero</i> does it, with a repetitive tune
saved from monotony by the crescendo of increasingly insistent rhythm until its
crashing ejaculation. But can you put together a whole opera by playing <i>Bolero</i> over and over again? Plot tension
requires some kind of obstacle, and love triangles and rivalries have filled
that bill for a long time. Wagner didn’t invent the Tristan/ Isolde/ King Marke
plot, but he did add some twists. That it resembles something in his own life
does not tell us how he could write the music that makes that opera such a
landmark. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In fact it isn’t close to anything in ordinary reality. Tristan is
a warrior who killed Isolde’s betrothed; but he is wounded and goes to her in
disguise, for she has magic cures. Later, his King sends him back to Ireland to
bring Isolde for his bride. On the ship, she drinks a poison potion with him,
but it turns out to be a love (-plus-death) potion. The King is angry at being
double-crossed; Tristan lets himself be mortally wounded, and the lovers die in
each other’s arms--- well, actually Tristan dies, and Isolde returns to the
King; the way of the world.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The music is built around the famous “Tristan chord”: F - B - D
sharp - G sharp. It is a mysterious tension that finally, at the very end of
the opera, finds resolution in a B major chord. Play it on the piano; it says
what Wagner said could not be said in words. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Two years before Wagner composed the opera, he wrote to Liszt: “I
have never in my life known the true happiness of love.” So he’s sketched it
out in his head-- Tristan and Isolde. What was he thinking?</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Wagner was reading Schopenhauer’s philosophy, which pulled it all
together. Kant said we never see the real world; all we see is what is shaped
by our conceptual eye-glasses. Schopenhauer replied that the thing-in-itself is
will, the energy of striving, the energy of life. For a man, the ultimate
reality is located in the center of a woman’s body in the act of sex (and vice
versa?). Schopenhauer also wrote there is another path: music reveals the
thing-in-itself. Is the equation then: music = sex = ultimate reality? </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">We have some sociological evidence. The ethnographer Claudio
Benzecry interviewed opera fanatics (the ones who buy the cheap seats in the
balcony to hear every performance). What they focus on are the moments during
an aria when the soprano’s voice resonates inside their own body; they won’t
talk to anyone as they leave the opera house, preserving the thrills and echoes
to take home with them. Interviewees said they didn’t like to listen to opera
while having sex; it was too distracting for either to feel right.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Wagner was proud, self-centered, flamboyant, a prima donna. Is
there anyone like him in his operas? No-- nearest would be <i>Die Meistersinger,</i> about a singing contest in the music guilds of
late-medieval Germany. But the hero is not Wagner, and the play is one of
Wagner’s least erotic. A foolish carping critic of Wagner’s hero is patterned
on a real critic from the Brahms camp; but that is hardly central to the music.
No one’s opera characters are less like real people than Wagner’s; they are
symbols of larger forces. This goes for his romantic plots too. In <i>The Flying Dutchman</i>, the sea-captain is doomed to sail
forever until he is redeemed by a woman’s pure love. <i>Tannhäuser</i> is about a knight who ascends a mountain of erotic
magic-- in translation it is <i>mons veneris</i>--
to test himself and win release from the bonds of lust. There are plenty of
orgiastic scenes in the stage setting, but the tone that emerges is heroic. <i>The Ring</i> and <i>Parsifal</i> are full of metaphysical and religious meanings. Just what
these are is open to debate. G.B. Shaw thought <i>The Ring</i> is about the struggle between capitalism and socialism. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Audiences, then and now, don’t attend Wagner’s operas for the
symbolism; they go for the music, and its integration with the most imposing of
all stage settings and with the plot tension fused out of human drama and
musical tension-and-resolution. His techniques for achieving this would be his
legacy, not the memory of his personality, loves and grudges. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">His troubles continued to the end of his life. With fame and
material luxury, his ambition kept raising his goals. He always overspent,
overborrowed, demanded more than what most audiences could accept; but in the
end he accomplished. Of his 13 operas, his third was a contemporary hit; the
next 10, though meeting initial difficulties, were adulated and entered the
permanent repertoire. The trajectory of his love life was not quite parallel.
In 1883, in his 70th year, he started an affair with one of the Flower Maidens
in newly permiered <i>Parsifal</i>. Cosima
found out about it; they had a stormy confrontation. A few hours later Wagner
had a heart attack and died. He was in the midst of writing an essay about “the
eternal Feminine.”</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Smooth sailing: Rossini,
Verdi, Puccini</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Rossini grows up in a family of musicians, his father a horn
player, his mother an opera singer. He himself sings in minor roles. By age 18
he is composing operas; while playing harpsichord for an opera season in
Bologna, he starts having successful productions. He launches into an extraordinary
pace of composition: 5 operas in a year, 6 operas the next year; 18 more operas
in 7 years. Opera is the favorite form of entertainment in Italy, and the land
is full of opera houses. Rossini travels all over, riding his popularity; he
can turn out an opera in 2 weeks, slapdash in his methods, but lively and
upbeat, full of melodies. No doubt he composed tunes so easily because he had
heard and sung so many of them since childhood; it was a language he had
learned at an early age.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The Barber of Seville</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> -- a remaking of the
Figaro story -- produced in Rome in 1816 makes him famous throughout Europe at
age 24. He slows down a bit in the 1820s. He is invited to Paris, London,
Vienna, given grand titles and lavish pensions; he has a house and a summer
villa in Italy; his wife and star soprano spends extravagantly and takes up
gambling. In 1829, Rossini has one more all-time hit, <i>William Tell</i>, whose overture would become famous a century later in
America as theme music for the radio cowboy serial The Lone Ranger. In his
overtures, Rossini had invented a style of starting quietly, slowly building up
to a rousing crescendo, filling
the audience with expectation. Some said he over-used the device. Perhaps bored
with himself musically, Rossini gave up writing operas in 1829, age 37. He
lived another 40 years, writing little, getting fat and in ill health; but rich
and honored for his 20-year run.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Verdi</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Verdi comes out of nowhere. Except that the little village where
his father is an inn-keeper is in northern Italy at a time when opera is a
national fervour. He takes music lessons from the village
school-teacher/organist, and composes music for local occasions-- marches and
church events. He gets support from a wealthy merchant who wants to send him to
the Milan Conservatory. But he is rejected as over-age: he is 19 (it is the
year 1832); unlike today, it was customary to enter around age 10, at the most
14. Verdi does get private lessons from the chief harpsichord player at La
Scala, then goes home to take over as music teacher and organist. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">But he has a contact with the music publisher Ricordi, literally
right next door to La Scala, whose opera scores it published. Verdi sends them
some music which they publish in 1838 (he is now 25). His first opera is not
produced, but in 1838 his second is performed at La Scala with enough success
that he gets a commission for 3 more operas. His next opera is a fiasco (a
failed comedy); but his fourth-- <i>Nabucco</i>
-- is a box-office success in 1842, and at age 29 Verdi’s upward career is on
its way. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">By this time, the route to musical fortune was through the great
conservatories. Verdi is rejected but he manages to get into opera by the side
door. Paralleling Chopin’s career in Paris, the music publishing business has
become so big that a network connection with an important publisher opens the
opera house, too. Ricordi and other publishers would broker many of Verdi’s
collaborations with librettists throughout his career.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Verdi now turns out a long series of operas, most of them modest
successes, enough to live off the voracious Italian appetite for new operas. He
is 38 before he moves up to the first rank: <i>Rigoletto</i>
in 1851 is his breakthrough, followed by <i>Il
trovatore</i> and <i>La traviata</i> in
1853. After a few let-downs, there are <i>Un
ballo in maschera</i> (1859), <i>La forza
del destino</i> (1861), and <i>Don Carlos</i>
(1866). By now he is producing operas all over Europe. His other mega-hit, <i>Aïda</i> (1871) is commissioned for the
opening of the Suez canal; and there are two works of his old age, <i>Otello</i> (1887 -- age 74), and <i>Falstaff</i> (1893 -- age 80), showing that
he has kept up with the modernist tendencies of the age. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Throughout, Verdi is a hard-bargaining businessman, and he amasses
a considerable fortune. He was already a political hero of the nationalist
movement for a unified Italy freed from Austrian and French occupation. His
rousing opera choruses (not just in his top repertoire) were taken by patriots
as expressing anti-Austrian sentiments, and often led to political
demonstrations. His name itself V-E-R-D-I was written on walls as a political
slogan (Victor Emmanuele Rei D’Italia).
After Italy unified in 1870, he was made a Senator. Eventually he tired
of politics; opera audiences have never tired of his music.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">What makes Verdi so memorable? Two examples: <i>Rigoletto</i> is an ironic title; it means “the man who laughs”. It
comes from a French story, <i>Le roi s’amuse</i>
-- “the King amuses himself” -- and exposes aristocrats as far from interested
in the welfare of their subjects, but rather in this case as a carousing
rapist. This would have had strong political resonance in 1851, in the
aftermath of the failed revolutionary wave of 1848-49; though that doesn’t
explain its continuing popularity. It also includes a sinister assassin and a
pretty young female victim. Its most famous song, <i>La donna e mobile</i> (women are fickle) puts the blame on women for
being teases. It plays an ironic role in the plot, since this is the tune by
which the bad guy announces his approach, disguised as a happy drunk. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">It is more like a popular song than an extended aria: a short
8-bar melody repeated several times, with trills on the long-held high notes so
the tenor can show off. The tune is
constructed of simple tonic/dominant chords, quite a lot like the famous
love duet in Mozart’s <i>Don Giovanni</i>.
The main melody is harmonized A - E7, E7 - A, (repeated twice). </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOgzTlqZzee30xWm6G0pWRoRrn1BVFIuSp58bYiRQ4KxVDaMzLALhHVMnq4ggQJTAxFRPJebUDA8BDWbyq2C1zOeI5qDj79S29rOEnBcdPK-mr10pVybWn4EM3Dmi0uLQnEPyGB7yOa3I/s1600/Verdi-DonnaMobile%252C1-8.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="834" data-original-width="1600" height="332" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiOgzTlqZzee30xWm6G0pWRoRrn1BVFIuSp58bYiRQ4KxVDaMzLALhHVMnq4ggQJTAxFRPJebUDA8BDWbyq2C1zOeI5qDj79S29rOEnBcdPK-mr10pVybWn4EM3Dmi0uLQnEPyGB7yOa3I/s640/Verdi-DonnaMobile%252C1-8.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Then comes the bridge (bars 27-32), chords cranking upwards
towards the climax: B7 - E, C sharp minor - F sharp minor, E7 - A (hold the high note at bar 32)--</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfwm5jfBTLIBNe_241RrCSxy2EKOTvOG3vQS2r21JsqzMQVjxPmyjk0MNvnH0CoGpFdm2pMAU5qyndZIdJ53u6sa5c4gTLKXQu6zP_3e4Cqwf1x5DWXIucuAVO8cUiOJH1ucvq03-Vx0g/s1600/Verdi-DonnaMobile%252C25-32.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1006" data-original-width="1600" height="402" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfwm5jfBTLIBNe_241RrCSxy2EKOTvOG3vQS2r21JsqzMQVjxPmyjk0MNvnH0CoGpFdm2pMAU5qyndZIdJ53u6sa5c4gTLKXQu6zP_3e4Cqwf1x5DWXIucuAVO8cUiOJH1ucvq03-Vx0g/s640/Verdi-DonnaMobile%252C25-32.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Then back home (bars 33-34): B minor - A - E7 - A. (Plus a final high octave leap to
high-high E at bar 35.) </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPY3SA-6eW_WbSr4vXWsL-Ma0gEK8wabwT7Um-JKL3RmArP1Zrk5V9yDc3a_IlEQE3wRyRnKUAYnOjPwjakP0MiVojecfKgTlPvfmKO1nFHyk4uzR3G7FXPbFHXrmXSBNFms6wZE5lTus/s1600/Verdi-DonnaMobile%252C33-35.jpg" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="489" data-original-width="1600" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiPY3SA-6eW_WbSr4vXWsL-Ma0gEK8wabwT7Um-JKL3RmArP1Zrk5V9yDc3a_IlEQE3wRyRnKUAYnOjPwjakP0MiVojecfKgTlPvfmKO1nFHyk4uzR3G7FXPbFHXrmXSBNFms6wZE5lTus/s640/Verdi-DonnaMobile%252C33-35.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Verdi creates his effect by rising through a cycle of dominant
7ths. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Compare Mozart’s most famous song, <i>La ci darem la mano</i>. The melody is harmonized to G - C - A minor -
D7 (bars 1-4, repeating several times), and followed by alternating G - D or D7
down through bar 17.</span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Bars 18-22 are the struggle of male and female voices in seduction
and resistance, a struggle between A7 and D, climaxing on a victorious high D7
(bar 22).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The melody comes back at bar 23, and starts yet again at bar 27,
before modulating into a high, drawn out C--- and resolving back into familiar
D7 - G, C - A minor - D7.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Taking up the struggle of alternating G - D7 chords from bars
33-37, we get a final sequence of chord modulations: G - B7, E minor - G7, C -
A minor, D - B minor, E minor - C,
and climaxing on a long high D turning into D7 at bar 42. (The rest is
omitted, the male/female struggle winding down in an alternation of G, C, and D7 chords ending in the home
key, G.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Both melodies consist entirely of pretty, pure diatonic tones, the
most familiar kind of sounds, with mild musical tension supplied by the chord
progression and the operatic high notes. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Second example: <i>Aida</i> is
a tragedy, in the classic sense of a heroic downfall which is also a moral
victory. The hero has a love affair with the High Priestess, and is punished by
being buried alive in a tomb. The same plot becomes the back story for the
classic 1930s horror film <i>The Mummy</i>,
where it is played simply for shock value as a team of archeologists find him
alive in the pyramid, no longer a tragic hero but just a movie monster. Note
also that <i>Aida</i> is familiar to
everybody for its triumphal march, because it is played by every high school
and college marching band at half time of football games. In sum, Verdi is a
big energetic sound, tuneful and easy to understand, both in happy major and
picquant minor keys. It is the epitome of popular music, for the pre-jazz era.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Puccini</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The beginning of Puccini’s career is quite a lot like Verdi’s. He
comes from a small city in northern Italy, in this case from a family of church
choir-masters and organists, and this is the path he follows. But in 1880 at
age 22 he gets a scholarship to the Milan Conservatory (the age requirement
having changed), where he receives training in advanced orchestral techniques.
The same music publishing house, Ricordi, likes his first opera well enough to
encourage him to write another; the second fails, but Ricordi hooks him up with Verdi’s last
librettist, Boito. In 1893, <i>Manon Lescaut</i> makes him internationally famous, and
he is on the road to wealth, eventually earning millions of dollars. Then comes
his big three all-time hits: <i>La Bohème </i> in 1896, <i>Tosca</i> and <i>Madama Butterfly</i>
both in 1900. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">His only troubles are at their premieres. <i>Tosca</i> is attacked by critics in Rome because the plot involves a
corrupt police chief who tortures the hero to find out where he is hiding a
political prisoner (we can hear his screams off stage while Baron Scarpio
sings); the prima donna Tosca offers to give herself to him if he will release
her lover, then murders him with a carving knife; one treachery follows another
and she jumps to her death at the final curtain. The fact that Scarpio sings of
his lust in the church while a mass is being sung does not endear Puccini to
the conservatives, either. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Madama Butterfly</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> is hissed and booed at
its premiere at La Scala, apparently because of opera politics at this
headquarters of Italian music. Puccini withdraws it but gets it on the circuit
in 1904 by starting at a minor city. Do his experiences with hostile audiences
affect the emotions Puccini puts into his operas? Obviously not in the case of
the operas which had already been written; nor are there any such signs in his
later operas, most of which are of lesser note. In the era when societies took
opera seriously-- from the mid-1800s through the early 1900s-- demonstrations
by one faction or another (or even against each other) were just the way things
were. Puccini understood the politics, and he knew he was the favourite of a
strong faction. Photos show him with an air of insouciance, a <i>boulevardier</i>
in elegant clothes, hat at a rakish angle. With success he became something of
a roué and a ladies’ man. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In his great operas he is meticulous with orchestration, which
means paying attention to the nuances of every combination of instruments. He
takes great care with the sound of bells in <i>Tosca</i>
and of Japanese music in <i>Butterfly</i>.
He is the most successful exponent of Wagner’s method of wall-to-wall
orchestral music. He even gets rid of the overture, which Wagner had
retained. <i>Tosca</i> starts off with a sinister crash of minor chords, and we are
in the dark cathedral while the escaped prisoner looks for shelter in the
chapel of his sister. It is non-stop drama from beginning to end, music and
voices carrying the plot tension equally, making for a near-hypnotic listening
experience. Perhaps another reason for the opposition to his greatest operas
was their announcement of the full-fledged victory of Wagner’s style in Italy.
Puccini differs from Wagner in two important respects: Where the German’s
literary sources are the mythological world, heavy with cosmological and
religious meanings, Puccini is more modernist; part of the movement of <i>verismo</i>, taking its plots from the
ordinary life, especially the joys and tragedies of the downtrodden. (Granted,
this is more <i>Bohème</i> and <i>Butterfly</i> than <i>Tosca</i>; but its violence is <i>verismo</i>
in spades.) And Puccini is lighter, shorter, better at melodies that leave you
weak in the knees. No wonder his greatest three operas are at the top of every
list of the most performed in the world. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">I Pagliacci: the clown
who cries</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The strongest case for life events being expressed in music is
Leoncavallo, a one-time friend and collaborator of Puccini. If Bizet’s <i>Carmen</i> is a one-hit wonder,
Leoncavallo’s <i>I Pagliacci</i> (1892) is a
one-song wonder. (The title means “the players” or “the actors”.) <i>Vesti la giubba</i> (put on the costume) is
sung by a clown who has just seen his wife making love to another actor, crying
as he gets ready to go on-stage.
It is probably the most famous aria of all time, and it made Caruso (the
so-called greatest tenor voice of all time) famous.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Leoncavallo did have a hard life, although it wasn’t about lost
love. His first opera was slated to be produced in 1878, but the impressario
absconded with the money. Leoncavallo went off to the Middle East playing
piano; sponged off a relative who was a government official; fled the
Anglo-Egyptian war; ending up in Paris where he scraped by as café pianist and
vocal accompanist, until after 10 years he made a connection with Ricordi that
brought him to Milan. Ricordi took options on Leoncavallo’s operas but put him
to work as a librettist for Puccini’s <i>Manon
Lescaut</i>-- Puccini didn’t like his work and had him replaced. Then Ricordi
rejected Leoncavallo’s completed operas. In anger, he wrote <i>I Pagliacci</i> for Ricordi’s publishing
rival; its success was his revenge. Unfortunately for Leoncavallo, his own
production of <i>La bohème</i> came out in competition to Puccini’s; he had enough reputation
to keep on getting operas performed (16 in all), but never again a big hit. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Can we say the frustration of Leoncavallo’s life comes out in <i>I Pagliacci</i> ? He is successful in giving
the opera’s theme a very sad tone. How does he do it?</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Vesti la giubba</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> is the saddest-sounding
music I know of. It is in the key
of D minor, but the saddest parts are not the minor chords.* Look at the sheet
music of <i>Vesti la giubba</i>. Where is
the sadness in it? (There are no words here.) </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">* Every major key scale contains 3 minor chords: 2-4-6 (D minor in
the C major scale); 3-5-7 (E minor); 6-8-3 (A minor). Most music in a major key
sounds some minor chords, without sounding sad. And music in a minor key is not
necessarily sad either, e.g. Brahms’ <i>Hungarian
Rhapsodies</i>. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Where is it, then? It is in the dissonances, and how they are
emphasized; plus the chord sequences-- the relationship between the last chord
still ringing in your ears, and the next. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"></span><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj26gin2AVZldczTOxZMr7X_mlCK1lYlvHsT3jDr2CccGu-ZQBAEQbgVZT2_mLSDpNY5jeaZKeYah2cUUauG9L8_OXbwPiezFlAFEtf0eBhn2vwXE9Eh1Xto5JytgvT5v63oFj3RU0IEtI/s1600/VestiLaGiubba%252C1-16.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1435" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj26gin2AVZldczTOxZMr7X_mlCK1lYlvHsT3jDr2CccGu-ZQBAEQbgVZT2_mLSDpNY5jeaZKeYah2cUUauG9L8_OXbwPiezFlAFEtf0eBhn2vwXE9Eh1Xto5JytgvT5v63oFj3RU0IEtI/s640/VestiLaGiubba%252C1-16.jpg" width="572" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The melody is in D minor, but the chords rarely follows the
tonic/dominant sequence (which would be D minor - A 7th). Instead, the first
time through the melody (bars 1-8), it modulates through B flat 7th; then to
the conventional subdominant G minor (bar 5); then a sequence through A minor
6th, F 7th, and B flat--- and this prepares the way for the second time through
the melody (bars 9-16) to be played in the relative major key, F. Here too it
avoids the tonic/ dominant pattern; dominant should be C 7th, but we don’t get
to that until bar 15, when it prepares to close back on F. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The dissonances are created by playing high C sharp over low D
(bar 1); the high note is only a passing tone, but it is emphasized by being
held longer (a dotted 8th note). Same again at bar 3, where high A is played
against low B flat. Again at bar 10, G is in double octaves but its augmented
5th (E flat) is held longer than the following passing note. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRLV8Y_9sdxvRiKg9n0lflzR74ockXEVK9VEQYhB2wcTjy4qeHN9t_qY1zU3RP3_oHcPN7U4hlEIB9wAqWxYyyh6yhnwGQtAKpTExle4YlB1mSPCbKCu2H7qj8nv3PqRteZh3FRQQRq5w/s1600/VestiLaGiubba%252C25-31.jpg" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="902" data-original-width="1600" height="360" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiRLV8Y_9sdxvRiKg9n0lflzR74ockXEVK9VEQYhB2wcTjy4qeHN9t_qY1zU3RP3_oHcPN7U4hlEIB9wAqWxYyyh6yhnwGQtAKpTExle4YlB1mSPCbKCu2H7qj8nv3PqRteZh3FRQQRq5w/s640/VestiLaGiubba%252C25-31.jpg" width="640" /></a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">These top-note dissonances are even stronger when we get to the
peak of the aria, the anguished high notes of the tenor in the clown suit. At
bar 26, he sings F over a G minor 7th chord, then dropping to E (top note in a
G minor 6th); this is repeated at bar 27, like screaming and catching your
breath. Then it flows upward still higher, holding the high G in bar 29-- only
this time it is the 4th above a D minor chord, resolving to F on the next note.
</span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The peak of the aria descends back to the home key, D minor (bars
30-31).</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Then comes the most surprising part of the entire sad song: at bar 32
we get an A major 7th (it had been A minor up til now); and the entire key
signature changes to D major. Happy ending? Not at all. As the melody fades
out, the melody’s downward leap (same as bar 1) plays C sharp over low D; the
dissonance is repeated 3 times (bar 33, 35, and 36), each time sinking deeper
into the bass clef. The final D is 3 octaves below middle C, about as low as
you can get on a piano. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Leoncavallo’s technique is innovative; a relatively simple,
cleanly-harmonized melody; but what for other composers would be passing notes,
quickly resolved, are dissonances emphasized by the length they are held. He
manages to make a major key sound even sadder than the minor. </span></span></div>
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</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">A good composer, or even an average one, can create sounds that
will make listeners feel happy, or sad, or creeped out, or whatever-- think of
movie background music. What difference is there between a professional
creating these effects on demand, and expressing your own emotions in music? Is
there any way we can tell the difference? </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Opera failures</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">It is hard to have a good batting average as an opera composer.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Beethoven wrote only one opera, <i>Fidelio.</i> He said it was his own favorite composition of all his
music, but he tried three different versions over 12 years (1804-5, 1805-6, 1814)
before he could get it performed, and it was never really popular. He was at
the height of his fame and productivity; you might think an emotional person
like Beethoven would be perfect for opera. Quite the contrary-- the
requirements of operatic emotions have to take precedence in shaping the music.
Beethoven did create successful vocal music-- the choral movement in his 9th
Symphony includes soloists, but they don’t sound at all like opera singers in
dramatic situations. It is a useful comparison case for what makes an opera
composer successful. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Von Weber wrote 7 operas; 2 of them were contemporary hits; none
made the long-term repertoire. <i>Der
Freischütz</i> was enormously influential, but was superceded. Historical batting average: .000 (2 for 7)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Rossini wrote about 50 operas, of which 2 remain in the
repertoire. HBA: .040 (2 for 50)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Bizet wrote 9 operas, starting at age 19; his only hit was his
last, just before he died of an illness at 37. But what a hit: <i>Carmen</i>, probably in first place all-time
for number of performances. HBA:
.111 (1 for 9)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Mozart wrote 16 operas. Of these, 3 are all-time greats, another 2
are in the standard repertoire. HBA: .313 (5 for 16)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Verdi wrote 28 operas; 4 of them are among the most popular ever,
and 6 more are in the repertoire.
HBA: .357 (10 for 28)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Puccini wrote 12 operas. Three of them are in the all-time Top Ten
list; 2 others are in the repertoire. HBA: .417 (5 for 12)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Wagner wrote 13 operas; 10 are in the repertoire. HBA: .769 (10
for 13)</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">There are different criteria for comparison. Mozart, Verdi, and
Puccini tie for most operas in the Top Ten. Wagner has the longest winning
streak (10 hits in a row; Verdi is second with streaks of 4 and 3 consecutive
hits; Mozart and Puccini also have 4-hit streaks. Wagner and Verdi are tied for
most all-time hits. Rossini wrote the most operas (among the big stars; but there are little-known Italian
composers who wrote a hundred or more, mostly of the 1700s when operas were
shorter; the great Vivaldi wrote more than 40 operas, none of them remembered).
Puccini had the earliest perennial hit (his 3rd try); Wagner’s was on his 4th
try; Mozart on his 12th; Verdi on his 17th; Rossini’s was about his 16th try,
and he would write another 3 dozen before he had another classic hit, whereupon
he retired. Mozart is not quite the spontaneous it-all-comes-easy genius people
think he is. Winning at opera takes something else.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">My point is not the ill-posed question “who was the greatest of
all time?” but what determines what kind of composing careers would produce
these different profiles. This takes us deeper into the how and when of
creativity. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Of the total perennial-repertoire operas produced by the big four
names (Mozart, Wagner, Verdi, Puccini), 24 of 30 operas --80 percent-- come in
bursts of 3 years (Verdi’s 3-hit streak), 5 years (Mozart’s 4-hit streak), and
7 years (Puccini’s 4 hits); plus a 26-year victory span with long gaps for the
aging Verdi (starting age 54), and 40 years of continuous work for Wagner
(starting age 29). And these bursts contain all of their most famous operas;
the ones outside these bursts are marginal to their reputation. They ride the
same vein of “inspiration” from one great opera to the next. The word is just a
marker; we need to unpack what it is pointing to. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">A clue is that Wagner, the most successful at sustaining a string
of hits, conceived them all about the same time, a family related by a
continuous thread. They were unified by his new musical methods and a new
topic, the mythologies of Nordic history. (Previously everyone lived off the
mythologies of the ancient Mediterranean.) It was easiest to do this when you
write your own librettos. </span></span><span style="font-size: large;">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "Times New Roman";">In this respect, Wagner resembles Homer, who
produced long epics of the dramatic mythology of Greek gods and heroes.</span></span><style>
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<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Verdi’s streak of mega-hits, from <i>Rigoletto</i> to <i>La Traviata</i>,
is also unified by its literary themes-- bloody melodramas but set off by
wonderful songs and chorus. All really popular operas have fresh, memorable
plots and music to match. Wagner, the most literary of the bunch, was best at
it. But then, he did come from a theatre family.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Bottom line</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">: <i>writing program music about oneself </i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Does music exist to express the emotions of composers’ lives? No
one before Beethoven would even think of such a thing. For them, music was what
you created for the occasion and the audience. Even after Beethoven, composers
like Rossini and Verdi wrote to entertain their audiences, even if Verdi or
Mussorgsky might want to stir up their nationalist feelings. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">But what if you want to use your music skills to make your own
life a subject for music? By the 1890s, this was a plausible thing to do-- even
if it shocked traditionalists, which might also be the point. Richard Strauss
made his career by seeing how much theatrical shock he could get out of
Wagner’s techniques. The 1890s is the decade of modernist sophistication, and
Strauss is its <i>enfant terrible</i>. His
father is a famous horn player in the Munich orchestra, a partisan of Brahms,
but Richard becomes assistant conductor to von Bülow for an elite orchestra at
age 21, and converts to the Wagner camp. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">At age 25 (1889) he launches a series of tone poems-- highly
condensed operas without words, telling their story entirely through the
instruments of the orchestra, helped out by Strauss’s program notes. Wagner has
been dead since 1883; Brahms and Verdi are on their last legs; and Strauss is
soon the most famous musician in the world. Tall (6 foot 3 inches), elegantly
dressed, supremely self-confident, his premieres and tours are events of the
first magnitude, in music-crazed Germany, in New York and everywhere. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">He feeds on controversy and always pushes the envelope. In 1890, <i>Death and Transfiguration</i> is a musical
depiction of an old man’s train of thoughts on his deathbed, the rhythm of his
faltering pulse in the background; 60 years later, the dying Strauss said it
was just like he had composed it. In 1895 <i>Till
Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks</i> depicts the life of a medieval folk hero/rogue,
on down to when he is hanged and his spirit flies away mockingly with the
piccolo playing his <i>leitmotif</i>. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In 1896, it is <i>Thus Spake
Zarathustra</i>, Nietzsche’s recently discovered philosophical testament --
Nietzsche himself is now silently insane, but suddenly famous after years of
obscurity. The text contains the famous line “God is dead; churches are his
tomb”, and preaches that Christianity must be replaced by a return to the
Dionysian ecstasy of earliest Greek religion, when man will become Superman.
Strauss opens with a stunning octave leap, trumpets above a deep organ bass,
culminating with a major third suddenly turned minor; followed by a triumphant
chordal march upward to orchestral infinity. It has an enormous orchestra, 30
woodwinds and brasses, all manner of drums, cymbals, harps, with a large
contingent of strings and a final tolling bell, 150 players in all.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In 1897, Strauss conducts <i>Don
Quixote</i>, a more conventional theme but rendered with extra effects like a
wind machine to turn the windmill sails; bleeting sheep are mimicked by the
sounds of muted horns. Audiences and critics were split but on the whole
dazzled by the array of effects Strauss can get out of orchestral instruments
as he depicts the contents of Quixote’s mind. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">What next? In 1899, Strauss cheekily conducts <i>Ein Heldenleben</i> (A
Hero’s Life). It seems fairly obvious that the hero is himself. In a section
called “His Works of Peace” he quotes themes from his previous works. There is
a section called “His Adversaries” where solo woodwinds play ugly, stuttering
music easily interpreted as his critics. “His Consort” is a picture of his
wife, a Wagnerian prima donna; the musical directions are not just “andante” or
“allegro con brio” but “frivolously,” “haughtily,” “insolent,” “scolding,” and
finally a duet of instruments to be played “tenderly and lovingly.” The rest of it is more of a fantasy;
the Hero’s theme is loud trumpets; there is a long Battle Scene with
kettledrums, the thunder of a bass drum, and the sounds of troops and horses
rushing in every direction. The last section is called “Escape from the World
and Fulfillment of Life”, recalling some of the metaphysical/ religious moods
of <i>Death and Transfiguration</i>
and <i>Zarathustra</i>.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">So Strauss has done it: he has used his expert tools at musical
portrait-painting to express his own life. Or does he? For one thing, he is
only 35 years old and he has certainly not escaped from the world. He is not a
soldier and his music is not militaristic; the only adversity he has had is
with his critics, but he thrives on <i>succès
de scandale</i>, and has always come out ahead. The most realistic part is the
portrait of his moody wife, but that is not a picture of himself. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Moreover, in private life, Strauss is quite different than proud
and heroic. He is an energy demon and a workaholic, who will stay up until the
small hours of the morning; conduct a long string of concerts on the road,
writing out orchestra parts at odd moments during rehearsals. He stops to call
out instrumentalists for special praise. Although he is surrounded by musical
factionalists, he is not one himself; he conducts all sorts of music besides
his own; classics like Mozart, Tchaikovsky whom he introduces to Berlin; when a
journalist marvels at the complex scores Strauss writes interweaving themes
among instruments, he points out his young protégé, Arnold Schoenberg, who
needs 65 staves for his avant-garde music [Tuchman 346]. In company, Strauss
often engages in humorous buffoonery, sometimes cordial, sometimes sarcastic.
He has detachment on what he is doing; he is out to astound the world, and he
has the bag of tricks to do it.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">He gives up tone poems and turns to opera. This is a hard league
to play in; his first efforts, in the vein of Wagnerian-Germanic mythology, are
failures. His nose for scandal helps him to a new direction. Oscar Wilde had
written a play, <i>Salomé</i>, which was
banned in England as sacreligious and pornographic. But German theatre was in
an avant-garde mood, and Max Reinhard in Berlin produced a German version in
1903. Strauss sets it to music; it is prohibited in Berlin and Vienna, but
Dresden (Wagner’s old stronghold) allows it. It is a tremendous scandal and a
tremendous success. Salomé lusts after the imprisoned John the Baptist; when he
righteously rejects her as the devil incarnate, she seduces her step-father
into granting her any wish: the head of John the Baptist on a silver platter.
The opera ends with Salomé kissing the bloody lips and King Herod ordering his
soldiers to crush her to death with their shields. It is all rendered in
Strauss’s most dramatically controlled dissonances. At the premiere, there are
38 curtain calls demanding to play it again. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Strauss makes a tremendous amount of money on this production.
Searching for a sequel, he takes up another Max Reinhard production, <i>Elektra</i>, Greek tragedy rendered by Hugo
von Hofmannsthal, centering on a maiden who kills her mother Clytemnestra for
murdering her father. The music is as avant-garde as anything ever heard in an
opera house; it too is a huge event in 1909; it is so eagerly awaited that
Strauss receives the equivalent of $1 million in today’s money for the
publication rights. It is another <i>succès
de scandale</i>, enormously controversial, all the more sought out for being
banned. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">After that, what can you do for an encore? Strauss suddenly
reverses course. In 1911 appears <i>Der
Rosenkavalier</i>, beautifully conventional music in the style of Mozart,
anachronistically echoing the sounds of Viennese walzes by that other (Johann)
Strauss. Well, not entirely conventional. The opera opens in an 18th century
boudoir, a couple making love: it turns out to be two women, both in powdered
wigs, but one of them in the trousers of a man. Strauss sustains the
cross-dressing lesbian theme all the way through; there are no important male
characters and he writes unprecedented opera combinations for three sopranos. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Strauss’s most permanent triumph is also his last. In 1913,
Strauss creates a lavishly erotic ballet for the sensational Ballets Russes in
Paris; Stravinsky upstages him with <i>Le
sacre de printemps</i>. Strauss
would live to age 85, but the avant-garde had moved beyond him. Avant-gardes
have a way of doing that.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">The bottom line, really</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">We started with the question: does music express the emotions of
the composer’s external life? The answer, almost across the board, is no. In my
view, this makes composers not less interesting or less human; but takes us
more deeply inside the life-experience of what it’s like to be a great
musician. Yes, composers sometimes have traumas. When they have the skills that
make them great, music carries them above it all. It is a mistake to assume
that the only emotional events can be in the external part of a creator’s life.
Composing is the biggest part of your life, if you spend many hours a day at it
for months on end-- sometimes years with or without taking a break. Yes, many
of the great composers worked themselves too hard for their health. But then,
they were obsessed with it; they were addicted to it, they enjoyed it-- the
best and most meaningful hours of their lives. If we find listening to their
music a great experience, imagine what it must have been like to hear it taking
shape in your head or beneath their fingers. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">In your head is also what you know from your network: what you
have internalized of them; some to go beyond; some as rivals, some as
collaborators and allies. It is a social world of musicians playing in your
mind.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">References</span></i></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Chambers Biographical
Dictionary</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Cambridge Companion to
Music</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Harvard Dictionary of
Music</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Phil Goulding, <i>Classical
Music:The 50 Greatest Composers.</i> </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Charles Rosen, <i>The Classical
Style</i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Charles Rosen, <i>The Romantic
Generation</i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Tia DeNora, <i>Beethoven and
the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna</i>. </span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Barbara Tuchman, <i>The Proud
Tower: the World Before the War, 1890--1914. </i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Daines Barrington, “Account of a remarkable young musician,” <i>Transactions of the Royal Society, </i>1770.</span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">George Bernard Shaw, <i>The
Perfect Wagnerite.</i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, <i>Principles
of Orchestration.</i></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";">Claudio Benzecry, <i>The Opera
Fanatic.</i> </span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman";"></span></span></div>
<span style="font-size: large;">
</span>Unknownnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-56707024629464059012020-04-16T17:11:00.001-07:002020-10-19T11:47:18.724-07:00CHOPIN'S ANTI-NETWORK CREATIVITY<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Sociological
research finds creativity is concentrated in networks: the most creative in one
generation start their careers by contact with the most creative of the
previous generation. This is the pattern world-wide in the history of
philosophy, mathematics, and science. The pattern also appears in art and
music. But Chopin looks like an exception. Chopin is among the most famous
composers of all time. But he has no contact with the stars of the previous
generation. </span></span>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
seemingly comes out of nowhere. His father is a French servant on an estate
owned by a Polish aristocrat, who returns to Poland to escape the French
Revolution. In Poland, he becomes a tutor in French, the high-status
international language, then live-in master at a boarding school for boys,
where young Frédéric grows up among upper-class friends. His mother, an
educated woman from the aristocrat’s household, teaches him piano at an early
age. Chopin is treated as a child prodigy, composing by age 7 and touring
Poland in his early teens, regarded as a local Mozart. Chopin fits the pattern
of servants of east European aristocracy who became upwardly mobile through
music-- from Haydn through Liszt--<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>when
feudal lords sought reflected glory as patrons in the new era of musical fame. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Poland
had no famous musicians yet, but desperately wanted one in the era of national
struggles after Russia and Prussia partitioned Poland in 1795. Young Chopin
(born 1810) was groomed for the part in the 1820s. What Polish nationalists
wanted was grand political opera-- the prestigious musical genre of the time--
what Verdi (3 years younger) would supply for Italy with his resounding<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>operas of the 1850s that became rallying
cries for resistance against Austrian domination. Chopin never filled that
part, but national hope launched his early reputation as a pianist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Liszt, one year younger, set the example,
touring Europe as a teenager in the 1820s, both as a Hungarian nationalist
(although ethnically German) and as the first super-star whose concerts
infatuated mass audiences, like the Beatles of the 1960s. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Being
famous as a performer, however, is not the same as creating a lasting
reputation as a composer; and until the mid-1830s Chopin (when he is around 25
) had not yet composed the works that would join the repertoire of
classics. On theoretical grounds this is not surprising, since creating at the
forefront usually comes from an early network that launches you from the
previous high plateau of techniques. This network came late for Chopin. It is
true that in Warsaw, he was accepted as a pupil at age 6 by a grand-pupil
(pupil of a pupil) of Johann Sebastian Bach. Thorough training in Bach’s
keyboard music was the foundation of Chopin’s style-- it was one ingredient that
set him apart from other composers, and throughout his career Chopin would warm
up for performances of his own work by playing Bach. But Bach (who died in
1750) had been considered old-fashioned by proponents of new music even in his
own lifetime; and it was Chopin’s new blend that would make him one of the most
famous of innovators. Where did the other ingredients come from? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Road
Map:</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
enters the horizontal network of New Music</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Beyond
the Classic style: Tonic-dominant chord harmonies</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
before and after he finds his niche</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin’s
peak and decline: hustling on the music market</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin’s
distinctive style: Prelude in E minor</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin’s
ingredients: Baroque counterpoint plus Bellini arias</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dissonances
as plot tension: Prelude in A minor</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">History
of dissonance: Mozart’s quick resolution</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
and Mozart, dying young</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
enters the horizontal network of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>New
Music</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We
see young Chopin’s limitations in his early ventures outside of Poland, two
visits to Vienna in 1829 and 1830. Here there is more competition; Hummel’s
pupil Thalberg is the reigning virtuoso pianist (he would have a famous piano
duel with Lizst in 1835), and there are other musicians in the wake of Schubert
and von Weber. Chopin’s earliest music score is a piano settting of Mozart’s
famous duet from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don Giovanni</i>, “La ci
darem la mano”, but this was from 40 years ago and Vienna publishers seeking
new music turn it down. Prospects change when Chopin makes his way to Paris in
1831. By fortunate catastrophe, his old patrons and admirers from Poland had
arrived there in exile, after a failed uprising against Russian occupation in
1830; and since they had brought their fortunes in cash, he immediately has a
social and economic base of support. Chopin was the darling of the Polish
ex-pats in Paris even before he composed his great new works. Yet in the early
1830s Chopin still shared concert stages with other pianists, and he performed
other composers’ music as well as his own. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
wealthy international salons were a springboard, at first, because they hosted
the networks where Chopin encountered the cutting edge of the musical world:
Liszt, Berlioz, Mendelsssohn, Bellini. Chopin formed his distinctive style: not
so much by imitating them, but by close acquaintance with the new music then
generating popular enthusiasm, while finding his own niche. Liszt was famous
for his dramatic modulations and high-speed ripples of sound so dazzling that
it was rumoured his hands had six fingers.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Thalberg invented a way of playing the melody with both hands, and
accompaniment too, giving the impression he had three hands. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
reaction, Chopin composed pieces to show off his light touch, clear and
distinct in every voice. As a teacher, he would admonish his pupils not to
practice too many hours; the aim was not to build up muscles for loud
crescendos and acrobatic feats on the keyboard, but quiet delicacy. Liszt is
the master of the fast and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>loud; Chopin
becomes the master of the quiet and smooth. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
began by noting that Chopin is an exception to the pattern of creative persons
being pupils or followers of the stars of the previous generation. But there is
a second dimension of creative networks: a horizontal network of contemporaries
all breaking away from the older generation at the same time. In the 1820s and
30s, they were breaking away from Beethoven, whose symphonies and concertos
were so dominant that younger musicians thought nothing more could be done
along that line. Chopin taps into the horizontal network, indeed is greeted by
them as a new recruit to their cause. Liszt is quick to befriend him; Schumann,
who has started a musical periodical newspaper to promote the new music, gives
him enthusiastic reviews. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">But
horizontal networks of “young Turks,” a brotherhood of rebels, soon encounters
a problem of their own: if they all do the same new thing, most of them will
not get credit for it, the fame going to the one who most dramatically catches
the public eye. * Thus a circle of young rebels eventually start fighting with
each other, breaking away to promote their own version of the new style. Each
one has to create their own niche. Chopin quite soon recognizes that he needs
to do something to distinguish himself from Liszt and other dazzling pianists
drawing the big crowds..</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">*
To give just one example from the history of philosophy: Marx, Engels, Stirner,
Bakunin and others in the aftermath of Hegel agreed that the Idealist
philosophy must be replaced. But they soon quarreled with each other over what
direction to go. Their quarrels were constitutive of what they create as they
split up the post-Hegelian field.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such
quarreling itself was structured by what they had to do to make a distinctive
reputation. In this case, Marx upstages all the others. See Collins, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sociology of Philosophies, </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>for the worldwide historical pattern of
creativity by opposition. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
eventually becomes the prima donna of the Paris salons. One might describe him
as delicate/aggressive; always polite and agreeable with his high-status
friends and supporters, but frequently contemptuous of them in private. He is
admired and promoted by Liszt, Mendelssohn, and Schumann, but he dislikes their
styles and scorns their movement of “new German music” (i.e.
post-Beethoven).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Berlioz, striving to
establish a post-classical orchestral style, emphasizes the musical colour of
instrumental combinations; but Chopin rejects the idea of an alliance and
declares his preference for Bach and Mozart. The one Paris contact that Chopin
does imitate is Bellini, an opera composer, whose way of writing arias Chopin
adapted for piano melodies. The salon networks bring him together with the
avant-garde of art and literature, including Balzac and George Sand. Delacroix
is a close friend and supporter during Chopin’s growing illnesses, but Chopin
dislikes Delacroix’s painting and finds nothing in common with his emphasis on
colour over<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>form. Most of his friends
are political radicals, but he himself becomes conservative, despising
revolutions of any kind. Although in fact a social climber (or perhaps
because), Chopin clings to the lifestyle and milieu of aristocracy. Opposing
the main trends is Chopin’s niche. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chronology
tells the story. Chopin meets the cutting-edge musical networks during 1831-34
onwards. His most important works follow: the Preludes in 1837-41; Ballades and
Sonatas 1839; Polonaises 1834-42; Mazurkas and Nocturnes 1830-46. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">What
Chopin gets from the avant-garde is not new tools of the trade. He acquires a
sense of the competition in the field, a sense of where a distinctive niche can
be found. His unique resources are the counterpoint he has learned from Bach’s
disciple, combined with Bellini’s style of “never-ending” melody. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Beyond
the Classic Style:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Tonic-dominant chord
harmonies</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
is classified as a Romantic composer. In technical terms this doesn’t just mean
a love-lorn sentimentalist, but a method of composing music that comes after
the Classic style (Haydn-Mozart-Beethoven), which in turn followed the Baroque
(Bach and Handel.) These categories are rather clichéd, and music historians
tend to explain these shifts in terms of the psychology and emotions (or lack
thereof) in the music. But you can actually see the shift in how the music is
written-- and this is what determines what it sounds like. You can be as
sentimental as you like, but if you can’t write the notes and harmonies in a
particular way, it won’t work. So how did Chopin do it? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
comes along when Classic composing techniques are morphing into something different.
The core of Classic composition is the tonic-dominant pattern. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Tonic</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
is the basic note in the scale of the key you are playing in. In the key of C
major, these are the white keys of the piano, starting with C and going up the
octave via D-E-F-G-A-B-C. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">tonic</i>
chord is C-E-G. We can also call this 1-3-5. These intervals resonate well
together and give a bright, cheerful sound. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5E-JdNGbaD2Vm9bT5wR_iebJcV5XeHrsIi_AXIvLkJMTIfRoFMiObR2Trw_M3ZAIAyAIsqnxOIcQZXsgJ3lkT_IxyRBfyV-Fn1k263xb4NH45zIPaH_nJeJohTm0Q51MWYrvGVZdOJ-g/s1600/tonic-dom%253DCmaj-G7th011.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="320" data-original-width="1600" height="78" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5E-JdNGbaD2Vm9bT5wR_iebJcV5XeHrsIi_AXIvLkJMTIfRoFMiObR2Trw_M3ZAIAyAIsqnxOIcQZXsgJ3lkT_IxyRBfyV-Fn1k263xb4NH45zIPaH_nJeJohTm0Q51MWYrvGVZdOJ-g/s400/tonic-dom%253DCmaj-G7th011.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If
we start on the 5th note and skip upward every other white key, we get the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dominant</i> chord: G-B-D-F. This is
smoothest-sounding chord that isn’t the tonic. Other than its own octave (C-C
an octave up or down), the micro-tone vibrations of C sound best with G. It is,
so to speak, a resting place away from home.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The G chord or G-7th chord (with the F) creates a tension in the
listener, but this tension is easily resolved by sliding into the tonic chord.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> G stays the same, since it exists in both
chords; the other notes pivot around it: B goes up to C; D goes up to E, and F
goes down to E or up to G.</i> Melody notes don’t have to move very far to get
from a tonic chord to a dominant chord, or vice versa.* </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">*The
same principle applies to all other keys. Tonic is 1-3-5, counting from
whatever note you start on;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>dominant is
5-7-2-4 (or played in any other order, 2-4-5-7 etc.). Adding the 7th (F is the
7th note going up the G scale) to a dominant chord increases the tension, since
there is one more note your ear is striving to resolve back onto the tonic
chord.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
tonic-dominant system has been the normal mode in Western music ever since the
mid-1700s. Most popular music uses it, even in the era when 20th century
“serious” or “art” composers were using more and more dissonances and creating
music that avoided resolving back to the tonic. In this respect, rock n’ roll
and Beethoven are quite similar. Consider a simple example, the children’s
nursery tune, here in the key of C major:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mary
had a little lamb<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[E-D-C-D-E-E-E]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[accompanied by tonic chord C-E-G]</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Little
lamb [D-D-D] [dominant chord G-B-D]</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Little
lamb [E-G-G] [tonic chord]</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mary
had a little lamb<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[E-D-C-D-E-E-E]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[tonic chord]</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Its
fleece was white as<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[E-D-D-E-D]
[dominant chord] snow. [C] [tonic chord]</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
is a typical song form. The melody is sung or played twice. Each time it goes
from tonic to dominant back to tonic. Most rock n’ roll songs do this too,
while adding a few more chords, notably the<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
subdominant 4-6-1 (F-A-C in the key of C), or F-A-C-E flat (i.e. F 7th)</i>.
This is the distinctive “blue-note”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>of
jazz and blues, since E-flat clashes with E of the tonic chord. Even with this
cool-sounding dissonance, rock n’roll almost always resolves back to the tonic
before long.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
before and after he finds his niche</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
becomes simultaneously more old-fashioned and more modern as he developed his own style. His earliest work is
more narrowly in the tonic/dominant style. For example, a waltz written in
1829, before he came to Paris, has a conventional sequence of chords in the
accompaniment:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Chopin<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Waltz </i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;">(1829)</span></span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh81KfcL646c9wtqar_GkbS-Ewd_MuFYoaDGceP4uFPetEnHl-vtJBN3LtPStFZ99hYHR4BGf76QU8CkGtCo19r9kzmZr8E4sehMfcWtt5KhCcyp3IZkjrj-DQ3Xuhf90Cxu3n2KPvXg8/s1600/ChopinWaltz-1829.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="758" data-original-width="1600" height="302" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjh81KfcL646c9wtqar_GkbS-Ewd_MuFYoaDGceP4uFPetEnHl-vtJBN3LtPStFZ99hYHR4BGf76QU8CkGtCo19r9kzmZr8E4sehMfcWtt5KhCcyp3IZkjrj-DQ3Xuhf90Cxu3n2KPvXg8/s640/ChopinWaltz-1829.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span><br />
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
score is in D-flat major, and the chords as you read across the bottom clef
are: </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">D-flat
major [tonic], A-flat major [dominant], B-flat 7th, E-flat 7th, A-flat major
[dominant], and again:</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">D-flat
major, A-flat major, B-flat major, E-flat major, A-flat 7th, D-flat major
[tonic]. </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
is mostly the cycle of fifths. A-flat major is the dominant, the second most
common chord in the classical style and its descendants.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">One
can hear how much Chopin changed by listening to his Piano Concerto No. 1,
written in 1830 before reaching Paris. It is an incongruous combination of
orchestral effects in the style of Beethoven symphonies, loud blasts of chords
in brass and massed strings, alternating with passages of lyrical piano, nice
melodies with familiar chord progressions. It contains little that is
memorable, nothing comparable to the haunting effects of his famous Preludes.
If Chopin had composed nothing but this piano concerto, it would not be
remembered. Chopin soon recognized this was not the direction he would make his
mark, and composed no more music for large orchestral ensembles. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
found his niche in music for the salon, not for large public concert halls. Big
concerts had bigger payoffs (5000 francs or more-- multiply by a factor of
perhaps 5 for current dollars) for the few piano concerts Chopin gave when
desperate for money. But he felt uncomfortable in big halls, where his light
touch did not carry well; and the exclusivity of private salons appealed to his
sense of eliteness. Probably he felt out of his element, where he could not
keep up with Liszt or Thalberg-- Chopin even said Liszt could perform his music
in public better than he could himself. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin’s
peak and decline: hustling in the music market</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
came along at just the right time to specialize in intimate piano pieces. The
lightweight piano of Beethoven’s day had been surpassed by stronger and more
resonant pianos. It was one of the most explosive consumer markets of the
industrial revolution. Pianos were now constructed with metal frames that did
not warp and allowed tighter strings with stronger sounds all across the range
from low base to high treble. And they began to be mass-produced, for an expanding
middle-class whose prime form of entertainment, as well as claim for cultural
status, was a piano in the home. By the 1840s, there were 60,000 pianos in
Paris. Along with this came a demand for piano music. The economics of a
composer’s career took a new direction. Where previously they had depended on
patrons (or the hyper-competitive world of getting an opera produced), famous
composers now could make a living by selling music scores. Music publishing had
become big business.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Recorded music did not come along until the
early 1900s. In the decades from 1830s through the 1890s, if you wanted to hear
music other than by attending a concert, you needed a piano, someone in your
home who could play it, and printed sheet music. Operas and orchestral music could
be heard in piano arrangements. One of the ways that Liszt padded his income
was arranging piano versions of popular operas. At the beginning of his Paris
career, Chopin did a little of this too. But his niche was short pieces, like
preludes, because they sold well. Obviously, Chopin was far from being a hack,
but the economic dimension blended with his special skill. Chopin’s is probably
the most beautiful music that an average piano player can perform, not to
mention professional pianists and musicologists who see deep excellences in his
scores.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fame
brought a composer publishing contracts and high-paying pupils. Concerts were
the best way to fame, but Chopin preferred salons where he could pretend to be
uncommercial, just another distinguished guest of the aristocracy. This caught
him up in a cycle of expenditure. He dressed like a dandy, a style-setter in
opera cape and pale gloves, dark gray trousers (no stripes), velvet waistcoat
(with a small pattern). His rooms must have dove-gray wallpaper with a dark
green border, “nothing loud or vulgar,” and needed a private entrance not
shared by children or servants.To make the proper impression on aristocratic
pupils, he kept a grand coach to arrive at piano lessons. It took him until the
mid-1830s to work himself up to a comfortable level of fame and prosperity
(charging $100 per lesson), while his expenses grew along with his status. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
combination of his economic situation, his spendthrift habits, and his need to
keep up an aristocratic front probably contributed to Chopin’s declining health
during his years of greatest fame. He found himself hustling more and more--
teaching six or seven pupils a day, attending several salons in the evening and
playing piano into the small hours of the morning. He got some relief in the
summer months, living in a country mansion where he had time to compose. His
country hostess and mistress from 1838<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(age 28) onwards was George Sand, pseudonym for Aurore Dudevant, an
aristocratic heiress and quasi-divorcée, famous writer and exemplar of women’s
sexual liberation. But living with Sand created its own strains, with her
multiple affairs -- she had a fling with all the Paris celebrities-- and
quarrels with her own children over their failed careers and arranged
marriages. Chopin distanced himself from her in 1846-- henceforth no more
idyllic vacations in the country. His last years were spent in the city,
hustling even harder for pupils. In 1848, months of revolution and political
turmoil in Paris drove away aristocratic patrons. Chopin finally had to accept
an invitation to tour Britain. It was just the kind of public appearances he
abhorred, in large halls where his playing could scarcely be heard. English
weather and the constant strain of respiratory and digestive illnesses finished
him off. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin’s
distinctive Style: Prelude in E minor </span></i></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">We
can capture the distinctiveness of Chopin’s technique if we look at two of his
compositions from 1837-9. I have chosen some of his simplest music, accessible
even to persons with a slight acquaintance with reading music. The striking
thing about Chopin is that he makes the simple sound beautiful, never banal or
boring. How does he do it? </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Let
us start with Prelude No. 4 in E minor. The key is easy, only one sharp, and
the tempo is Largo-- slow, dignified, unhurried. We will walk through it,
starting with the melody in the upper clef; then the chords in the lower clef.*</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">*
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I suggest that you play the upper or
melody line on the piano, and also try to sing it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Each bar or measure has 4 beats, and we will
go through it bar by bar. Many of the bars repeat themselves, especially in the
melody line.</i><span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-font-style: italic; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">For orientation,</span><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Chopin’s E minor Prelude begins and ends
with the tonic/dominant sequence. (The tonic chord is E-G-B; the dominant in B -
D sharp - F sharp.) What happens in between is what makes Chopin distinctive.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">BARS
1-8</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuCtmO6R0BfxZYZxsD0c4nZ7islvClCAP3Ml_2xm5BmheruLjXNcpqJKcMBND-pVDq-vlI9djsLMAFXQ6h41AlJE8-aBOjIpOMBkK_m9r4knI_gyl-sC47-hqpvop_f0mk4xycHGoq5p8/s1600/ChopinPrelude4%253D1-8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="659" data-original-width="1600" height="260" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjuCtmO6R0BfxZYZxsD0c4nZ7islvClCAP3Ml_2xm5BmheruLjXNcpqJKcMBND-pVDq-vlI9djsLMAFXQ6h41AlJE8-aBOjIpOMBkK_m9r4knI_gyl-sC47-hqpvop_f0mk4xycHGoq5p8/s640/ChopinPrelude4%253D1-8.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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</div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
melody line jumps an octave to high B [bar 1], holds it for 3 beats, then the
4th beat goes up to C [bar 2]. Same thing repeats for bars 3-4. Then it slowly
descends through bars 7-8.</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
same pattern occurs over and over: hold the main note for 3 slow beats, then a
brief note upward, or drop to a new note, with long slow holds again.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">BARS
9-12</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi07XpESBpuCksszhSvi4k6XzYgmxSKzp1xXjXxSHLLTFaJ93-zkX-9CmgwAO4bYoftYTJAFFuucFvjkmogDbE2o5napUaMFWe4-2tHBKdyamZwzCVuqJ09AQO9vTXjEmUgTDO5AxrUsAw/s1600/ChopinPrelude4%253D9-12.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="296" data-original-width="1600" height="118" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi07XpESBpuCksszhSvi4k6XzYgmxSKzp1xXjXxSHLLTFaJ93-zkX-9CmgwAO4bYoftYTJAFFuucFvjkmogDbE2o5napUaMFWe4-2tHBKdyamZwzCVuqJ09AQO9vTXjEmUgTDO5AxrUsAw/s640/ChopinPrelude4%253D9-12.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bar
9 continues descending, 3 beats A, 1 beat G-sharp. Bar 10 briefly livens up the
melody line, with a little up-and-down riff of 8th-notes, settling in bars
11-12 onto F-sharp. </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">BARS
13-16</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuKXk9QaeSwz8Quwctau5mLuz0Bmu1xD9YPm4YZ9NuwrplSmSFwYI6qXrnSXSuzwwumoWxQaEwtwOfX-suqYwJMGtKJaK8Yx8kvj2Mcqpg_4-0NLlgA-LatuE8sExFUEHKTnO6kH_2F9Q/s1600/ChopinPrelude4%253D13-16.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="266" data-original-width="1600" height="106" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiuKXk9QaeSwz8Quwctau5mLuz0Bmu1xD9YPm4YZ9NuwrplSmSFwYI6qXrnSXSuzwwumoWxQaEwtwOfX-suqYwJMGtKJaK8Yx8kvj2Mcqpg_4-0NLlgA-LatuE8sExFUEHKTnO6kH_2F9Q/s640/ChopinPrelude4%253D13-16.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Finally,
in bar 13, we get another little descending 8th-notes riff that gets all the
way down to B-- repeating the starting note in the 1st measure--<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>before skipping up to high D-C-B, bringing us
in bars 14-15-16 exactly where we were in bars 2-3-4. </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bar
13 is the half-way mark and the turning point in the Prelude. We have run
through the melody once, and finally melody and chord are aligned on a B-7th
chord; the dominant chord which should bring us home to E minor. Instead, it’s back to the top, and we run through
the melody again, only this time with some new chord changes and a faster
melody line. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">BARS
17-26</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFtejGnYF8Bc8xHEztOG356ZNq0Zm3SprF7fQAvPp5dtugz8QjcTFLW_QDcKK_4NbXR7VL4c1SqOnf1bSsTfdH_dKZqs7W5mMwGrsk02x8fHmDS7xHF3b0fNxaeLj7_UwCvJyE4QFv-ls/s1600/ChopinPrelude4%253D17-26.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="712" data-original-width="1600" height="284" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjFtejGnYF8Bc8xHEztOG356ZNq0Zm3SprF7fQAvPp5dtugz8QjcTFLW_QDcKK_4NbXR7VL4c1SqOnf1bSsTfdH_dKZqs7W5mMwGrsk02x8fHmDS7xHF3b0fNxaeLj7_UwCvJyE4QFv-ls/s640/ChopinPrelude4%253D17-26.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">I
will skip bars 17-19, and pick it up again on the last note of bar 19: A
leading to 3 beats of F-sharp in bar 20; and same thing again bar 20 into 21 at
the end of which-- finally! F-sharp drops to E (home key). But not yet-- it
teases us for two more measures (bars 22-23): 3 beats E, back to 1 beat
F-sharp; and repeats. </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Bar
24 looks we’re there-- but not if you look at the left hand, which throws us a
switch, harmonizing E with a C-7th chord instead of E minor. We’ll finish up
the last two measures below.</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">That
is Chopin’s game: the melody note goes remote from home, then slowly drifting
downwards, briefly punctuated with slight upwards teasing notes. In chordal
terms, we jump an octave to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the 5th</i> (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">B, in the key of E minor</i>); slide all the
way down once; then back up again, slide down even further-- and a little
surprise before we finally resolve into the home key.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Shortly
we will look at the score again, this time for the bass clef (the left hand
piano part). But first, consider how Chopin has combined elements from several
styles, creating his unique sound.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin’s
ingredients: Baroque counterpoint plus Bellini arias</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
melody line in Prelude No. 4<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is unusual,
compared to Classical style. At first glance at the written score, it looks
simplistic. It has none of the ringing high notes, trills and vocal acrobatics
favored by opera singers throughout the history of previous opera. It is just a
long, slow, descent from B down to E. The descent is chromatic, and each step
is held a long time-- it would be an opportunity for a singer to show off her
voice quality. It is made even slower since in most bars the melody note is
held for three beats, then takes a short upward step on the fourth beat.
Everything about the melody echoes itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">These
brief rising notes usually create suspended chord dissonances.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These passing dissonances are quickly
resolved, although they keep on repeating.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>They give interest and tension to the melody line: imagine what it would
sound like if it were nothing but a straight descent from B down to F-sharp,
with every note held for four beats or even longer. These suspended dissonances
make the melody work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
type of aria was invented by Vincenzo Bellini, an opera composer from Naples
who moved to Paris in 1834 and became a friend of Chopin. Bellini was known for
the “never-ending melody”, his technique of stretching out the sequence of
notes to create sweetness and emotion in the aria. Chopin in effect makes the
piano sing a Bellini aria in the melody line, combining it with his
chromatically shifting counterpoint in the accompaniment. The combination is
the same that Puccini would use in the 1890s and early 1900s in operas with
full-scale orchestration (instead of the tonic/dominant accompaniment Bellini
still used). Think of the slowly descending aria “Vissi d’arte” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tosca,</i> or similarly nerve-melting
moments in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Madama Butterfly </i>that
leave you weak in the knees. Puccini is too sweet for some hardened music
critics, and it is true that he is more of a culmination than a pioneer of new
paths; but the point here is that the techniques that make such music work were
created in the lineage Bellini/ Chopin/ Wagner/ Puccini.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
Prelude No. 4, the overall design is counterpoint, the style of composition
that preceded Classical, and that dominated in the century leading up to
Bach.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Counterpoint itself developed out
of medieval music, which for centuries consisted of singing one line only. When
more voices were added, each one followed its own melody. Counterpoint was a
technique of singing or playing lines simultaneously, guided by rules for what
kinds of relationships there could be between two notes heard at the same time.
It had no tonic and no dominant. Various chord intervals were created as the
music went along, but the chords were not driving the melody the way they do
with Classical music. Chords did not resolve into each other, but just happened
coincidentally as the result of the combined melody lines. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
is essentially what Chopin was doing. The E minor Prelude is harmonic to the
extent that the melody and chord lines start out and end in the same key. But
in between, they go their own way. The overall effect of the chords is a series
of coincidences. To be sure, original counterpoint did not sound like Chopin;
for one thing, he is much more chromatic than early counterpoint, and the
development of keyboard instruments made it possible to play a lot more notes
in faster rhythms. Chopin’s counterpoint is based on Bach. His set of 24
Preludes, in all the major and minor keys (more or less), is patterned on
Bach’s systematic compositions displaying the possibilities of the clavichord.
Bach is also similar since he composed in the early 18th century, when the
tonic/dominant system was coming in, and thus combined elements of it with
counterpoint. Chopin also sounds like Bach’s predecessors and contemporaries
such as Pachabel and Albinoni, who ring through the changes of chords that
arise above a chromatically changing base line. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
chord accompaniment line<span style="mso-bidi-font-style: italic;"></span></span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">BARS
1-8 AGAIN</span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYUSmsdPsKv0qXIJyO4Sa8UAiamNHL8vyOhmXa5FGOZmRq28ZKuvjNBCbfAMxKfXn7wFWokXLoDhAL7dMycsdeObptWk9YwTPblmSC73BJu3yRge-KQ0Ymvf58CZ6xeQZj1f4XcJwPcW0/s1600/ChopinPrelude4%253D1-8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="659" data-original-width="1600" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjYUSmsdPsKv0qXIJyO4Sa8UAiamNHL8vyOhmXa5FGOZmRq28ZKuvjNBCbfAMxKfXn7wFWokXLoDhAL7dMycsdeObptWk9YwTPblmSC73BJu3yRge-KQ0Ymvf58CZ6xeQZj1f4XcJwPcW0/s640/ChopinPrelude4%253D1-8.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Starting
with bar 2, we are in E minor, because the left hand is playing G-B-E.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is the E minor chord, except in inverted
order; E is not at the bottom, which creates a little feeling of tentativeness,
since the firmest chord would have the tonic note in the base line. The melody
line above it -- high B-- also fits the E minor chord. </span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
left hand plays the E minor chord eight times in the bar, a steady strumming of
eighth-notes in a rhythm that will be maintained until the final 3 bars
(24-26). The only exception is bar 13,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>where the melody has been played through the first time: the left hand
holds a dominant-7th chord for 1 beat, followed by three beats of silence while
the melody climbs back to the top to begin again. </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">A
classic tonic/dominant composer would undergird the melody line with chords,
not so much by strumming them repeatedly but breaking them into arpeggios
(skipping up and down the notes of a chord, which gives a lively but harmonious
quality to the “development” parts of a Beethoven sonata where he is
elaborating on the theme). Chopin creates more variation in a different way: he
gradually changes the strumming chords very slightly so that the harmony
shifts. In Prelude No. 4, he changes one or two notes in the chord at a time,
almost always descending a half-note. This gives a chromatic sound-- like going
through all 12 white and black keys in the octave, and violating the
straight-forward sound of a regular 7-note scale (also known as a diatonic
scale). </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
bar 3, the E minor chord keeps the top E but the lower notes drop to A and
F-sharp for 4 repetitions; then the top E drops to E-flat for the next 4 reps;
in bar 4, the top E-flat is still there but the bottom F-sharp drops to F
natural; then the E-flat drops to D (2 reps), then A drops to G-sharp (2 reps).
</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If
you trace with your finger across the base clef of the entire Prelude, you will
see the bit-by-bit dropping of one note at a time happens 18 times while the
melody line is first played through. Then back to the top again, dropping more
rapidly the second time around. The whole Prelude, in both the melody line and
the chord accompaniment, consists of a gradual downward flow. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
could sound mournful, but it’s beautiful. What keeps it from being boring? It’s
the steady stream of key changes, many of them strange and surprising. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">If
you include the melody note as part of the chord underneath it, the Prelude
starts out in familiar E minor; then shifts to something that sounds like B 7th
except for the E held over from the previous chord-- this would be called a
suspended 4th, since in a B chord E is the 4th note, and clashes with the
expected D-sharp right next to it. This tension is soon resolved by dropping
the E to E-flat (which is the same as D-sharp in the B chord); but then the
F-sharp goes to F, creating another strange-sounding chord, which resolves into
the next one (D minor 6th)-- and on and on. </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Every
once in a while there is a recognizable chord (E 7th in bar 5); but nothing is
stable, the whole rhythm of the piece is to keep changing the chords note by
note downwards.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Obviously,
Chopin is not being a tonic/dominant composer. Or is he? The melody is played
through twice. The first time it ends on B 7th-- the dominant, which should
resolve into the tonic E minor. Now we are back in the normal universe, except
that in bar 14 everything jumps back to the high B melody note and the chords
start their chromatic journey downward again, with a few more surprises. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Look
at the bottom line:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">BARS
21-26</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUNnfuhsAKOhP5-wWpQj_-y24qeVvTo1e_HTb0LCxmr_qp4JvBj1qYZ5obtQZZhaFopWYTbznQQLU-AW_NPsA8ZsilT0HLA3GjrGUi8Cf8jOx4kZ40ukeA-c81dV8gMSNKLgSVUNVyMxw/s1600/ChopinPrelude4%253D21-26.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="366" data-original-width="1600" height="146" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUNnfuhsAKOhP5-wWpQj_-y24qeVvTo1e_HTb0LCxmr_qp4JvBj1qYZ5obtQZZhaFopWYTbznQQLU-AW_NPsA8ZsilT0HLA3GjrGUi8Cf8jOx4kZ40ukeA-c81dV8gMSNKLgSVUNVyMxw/s640/ChopinPrelude4%253D21-26.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
bar 22, the melody line has finally ended its descent to the tonic E; but the
chord underneath it is C, then C 7th. In bar 23, the left hand underneath the
melody E goes to B-E-A, which is a suspended 4th; the next two eighth-notes
resolve this chromatically into B-E-G-sharp-- we’re home, except this is a E
major chord and we’re supposed to be in E minor. Two eighth-notes later we drop
to the expected E minor-- except that now the melody line rises to a suspended
F sharp, for one last bit of tension... </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
bar 24: the suspended F goes back to E, but instead of finishing, the low B
goes down to B-flat-- now we have a C 7th chord</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">--
where the hell is this going? Chopin piles on the suspense, breaking the
strumming rhythm of the entire Prelude by holding the chord for two beats. ---
Then--- 2 beats of silence, as prolonged as the pianist wants to make it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Now
both hands are in the base clef: left hand playing low B in octaves; right hand
playing E-F-sharp-B-E -- what the hell is this? it should be B-F-sharp-D-sharp
to create the dominant chord leading back to E.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>A half-note later, the chord resolves chromatically downwards, the E’s
become D-sharps, we’ve got our dominant, leading to the final measure which is
a full-scale whole note E minor chord:</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> THE END.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
sum: the first chord of the entire prelude is the tonic E minor; at the
half-way point between the first and second times through the melody, the
chords go from dominant B 7th to E minor; and again in the last two chords to
end on the tonic. In between, Chopin follows none of the normal chord
transitions.* </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">*
Not even the cycle of fifths, so common in Mozart and the Classicals: a
succession of chord changes, each a fifth apart, each one acting as a dominant
for the next tonic. The cycle of fifths is a staple of popular songs: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Twenty-six
[C major] miles a- [A minor] cross the [D minor] sea [G 7th]</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Santa
Cata- [C major] lina is a- [A minor] waiting for [D minor] me [G 7th]</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Santa
Cata- [C major] lina [A minor] the island [D minor] of ro- [G 7th] mance [C
major]</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
is a tonic/dominant composer at the beginning and end, while in between he
follows an entirely different pattern of chromatic changes. These create a lot
of strange-sounding but momentary dissonances. The reason Chopin could get away
with this, and why he has been so enduringly popular ever since, is because the
outer frame of his music is conventional. The audience recognizes the normal
harmonies and chord sequences at the beginning and the end, and occasional
points in between. It is like a journey away from home, but you eventually get
back there. This is the essence of post-classical music (I am resisting calling
it by the misleading cliché, “Romantic”). George Bernard Shaw, explaining
Wagner to the English public in the 1890s, said that Wagner starts with
dramatic but recognizable harmonies, then pulls further and further away (especially
in vocal parts of his operas), creating a tremendous feeling of tension; so
that when the tension is finally resolved in the climax, it is like a musical
orgasm. Chopin is a lot quieter, but the principle is the same.*</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">*
Musicologists have pointed out that many of Wagner’s most exotic chord effects
are there in Chopin. Although they never met, Wagner worked in Paris in his
struggling years of the early 1840s, and surely would have known Chopin’s
music. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dissonances
as plot tension: Prelude in A minor</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Try
another Chopin Prelude, No. 2 in A minor. This one is even more blatantly
disssonant, in the chords accompanying another sweet “never-ending” melody
line. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">PRELUDE
NO. 2<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>BARS 1-8</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDNfJOZhmulkYreb64P9MIR70BLjDoD07oFnWpKJO3xuCFzjxPK1f2E_V0_YFizeSdmJJdLnUhh_zruqlYAaJm9My81WZ9zwtQ_aYSpE41GMsS-Ko1M0j1OBc67p1GD3rcsuXnugRCSb4/s1600/ChopinPrelude2%253D1-8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="723" data-original-width="1600" height="288" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjDNfJOZhmulkYreb64P9MIR70BLjDoD07oFnWpKJO3xuCFzjxPK1f2E_V0_YFizeSdmJJdLnUhh_zruqlYAaJm9My81WZ9zwtQ_aYSpE41GMsS-Ko1M0j1OBc67p1GD3rcsuXnugRCSb4/s640/ChopinPrelude2%253D1-8.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Start
by tracing the left hand.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first three
bars are exactly the same, 8 eighth-note chords per bar, the second and fifth
chords clashing with the lower chord that makes a steady drone every other
half-beat. This rippling alternation goes on slowly-- Lento-- all the way down
to bar 19, when the melody line takes over and we get a traditional
dominant-tonic conclusion.</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
Prelude is in A minor, but you wouldn’t know it until the very last chord (bar
23). The beginning measures are especially ambiguous, since the left hand plays
two-finger chords. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The melody line
doesn’t start until bar 3, so in the first two bars, we hear only two notes at
a time: E-B / A-sharp-G / E-B / G-G octave / E-B / A-sharp-G / E-B / G-G.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">E-B
is an open fifth, the tonic and dominant notes of the E scale; but is it major
or minor? Open fifths have a hollow sound. The second chord has G as its upper
note, which fills in the minor third-- we are in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>E minor. --except that the low note is
A-sharp, a very dissonant combination. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Another
way to say it is that<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> the middle note of
the E chord wavers between B and A-sharp. B is the 5th of the E chord, but
A-sharp is an augmented 4th-- if you play A-sharp and B together, the result is
is a grating sound, especially when the other notes anchor it in the E chord.
Chopin softens the dissonance by having it appear only in two of the eight
chords in a measure; the E chord gets the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th repetitions,
the dissonant A-sharp-G chord gets the 2nd and 6th, while a bland G-G octave
gets the 4th and 8th</i>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
effect is that the accompaniment is constantly going in and out of harmony, “in
and out of tune”. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
same pattern repeats throughout the Prelude. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In bars 4-8, the basic chord is D-B, then D-A, then G-E-G,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>then B-F-sharp; and so on throughout</i>. The
2nd and 6th chords in each measure create a harsh dissonance, while the 4th and
8th chords usually soften it. This goes on all the way down to bar 19. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
gets away with what in the 1830s would have been considered a horrible
dischord. In one respect he pours it on: if it had been played fast it might
have just sounded like a passing ripple, but it is played Lento-- you can’t
avoid hearing it. But you soon get the idea-- this piece is driven by the
device of going in and out of key, in a predictable pattern. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">PRELUDE
NO. 2<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>BARS 9-23</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQN8yN6NVn2ZrGSjxv4zXKSQd57o_0GNHm1iW4OdITDSqmA55_RVJG3OCY69Jds_zi6YGocSYUqJFrL-v8cEATcKnjoWU1fAn6b9vbvSPQrRhNLEt033Ff06KrqGWslGpMxD8OJfmGhn4/s1600/ChopinPrelude2%253D9-23.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1110" data-original-width="1600" height="444" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQN8yN6NVn2ZrGSjxv4zXKSQd57o_0GNHm1iW4OdITDSqmA55_RVJG3OCY69Jds_zi6YGocSYUqJFrL-v8cEATcKnjoWU1fAn6b9vbvSPQrRhNLEt033Ff06KrqGWslGpMxD8OJfmGhn4/s640/ChopinPrelude2%253D9-23.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Now
for the melody line. The melody is simple; it has four phrases, all with the
same shape.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
bars 3-7, we start with E, held for three and one-half beats, then down to B
(the 5th of the E chord) for a half-beat, and up to D. Then D is held five and
one-half beats (ignoring a little F-sharp-E grace note), down to A (its 5th)
for a half-beat, and up to B, which is held for 6 beats (including a little
syncopated repetition of B).</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"> Altogether, the melody first time
through moves very lazily from E to D to B. We then get four beats of silence
in the melody line, while the left hand continues its alternating harmonic and
dissonant chords.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Second
time through (bars 8-12),<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> the same
pattern is shifted up to B, down to A (with the same grace notes), and then to
F-sharp (with the same syncopation).</i> Another silence (7 beats long) in the
melody line. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Third
time through (bars 14-19), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">same pattern
starting in A, down through F-sharp, to D.</i> After a 2-beat silence, we get:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Fourth
time the same melody starts, but more quickly (bar 20): <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">D three and one-half beats-- (including the grace notes), down to A
(its 5th).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But then (bar 21) B is added
above it, both held for two beats</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>B
above A, no other notes: what is this? it could be a segment of a B 7th chord,
ambiguous because the left hand is silent. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Then
two firm chord changes:<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> resolving the A-B
into G-sharp-B with E below it-- an E major chord-- not the B 7th we expected;
but then comes a full B chord (B-D-sharp-F-sharp-B)</i>. Bar 22 repeats the
conventional dominant/tonic closing even more emphatically: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">two beats E major chord, two beats E 7th.</i>
The ending (bar 23) is a full-fledged <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
minor chord rippling from low A upwards</i>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
is the first time Chopin gives us an A minor chord, although the piece is
titled Prelude in A minor. One might call it an A-minor tease. Also, a
tonic/dominant tease, since Chopin has been playing with ambigous and dissonant
chords all the way through. No worries: in the end, all is revealed; the cycle
of fifths is firmly repeated: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">B-7th-E
/<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>B-E7th /<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A minor</i>. Your tradition-accustomed ear is
cleansed. It was all a dream, and now you are waking up.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
History of Dissonances: Mozart’s quick resolution</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dissonances
of course had been used before. A mild dissonance had been a staple of Classical
compositions, certainly since the time of Mozart: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 2;"> </span>MOZART MINUET K.6</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh716zl4oITCM8gXQ7BR2b0FFALiGn0nwwWxzA5eY87dVyaeAlF1V10LiYGjxZ3L0bafPrHLcDqR3NgSN80upXmvv38c0QQPRbVmTl2WKfUbLL9m_dvzyW7XKIK7Dm5T_MEgT7XKjgf-k0/s1600/Mozart-K6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="579" data-original-width="1600" height="230" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh716zl4oITCM8gXQ7BR2b0FFALiGn0nwwWxzA5eY87dVyaeAlF1V10LiYGjxZ3L0bafPrHLcDqR3NgSN80upXmvv38c0QQPRbVmTl2WKfUbLL9m_dvzyW7XKIK7Dm5T_MEgT7XKjgf-k0/s640/Mozart-K6.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">In
the 8th bar, Mozart plays F-sharp in the right hand against G in the left; but
this resolves on the very next note, upper line going up to D, lower line down to
D and G-- i.e. resolving into the G chord. He does it again in bar 16, this
time playing a B above a low C, then resolving it into a C chord for the ending</span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Mozart
composed this when he was six years old, and it was quite standard-sounding
music for that time (1762). The value of the temporary dissonance is easy to
hear. If you play it G over G, C over C, it takes away some of the interest of
the piece. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">This
was a general principle, well understood by composers ever since the tonic/ dominant
system came into use. Dissonances drive the music forward, because the ear
wants them to resolve into another note. The rules of composition told you how
to do this, and to do so more or less immediately. Dissonances play the same
role in music as plot tension does in literature. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Dissonances
are even more important for tension-creating in Chopin, since he doesn’t
resolve them in the conventional way. They are much more frequent, and give a
distinctive bitter-sweet quality to his music. Mozart’s music is clear and sweet
because he got the most out of tonic/dominant harmonies with the briefest of
dissonances. With Chopin, if you change the dissonant notes to harmonies-- as
one can easily do with Prelude No. 2 on the piano-- it loses its quality. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
can be considered the first composer in the modern style (usually considered to
come after the Romantic style). But he knew how to please his audience, and he
didn’t take it too far. The pathway to modern music would increase the
dissonances and put off their resolution until later, or not at all.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
and Mozart: dying young</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Chopin
died in 1849, age 39. In this he resembles Mozart, who died at age 35, in 1791.
They lived in different music-market conditions. Mozart had to work harder,
because the amateur market for piano scores was as yet small. In his last
years, he was simultaneously producing operas-- not just composing and
directing them; taking commisions for church masses; giving orchestral
concerts, chamber music, anything that paid. No wonder Mozart wrote so much
music-- Opus numbers mounting over 600--- he needed the money. Like Chopin,
Mozart was a spendthrift, renting posh apartments in Vienna and keeping up with
aristocratic fashion as best he could. Mozart literally worked himself to
death, staying up all night trying to fulfill commissions. There were a lot of
pages to write out-- even if he composed tunes and harmonies in his head--
since he did large-scale works requiring scores for many instruments and
voices. Chopin wrote fewer pieces -- reaching Opus 68-- and these were shorter
and had fewer instrumental parts. But Chopin spent more time hustling than
Mozart, in a daily grind, out on the streets of Paris no matter his bad health,
making visits to give lessons and entertain salons. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
image of Chopin as a Romantic artist following his spontaneous impulses is far
from the truth. He worked hard over his music, obsessively revising, a
self-driven perfectionist. It was not Romantic fatefulness that killed Mozart
and Chopin at an early age; nor were they starving artists whose time had not
yet come. They had opportunities to become famous and make a lot of money, but
neither had a salaried position or a steady income. They lived among the
wealthy elite and disguised themselves as one of them, but they had to hustle
every day, piece-meal for what the music market could give them. Both worked
constantly and under a lot of strain. Whenever there was a temporary setback,
they had to hustle even harder. Both died struggling, to do what they did so
well, just one more day.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">It
is tempting to exclaim, what couldn’t they have done if that hadn’t died so
young! On the contrary, it is easy to see what they would have done if they had
survived their last sickness. It would have been more of the daily grind, with
all its strains and susceptability to illness. They were like boxers who
couldn’t afford to leave the ring, taking more and more punches until the final
knockout.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Liszt,
whose career as pianist more or less parallels Chopin’s, escaped alive.
How?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Liszt made a great deal of money on
concert tours-- more whole-sale income than piece-meal. He was not a
spendthrift. And he retired from touring at age 38, taking a salaried position
as musical director for the court at Weimar, where he composed at a leisurely
pace, and promoted the works of other new musicians, having made the transition
from entrepreneur to patron. He lived to 75. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">References</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Benita
Eisner. 2003. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chopin’s Funeral.</i>
Random House.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Harvard
Biographical Dictionary of Music. </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">1996. Harvard Univ. Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">The
Cambridge Music Guide. </span></i><span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1985. Cambridge Univ. Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Charles
Rosen. 1995. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Romantic Generation.</i>
Harvard Univ. Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman" , serif; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt; mso-bidi-language: X-NONE; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";">Randall
Collins. 1998. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sociology of
Philosophies. </i>Harvard Univ. Press.</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 16.0pt;"></span></div>
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div.WordSection1
{page:WordSection1;}</style>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-47733406852616148432019-06-18T15:55:00.000-07:002019-06-19T12:08:48.855-07:00WRITING WITH FORCE AND EASE<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Writing
is putting thoughts and arguments that are usually complex and multidimensional
into a single-dimensional flow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thoughts
about anything of intellectual interest usually go in several directions at
once; but writing always has to string one word and one sentence after
another.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All writing problems boil down
to this: choosing which words in which order. You have to make it flow through
a single sequence in time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">MACRO-STRUCTURE
COMES FIRST </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Structuring
is figuring out the sequence in which ideas will emerge. There are two main
levels of structure: the micro-structure of word by word within sentences; and
the overall macro-structure of the entire argument. The larger structure is
determining over what is within it, as structure tends to be set from the
outside in. Knowing what the larger structure of your argument is will help you
with micro-structuring sentences, but the reverse is not usually true.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">WORK OUT
STRUCTURE VIA AN OUTLINE</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
easiest way to work out the structure is to make an outline. This is often the
intellectually hardest part of writing, but there are routines you can use to
force your way ahead, even when it is very difficult.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Collect
your notes in one place. Wherever you jot your ideas—on margins in books,
scraps of paper, summaries of things you've read—try to boil these down into
major points and get them on one piece of paper. (Or as many pages as necessary;
but then you need to re-summarize them, as many times as you need until you can
see the whole thing at once.) Then go through it, for instance with a colored
pen, and try various sequences (A,B,C; 1,2,3, 3a, 3b, 3c, whatever) until you
get one that conveys your argument in a reasonable sequence. You will find
yourself collecting similar points together, but also wrestling with
contradictions and gaps. This may seem mechanical, but it also is a time that
can produce creative ideas.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If you
can't find an ideal sequence, or even decide which point to start with, be
arbitrary: pick a starting point and go from there. If you can't decide which
point comes next, be arbitrary: pick one and string the others after it. All
that means is that no one point obviously leads into or dominates the others,
and they all have to be treated on the same level. Don't waste time over such
quandaries; a crucial factor is getting your argument flowing, and you can't do
that by being stalled at choice-points.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">WHEN YOU’RE
STUCK, GO BACK AND WORK ON THE OUTLINE</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When you
are actually writing, you will sometimes get stuck. You can't figure out what
to say next; the words won't come; you can't decide on the next sentence or the
right term.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you are seriously stuck,
it is because of a problem in the macro-structure of your argument, not in the
surface structure of the sentence itself. You don't know where your argument is
going.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If I go back and look at the
outline—sometimes I'll make a new outline based on what I've written so far—I
always find that I got stuck at the point where my outline no longer told me
where to go next. Do your revising on the outline.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It saves a lot of trouble in rewriting; it's
a lot easier to tear up unsatisfactory outlines and start again than to have to
do it with unsatisfactory drafts of your paper or book.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">OUTLINES
CAN BE JUST IN YOUR HEAD</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If you
really know what you're going to say, a written outline may be
unnecessary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you feel that potential
flow of sentences ready to pour out, go ahead and write it. But you'll have the
outline in your head, and essentially will be saying to yourself: first I'll
say this, then that, then....<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course,
the process of writing itself can be creative; you can get new ideas on the
fly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But they will be effective ideas
only if a structure of argument emerges as you go along. When it happens,
consider yourself lucky. When it doesn't (or when it stops), go back to
outlining.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">TAKE
DOWN THE SCAFFOLDING WHEN YOU'RE THROUGH</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">An
outline may go through several phases: a messy collection of notes and ideas;
various ways of getting them in order; and a final outline page reduced
to a set of headings in sequence. Some of this will get explicitly transferred
into the paper or book itself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But good
writing is that which is not cluttered by a lot of pedantic-looking</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"I.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>IA.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>IA.1<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ia.2<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>etc." Some of this is useful to guide the reader through (see
TRAFFIC below). But it is far better for the structure to be implicit in the
writing, than overlaid with these markers. (If you want to see an example of a
clumsy use of such markers, look at Oliver Williamson's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Markets and Hierarchies:</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>an
important and intelligent book, but very unpleasant to read.) These
order-markers were useful in getting your argument in sequence, but now the
sequence will generally carry itself. Get rid of most of the numbers, letters,
and hierarchies of sub-headings. To the extent that such markers are still
useful, disguise them as vivid and apt titles for sections of your argument.
Retain numbers and letters only in places where you genuinely have to list a
series of points that are arbitrarily collected, that have no intrinsic order.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">DON’T
WASTE SUB-HEADS ON BOILERPLATE</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Headings
and sub-headings are a good place to make sure the reader gets your point. Don’t
waste them on conventional labels like “Introduction” “Summary” “Discussion.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Write like Nietzsche, not like a bureaucrat. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">USE
SPACES AS HIDDEN STRUCTURE FOR YOUR ARGUMENT</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sections
of your argument stand out better when surrounded by some empty space. This is
a visual trick to influence the reader's mind. More than that, writing
generally improves by adding space within it. Break up your paragraphs when
they get too long. Usually this is not hard to do, even if you have to do it
arbitrarily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You may think that the
thread of a complex argument is being kept together by having it all in the
same paragraph, but the effect on the reader tends to be to bury it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The same
thing holds for sentences. When they get too long and complicated, it is almost
always better to break it into several sentences. This is not hard to do, even
if you have to repeat a subject noun to do it. Bertrand Russell (who was a
wonderfully lucid writer) gave this as his one piece of advice on writing: whenever
you have to convey something complicated in a sentence, put at least part of it
in a separate sentence. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A negative example is Pierre Bourdieu. He has even
explicitly defended himself (in the Preface to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Distinction</i>) for his
inordinately long sentences and paragraphs; he claimed that the complexity and
subtlety of his ideas, and all the qualifications they involved, required this
form of writing. Don't believe it. Russell, Wittgenstein, and other
philosophers have dealt with matters of equal subtlety in lucid (and
well-spaced) prose;* and one could certainly rewrite Bourdieu to good
intellectual as well as stylistic advantage. Habermas is just as complex as
Bourdieu, and better organized; if his writing seems heavy, it is for other
reasons, more on the level of the way he expresses his concepts. Erving Goffman
was not only well-organized, but also had a light and elegant touch. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
Russell was obviously very good at structure. When you have that skill, you
don't have to rewrite much. Russell once quipped: "I have only rewritten
once in my life, and the result was so much worse than the first time that I
resolved never to do it again."</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">ORDERING
WORDS IN SENTENCES</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Writing
sentences is not so difficult if you follow the above advice: get the overall
structure so you know where you're going in each part of the argument; break up
long involved sentences (which will also give you an easier syntax). Inside
particular sentences, these points help:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>> Use the active voice more than the
passive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is old advice, but still
good. But no need to be rigid about it. Do whatever sounds right. Whatever is
easiest to write, usually turns out to be easiest to read. (Sartre had a
terrible time writing his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Critique of
Dialectical Reason</i>, and it shows.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>> Try to keep the parts of a verb
phrase together, where possible. Get the main action of the sentence into the
reader's attention early on, and move the qualifications to the end. This isn't
necessarily the way it will first come out in your head, or on paper. Don't
worry about it; just get the sentence out and then engage in
"word-processing", moving things around to where they fit best. With
more experience, rearranging<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sentences
happens faster and faster, and eventually will occur almost before you have it written
down.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>> The most important thing in
getting writing done is the flow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you
notice your sentences need to be broken up, reorganized, etc., but it seems
tedious and a side-track to do it now, then don't. You can always do it later,
as long as you know what it is you have to do. The hardest part of writing is
getting that first draft on paper. Once it's there, you can always fix it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>> If you can't decide which of two
words, or two expressions, you want to use, don't get bogged down over the
decision.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There is no such thing as
"the perfect word".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>When I'm
in this situation, I just write both words (both expressions) down, one above
(or alongside) the other, and later come back and cross one out. If they're
both about the same, then it doesn't make any difference which to choose, so
just be arbitrary.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Again, with writing
experience, the choices happen faster and more easily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">anything</i>
to keep up the flow.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">WHEN IN
DOUBT, THROW IT OUT</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">My
father-in-law, who was a newspaper editor and columnist, gave this as his one
piece of writing advice, and it has always worked. When revising, or just
plodding along deciding how to say things, it almost never hurts to cut. If you
can't decide whether or not to cut a word, phrase, or paragraph, cut it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">TRAFFIC
SENTENCES</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There
are two kinds of sentences: substantive sentences, and traffic sentences.
Because complex arguments do not necessarily flow in a single sequence of
ideas, it is sometimes necessary to stop and explain the order in which you are
giving them: in other words, directing verbal traffic. One of the major
differences between good and bad writing is that the former uses traffic
sentences forthrightly, while the latter avoids them. If there is a problem
with the complexity of your exposition, be up-front about it. Let the reader in
on the problem:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"This topic is
complicated because... To unravel it, we have to pull apart these features... I'll
take them in the following order..." (An example is Habermas, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Theory of Communicative Action</i>. Although
Habermas is not a stirring writer, he is clear on the structural level, and he
uses traffic sentences well. Student papers, on the other hand, often get
balled up for lack of this.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Summaries
are a kind of traffic sentence, but coming at the end of the argument and
looking back to where it has gone. This can be useful, but you have to use your
judgment as to when the summary is really useful to keep things straight (and
especially when it leads into the following part of the argument). Summaries
which are too mechanical, or which break up the flow of the argument, really
fall under the category of "scaffolding" which should have been taken
down.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Questions
(including rhetorical questions) can be a graceful way of setting up the flow
of what is to come next, or acting as local traffic sentences. Immanuel
Wallerstein, who is quite a good writer, organizes a lot of dense material this
way. ("The other element involved in banditry was part of the nobility,
but again which ones?..." <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Modern
World System</i>, volume 1, p. 142. "What does our argument add up to so
far?..." etc.) Questions tend to give a nice flow to the sentences, and to
lighten up heavy indicative exposition.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">JARGON</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The use
of special technical vocabulary is a matter of taste. Often things can be said
more directly without it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lord Kelvin,
the physicist, said that if a theory really has something to say, it should be
possible to explain it in words your bartender can understand. That may be
exaggerated, but it is usually true for sociology. Some writers, like Bertrand
Russell, got a lot of malicious pleasure out of deflating jargon, by defining
its meaning in simple terms. (C. Wright Mills once did this in a famous passage
on Talcott Parsons.) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But if
you write without jargon, bear in mind you are taking a risk. Technical
language shows off one's membership in a particular linguistic community, and
people who are committed to a professional specialty tend to automatically put
down people who don't use their jargon. Whether or not to use jargon is more of
a social decision than a stylistic one; it represents different strategies
toward the intellectual field. But let’s at least be honest with ourselves
about what we are doing. Contemporary neo-Marxists (which includes most of the
post-modernist/ post-structuralist/ post-colonialist/ liberationist movements)
tend to be bad offenders here. They are among the most jargon-ridden of today's
intellectuals, which reflects the fact that they write esoterically for an
elitist group of intellectuals. This is a remarkable example of self-deception
for movements which regard themselves as anti-elitist and liberating. Marx
himself was one hell of a lot better writer (probably because he hung around
with Heinrich Heine, the liveliest of all German poets—and because he genuinely
wanted people to get the point). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">VOCABULARY
IN GENERAL</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A lot of
otherwise competent writers in sociology are flat, because they give us a
steady diet of abstractions: heavy nouns and verbs which are really nouns with
verb endings.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>If you have any good
metaphors, and any good colloquial turns of speech, this is where they are most
needed. But it has to come naturally; artificial metaphors (or old clichés)
have the opposite effect from what they are intended to do. If you can't write
vividly, too bad; don't try to force it.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">PERSONAL
REFERENCE<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">One
tendency of mediocre writers is to try to be extremely impersonal, never using
the word "I".<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good style, on
the contrary, is quite willing to say "I will come to this later...."
Or the word "we:"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>"So far
we have found...."<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First person
pronouns are pretty much necessary in traffic sentences.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is foolish and clumsy to try to avoid
personal pronouns when they are the most direct way of making your point.
Over-formality is a mark of the semi-literate. (Unfortunately, we find a lot of
this among copy-editors and journal reviewers. Dealing with these kind of
people is an occupational hazard.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Exception:
starting sentences with “I think…” or “I believe that…” is usually just extra
verbiage that will annoy the reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Go
ahead and say what you have to say. If you need to write that way to get the
flow of words on paper, okay, but come back at the end and cut out the
unnecessary words.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A
related problem, common in abstract social science, is to write so as to avoid
any active agent in one's sentences at all.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>For example, George Herbert Mead, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Philosophy
of the Act,</i> p. lxiv: "The undertaking is to work back from the
accepted organization of human perspectives in society to the organization of
perspectives in the physical world out of which society arose." Mead was a
poor stylist for this and other reasons. Max Weber, by comparison, is
structurally a much better writer, even when he is being very abstract.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">GOOD
WRITING MEANS RE-READING</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
difference between mediocre writing and good writing is often just taking the
time when you are finished to go back over what you have written, and making
corrections. This is the difference between a memorable article or book, and a
turgid one; or between an A+ paper and a B+ paper. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Personally,
I enjoy re-reading what I have written (unless I’ve done a terrible job of it,
which means a lot of work hasn’t been done yet). <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even in good writing, there are a lot of
things to clean up: typos (leaving them in shows you don’t care what your
writing looks like); places where I can say it more sharply with fewer words,
or sometimes where something has to be better explained; good ideas I’d like to
add, or sometimes where too many things are being said and it’s better to save
some of them for another piece. Get rid of anything that sounds like a cliché,
unless you’re being sarcastic. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A harder
task is places that repeat what I’ve said somewhere else in the same paper. The
question then is: do I need to make this point in different contexts? If so, OK.
If not, it’s annoying to the reader to read the repetitions. So I flag them all
and make a list of where I said this; then figure out where is the best place
to introduce it, and cut the others. Some very good writers I know are sloppy
in this respect; but this kind of sloppiness can make it hard to get your stuff
published. – So why do I enjoy this? As your text gets sharper, it acquires
more rhythm. It <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">feels</i> right. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">GETTING
YOURSELF GOING</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">"Writer's
block" is a common complaint: you just can't get yourself to start
writing. It's basically a matter of getting into the rhythm. If you write every
day, it's easier the next day. A lot of writers start off by going over what
they wrote the previous day, or their outline, or reading something you want to
argue with. But still, you may feel you are starting cold. Just get it going,
no matter how.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first words on paper
aren't important; you can always come back and cross them out later. Good flow
by the writer is the key to good reception by the reader.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So keep plugging until you get into a good
rhythm, and then throw out the stuff that isn't good.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When I can’t
get myself going at the keyboard, I take a pad of paper and scribble out the
easiest parts of the argument I can think of, as fast as I can. This is a trick
to tell myself, it doesn’t really matter, this is just a preliminary draft. After
a while it starts to flow (assuming I don’t have a macro-structure problem
where I don’t know what I want to say). Then you’re home free—sort of. After it’s
on paper I tell myself, now the rest is just typing it up. That’s not really true,
but whenever you get momentum, better expressions and new ideas come
easily.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes this will get me into
a prolonged writing binge: I feel like I ought to take a break, get a drink of
water or something—but, when you’re riding that horse you want to go as far as
you can with it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">LUCIDITY,
FORCE, AND EASE</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">"Lucidity,
force, and ease:"<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Edmund Wilson, a
wonderfully competent writer and critic, singled these out as the great virtues
of classic prose. Lucidity is what all the advice about structure is supposed
to produce; if you can get the hang of it, and develop a sense of verbal
rhythm, the ease will be there too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Where does force come from? The energy of one's writing comes mainly
from having something to say. The argument drives itself along, because it is
going somewhere.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How do
you have something forceful to say? Mainly, by being involved in the
intellectual discourse of your field, knowing where the arguments are, and
trying to move it forward. Set some high standards for yourself, so that you
know in what direction to move. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">TO BE A
GOOD WRITER, READ GOOD WRITERS</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The way
you acquire intellectual and stylistic standards is by being exposed to the
best in the people you read. One reason sociologists are often bad writers is
because they read so many other sociologists (or philosophers, or economists or
statisticians) who are bad writers. For style, don't confine yourself to
reading social science. Personally, I think the secret is to read poets—Yeats, Dylan
Thomas, whoever you like—in order to pick up your own sense of rhythm. Of
course you can't always just read good stylists; often you need to read for
content. But whoever you are reading, ask yourself if they are writing well or
not. Either way, notice how they are doing it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A book
that breathes the sheer energy of writing is D.H. Lawrence, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Studies in Classic American Literature</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lawrence was always an impassioned writer and
this book, though really a work of literary criticism, is even more impassioned
about writing than he was about sex.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Which is saying a lot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You can
get a contact high just from reading Lawrence—his energy is contagious.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
That’s what you want to aim for: make your energy
contagious.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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</style>Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-44118392558812345002019-02-16T16:32:00.000-08:002019-02-26T14:27:14.358-08:00HOW DID LOLITA BECOME A GREAT NOVEL?<style>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When
Vladimir Nabokov finished <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> in
1953, he couldn’t get a publisher to take it. One called it “pure pornography,”
and all feared prosecution. His agent finally placed it with a press in Paris
that specialized in pornographic books for visitors to smuggle into
English-speaking countries. When it came out in 1955, the sardonic English
novelist Graham Greene praised it in a year-end article in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">London Sunday Times</i> as one of the best
books of the year. Pushback came next year from a rival paper’s reviewer who
attacked Greene and called it “sheer unrestrained pornography,” launching the
kind of literary disputes that enliven the world of British intellectuals and
the sales of English journalists. News of the scandal was picked up by the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">New York Times Book Review</i>, and other
writers chimed in. Suddenly American publishers were competing for publishing
rights, followed by foreign publishers seeking translations. When <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> came out in 1958, it sold 100,000
copies in three weeks-- the fastest-selling novel in twenty years. Stanley
Kubrick (just off from making <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spartacus</i>)
bought the film rights for $150,000 (worth about 10 times that amount in 2018
dollars), and gave Nabokov $40,000 to write the screenplay. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Succès
de scandale, for sure. What else? Literary acclaim grew. Modern Library (which
published affordable “quality” editions of world classics) ranked <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> number 4 in a poll for the
hundred greatest English-language books of the 20th century, after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i> (the unquestioned number 1), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Great Gatsby</i> at number 2, and
another Joyce, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portrait of the Artist as
a Young Man,</i> at number 3. A French poll in 1999 by <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Le Monde</i> had <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> at
number 27. Contemporary reviewers were even more enthusiastic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">From
England, Kingsley Amis: “the variety, force, and richness of Nabokov’s
perceptions have not even the palest rival in modern fiction. To read him is...
the nearest thing to pure sensual pleasure that prose can offer.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Daily
Mail</i> (London): “He has moulded and manipulated the language with greater
dexterity, wit and invention that any author since Shakespeare.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And
America, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Time Magazine:</i> “Lolita is a
major work of fiction: it is also a shocking book... He has evolved a vivid
English style which combines Joycean word play with a Proustian evocation of
mood.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Reporter:</i> “In many ways
the most remarkable-- and certainly the most original-- novel written in
English during recent years.” Women writers were impressed too. Anita Loos
(author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gentlemen Prefer Blondes</i>):
“The only sure-fire classic written in my lifetime.” Dorothy Parker called it
“a great book.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What
would be the judgment today? Less style points, more focus on the Lolita plot.
A bare outline:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A
cosmopolitan European gentlemen in his late thirties, haunted by a pubescent
love affair long-ago on the Riviera, falls for a twelve-year-old American girl.
To get access to her, he marries her widowed mother, who he tries to murder but
fails. When she dies in a chance accident, Humbert Humbert takes off with his
step-daughter Lolita on a long road trip across America, copulating with her as
frequently as possible. Lolita turns out not to be a virgin (having been
initiated at summer camp), but a precocious sexpot, and at first she finds
Humbert handsome and exotic as the movie stars she is stuck on. Naturally this
doesn’t last long, as Lolita becomes bored and Humbert tyrannical trying to
keep her away from boys, growing increasingly suspicious as Lolita becomes
increasingly evasive. Finally she manages to run off with another older man-- a
famous playwright who has been toying with Humbert’s paranoia. Bereaved Humbert
settles down in a college town for three years, until he gets a letter asking
for money from now 17-year-old Lolita--<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>married, pregnant, living in poverty, and no longer a romantic nymphet.
Humbert learns the identity of his tormentor, stalks him in his mansion, and
kills him with a pistol. The novel is framed by a psychiatrist’s report and
written in prison as Humbert awaits trial, not for child abuse but for murder.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">For what
it’s worth, Amazon shows considerable falling off from the book’s once-exalted
ranking. The most popular edition of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i>
ranks no. 12,487 among electronic books as of October 2018; relegated to best
showings in categories of Literary Satire Fiction (no. 17); Classic British
[sic!] Fiction (no. 19); and Classic Coming of Age Fiction [Nabokov would be
insulted] (no. 27). There are still a lot of customer reviews (1440), 62%
giving it 5 stars; some of the recent reviews are very negative. Are we back in
1953? or where, exactly, in the historic moving arc of literary standards and
tastes?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What we
need to consider:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[1]
Sexual standards change. Sex came out of the closet (in literature and real
life) from the 1920s, peaking in the 1960s. A counter-movement set in from the late
1970s onwards, shining spotlights on rape, child abuse and sexual harassment,
and coining new terms for the dark side of sex. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[2] Why
it was Nabokov who rode the literary sex wave with the most shocking and best
written of the closet breakouts. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[3]
Nabokov’s 1939 try-out of the Lolita plot, in his Russian novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Enchanter.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[4] How
Nabokov’s much-admired style made Humbert Humbert the only sympathetic
character in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[5] And
finally, not a decision on how great a novel <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> really is, but what forces determine that historically
located phenomenon, a “Great Classic”. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sexual/literary standards change</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sex was
often a topic behind the scenes in respectable novels, but only alluded to,
never actually depicted. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Scarlet
Letter</i> is about Adultery, but if you don’t know what that means, Hawthorne
was not about to show you. There is little or no overt sex in English-language
novels after the time of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tom Jones</i> in
the 1740s. France had more sex novels -- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Liaisons
Dangereuses</i> (1782) is all about seduction, but without explicit scenes.
Zola wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nana</i> (1880) about
courtesans (and even did research interviewing them) but stays out of the
bedroom and maintains a moralistic tone throughout. Some Russian novels
featured prostitutes (usually low-class); in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Notes from Underground</i> (1864) Dostoyevski’s narrator humiliates a
prostitute, and in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crime and Punishment</i>
(1866) a prostitute with a heart-of-gold guides the young killer to redemption.
There are no sex scenes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dr. Jekyll and
Mr. Hyde</i> (1886) nor in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portrait of
Dorian Gray</i> (1891); just what they go off to do in darkest East London is
only hinted at in horrified tones. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
1920s, the literary sex race was on. Hemingway’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sun Also Rises</i> (1926) centers on an aristocratic English
playgirl with a string of lovers, but sex scenes are limited to abortive
embraces in a taxi because the hero has been wounded in the war (had his penis
shot off or something). D.H. Lawrence features another war-wounded soldier,
whose place is taken by the game-keeper in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lady
Chatterley’s Lover</i> (1928). These are the first blow-by-blow sex scenes in
serious literature, the first literary micro-sociology of sex. Hemingway was
better at getting sex published than Lawrence, with “the earth moved” scenes in
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">For Whom the Bell Tolls</i> (1940);
meanwhile <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lady Chatterley</i>, Henry
Miller’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tropic of Cancer</i>, and other
explicit celebrations of sex were banned in England and the United States until
the early 1960s. Joyce’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i>
(1922) was admitted by court decision in 1934, but its sexual content was
mostly rather oblique (a few snippets in Molly Bloom’s interior monologue). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nabokov rides the literary sex
wave</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lolita</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> was published and got its
literary fame by the same route as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lady Chatterley</i>, Henry Miller et
al.-- underground publication in Paris and the buzz of reputation in the
avant-garde network. Nabokov took pains to distance himself from his
predecessors. In an early apologia (“On a Book Called Lolita,” 1956), he
summarizes the rules of the genre he is not emulating: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“...in
modern times the term ‘pornography’ connotes mediocrity, commercialism, and
certain strict rules of narration. Obscenity must be mated with banality
because every kind of aesthetic enjoyment has to be entirely replaced by simple
sexual stimulation... In pornographic novels, action has to be limited to the
copulation of clichés. Style, structure, imagery should never distract the
reader from his tepid lust. The novel must consist of an alternation of sexual
scenes. The passages in between must be reduced to brief expositions and
explanations that the reader will probably skip... Moreover, the sexual scenes
must follow a crescendo line, with new variations, new combinations, new sexes,
and a steady increase in the number of participants (in a Sade play they call
the gardener in), and therefore the end of the book must be more replete with
lewd lore than the first chapters.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>[294-95]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nabokov
goes on to say that the publishers who rejected his manuscript apparently read
only the first chapters (which are most focused on Humbert Humbert’s sexual
thoughts) and assumed the rest would follow the formula. Nabokov, however,
insists that “the nerves of the novel” are personally meaningful bits of
writing about imaginary scenes or his own observations of the American
landscape while driving around hunting butterflies and “trying to be an
American writer.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[296-97]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Vis-à-vis
the high-literary world and its race to go farther into sex than anyone before,
Nabokov wants to stay away from the rough-and-tumble of Hemingway and Henry
Miller, and his aristocratic taste could not condescend to the lower-middle
class milieu of Joyce. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lady Chatterley</i>
is more his class level, but (a) Nabokov is against novels with a message; (b)
disillusioned war veterans has already been done; (c) if anyone is going to be
disillusioned, it is a high-toned Russian exile having to teach literature at
an insufferably middle-class American college (the story of Nabokov’s life as
well as Humbert Humbert’s). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Every
breakthrough writer has to find something new, something that combines shock
with redeeming higher purpose (in this case literary style). What we would now
call sexual child abuse provides the shock. It was mitigated in the 1950s
context: marriages between adults and girls of 12 or 13 were still legal in
many American states (rock n’ roller Jerry Lee Lewis married his 13-year-old
cousin in 1957).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>During the course
of the novel, Humbert has Lolita sexually when she is age 13-14. As Humbert
frequently points out to Lolita when they are on the lam together, if the
authorities find out she will be sent to an institution for delinquent girls--
the concept of pure victimhood not yet having been developed. Humbert would
expect to go to prison too, for a year or so (aging tennis star Bill Tilden received
such a prison term around 1950 for his affairs with teen-age protégés).
Sentencing would become much more severe in recent decades. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Altogether,
the late 1950s was an ideal moment for Nabokov to enter the race. The literary
world was primed to acclaim the next big step in literary sex. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> the writing is brilliant but
accessible, a golden mean between Joyce’s stylistic labyrinths and Hemingway’s
minimalist show-don’t-tell (stylistically Nabokov is the anti-Hemingway, with
his narrator constantly commenting on himself). And <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> is much more filmable than D.H. Lawrence or Henry Miller.
The 1962 film starring suave James Mason, clutzy mother Shelly Winters,
precocious Sue Lyon, and funny-man Peter Sellers did nothing to arouse the
censors. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lolita</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> also is Nabokov’s great career
success. In exile from Russia since 1919, he lived in Russian émigré circles in
Berlin, the French Riviera, and Paris, while he wrote nine novels in Russian.
In the US since 1940, he kept on trying to publish in Russian. If he eventually
made it into histories of Russian literature in the Wikipedia era, it was on
the strength of his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i>
reputation. It also brought reflected fame to his other main English novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pale Fire</i> (1962), which continued the
theme of an exiled professor in America, here obsessed with his childhood
affairs before becoming king of an idyllic land resembling pre-revolutionary
Russia. Above all, the financial success of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i>
and its film enabled him to move back to Europe, where he spent the rest of his
life at resorts in France and Switzerland (like the childhood of his fictional
Humbert Humbert). It may well be that Nabokov was never in love with pubescent
girls; his nostalgia was centered on living on perpetual vacation among the
pre-war rich.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nabokov’s 1939 try-out of the
Lolita plot</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> .</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nabokov
wrote an early version in Paris, but never published it. The protagonist is a
man in his late 30s who sees a 12-year-old girl playing in the park. He marries
the girl’s mother to get access to her, expecting the mother to die since she
is an invalid. When she doesn’t, he considers poisoning her but fails.
Eventually she dies and he takes the girl south to the Riviera. On the way they
stop at a provincial hotel; when he touches the sleeping girl, she wakes up
screaming, the hotel guests mob him; he runs into the street and is killed by a
truck. The main plot tension is his scheming-- getting the sick woman to
consider him a suitor; trying to be alone with the girl; planning how to
approach her once he has her. His schemes are interrupted by Hitchcock-like
hitches, which serve to keep the story in suspense. In the hotel, just as he is
getting the girl in bed, there is a knock on the door-- a gendarme wants to
question him. It turns out to be a mistaken identity. But he doesn’t know his
room number, bumbles around through the dim-lit stairs and corridors, trying
the wrong doors. Finally as he starts his caresses, he sees someone else in the
room!-- no, it’s the reflection of his striped pajamas in the mirror. And so
throughout.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Aside
from the truncated plot (a 50 page story versus a 300 page book), there are
numerous differences from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i>. The
12-year-old girl is the same age as Lolita when Humbert Humbert first sees her,
but much more childish and sexually innocent. In the park, she is
roller-skating and playing hopscotch. Lolita is sun-bathing in her back yard,
wearing a bikini and sunglasses. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Enchanter</i>’s girl (she is never given a name) says little, except she would
like to go to the beach and learn to swim. Lolita devours movie-fan magazines,
chats cynically about boys, and flirts with Humbert, her mother’s summer
lodger. Nabokov observed a real difference between European adolescents, who in
the 1930s and later were still treated like children under the eyes of
nursemaids, and American kids who by the 1950s had acquired the label
“teenagers” with their own culture, pop music, and closed-off-from-parents
social life. The reception of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i>
in 1958 was of a piece with the furor over juvenile delinquency, street gangs,
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">West Side Story</i> (also 1958). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
“nymphet” theme is there in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Enchanter</i>,
if not the term. The anonymous middle-aged bachelor is smitten by girls on the
cusp on puberty, a look that he knows is ephemeral, due to pass away by age 17
or 20, or even on-rushing 14. Young women become less delicate and more banal;
full-grown women are just widening bodies. This is reiterated at length by
Humbert Humbert, who finds Lolita’s mother cow-like. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lolita </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">almost immediately gives us the
backstory. Humbert remembers himself at 13, summering on the Riviera and
falling in love with the daughter of family friends, a girl named Annabel
(echoes of Edgar Allen Poe) who is a few months younger and the archetype of
the nymphet. Their sexual liaisons out of sight of their elders are abortive,
and before the next season she dies of typhus in Corfu. So the grown-up Humbert
never marries, finds prostitutes gross, undergoes more exile until his life
lights up when he sees Lolita: “But that mimosa grove-- the haze of stars, the
tingle, the flame, the honeydew, and the ache remained with me, and that little
girl with her seaside limbs and ardent tongue haunted me ever since-- until at
last, twenty-four years later, I broke her spell by incarnating her in another.”
[12-13] </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He goes
on to explain about nymphets: “When I was a child and she was a child, my
little Annabel was no nymphet to me; I was her equal, a faunlet in my own
right, on that same enchanted island of time; but today, in September 1952,
after twenty-nine years have elapsed, I think I can distinguish in her the
initial fateful elf in my life... Soon I found myself maturing amid a
civilization which allows a man of twenty-five to court a girl of sixteen but
not a girl of twelve.” [15] </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Enchanter </i>there is no backstory,
Riviera luxury hotels or anything else. The bare-bones plot-- a man who loves
nymphets, marries one’s mother to get to her; but it comes out badly in the
end-- is artfully crafted into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
mothers are different too. “...a tall, pale, broad-hipped lady with a hairless
wart near a nostril of her bulbous nose” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Enchanter,</i>
15).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The pursuer has to
scheme and play-act to pretend he finds in her some vestige of attractiveness;
and the prospect of consummating their marriage sexually fills him with
disgust: “it was perfectly clear that he (little Gulliver) would be unable to
tackle those broad bones, those multiple caverns, the bulky velvet, the
formless anklebones, the repulsively listing conformation of her ponderous
pelvis, not to mention the rancid emanations of her wilted skin and the as yet
undisclosed miracles of surgery... here his imagination was left hanging on
barbed wire.” (30) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lolita’s
mother, on the other hand: “I think I had better describe her right away, to
get it over with. The poor lady was in her middle thirties, she had a shiny
forehead, plucked eyebrows and quite simple but not unattractive features of
the type that may be defined as a weak solution of Marlene Dietrich.” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita,</i> 33) Humbert finds her gauche and
pretentious, stuck in the utterly middle-class world (before such women had
careers) of book club and bridge club “or any other deadly conventionality.”
Charlotte Haze, unlike her 1939 Paris counterpart, actively pursues her
daughter’s would-be lover, and the plot tension in this part of the book is
chiefly about Humbert fending her off while keeping her sufficiently happy not
to be suspicious. Here he has an ally in Lolita, who likes defying her mother
and finds Humbert refreshingly different from her callow age-mates. This
develops into mother-daughter rivalry, with Charlotte planning to get Lolita
out of the way at summer camp, and then off permanently to boarding school. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Enchanter,</i> the widow is a
self-centered invalid, claiming the privilege of not being bothered by her
daughter, who she finds too noisy to have around her apartment, and keeps her
boarded with a couple in a provincial town. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita,</i> all this is more pleasant to read about, more comic, and
more dramatic than in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Enchanter</i>.
Charlotte gets hold of her husband’s secret diary, reads about his designs on
Lolita and his real opinion of herself. Humbert reads Charlotte’s shocked/angry
note, tries to compose an explanation (just a novel I’m writing) when the
neighbour knocks on the door-- his wife has been killed by a car as she was
crossing the street to post the tell-all letters in the mailbox. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Enchanter</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> has no memorable personalities.
No one in the story even has a name. The protagonist is simply “he,” the widow
is “the old woman” (age 42) and then, since he cannot bring himself to think of
her as his wife, simply “that person.” The object of his obsession is merely
“the girl.” The narrator sticks entirely to the protagonist’s point of view,
with passages of inner dialogue or its paraphrase. The writing has its passages
of eloquence and clever word-play (judging from the translation by Nabokov’s
son from Russian into English), but this doesn’t rub off on the protagonist,
unlike in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita,</i> where Humbert
Humbert’s first-person account makes Nabokov’s light-touch wordplay into a
feature of the character himself. The “enchanter” is polite and respectable on
the surface, but his inner thoughts are largely dour, with none of the jokes
and self-ironicizing that makes Humbert the most attractive person in the book.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
“enchanter” doesn’t seem very enchanting. Only in the last chapter do we learn
what the title is meant to convey. This is his self-image, engaged in schemes
to bring the girl under his spell, getting her accustomed to step-fatherly
affection, until:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“We
shall live far away, now in the hills, now by the sea, in a hothouse warmth
where savage-like nudity will automatically become habitual, perfectly alone
(no servants!), seeing no one, just the two of us in an eternal nursery and
thus any remaining sense of shame will be dealt its final blow. There will be
constant merriment, pranks, morning kisses, tussles on the shared bed, a
single, huge sponge shedding its tears on four shoulders, squirting with
laughter amid four legs... During the first two years or so the captive would
be ignorant... of the puppet-master’s panting... He would have to be
particularly cautious, not to let her go anywhere alone, make frequent changes
of domicile, keep a sharp eye out lest she make friends with other children or
have occasion to start chatting with the woman from the greengrocer’s or the
char, for there was no telling what impudent elf might fly from the lips of
enchanted innocence... And yet, for what could one possibly reproach the enchanter!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“He knew
he would find sufficient delights in her so as not to disenchant her
prematurely... He knew he would make no attempt on her virginity in the
tightest and pinkest sense of the term until the evolution of their caresses
had ascended a certain invisible step.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(42-44)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So he
thinks on his train ride to pick her up and take her south. Finally, after a
series of petty interruptions, he is in the hotel room, lying down beside her: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“So. The
hour he had deliriously desired for a full quarter century had finally come,
yet it was shackled, even cooled by the cloud of his bliss. The flow and ebb of
her light-colored robe, mingling with revelations of her beauty, still quivered
before his eyes, intricately rippled as if seen through cut glass. He simply could
not find the focal point of business, did not know where to begin, what one
could touch, and how, within the realm of her repose, in order to savor this
hour to the fullest. So.” (54)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Descending
even more into micro-detail: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“The
stuffy air and his excitement were growing unbearable. He slightly loosened his
pajama drawstring, which had been cutting into his belly... Then, starting
little by little to cast his spell, he began passing his magic wand above her
body, almost touching the skin, torturing himself with her attraction, her
visible proximity, the fantastic confrontation permitted by the slumber of this
naked girl, whom he was measuring, as it were, with an enchanted yardstick...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“...slowly,
with bated breath, he was inching closer and then, coordinating all his
movements, he began molding himself to her, testing the fit... A spring
apprehensively yielded under his side; his right elbow, cautiously cracking,
sought a support; his sight was clouded by a secret concentration... He felt
the flame of her shapely thigh, felt that he could restrain himself no longer,
that nothing mattered now, and, as the sweetness came to a boil between his
wooly tufts and her hip, how joyously his life was emancipated and reduced to
the simplicity of paradise-- and having barely time to think, ‘No, I beg you,
don’t take it away!” he saw that she was fully awake and looking wild-eyed at
his rearing nudity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“For an
instant, in the hiatus of a syncope, he also saw how it appeared to her: some
monstrosity, some ghastly disease... She was looking and screaming, but the
enchanter did not hear her screams; he was deafened by his own horror,
kneeling, catching at the folds, snatching at the drawstring, trying to stop
it, hide it, snapping with his oblique spasm, as senseless as pounding in place
of music, senselessly discharging molten wax, to stop it or conceal it...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“How she
rolled from the bed, how she was shrieking now, how the lamp scampered off in
its red cowl, what a thundering came from outside the window, shattering,
destroying the night, demolishing everything, everything... ‘Be quiet, it’s
nothing bad, it’s just a kind of game, it happens sometimes, just be quiet,’ he
implored, middle-aged and sweaty...” (56-57) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Then the
pounding on the door, the mob in the hall, escape down the stairs, out into the
street where the trucks rolled down hill, finding one opportunely to throw
himself under. “...and the film of life had burst.” [59]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In every
respect, Nabokov made <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> a more
attractive book than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Enchanter. </i>No
wonder he tried to trash the early manuscript and even his first attempts at a
reworking. Each time it was rescued by his wife. Did she sense it was the key
to their future?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
oddest thing about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Enchanter</i> was
that Nabokov wrote it in autumn 1939, just after Stalin and Hitler joined to
invade Poland. Falling back on sheer escapism? Nabokov as an adult was
apolitical (even though, or perhaps because, his father was a reformist party
leader, journalist and sometime official in various Russian governments, who
was killed in Germany in a fight among exile factions in 1922). (If I can
intrude a telling irrelevancy, Nabokov’s next literary project after his father
was shot was a Russian translation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice
in Wonderland.</i>) In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita,</i> the
one mention of external events is when summarizing his prior life, Humbert
says: “the gloom of yet another World War had settled upon the globe when,
after a winter of ennui and pneumonia in Portugal, I at last reached the
States.” (28-9)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nabokov’s
protagonists are too self-absorbed to be interested in anything else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Style creates sympathy</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“They
kissed, undressed, and smoked a cigarette. I got ready to climb down. At that
moment I felt the ladder sliding away under me. I tried to grab hold of the
window, but it gave way. The ladder fell with a crash and there I was, dangling
in the air. Suddenly the whole apartment exploded with alarm. Everyone came
running...”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[114]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Pink
veins glimmered in the white stone of the portal, and above it columns as thin
as candles. The organ fell silent and then burst into a laughter of bass notes.
The church was filled with light, filled with dancing rays, columns of air, and
a cool exaltation...” [287]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“His
hatred followed me through forests and over rivers. I felt it on my hide and
shuddered. He nailed his bloodshot eyes on my path...” [346]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Someone’s
horse neighs softly like a pining woman, and the cannonade, falling silent,
lies down to sleep on the black, wet earth.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only one window is ablaze in a faraway street. It cuts
through the gloom of the autumn night like an exhilarated searchlight,
flashing, drenched with rain... I can still hear the sound of water. The rain
is continuing to stutter, bubble, and moan on the roofs. The wind grabs the
rain and shoves it to the side. The light of the room has dimmed by half. A man
rises from the bench, splicing the dim glimmer of the moon...” [339-40]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“I took
the manuscript home with me and cut swaths through the translation. When a
phrase is born, it is both good and bad at the same time. The secret of its
success rests in a crux that is barely discernable. One’s fingertips must grasp
the key, gently warming it. And then the key must be turned once, not twice.”
[445]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nabokov?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No. It’s another Russian, Nabokov’s
contemporary, five years older Isaac Babel. One might have guessed from the
mention of “cannonade” in the fourth excerpt that these are Babel’s Red Army
stories from the 1920s, while Nabokov was traversing southern Russia on the
Whites’ side of the front and on into exile. But the first excerpt, from “The
Bathroom Window” is set in a brothel in Petersburg (Nabokov’s home town), a
story that got Babel prosecuted for obscenity in 1917. The last excerpt is
again Petersburg in 1916, about translating literature from French into
Russian, and both its message and its tone are closely aligned with Nabokov’s
thought processes. I am not claiming that Nabokov was influenced by Babel. But
that he read some of these stories is quite likely; Babel himself went back and
forth between Russia and Paris in the late 20s and early 30s, and it would not
be hard to find intermediate network links between them-- except for a big
difference in social class between the writers. And in politics, of course;
19-year-old Nabokov considered enlisting in the White Army, then thought better
of it-- otherwise the two writers could have shot each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What is
more to the point is that startling metaphors and figures of speech were in
vogue in avant-garde Russian writing in the early 20th century, and
sophisticated analysis of literary effects was being done by Russian theorists
such as Viktor Shlavsky and Roman Jakobson. This sophistication reached the
West via France, where it transmuted in the 1950s into structuralism. Nabokov
took the Russian stream, not of theory but of practice, to America. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita,</i> Nabokov’s writing hits a new
peak and never lets down. Every line is a bon mot, every sentence beautiful,
alive, compelling. Even banalities are rendered gracefully. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“...the
little diary which I now propose to reel off (much as a spy delivers by heart
the contents of the note he has swallowed) covers most of June.” [37]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“At
first, I planned to take a degree in psychiatry as so many <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">manqué</i> talents do; but I was even more <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">manqué</i> than that; a peculiar exhaustion, I am so oppressed, doctor,
set in; and I switched to English literature, where so many frustrated poets
end as pipe-smoking teachers in tweeds.” [13]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There is
hardly a pedestrian sentence in the book, but you never feel it’s overdone, nor
do the verbal acrobatics distract from the movement of the story. Hold on--
what movement? -- since not a lot happens in the ordinary sense of the word.
More the other way around-- Nabokov’s sentences <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">are</i> the movement of the story.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“In the
course of the sun-shot moment when my glance slithered over the kneeling child
(her eyes blinking over those stern dark spectacles-- the little Herr Doktor
who was to cure me of all my aches) while I passed by her in my adult disguise
(a great big handsome hunk of movieland manhood), the vacuum of my soul managed
to suck in every detail of her bright beauty, and these I checked against the
features of my dead bride. A little later, of course, she, this <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">nouvelle</i>, this Lolita, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">my</i> Lolita, was to eclipse completely her
prototype. All I want to stress is that my discovery of her was a fatal
consequence of that ‘princedom by the sea’ in my tortured past. Everything
between the two events was but a series of gropings and blunders and false
rudiments of joy.” [36] </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How does
he do it? A salad of word-play, alliteration, American colloquialisms (Nabokov
showing off his mastery of yet another tongue), shifts in rhythm and cadence--
now mellifluous, now abrupt. Acres and acres of long run-on sentences,
constructed out of parenthetical interpolations; but the piling-on of clever
phrases never feels confusing or overwrought. You the reader never lose track
of where you are (unlike, for instance, reading Joyce);* the bouncing tropes
are in the service of vivid word-painting, the pyrotechnics keep you in the
picture. A combination indeed of word-magic and realism. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
Nabokov was not given to footnotes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but here we can mention that he wrote
to Joyce in 1933 offering to translate <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i>
into Russian. In 1937, Joyce attended a Nabokov reading; and the two met in
1938 in Paris.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It holds
together because the long sentences full of self-interruptions perfectly match
the narrator’s character. And that is what drives the plot: not so much what
Humbert Humbert does but his ironic self-reflections on what he has done and
plans to do. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">By
keeping his own voice in the foreground, Humbert manages to be the only
sympathetic character in the novel. He travels around a country full of people
who are crass, ugly, dismal, uncool, unsophisticated and tasteless. The only
person in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> who is cool, upbeat,
fun, a good guy to be around, is Humbert Humbert (the pseudo-Nabokov). Both
author and protagonist are Euro-snobs, disdainful of Americans. Probably this
is why there is relatively little dialogue in considerable stretches of the
book, since only Humbert can talk in an interesting manner. When other
characters speak, the effect is almost entirely satirical, such as when Nabokov
parodies the headmistress of the girl’s school Lolita attends.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Perhaps
we should add Lolita as a dominant character. She gets a certain amount of
clipped dialogue, allowing Nabakov to show off his perfect ear for the teenage
idiom. She is very unlike “the girl” in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Enchanter</i>, flirting with Humbert and even initiating sex with him in their
initial hotel-room scene. The rest of the book is a struggle of wills between
them, which Lolita wins.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Humbert/Nabokov
is attractive because of his word-magic. (Was the author conscious of
vindicating at least that residue of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Magician </i>?) The endlessly dancing sentences convey us inside the mind of a
light-footed, all-angles-considering, gracefully quick-witted consciousness. He
is endlessly self-ironicizing but not self-alienated. Being in Humbert’s
presence is never a downer although what happens in his life is.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Here it
is worth peeling away Nabokov’s style to get at a bare-bones account of what
happens as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita</i> winds down. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lolita as tragedy</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lolita</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> is tragedy, not in the vulgar
newsmedia use of the word to mean whenever anyone gets killed, but in the high
literary sense. It is even classic tragedy: a hero with great qualities (in
this case, a magical style) and a fatal flaw, treading towards downfall with
inevitable destiny-laden steps. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As soon
as Humbert has Lolita, things start going downhill. Taste mismatches: European
high culture vs. coca cola, hamburgers, and movie magazines. Humbert is getting
plenty of sex, but he has to pay for it with a continuous stream of bribes,
candy, clothes; even money (3 cents a day, which she wheedles up to 15 cents)
for her allowance, “under condition she fulfill her basic obligations... [while
she] managed to raise the bonus price of a fancy embrace to three, and even
four bucks.” [172]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lolita chafing
at the bit is a constant source of anxiety, as Humbert becomes increasingly
paranoid about any contact she has with boys. This leads to a certain amount of
comedy, as school officials complain to Humbert about being too strict and
old-fashioned with her. Paranoia takes on a dimension of reality as neighbours grow
suspicious and her girlfriends cast knowing looks. Their intermittent quarrels
grow worse as Lolita protests about being denied her teenage freedom and
resorts to ruses and lying about everyday trivialities. Humbert finds himself
resorting to force, from twisting her wrists to slapping her face. [192, 212]
Everyone has mutated into their opposite; Lolita recapitulating Humbert’s
furtiveness in his clandestine courtship days; Humbert repeating the harshness
of Lolita’s mother during their siege of rivalry:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“ ‘Just
slap her hard if she interferes with your scholarly meditations.’ ” Charlotte
Haze says, finding Lolita putting her hands over Humbert’s eyes from behind as
he sits reading a book. [51]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Finally
Humbert escapes with Lolita into an endless, year-long auto trip, where
paranoia approaches hallucination as he thinks they are being followed by
another car. When Lolita is hospitalized, she manages to escape, allegedly
picked up by her uncle. Humbert hires detectives but can never find her. We skip
three years to the denouement: he gets a letter from her, telling him she is
married and asking for money. This Humbert willingly provides, and in return
gets the satisfaction of finding out who took her from him: the famous
playwright/screenwriter Quilty, whom Lolita had a crush on for years-- Humbert
not being the only mature man she preferred to adolescent boys. Quilty took her
to a dude ranch in New Mexico, surrounded by hipsters, drug-using carousers,
the Hollywood scene.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another
irony: Humbert’s old-world culture is out-bid by the trendy edge of American
life.* Quilty takes none of this as seriously as Humbert, tries out Lolita for
the casting couch, offering to get her a movie part. She willingly slept with
Quilty but resisted being in a pornographic movie, leaving the dude ranch to
enter a downward spiral of dish-washing in restaurants and marrying a
workingclass guy. Humbert goes off to avenge himself on Quilty (“before I drove
to wherever the beast’s lair was-- and then pulled the pistol’s foreskin back,
and then enjoyed the orgasm of the crushed trigger.”) [258] Lolita dies in
childbirth. Humbert Humbert dies in prison of heart failure. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* Quilty
is the only character besides Humbert who gets to talk at length, in the 10
page section near the end where Humbert tries to torment him before shooting
him. Quilty displays a range of rhetoric rivaling Nabokov’s-- perhaps a
parodied American counterpart. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tragedy
elevates, purging pity and fear, Aristotle said. Shakespeare’s tragedies are
elevating in just that sense; Faulkner’s too.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can we say this about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lolita
</i>? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What makes a Great Classic?</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Simple
answer: surviving the test of time. In the history of philosophy, one does not
become canonical in the generation after one’s death. There is often a dip in
reputation; the real test is 100 or more years later, as the names remembered
from the past are winnowed out. Similar processes operate in the history of
art. As yet there is no systematic study of these reputational time-patterns
for literary writers. Nabokov died in 1977, and now (the late 2010s) is about
the time when past fame no longer counts; there has to be something in it
people still want to read. Moralistic attacks on literature (which is to say,
external to literary criteria) are fairly common in the history of literature.
By the same token, books famous for moving-the-boundaries-of-what-can-be-said
may not outlive their shock value. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Do
standards of what constitutes literature-- internal to the world of serious
readers-- change historically to such a degree that one-time classics become
outmoded? It happens, although not very often. Literature of the Renaissance
period, with its allegories and symbolism, stopped being appealing by the
1700s. We can’t rule out a similar repudiation in the future of the whole
realist and psychological (AKA “romantic”) literature of the past three
centuries. But our theorizing about literary reception and production has not
advanced enough to speculate about what kinds of social changes would make this
happen. Come back in a hundred years or so, and we’ll see.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">References</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Vladimir
Nabokov. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Novels 1955-62.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Library of America. Includes detailed
chronology of Nabokov’s life.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Vladimir
Nabokov. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Enchanter</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1986. translated by Dmitri Nabokov. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Isaac
Babel. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Collected Stories.</i> 2002.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Originally published 1913-1938.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Peter
Steiner. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Russian Formalism</i>. 1984.
Cornell Univ. Press </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Eric
Schneider. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Vampires, Dragons, and
Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York.</i> 1999. Princeton Univ.
Press. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Randall
Collins. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sociology of Philosophies. A
Global Theory of Intellectual Change.</i> 1998.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-47436444504416261232018-07-12T17:38:00.000-07:002019-06-19T02:07:19.576-07:00THE ROAD TO THE MALTESE FALCON<style>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sam
Spade is the most famous movie detective, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is
the greatest writing by Dashiell Hammett, who created the modern detective
story. But there was a long road leading to Sam Spade from Hammett’s stories of
the 1920s, when he leveraged his experience as an operative for Pinkerton’s
National Detective Agency into a series of pulp-magazine stories telling what
it’s really like on the ground.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Pinkerton Agency was a big, bureaucratic, nation-wide organization. Its agents
were cogs in the machine, drawing on each other for information and assistance
to track down criminals. They were more FBI than Private Eye. They worked
closely with the local police. Their operatives were the opposite of the
lone-wolf detective in the mold of Sam Spade or Raymond Chandler’s Philip
Marlowe, who were constantly in trouble with the cops. The road to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>had to turn allies into antagonists;
eventually the PI genre would generate half its plot tension from heavy-handed
intrusions by the police. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">From the
outset, Hammett’s detective is a hard-boiled tough guy, at home with underworld
slang, who knows how to give it out and take a beating in a fight. He is
laconic and lacking in personality in other respects. This had to change, to
arrive at the cynical/romantic detective sparring verbally with glamorous women
and sometimes falling for them. Hammett’s Continental Op is essentially sexless
as well as emotionless, like Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Miss Marple and
the like. Spade and Marlowe become a different breed of cat.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Pinkerton/Continental
Detective Agency: a bureaucratic team</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When the
Continental Op is on a case, he has plenty of backup. When he wants somebody
shadowed, he calls on an office-full of agents to watch a home for a week, even
renting nearby apartments with good vantage point. (Even today, this would by
an expensive stakeout by the FBI, usually reserved for Mafia investigations.)
The Continental Op checks out suspects’ alibis and tracks their movements by
telegraphing his company’s offices around the country. When he wants to
identify someone, he can wire for photographs from the company’s archive. He
can even get fingerprints, and have them analyzed for whether they have been
altered. (One of Hammett’s early stories hinges on a suspect who created fake
fingerprint by coating his fingers with gelatin and pressing them onto an
engraving of someone else’s prints.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The Continental Op runs down information by using organizational
bureaucracy whoever runs it; when he knows a suspect has taken a taxi, he sends
a team of operatives to the taxi company’s office to go through the records and
find where the suspect was driven. All the implausible sleuthing done by
Sherlock Holmes as an individual working alone-- tracing a cigarette stub
through his own private collection of every kind of tobacco, and finding these
cigarettes are specially made, by a tobacconist in Holmes’ file, for only three
people-- is carried out by the Continental Op’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>team. Eventually, these methods of tracing suspects would
become standard procedure in police bureaucracies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cops as allies</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Far from
being rivals of the cops, the Pinkerton/Continental Agency works closely with
them. The police routinely call them with information and invite them to
accompany them to the scene of a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>crime or a body discovered. The Continental Op drops in on the police to
discuss the progress of a case they are both working on. In later films, the
viewer assumes that Spade or Marlowe just have personal friends among the
police who occasionally tip them off; but<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the Pinkertons always coordinated with the police. On the whole, their
work was less dramatic than the detective-story murders: bank fraud, jewel
robberies, embezzlement and blackmail were their chief line of work; and these
could involve far-ranging movements of persons or loot around the country, so
that the nation-wide range of the Pinkertons provided a larger resource than
any local police department. The Pinkertons had the first national fingerprint
file, and archives of criminals’ photos and descriptions.* The police looked up
to the Pinkertons and welcomed their cooperation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Continental Op can count on them to lay a police dragnet
around all traffic out of Los Angeles, when he is testing the alibi of a
suspect. They also accept his request to release a suspect from jail so that
shadowing her might lead to other suspects.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*The FBI
scientific crime detection laboratory, established in 1932, began to coordinate
fingerprint and photo files from police departments around the country. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cops
liked the Pinkertons to do their dirty work for them, roughing up suspects or
killing them. Oversight of police methods was weak, but even so what the
Pinkertons did was completely off the books. This was especially so in the area
of labor struggles, where the Pinkertons had been employed as strike breakers
and labor spies, dating back to bloody confrontations in the 1880s. Their
action went beyond fighting with union picket lines and escorting strike-breaking
workers into a plant. They shadowed labor organizers (especially from radical
organizations like the International Workers of the World), beat them up and
sometimes crippled or killed them. They posed as union men to stir up disputes,
act as agents provocateurs, and finger the militants. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red Harvest, </i>the Continental Op follows this pattern,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>drawing on Hammett’s own experience as
a strike-breaker, plus reports of a murderous struggle at a copper mining town
in Montana in 1917.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In a town
where everybody is on the take one way or the other, the Op succeeds in making
the leaders of different factions suspicious of each other, in effect
accomplishing his assignment by instigating (and taking part in) a long series
of murders.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
police welcomed the Pinkertons/Continentals for operating outside the law more
effectively than they could within the law. Of course, most of their cases were
routine-- bank fraud and the like-- where the private agency simply provided
more resources. It would be writers like Hammett who spiced up their stories
with a dramatic back-and-forth of violence. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The essence of detective work:
shadowing, reporting, record-checking</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In an
early story (1924), the Continental Op says:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Ninety-nine percent
of detective work is a patient collecting of details-- and your details must be
got as nearly first-hand as possible, regardless of who else has worked the
territory before you.” </i>[Op.110]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(He means here that he can see things the cops overlook.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“A good motto for the detective
business is, ‘When in doubt, shadow ‘em.’” </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He goes on to
give four rules for shadowing: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Keep
behind your suspect as much as possible; never try to hide from him; act in a
natural manner no matter what happens; and never meet his eye.”</i> [Op.89-90]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Continental Op can call on a whole team of accomplished shadowers. One of them
has the information down to a laconic formula:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Made him,” he
reported. “Thirty or thirty-two. Five, six. Hundred, thirty. Sandy hair,
complexion. Blue eye. thin face, some skin off. Rat. Lives dump in Seventh
Street.”</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>[Op.405]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Op
does plenty of shadowing of his own; and Dashiell Hammett himself, during his
years with the Pinkertons was regarded as an excellent shadower, even though he
was over six feet tall (unusual for the time). The shadower also has to report
what he sees; a concise description, addresses, times when people were present
or went somewhere else. The Op writes up his reports for the local office, and
calls on reports by other agents as he builds his investigation. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This is
the essence of bureaucracy. In Max Weber’s famous summary of the characteristic
of bureaucracy in world history, these elements stand out: a bureaucracy makes
written reports, keeps them in files, and uses them as the basis for its
actions. Bureaucrats’ reputation as paper-pushers is justified, but Weber
underlined its effectiveness: keeping records is the only way to coordinate a
large number of people, and to bring rational calculation to bear on figuring
out what is a pattern and how to deal with it. The Continental Op glamorizes
bureaucracy, when records are created by stealthy surveillance and their
subjects are possible murderers.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Dashiell Hammett brand</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett’s
years with the Pinkertons were the origins of his writing style. This would
become the hallmark of the Hammett brand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Concise, vivid descriptions and
wise-guy comments</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">At or
near the opening of a story, Hammett describes an important character who sets
in motion the plot. His descriptions are the kind of things he did in his shadowing
reports: giving height, shape of face, coloring, distinctive body carriage--
all the things that enable a shadower to keep tabs on his target, as well as
clueing in another agent who would take over surveillance. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“He was a big balloon of a man, in
a green plaid suit that didn’t make him look any smaller than he was. His tie
was a gaudy thing, mostly of yellow, with a big diamond set in the center of
it, and there were more stones on his pudgy hands. Spongy fat blurred his
features, making it impossible for his round purplish face to ever hold any
other expression than the discontented hoggishness that was habitual to it.” </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[Op.108]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“I sized up the amateur while he
strained his neck peeping at Ledwick. He was small, this sleuth, and scrawny
and frail. His most noticeable feature was his nose-- a limp organ that
twitched nervously all the time. His clothes were old and shabby, and he
himself was somewhere in his fifties.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Op.92]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Surroundings
are significant introductions to their owners:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“While I waited for him I looked
around the room, deciding that the dull orange rug under my feet was probably
genuinely Oriental and truly ancient, that the carved walnut furniture hadn’t
been ground out by machinery, and that the Japanese prints on the walls hadn’t
been selected by a puritan.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Op.631]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Other
than when he describing people, Hammett is a minimalist writer, clear and
clean, having shaved away all excess verbiage. This is a main reason why his
stories move along so rapidly-- and why critics recognized him as a distinctly
modern writer, even comparing him to Hemingway. But in his descriptions Hammett
is very un-Hemingway. This emphasis comes from his training in writing
shadowing reports-- a writing apprenticeship of five years. Hammett no doubt
enhanced his descriptions beyond his early practice-- in effect, his first step
towards creating his own brand. One gets an initial idea of what kind of person
is hiring the detective (quite possibly for hidden motives); the description is
the first clue. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">They
also give a sense of the Continental Op’s character. On the whole, the
detective is laconic in his speech; and since he is also the first-person
narrator, the same style pervades the entire story. The Op keeps his emotions
to himself; better yet, he prefers not to have any emotions, he is just doing
his job.* His clipped utterances convey a tinge of cynicism, and this is
enhanced by the wise-guy remarks he often smuggles into his personal
descriptions. Most writers’ descriptions are bland, just setting the scene
before getting into the action (a reason why Hemingway avoids them); but
Hammett’s episodic portraits convey a moral judgment, and a sardonic wit. We
don’t learn much about the Op as a character, but he is a master of the
wise-crack. He doesn’t engage in repartée, but in his mind he looks down on the
people he deals with.**</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“This lawyer was bound upon getting me
worked up; and I like my jobs to be simply jobs-- emotions are nuisances during
business hours.”</i> [Op.98]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* People
he likes are usually cops.: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“... his
freckles climbing up his face, to make room for his grin.”</i> [Op.419]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Op
also conveys his easy familiarity with slang, sprinkling his narrative with
underworld expressions. This is part of the hard-boiled character that Hammett
is credited with inventing. He didn’t start the literary movement conveying the
speech of ordinary people of the lower classes. This had been done previously
by writers like Twain, Bret Harte, and Kipling. Such writing could be verbose,
showing off, or mocking the speaker. Stephen Crane’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maggie, A Girl of the Streets</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(1893) is so full of lower-class dialect and phonetic spellings that it
is tedious to read. Hammett inserts a mere razor-cut of slang here and there,
following his tactic of never impeding the flow of the story. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There is
an unintended consequence of Hammett’s word-portraits. Every person has a
particular type of nose-- straight, thick, hooked, up-turned;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a shape of the head:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>narrow, broad-cheeked, round, oval--
and Hammett’s training made him sensitive to all the little things that combine
to make someone look distinctive. In writing his stories and novels, Hammett
was at pains to set off his characters from each other, both by descriptions
and by making up unusual names; and his most important characters usually get
an over-the-top description.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(The
Op himself is never described, except we learn that he is short and heavy,
reversing Hammett’s own appearance, tall and thin.) This tendency to portray
exaggerated, even grotesque persons is one of the things that appealed to
Hollywood in filming his novels. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This
reaches a climax in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon,</i>
where all the bad guys are extremes: the Fat Man (Sydney Greenstreet’s
character) who resembles the “big balloon of a man” quoted above, except that
he wears the pompous morning dress (tail-coat, cravat, spats) of the
old-fashioned British upper class. Joel Cairo (Peter Lorre), the dandy with
foppish manners, a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>carnation in
his lapel, and a perfumed handkerchief in his wallet. Wilmer, the diminutive gun-man,
who talks tough (and shoots people cold-bloodedly) but who barely comes up to
Humphrey Bogart’s shoulder. Why have a tiny gun-man instead of a more plausible
strong-armed hoodlum? Just breaking the pattern and thereby being memorable.
Visually-oriented Hollywood used the same set of actors (Greenstreet, Lorre,
Elisha Cook, Bogart) in other classic film noir. It is also a reason why <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon</i> is fun rather than
threatening: its bad guys are too grotesque to be real.*</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* All
the killings happen off screen, and the one real thug in the story, Thursby, is
never seen or even described.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Micro-observations and emotional
domination</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Op
is an excellent observer of other people-- not just what they look like, but
the little signals they give off. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“I paused at the door of the
Figgs’ room, until my ear told me that they were sleeping. At Mrs. Gallaway’s
door I had to wait several minutes before she sighed and turned in bed. Barbra
Caywood was breathing deeply and strongly, with the regularity of a young animal
whose sleep is without disturbing dreams. The invalid’s breath came to me with
the evenness of slumber and the rasping of the pneumonia convalescent.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Op.79]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“She talked for five minutes
straight, the words fairly sizzling from between her hard lips; but the words
themselves didn’t mean anything. She was talking for time-- talking while she
tried to hit upon the safest attitude to assume.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Op.97]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“The Whosis Kid let go of the
woman and took three slow steps back from her. His eyes were dead circles
without any color you could name-- the dull eyes of a man whose nerves quit
functioning in the face of excitement.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Op.240]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“I was puzzled. The Dummy’s
yellowish eyes should have showed the pinpoint pupils of the heroin addict.
They didn’t. The pupils were normal. That didn’t mean he was off the stuff-- he
had put cocaine into them to distend them to normal. The puzzle was-- why? He
wasn’t usually particular enough about his appearance to go to that trouble.” </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Op.306]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
detective sees through people’s motives by quickly recognizing the clues they
are giving off about what they are trying to accomplish. He is like a
Goffman-inspired sociologist, who sees the impressions people are trying to
convey and what effort they have to put into the performance. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon,</i> Brigid O’Shaughnessy
plays at being naive, nervous, helpless, overwhelmed; but Sam Spade is having
none of it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“You’re not going to go
around poking at the fire and straightening up the room again, are you?”</i>
[Novel.438]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The result
is the detective always dominates the interaction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He sets the rhythm, and refuses to let the other side
take charge. He listens when he is getting information, but when he is getting
nowhere he quickly pulls the plug. He is a skilled practitioner of emotional
domination, which micro-sociology characterizes as: taking the initiative,
feeling confidence and energy, and imposes one’s timing on the other. * If
possible, he pushes the other person into passively going along. If he meets
stone-walled resistance, he writes off the encounter for another time. But in
Hammett’s narratives, he almost always dominates: generally more verbally than
physically. (The Op is a tough fighter, but Hammett realistically shows when he
is overmatched and has to take a beating.) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
Research with audio and video recordings shows EDOM is based in the fractional
micro-seconds of talking and bodily movements. [Collins 2004] </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In this
sense, his detective-characters are charismatic, in the small encounters of
everyday life. Sam Spade is the most dominant of them, which is why he is the
most famous hero/anti-hero.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Never trust first appearances:
plot twists and final de-briefing scene</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett
never rests with a single mystery pursued to its solution. His stories almost
always feature an unexpected plot reversal. What the detective’s problem seems
to be at first turns out to be covering up something else. And this is not just
the conventional whodunnit shifting back and forth among suspects, but the very
nature of the crime turns out to be different. A suicide appears to be
blackmail but investigation opens a backlog of deceptions and murders; a
kidnapping turns out to be a scam; a suspect confesses to a murder he didn’t
commit, but that’s not the end of it. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A
consequence is that the last part of every story has to give a retrospective
explanation of what really happened. These de-briefing scenes tend to be
artificial and anticlimactic. Often the captured crook will spill out all the
details, even if he is on the way to the electric chair. Or the detective
explains his solution to an interested audience. In the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thin Man</i> films, this takes the form of gathering the dramatis
personae together while the sleuth explains what everyone did. This concluding
letdown is a price of the writer’s clever plot-twists. It would carry over to
Raymond Chandler’s similarly constructed mysteries.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett’s steps as a writer</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett
broke into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Mask </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in October 1923, and published a total
of 9 stories, all featuring the Continental Op, over the next 9 months. Within
another year he had published 6 more. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black
Mask</i> was a cheap-paper (“pulp”) magazine published as a pot-boiler by a
respectable New York publishing house.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Hammett got in on his credentials as an ex-Pinkerton detective, and the
magazine played him up as a new kind of detective writer, and soon had him at
the top of their stable. Through early 1926 (i.e. a period of two and a half
years) he published a total of 21 stories; then his short story production
declined, with only 7 more stories as his work in this genre petered out in
1930. Hammett wasn’t slowing down, but shifting to longer works, turning his
detective tales into novels. In the transition period, he was publishing his
novels in serialized form in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Mask</i>.
“The Cleansing of Poisonville” was serialized in 4 installments over the winter
of 1927-8, and published as a novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red
Harvest,</i> in 1929.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Novels paid
much better than stories (royalties instead of by-the-word), and generated more
fame and critical recognition. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How does
one turn short stories into novels? By making them longer, more complex, more
characters, more plot twists. The early stories of 1923-4 were very condensed,
averaging 6,000 words; then more than doubled to 14,000 words. Hammett also
began to link stories together, carrying over into sequels with overlapping
characters. An early story was bare-bones. The longer stories added more
scenes, more wise-cracks, more clever word-portraits. * Hammett started with the
laconic style from his Pinkerton shadowing reports, and built his trademark by
expanding. He kept a careful balance; just enough additional wording, without
losing the clipped, tight-lipped tone. Hammett was a meticulous rather than an
inspired writer, honing his sentences and revising carefully. It was also an
instance (perhaps rare enough)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>where good editors made useful criticism and suggestions. At least at
the beginning, there was something of a team quality to Hammett’s
creativity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* We see
the same thing a decade later when Raymond Chandler revised his short stories
into novels: generally, combining several unrelated stories, and thereby making
for a serpentine plot structure. Comparing the original stories with the later
novel, we see Chandler revising his word-portraits and wise-cracks, always in
the direction of making them longer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett
also began to make his stories more exotic, even far-fetched and fantastic. His
best work is known for its San Francisco atmosphere, but Hammett in the
mid-1920s also had the Continental Op traveling to a fictional Balkan state to
stave off a revolution; to a gambling house in Tijuana complete with an auto
chase in the desert; an Arizona cowboy town where rival ranch-hands have a
grudge fight and the Op has to prove he can ride a bucking bronco. He
experiments with expanding his repertoire by veering into clichés might be
considered trial-and-error learning. There are country mansions with plots
hinging on rich invalids and inheritances. An especially far-fetched plot (“The
Gutting of Couffignal”) involves an island off the California coast inhabited
by rich people; a gang using military weapons cuts off the bridge to the
mainland and loots the entire town, until the Op (who was called there to guard
some pricey wedding presents) shows his own military prowess to overcome an
armored car. The twist is that a former Russian general who lives on the island
engineered the whole thing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Even the
San Francisco setting was turned fantastic in “The Big Knock-Over” [1927]. The
Op notices that the city saloons are full of famous criminals from all over the
country, and people are murdered for knowing what is going on. It turns out
that a huge criminal coalition has been organized to close off the main
downtown streets, with gunners at every corner keeping back the cops, while the
biggest banks in the city are robbed. Everybody has minute instructions about
their part in the operation, logistics, getaway cars and all. The Op can do
nothing to stop it; but this is a long story (with a linked sequel), and it transpires
that the ad hoc mega-gang has been double-crossed by a mastermind who made off
with the loot, and this is where the Op makes his inroads. His word portraits
have a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>workout giving
distinguishing features to Itchy Maker, Bluepoint Vance, The Shivering Kid,
Alphabet Shorty McCoy, Toby the Lugs et al., leaving the whole thing with the
tone of caricature. Hammett’s on-the-job learning must have convinced him there
was nothing more to do in this direction, since at this time he was beginning
to write serialized novels that stayed closer to his forte as insider to the
detective business.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The private eye parts company
with the cops</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Continental Op was an organization man working in tandem with the police.
Perhaps because some of the Op’s more fantastic adventures had him off on his
own, without his usual organizational backup, Hammett began to imagine what he
could do if they cops became one of the obstacles. The turning point is a late
story, “The Main Death” [June 1927]. A women reports her husband was killed in
a home robbery while holding a large amount of cash. The Op tracks the robbers
and offers to let them get away without telling the police, if they give him
all the money. They think he is shaking them down. But the Op knows there is no
murder case against them, since the only person who could testify to the
killing won’t do it. Why not? Because he made the wife admit that her husband
commited suicide; she made up the story to keep the life insurance from being
canceled. The Op is no longer the straight-laced company man; he is breaking
its rules and its code of ethics, showing more human sympathy, and keeping his
manuevers to himself. He is acquring depth as a character, and even showing
some emotions on the job.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Adding sex</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Op’s
career to this point has been almost completely sexless. He deals with plenty
of women, all of whom he treats with disdain. His rich clients have wives much
younger than themselves, beautiful and stylish women whom the Op tacitly
regards as bimbos. The Op is impervious to them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When his
editor told him to introduce more sex appeal, Hammett wrote “The Girl with the
Silver Eyes” [1924] which has the following in a linked story: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“A white face beneath a bobbed mass of
red-colored hair. Smoke-gray eyes that were set too far apart for
trustworthiness-- though not for beauty-- laughed at me, exposing the edges of
little sharp animal-teeth. She was beautiful, as beautiful as the devil, and
twice as dangerous... She laughed at me-- a fat man all trussed up with red
plush rope, and with the corner of a green cushion in my mouth... Her
smoke-gray eyes lost their merriment and became hard and calculating.”</i>
[Op.126] She goes through further disguises and plot twists, but the Op was
wary from the outset.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Not
until Sam Spade do we get a detective who has a sex life. Hammett makes him a
lady-killer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Culminating in The Maltese Falcon</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">All
these trends come together in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon</i>. Hammett is back in
his city of mystery and fog, San Francisco. He has a new detective, tall and
handsome-- since there is going to be a sex-centered plot, the Continental Op
had to be replaced. The word-portraits are longer and fancier, but their
characters are worthy of it. The wise-cracks are no longer in these snippets,
but delivered by Sam Spade himself. We no longer have a first-person narrative,
and as you will recall, the attitudes of the laconic Op came through his
sardonic tags in describing what people looked like. Now the detective’s major
characteristic is to talk and act like a wise-guy. He pushes emotional
dominance to a main feature of the plot. No one every pushed the Continental Op
around, but Spade is a verbal aggressor, keeping his opponents off balance by
cutting them off.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“The fat man bunched his lips, raised his
eyebrows, and cocked his head a little to the left. “You see,” he said blandly,
“I must tell you what I know, but you will not tell me what you know. That is
hardly equitable, sir. No, no, I do not think we can do business along those
lines.”</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Spade’s
face became pale and hard. He spoke rapidly in a low furious voice: “Think
again and think fast. I told that punk of yours that you’d have to talk to me
before you got through. I’ll tell you now that you’ll do your talking today or
you are through. What are you wasting my time for? ... God damn you! Maybe you
could have got along me if you’d kept clear of me. You can’t now. Not in San
Francisco. You’ll come in or you’ll get out-- and you’ll do it today.’</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
turned and with angry heedlessness tossed his glass at the table. The glass
struck the wood, burst apart, and splashed its contents and glittering
fragments over the table and floor...</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
fat man said tolerantly: “Well, sir, I must say you have a most violent
temper.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Temper?”
Spade laughed crazily... He held out a long arm that ended in a thick
forefinger pointing at the fat man’s belly. His angry voice filled the room.
“Think it over and think like hell. You’ve got til five-thirty to do it in.
Then you’re either in or out, for keeps.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Novel.483-4]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sam
Spade is almost the opposite of an organization man. He still has a friend
among the cops, Sergeant Tom Polhaus, who helps him from time to time,
especially at the outset where he calls Spade to the scene of his partner’s
murder. But the cops play another role in the drama, adding to the suspense. A
thought-experiment: remove all the scenes where the cops interfere and what
have we got left? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- After
Spade gets home from viewing the body, Polhaus and his boss, Lieutenant Dundy,
pay a late-night call at his apartment. They inform him that Spade is himself a
suspect of killing Thursby, the man who is believed to have killed Spade’s
partner Miles Archer. This plot tension of Spade being charged with one murder
or another continues to the end of the book.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- Joel
Cairo and Brigid O’Shaughnessy are starting to reveal their past connection and
distrust at Spade’s apartment, when the cops arrive again, wanting to
interrogate him about his affair with his dead partner’s wife. Spade blocks
them from entering, but the noise of Cairo and Brigid fighting inside gives the
cops reason to come in. Now they are suspicious of everybody, but Spade palms
them off with a ridiculous story that they were only mocking the cops with a
make-believe fight, and no one is preferring charges against anyone. The cops
pick up Cairo anyway for a grilling, but Brigid comes even more under Spade’s
protection as he tells the cops she is one of his operatives.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- Spade
talks to his sleazy lawyer/fixer and gets called in to the District Attorney’s
office. The D.A. tells Spade he could be charged as an accomplice for
concealing information about a murderer. The police think Thursby’s old enemies
are involved because of his role in a welshed gambling debt. Spade gets angry
and high-handed again; but he knows the cops are sniffing around the trail that
would lead to Brigid who once was involved with Thursby in some caper in the
Orient. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- The
final scene, in Spade’s apartment, after the black bird is delivered and turns
out to be a fake. The fat man, Cairo and Wilmer all take it on the lam, and
Spade calls the cops. Before they arrive, Spades tells Brigid, she had better
come clean. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Spade, face to face with her,
very close to her, tall, big-boned and thick-muscled, coldly smiling, hard of
jaw and eye, said: “They’ll talk when they’re nailed-- about us. We’re sitting
on dynamite. Give me all of it-- fast. Gutman sent you and Cairo to
Constantinople?”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[Novel.575]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
over-all plot structure, this is the inevitable debriefing scene, that always
features at the end of a Hammett story explaining what really went on-- the
back-story that has been covered up by the mystery the detective has been
trying to solve. Mostly this de-briefing is an boring anticlimax. But not here:
For one thing, there is a twist. Spade gets out of her the truth, that she was
the one who killed Miles Archer. And Spade then counts all the reasons why, if
he protects her from the police, she would have something on him that would
hang over their relationship forever. He sums up:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“And
eighth-- but that’s enough. All those on one side. Maybe some of them are
unimportant. But look at the number of them. Now on the other side we’ve got
what? All we’ve got is the fact that maybe you love me and maybe I love you.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You
know,” she whispered, “whether you love me or not.”...</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She
put her face<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>up to his face. Her
mouth was slightly open with lips a little thrust out. She whispered: “If you
loved me you’d need nothing more on that side.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Spade
set the edges of his teeth together and said through them: “I won’t play the
sap for you.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She
put her mouth to his, slowly, her arms around him, and came into his arms. She
was in his arms when the door-bell rang</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>[Novel.582-3]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The film
closes even better with a shot of Brigid going down in the elevator with the
cops, the sliding grill closing like the bars of a cell.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Remove
these scenes, and what remains? Spade with Wonderly/Brigid; Spade with the
gunman Wilmer, and bits with Cairo; Spade with Gutman and eventually the whole
gang. Hammett would have to contrive some other way of bringing out the back
story, and conveying the tension that is driving Spade. This could be done, but most dramatic, confrontational scenes-- the most theatrical-- would be
lost.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Maltese Falcon</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> has much less physical action,
and very little on-stage violence, compared to Hammett’s stories and earlier
novels. The scene-by-scene drama happens almost entirely in Spade’s verbal
tussels over emotional domination. And it is a superior piece of dramatic
writing for that. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>has Hammett’s trademark plot twists.
Initial appearances are deceptive; Miss Wonderly’s series of cover stories are
quickly seen through. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Oh, that,” said
Spade lightly. “We didn’t exactly believe your story.” ... “We believed your
two hundred dollars.”</i>) [Novel.416]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>It takes a while to unravel that these people are connected together,
that they are all looking or waiting for something, and so on.*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* The
germ of the plot is in a 1926 story, “Creeping Siamese,” about a couple who had
found a treasure of gems in Burma, doubled-crossed their partner when escaping
across the Pacific to San Francisco, and then are threatened with murder when
the old partner finally reappears. This is the back-story, which the
Continental Op learns after investigating their initial cover story for hiring
a detective for protection. Two years later Hammett started writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Op
gets his twists of revelation by investigation: shadowing, checking records,
having violent encounters along the way. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Maltese Falcon</i> moves forward in another way: Sam Spade sits in his office,
and someone comes in; a gunman follows him on the street or sits in a hotel
lobby. This itself is a reversal: the shadow-methods of the Op and his
organization now appear on the side of the enemy. In a sense, Spade cracks the
case by happenstance. That is to say, Hammett is pulling the strings of the
plot, rather than moving it by the actions of the energetic Op. This might seem
contrived if we had a moment to stop and think; but the dramatic scenes are so
good -- and the characters are so amusing (such as Cairo/Peter Lorre holding up
Spade to search his office)-- that the pace carries us along without a let-up.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A serial, a novel, three film
versions: at last a classic</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett
wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon</i> during fall
1928; serialized it in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black Mask</i>
during fall and winter 1929; published the novel in February 1930, to excellent
sales and star reviews. By June, he had sold the movie rights to Warner
Brothers. But here the trail wanders off. He had already sold the movie rights
to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red Harvest</i> in 1929, and a
not-very-good film was released by Warner Brothers in 1930 under the title <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Roadhouse Nights</i>, which tells us
something about the trouble Hollywood would have in figuring out how to present
Hammett’s work. By May 1931, the first <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maltese
Falcon</i> film was released, starring a gangster-type actor, Ricardo Cortez.
It did not do well. There was enough interest in Hammett-- who had now become
famous, and was doing script work in Hollywood-- to make a second version in
1936. It was now called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Satan Met a Lady,</i>
and had A-list casting with Bettie Davis in the female lead. This too failed.
But Hammett was in demand; his next novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Glass Key,</i> was filmed in 1935, and again in 1942 (in a version that
launched the careers of Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake). Hammett’s final novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Thin Man</i>, was released by MGM in
1934, with William Powell and Myrna Loy as Hammett’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>detective couple, Nick and Nora Charles. It was so popular
that five <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thin Man</i> sequels followed
from 1936 to 1947.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Someone
in Warner Brothers finally figured out that Hammett’s best book could make a
successful movie. The secret, it turns out, was to not screw around with revising
and adapting it. The 1941<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>follows the book almost exactly--
unusual for Hollywood. If you watch the film with the book in hand, you will
see almost every line of dialogue is in the book. There are some cuts; some
dialogue is shortened; a few scenes are omitted (mostly the undramatic ones,
plus, as we shall see, all the explicit sex scenes). There are of course no
word-portraits, but the characters are depicted on screen almost exactly as
Hammett described them-- Gutman, Cairo, Wilmer, Brigid. The only exception is
Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade. This seems ironic, since it was the movie that
launched Bogart to stardom. The other candidate for Bogart’s best film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Casablanca</i>, [1942, again Warner
Brothers] was made on the heels of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Maltese Falcon</i> and using it as a model. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A clue
to why <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Satan Met a Lady</i> was a flop,
and the 1941 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Maltese Falcon</i> an
instant classic, can be found in the opening lines of Hammett’s novel. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Samuel
Spade’s jaw was long and bony, his chin a jutting V under the more flexible V
of his mouth. His nostrils curved back to make another, smaller, V.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>His yellow-grey eyes were horizontal.
The V motif was picked up again by thickish brows rising outward from twin
creases above a hooked nose, and his pale brown hair grew down-- from high flat
temples-- to a point on his forehead. He looked rather pleasantly like a blond
satan.” </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Novel.391]
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Satan Met A Lady</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> quite literally takes off from
this word-portrait of Sam Spade. The role was given to Warren William, a tall,
bony, aquiline actor who played in comedies and musicals. The problem is he is
not at all a tough guy, and he plays Sam Spade as a comedy-romantic role, as a
supercilious fop and a smiling clown, which is exactly what a Hammett detective
hero is not. The physical byplay is close to slapstick, ruining even those spoken
lines that come from Hammett. To make matters worse, the scene is shifted away
from San Francisco; the black bird becomes Roland’s horn; the Fat Man becomes a
matronly Fat Lady; Wilmer the diminutive gunman becomes a slovenly thug; the
Peter Lorre part turns into a tall, broad-shouldered Englishman<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with an “I say, old chap” accent and an
umbrella. Bettie Davis is sassy, pulls a gun on people, and makes a defiant
speech when pseudo-Spade turns her over to the police. There is even a happy
ending as pseudo-Spade goes off with his dizzy-dame secretary.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This was
Hollywood mix-and-match: since they didn’t want to repeat the 1931 film (which
played it closer to the book), they changed as many thing as they could. Where
Bogart is super-cool, Mary Astor is fragile/treacherous, Sydney Greenstreet the
archetype of the upper-class epicurean, and Peter Lorre uniquely
precious-and-sinister, the 1936 rendition manages to turn memorable characters
and scenes pedestrian and silly. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hollywood
had some excuse for trying to play up the comedy/romantic side of Hammett. At
that time, by far his most successful film was the Nick and Nora Charles
combination in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thin Man</i>, already
being remade over at MGM. The gentleman-detective Nick Charles is debonair,
childishly playful especially when he is tipsy (a running joke in the films),
always good-humored and never very tough, neither physically violent nor
verbally contentious. Why not play it this way, and see if any of the William
Powell/Myrna Loy halo might rub off on Warren William et al?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Maltese Falcon</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> was a transitional book for
Hammett. If we compare the book (unchanged since 1929) to the 1941 film, we can
see where the ambiguities were and how the film-makers created a sharper image
by cuts.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett
was at a point in his career where he wanted to make his detective a more
complicated and emotional character with a libido. Hammett went overboard making Spade
emotional, mostly in the direction of being belligerent and angry. The film
tones this down. Compare the endings of the scene quoted above, where Spade
walks out on Gutman and slams the door.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The novel:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Spade
rode down from Gutman’s floor in an elevator. His lips were dry and rough in a
face otherwise pale and damp. When he took out his handkerchief to wipe his
face he saw his hand trembling. He grinned at it and said, “Whew! so loudly
that the elevator operator turned his head over his shoulder and asked: “Sir?” </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Novel.488]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
film, Bogart in the hotel corridor claps his hands and laughs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It had all been a performance to
emotionally dominate his opponent. Bogart’s Spade is cool and self-controlled
all the time. Hammett’s Spade is more realistic (people in violent
confrontations usually have a hang-over period of feeling tense, until the
adrenaline wears off), but this undermines his hero image. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett’s
Spade is also more brutal to Brigid. In the penultimate scene where the
conspirators and Spade are waiting for the black bird to be delivered, Gutman
gives Spade an envelope with ten $1000 bills. In the film, Spade counts the
money again later and accuses Gutman of having palmed one of the bills. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Do you want to say so or do you want to
stand for a frisk?” </i>[Gutman:]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> “Stand
for--?” </i>[Spade:]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> “You’re going to
admit it, or I’m going to search you. There’s no third way.”</i> Gutman takes
out a crumpled bill and says, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“I must
have my little joke every now and then.” </i>These lines are both in the book
[Novel.566] and the film. But what precedes this episode in the book has been
cut from the film:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
book, Gutman is the one who points out there are only nine $1000 bills in the
envelope, and implies with a gesture that Brigid is the one who stole the
missing $1000. Spade takes her into the bathroom and demands that she strip. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“She... whispered: “I did not take that
bill, Sam.”</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
didn’t think you did,” he said, “but I’ve got to know. Take your clothes off.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Won’t
you take my word for it?”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“No.
Take your clothes off.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
won’t.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“All
right. We’ll go back in the other room and I’ll have them taken off.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She
stepped back with a hand to her mouth. Her eyes were round and horrified. “You
would?” she asked through her fingers.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
will,” he said. “I’ve got to know what happened to that bill and I’m not going
to be held up by anybody’s maidenly modesty.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Oh,
it isn’t that.” She came close to him and put her hands on his chest again.
“I’m not ashamed to be naked before you, but-- can’t you see-- not like this.
Can’t you see that if you make me you’ll-- you’ll be killing something?”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
did not raise his voice. “I don’t know anything about that. I’ve got to know
what happened to that bill. Take them off.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She
looked at his unblinking yellow-grey eyes and her face became pink and then
white again. She drew herself up tall and began to undress. He sat on the side
of the bathtub watching her and the open door.... She removed her clothes
swiftly, without fumbling, letting them fall on the floor around her feet. When
she was naked she stepped back from her clothing and stood looking at him. In
her mien was pride without defiance or embarrassment. </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>...
He picked up each piece and examined it with fingers as well as eyes. He did
not find the thousand-dollar bill. When he had finished he stood up holding her
clothes out in his hands to her. “Thanks,” he said. “Now I know.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Novel.565]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Also cut
from the film was a segment from the earlier scene when Brigid remains in
Spade’s apartment after Cairo and the police have gone. In the film, Spade
interrogates her, and she admits to being a liar. Sam: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Was there any truth in that yarn?” </i>Brigid:<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> “Some. Not very much.” </i>Sam:<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">
“We’ve got all night. I’ll make some more coffee and we’ll try again.”</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What
gets cut is what happens next in the book:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“She put her hands up to Spade’s
cheeks, put her open mouth hard against his mouth, her body flat against his
body. Spade’s arms were around her, holding her to him, muscles bulging his
blue sleeves, a hand cradling her head, its fingers half lost among red hair, a
hand moving groping fingers over her slim back. His eyes burned yellowly.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Novel.467]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>END OF CHAPTER.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The next
chapter begins with Spade waking up with both of them undressed in his bed. He
leaves her sleeping, takes her key from her pocket, and goes out to search her
apartment. He doesn’t find anything, but besides seeking information, his action
(when he conceals from Brigid) has the effect that she finds out when she goes
home that someone has broken into her apartment. This scares her into coming
back to Spade’s office, where he arranges for her to stay somewhere else to be
safe-- and where he can find her. The film leaves out the part where he makes a
mess of her apartment, revealing Spade being both manipulative and possessive.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The film
censors their having had sex. Also cut are the lines when Spade first visits
Brigid’s apartment and she pleads for her help, now that she knows Joel Cairo
is also looking for the black bird:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I’ve
thrown myself on your mercy, told you that without your help I’m utterly lost.
What else is there?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She suddenly
moved close to him on the settee and cried angrily: “Can I buy you with my
body?”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Their
faces were inches apart. Spade took her face between his hands and kissed her
mouth roughly and contemptuously. Then he sat back and said: “I’ll think it
over.” His face was hard and furious.” </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Novel.439]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Other sex
scenes were also cut from the film. After Spade acquires the black bird from
the dying sea captain, he gets a telephone call purporting to be from Brigid at
Gutman’s hotel--in danger. When Spade arrives, neither Brigid nor the fat man
is there, but his daughter is: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“a small
fair-haired girl in a shimmering yellow dressing gown”</i> who appears to have
been drugged:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“He
caught her as she swayed. Her body arched back over his arm and her head
droppped straight back so that her short fair hair hung down her scalp and her
slender throat was a firm curve from chin to chest.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She
twisted convulsively around in his arms and caught at one of his hands with
both of hers. He pulled her hand away quickly and looked at it. Across its back
was a thin red scratch an inch and a half or more in length.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“What
the hell?” he growled and examined her hands. Her left hand was empty. In her
right hand, when he forced it open, lay a three-inch jade-headed steel
bouquet-pin. “What the hell?” he growled again and held the pin up in front of
her eyes.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When
she saw the pin she whimpered and opened her dressing gown. She pushed aside
the cream-colored pajama-coat under it and showed him her body below her left
breast-- white flesh criss-crossed with thin red lines, dotted with tiny red
dots, where the pin had scratched and punctured it.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Novel.533]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The girl
regains consciousness enough to tell him she scratched her chest to keep awake
long enough to deliver a message from Brigid when he arrived. This sends Spade
on a wild-goose chase to the suburbs; and when he returns and calls the hotel,
he finds that no one is in the Gutman suite; a doctor had been called about a
sick girl but that must have been a practical joker. This bit of
sado-pornography would have been ultra-taboo in a film during the Code era.
Cutting it also tones down the impression the book gives that Spade is finding
sexual titillation all over the place.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Also
omitted in the portrayal of Joel Cairo as a homosexual. In the showdown scene
waiting for the black bird, Spade convinces Gutman that they have to offer the
police a fall guy to blame the murders on. They finally agree on Wilmer, who
gets disarmed of his pistols and knocked out by Spade.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">At this
point we learn that Wilmer is a boy with long eyelashes. Cairo sits beside
Wilmer, stroking and whispering to him:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Cairo, still muttering in the
boy’s ear, had put his arm around the boy’s shoulders again. Suddenly the boy
pushed his arm away and turned on the sofa to face the Levantine. The boy’s
face held disgust and anger. He made a fist of one small hand and struck
Cairo’s mouth with it. Cairo cried out as a woman might have cried and drew
back to the very end of the sofa. He took a silk handkerchief from his pocket
and put it to his mouth. It came away dashed with blood. He put it to his mouth
once more and looked reproachfully at the boy. The boy snarled, “Keep away from
me,” and put his face between his hands again... Cairo’s cry had brought Brigid
O’Shaughnessy to the door. Spade, grinning at her, jerked a thumb at the sofa
and told her: “The course of true love.” </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[Novel.567-8]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Three Women</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sexually,
the plot revolves around a jealous triangle of three women. All three appear in
the beginning and the conclusion, like bookends.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>First of all we meet Effie, Spade’s secretary. She is
described as “a lanky sunburned girl” and we are constantly reminded that her
face is boyish. Effie is plainly in love with Sam, who casually calls her
“darling” and “angel” and relies on her to man the office through any emergency
and do a little sleuthing of her own. Effie is really his office wife. She sits
on his desk, rolls his hand-made cigarettes for him. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“She licked it, smoothed it, twisted its ends, and placed it betwen
Spade’s lips. He said, “Thanks, honey,” put an arm around her slim waist and
rested his cheek wearily against her hip, shutting her eyes.”</i>
[Novel.411]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The very first page,
Effie ushers in Miss Wonderly, with the words: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“You’ll want to see her anyway. She’s a knockout.”</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Effie
knows where she stands in Spade’s affections. She isn’t jealous of Wonderly/
O’Shaughnessy, obviously out of her league. Who she doesn’t like is Iva, Miles
Archer’s wife, who pushes herself on Spade whenever she has the opportunity.
The first thing Spade does after he sees Archer’s dead body is to phone Effie,
to break the news to Iva and keep her away from him. Iva is always bursting in,
and in fact she admits to calling the police and telling them to go to Spade’s
apartment after she sees him enter the building with Brigid. This is how Iva and
Sam get along:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“She
was a blonde woman of a few more years than thirty. Her facial prettiness was
perhaps five years past its best moment. Her body for all its sturdiness was
finely modeled and exquisite. She wore black clothes from hat to shoes. They
had an impromptu air... Iva came quickly to him, raising her sad face for his
kiss. Her arms were around him before his held her, When they had kissed he
made a little movement as if to release her, but she pressed her face to his
chest and began sobbing. He stroked her round back, saying “Poor darling.” His
voice was tender. His eyes, squinting at the desk that had been his partner’s,
across the room from his own, were angry. He drew his lips back over his teeth
in an impatient grimace and turned his chin aside to avoid contact with the
crown of her hat.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">
[Novel.409]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But
Brigid O’Shaughnessy has the center of attention whenever she appears, and
becomes Spade’s obsession (both professionally and otherwise) for the bulk of
the story. For Spade, Iva is an unwelcome intrusion; and Effie is his pricipal
ally on this front. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This is
Brigid’s entrance:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“A
voice said, “Thank you,” so softly that only the purest articulation made the
words intelligible, and a young woman came through the doorway. She advanced slowly,
with tentative steps, looking at Spade with cobalt blue eyes that were both shy
and probing. She was tall and pliantly slender, without angularity anywhere.
Her body was erect and high-breasted, her legs long, her hands and feet narrow.
She wore two shades of blue that had been selected because of her eyes... White
teeth glistened in the crescent her timid smile made.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Novel.391] </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
jealous triangle, Effie hates Iva, Iva hates Brigid, and Brigid is oblivious to
the other two. Effie’s attitude towards Brigid is unexpected, but at least it
balances: a negative of a negative is a positive. And Effie is so loyal to Sam
that she roots for him in his love affairs too. This sets up a surprise
conclusion-- which is definitely not in the film.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
film, as we know, ends with Brigid descending in the elevator cell on her way
to the gallows. The book adds one more brief scene. It is Monday morning, and
Effie if reading the newspaper when Spade arrives. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Is
that-- what the papers have-- right?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>she asked...</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Her
girl’s brown eyes were peculiarly enlarged and there was a queer twist<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>to her mouth. She stood beside him,
staring down at him.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>He
raised his head, grinned, and said mockingly: “So much for your woman’s
intution.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Her
voice was a queer as the expression on her face. “You did that, Sam, to her?”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>...He
looked sharply at her. He put his arm around her waist, his hand on her hip.
“She did kill Miles, angel,” he said gently, “offhand, like that.” He snapped
the fingers of his other hand.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She
escaped from his arm as if it had hurt her. “Don’t, please, don’t touch me,”
she said brokenly. “I know-- I know you’re right. You’re right. But don’t touch
me now-- not now.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Spade’s
face became as pale as his collar.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
corridor-door’s knob rattled. Effie Perine turned quickly and went to the outer
office, shutting the door behind her. When she came in again she shut it behind
her.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>She
said in a small flat voice: “Iva is here.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Spade,
looking down at his desk, nodded almost imperceptibly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Yes,” he said and shivered. “Well,
show her in.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">
[Novel.584-5]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Full
circle: on the first page of the book, after Effie announces Miss Wonderly,
Spade said: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Shoo her in, darling. Shoo
her in.”</i> [Novel.391]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Yes, the
book is more complicated than the film. More morally complicated too. But that
is too much for a movie. There were a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>number of strategic cuts in the climactic scene between Spade and
Brigid. In the book, Spade keeps harping on his strategic concern that there
has to be a fall guy, somebody to pin the murders on to satisfy the police. If
he’s still worried about the cops suspecting him (an aspect that is much more
prominent throughout the book than the movie), he is ready to sacrifice Brigid
as the fall guy. He conveys a contagious sense of fear: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“He
looked at the watch on his wrist. “The police will be blowing in any minute now
and we’re sitting on dynamite. Talk!”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“She
put the back of a hand to her forehead. “Oh, why do you accuse me of such a
terrible--?”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Will
you stop it?” he demanded in a low impatient voice. “This isn’t the spot for
the schoolgirl act. Listen to me. The pair of us are sitting under the
gallows.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Well,
not really the pair of them; mainly her. But Spade engages in both moral and
physical intimidation: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“He took hold of
her wrists and made her stand up straight in front of him. “Talk!”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[Novel.577] </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>More
cut lines: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“You came into my bed to stop
me asking questions.”</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>...
She put a hand on his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t help me me then,” she
whispered, “but don’t hurt me. Let me go<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>away now.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“No,”
he said. “I’m sunk if I haven’t got you to hand over to the police when they
come. That’s the only thing that can keep me from going down with the others.”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You
won’t do that for me?”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
won’t play the sap for you.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> [Novel.580-1]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Only the
last line was retained.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The film
ending is shorter, cleaner, and more of a romantic tragedy. The limitations of
the film medium took Hammett’s overly-ambitious, or not quite manageable piece
of complexity, and turned in into an all-time classic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett’s career arc: </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">frenzied work pace,
projects in all directions, declining creativity</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon</i> in 1928 was the apex
of Hammett’s writing career. He had been working at the craft for 5 years and
was 34 years old. Before that he had a 5-year stint with the Pinkertons. He
started working even earlier, from age 14 as office boy, newspaper hawker, dock
worker, and salesman for his father’s failing businesses in Baltimore. His
downwardly mobile family was like Dickens’ father being sent to debtors’ prison
and the boy to a child-labor factory, giving the unexpected advantage of
knowing much more about the underside of the world than merely school-trained
authors. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">For 4
years, Hammett wrote stories. As he made them longer and more complicated, he
began experimenting with novels. Already in 1925 he started one called “The
Secret Emperor” which sounds like one of his exotic-locale adventures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By mid-1927 he was making the
transition to novels. Things would grow increasingly hectic.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Overlaps: Red Harvest; The Dain
Curse; Maltese Falcon</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">After
serializing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Cleansing of Poisonville</i>
over the winter of 1927-28, Hammett began working with a literary publisher,
Alfred A. Knopf, in February 1928, to turn it into a novel. Blanche Knopf, the
publisher’s wife, worked closely with the manuscript during the spring, toning
down the violence. At the same time, he was working on another series of linked
stories, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dain Curse,</i> which he
completed in June. By December, he had completed his third major project of the
year, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon</i>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
books are all different. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red Harvest</i>
is the most violent of Hammett’s works, set in a mining town, where the Op goes
far beyond his instructions in breaking the law. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Dain Curse</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> is a classic San Francisco
locale, about a mystical Oriental cult in a labyrinthine building, where
spoiled rich youth and trophy wives see occult visions which are really caused
by drugs piped into their rooms through ventilation pipes, giving Hammett the
opportunity to describe the sensations of drug experience. This remains a
typical Op story.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Maltese Falcon</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> is where Hammett abandons the Op
as a lead character for someone both angry and sexy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
three novels (published in February 1929, July 1929, and February 1930) sold
increasingly well, with favorable reviews. By the time <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon</i> came out, Hammett was famous. Movie rights to
all three were sold almost immediately.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Overlaps: The Glass Key, The Thin
Man, Hollywood and New York</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Just
before fame hit, Hammett was working on another novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Glass Key,</i> which he began in fall 1929 and finished in 1930.
Published in 1931, it too had good reviews and sales, and movies rights were
quickly signed. Meanwhile Hammett moved to Hollywood. He contracted in early
1931 to write a second Sam Spade film, but his script was rejected. In the
summer, he turned to another project, and wrote 65 pages of a novel called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Thin Man,</i> but put the project aside
when he moved to New York. By fall 1932, he was working on a new version of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Thin Man,</i> which he finished in May
1933. The book was published in January 1934; MGM had already snapped it up and
brought out the film in June, to tremendous success. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Thematically,
his work is now all over the map. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Glass Key</i> is about an Eastern city resembling Baltimore, run by a political
boss who shakes down contributors for campaign funds, rakes off city contracts,
and protects Prohibition-era speakeasies and gambling houses. The plot is the
boss decides to back a Reform candidate, because he falls in love with his
beautiful daughter. The boss also finds out his own daughter is shacking up
with the reformer’s playboy son, and soon afterwards the boy’s corpse is found
on the street. All this is seen through the eyes of a political fixer, Ned
Beaumont, who tells the boss he is making a big mistake in upsetting a
well-functioning racket. Bereft of police protection, gangsters push back, and
threaten to pin the boy’s murder on the boss, using publicity from a newspaper
that is in hock to the mob. Beaumont isn’t a detective nor a very heroic or
ethical person, but he does risk his life while pretending to go in with the
gangsters, to find out who is leaking information about the killing. There are
some mystery-like twists and surprises in the story, and Beaumont ends up with
the girl. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Glass Key</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> is an offshoot of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Maltese Falcon </i>manner, but even more cynical, except for
the romantic ending. But there are no memorably grotesque or exotic characters,
no astounding confrontation scenes, and no one is very sympathetic. It did OK
as a book and a movie, but Hammett may well have felt there was nothing more
for him to do in that direction-- especially since it was looking backwards
towards his distant past.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But now
he was partying with the rich and famous in Hollywood and New York. One can
conjecture that Nick Charles is himself, surrounded by reporters wherever he
goes, drinking merrily, tossing off urbane remarks to admirers, retired from
detective work but still solving (fictional) murders on the side. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Too many distractions: fame,
drinking, partying, sex, politics</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Thin Man</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> series of films had a life of
its own. Hammett was periodically in Hollywood, working on the sequels, but he
was becoming increasingly unreliable, and most of what got filmed was by other
writers. Hammett was no longer getting new work done. He failed to deliver a
promised new novel to Knopf in 1936; crapped out on another novel contract in
1938, and again in 1939. The titles: “My Brother Felix” and “There Was a Young
Man” seem to be off in new directions from anything he had done before;*
Hammett had been a meticulous writer, and he probably felt they just weren’t up
to the mark. His movie treatments were often tardy and his contracts suspended,
his scenarios for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thin Man</i> sequels
rejected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1939, MGM canceled
his writing contract. .</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
especially compared to his snappy early titles: “Crooked Souls,” “Slippery
Fingers,” “Bodies Piled Up,” [1923], “Zigzags of Treachery,” [1924], “The
Scorched Face,” “Corkscrew” [1925]. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hammett
would to live to 1961, dying at age 66. But his creativity had long since
petered out. What happened?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some
of it was sheer distraction. By the time he became famous in 1930, he was
surrounded by other literary stars. He drank heavily at an endless round of parties
on both coasts. He had affairs with numerous women-- among them on-the-make
playwright Lillian Hellman, whose plays Hammett revised and collaborated on. He
became involved in politics, signing petitions and appearing at Writers
Congresses and anti-Fascist rallies in the 1930s, elected president of the
League of American Writers, and active in Communist-front organizations. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It would
be too easy to say this was just another writer who drank too much. He was
pulled in too many directions. His main-- if not too reliable-- source of
income was movie treatments for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Thin
Man</i> series and whatever else he could convince his admirers to float; but
this would have pulled his head in conflicting directions:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nick and Nora were candyland, where
nothing very bad or very realistic ever intrudes (even the police don’t
threaten to impede their investigations; the criminals are old friends of Nick,
who brag about the times he sent them up the river; and their city, at least,
has no hint of corruption). This must have grated with his episodic attempts at
popularizing Sam Spade (as a radio show, as a comic strip, etc.). And his
left-wing political activities must have made his literary and film work seem
hypocritical, and vice versa. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Good
writing, especially of any great length, requires sustained concentration, a
prerequisite for getting the flow that is the personal experience of
creativity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hammett in 1928 and
1929 could devote himself for 3 months at a time to turning out a book. Later
he no longer had the uninterrupted time, the energy, or the focus. His five
novels are increasingly different from each other. The first two were in a
groove, a natural trajectory of his Continental Op materials.* <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Maltese Falcon</i> combines<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>hard-boiled with real-life ambiguity
about sex and love. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Glass Key</i>
drops the exotic facade to reveal ordinary dirty politics. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Thin Man</i> turns the detective genre into pure sugar. Unable to
start a new trajectory, and unable to continue with the old ones, Hammett was
paralyzed as a creative writer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Dain Curse</i> expands a 1925 story,
“The Scorched Face,” about rich young women in a drug cult, which blackmails
them with photos taken during their orgies. The blackmail/ pornography idea
here became the hook for Raymond Chandler’s first novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Big Sleep.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Raymond Chandler occupies the Sam
Spade niche</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But the
development was not lost. Hammett’s best techniques were picked up by Raymond
Chandler.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Chandler
was 6 years older than Hammett (born in 1888 rather than 1894), but he got a
later start as a writer. Chandler grew up mostly in England, saw combat in
World War I, and worked in Los Angeles in the 1920s as bookeeper, financial
auditor, and executive for an oil company. The discovery of oil in Southern
California set off a boom of companies drilling wells, a fever of investment
and their scandals; Chandler launched his upward career in the company by
uncovering embezzlement.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By 1930,
when Chandler was fired for heavy drinking, he had seen a lot of life in
America’s fastest growing city and its revolution in social manners. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Looking
around for a way to make a living, Chandler decided on writing. He schooled
himself for what would sell. He started studying pulp magazines in 1930, and
published his first story in 1933-- also in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Black
Mask.</i> With his conservative English education, he decided to learn American
English as if it were a foreign language. That meant especially its idioms and
its slang-- no longer just part of the underworld, but percolating upwards in
the American cultural democracy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Chandler
came into detective writing at just the time Hammett stopped. Chandler followed
the same early path: short stories, then combining and expanding them into
full-length novels. The first was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Big
Sleep</i> (1939) when Chandler was 51 years old. Biological age is less
important for a writer than experience learning the craft. It took 6 years for
Chandler to publish his first novel, the same as Hammett. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Chandler
copied the Hammett brand. A hard-boiled detective inured to violence. This is
Sam Spade resurrected, with no trace of the old organizational Op. Skilled at
sizing up a situation from micro-observations, and a sardonic way of dominating
people or at least holding them at bay.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
swift-moving plot, with minimal prose distractions. Vivid word-portraits,
enlivened by wise-cracks.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Short,
punchy titles: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Farewell, My Lovely;
Trouble is My Business; The High Window;</i> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Killer in the Rain</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Plots
that twist far from their starting place when a client visits Philip Marlowe’s
office-- whether it be a femme fatale, a squeamish female hick from the
Midwest, or a moose-sized ex-con. And Chandler has Hammett’s structural
weakness, the final reckoning in a scene where the detective has to explain who
did what and who killed who and why. (Some of Chandler’s plots are so full of
surprising episodes that experts say there are still ends left dangling.) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cops
sticking their nose in, threatening Marlowe,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>putting him through the third degree and into a holding
cell. Fighting through this is a much bigger deal in Chandler than in Hammett,
and it underlines a bitterness in his lone-wolf character. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And
there is a lot more sex. There are underworld molls now married to
millionaires, rich daughters who do drugs, run up gambling debts at illegal
casinos, and pose for pornographic pictures. There is more of a good girl/ bad
girl contrast, with Marlowe being more of a romantic than Spade; he likes the
tough good-girls who venture out into the underworld with him, flirty but
self-possessed. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And more
corruption. Here Chandler follows the lead of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Glass Key</i>. It is taken for granted that the D.A. does
everything with an eye for elections, that the police take payoffs to protect
illegal gambling and drugs. Chandler particularly has it in for medical
doctors. They run fake clinics that are really fronts for drug-peddling;
Marlowe is drugged out and locked up in one of them in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Murder, My Sweet</i>. When he goes out checking lists of doctors in
search of a lead, he finds doctors who get through the day on doses of heroin,
and others who are ready to commit or cover up murder. The whole world is
corrupt. And this gives a particular tone to his classic locale, Los Angeles in
the 30s and 40s. It is la-la-land, sun-drenched casualness replacing formal
clothes, formal manners, and old-fashioned ethics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Chandler’s
writing career stayed on track where Hammett’s spun apart, by sticking to the
techniques and settings that worked. He goes on writing novels and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>stories, at a slow, meticulous pace,
through the 1940s and 1950s, a total of 7 novels in 20 years. He has no
burn-out, no diffusion of his energies, no confusion about what kind of book he
wants to write next.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He even
survives Hollywood. Many of the top writers of the time were employed as script
writers: Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Hemingway, Hammett, Chandler.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of these accomplished nothing--
even when they were adapting their own novels, the resulting film was worse or
better than the original irrespective of their input. The exception is
Chandler. He too hated the work regimen, writing regular hours on the studio
lot, aware that everything could be changed by a director, and other writers
could rewrite the script, sometimes multiple times. Yet Chandler wrote one of
the greatest film noir, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Double Indemnity</i>
(1944), about a crooked insurance salesman and his boss, the claims
investigator (i.e. detective) who sees through everything. A conniving blonde
is the bad seed, but the real drama is between the two men, almost an office
married couple, building facades and tearing them down across an office desk.
In the final scene, when a dying Fred MacMurray tells Edward G. Robinson, “I
love you too”, it is reminiscent of the scene where Sam Spade says to his loyal
secretary, “You’re a good man, sister.” Heart-breaking moments in the sea of
hardboiled operatives. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">References</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dashiell
Hammett. 2017. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Big Book of the
Continental Op.</i> Vintage Crime.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>[page references to this volume thus: Op.xxx]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dashiell
Hammett. 1999. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hammett: Complete Novels.</i>
The Library of America. [page references to this volume thus: Novel.xxx]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Raymond
Chandler. 1950. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trouble is My Business.</i>
(short story collection)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nathan
Ward. 2015. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lost Detective. Becoming
Dashiell Hammett. </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bloomsbury
Publishing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tom
Williams. 2012. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Mysterious Something in
the Light: The Life of Raymond Chandler. </i>Chicago Review Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Randall
Collins. 2004. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Interaction Ritual Chains.
</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Princeton Univ. Press.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: 59.5pt;">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-41645837698439942292017-11-24T20:30:00.000-08:002017-11-29T09:44:56.044-08:00HEFNER’S PLAYBOY: SPINOFF OF ESQUIRE’S NICHE<style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hugh
Hefner died September 27, 2017, but mass market sex magazines died fifteen
years earlier. Hefner created an industry, like Steve Jobs. That doesn’t mean
he was alone. Innovation in magazines or films or any other kind of
popular culture is similar to creativity in other fields. Sex may be the topic
but how it gets presented comes from what happens when networks spin off,
experienced personnel circulate, and rivals imitate and jockey for position with
each other. A good way to trace this process is the field of men’s magazines
from the 1950s through the 80s when it had huge circulation and made big
fortunes. An entry point into the network is Hugh Hefner and Playboy Magazine. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Road map:</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Similarities and networks between
Esquire and Playboy</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Life-spans of US magazines and
generational die-offs</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Evolution in the men’s magazine
niche</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sex work markets</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tie-ins between sex magazines and
film</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Summary of sex models’ career
patterns</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Two dimensions of porn: How much
sex; Beauty / wealth</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Who made the big fortunes in sex?
</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Does creativity work the same way
in all fields?</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Similarities and networks between
Esquire and Playboy</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hefner
worked for Esquire Magazine before he started Playboy in 1953. Esquire was the
elite men’s magazine of its time, publishing a mixture of men’s fashion, short
stories by famous writers, and sex mostly in the form of cartoons by pin-up
artists of the 1940s. Playboy followed the same format. Its main innovation was
adding a glossy color photo of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>semi-nude women. This was a detachable centerfold fold-out, that could
be hung up like World War II pin-ups or the calendars that followed. This would
evolve.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">For the
outset, look at Esquire at the end of the 1940s and early 50s, with Playboy
overlapping:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Logo:</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Since its origin in 1934, Esquire always featured on its
cover a cartoon figure of a balding, pop-eyed gentleman. Playboy created a
similarly light-hearted logo, a rabbit dressed in tuxedo or other
tweedy/debonair clothes. The bunny, of course, “breeds like a rabbit.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Esquire was an honorific title for a
wealthy gentleman, although depicted humorously as a “sugar daddy” or “dirty
old man.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKs2qQEA6kpt0-CaFFzv5wabQgoG64DstZ8B5Dn-8-g62aHv5OT189XXNxpZVCFTTsFy8VN1y6UtxXq7OHd49UoGsZL8HLLyyCXCwvLL1TGh3kw46HsJRGzH372bevH5tNhTuGsoz7IUM/s1600/001-1934-51-Esquire-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="357" data-original-width="835" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjKs2qQEA6kpt0-CaFFzv5wabQgoG64DstZ8B5Dn-8-g62aHv5OT189XXNxpZVCFTTsFy8VN1y6UtxXq7OHd49UoGsZL8HLLyyCXCwvLL1TGh3kw46HsJRGzH372bevH5tNhTuGsoz7IUM/s400/001-1934-51-Esquire-.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>Esquire covers 1934-1951</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOr6E4F1fjrBcXrlyq8CjKPx814mlDcahtST3WvzCyWWu8OHKNNp9CWlW8B-MRlWKXAiRUKyuM4WL1KooX38ezBjCXBP05fge-Jru0JUX9twrTGZuOqOWEq_QOuvyzufYRbESud5r_qiE/s1600/002-1951.4Esquire%252C1955.6Playboy-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="470" data-original-width="714" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgOr6E4F1fjrBcXrlyq8CjKPx814mlDcahtST3WvzCyWWu8OHKNNp9CWlW8B-MRlWKXAiRUKyuM4WL1KooX38ezBjCXBP05fge-Jru0JUX9twrTGZuOqOWEq_QOuvyzufYRbESud5r_qiE/s400/002-1951.4Esquire%252C1955.6Playboy-.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Esquire 1951, Playboy 1955</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span></span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some of
Playboy’s early covers were close imitations of an Esquire cover. Here they
depict the dating game, Playboy’s looking surprisingly like a women’s romance
magazine:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjywjtS0aFfxXLufu7kGBVGkZudInAYGOqbhzjYI40YALQElwjn8VO63XTJKznTYxCfnQ2OpIt3d6UkqpQrBdLeIUnNSxvkNzTPPedimX0RhcLEdgcBIY5YNHkTG5b568f_8q4LzZkk4M/s1600/003-1952.1ESQ%252C1956.2PB-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="494" data-original-width="728" height="271" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjywjtS0aFfxXLufu7kGBVGkZudInAYGOqbhzjYI40YALQElwjn8VO63XTJKznTYxCfnQ2OpIt3d6UkqpQrBdLeIUnNSxvkNzTPPedimX0RhcLEdgcBIY5YNHkTG5b568f_8q4LzZkk4M/s400/003-1952.1ESQ%252C1956.2PB-.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Esquire 1952, Playboy 1956</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Fashion and upscale consumption: </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Esquire’s content from the beginning was very
fashion-oriented. Playboy updated to current styles and new products. When
long-playing, high-fidelity records came on the market in the late 1950s,
Playboy ran photos of well-dressed party scenes featuring records and hi-fi
equipment:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ8wiCyMzhaSIRZbslwXfkhz8s2W8saLF9HmSQNXNLdoXc0H20vth8vecpBA_DuGORG0FNo0TDaH0F8rveanidGkPoEPuvWqe6Yvx58TRMRt1t1BeR8ZT0QO81FmswZnGoBaKgt7Kbzms/s1600/004-1959.05PB-CindyFuller%252B+copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1017" data-original-width="1113" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgZ8wiCyMzhaSIRZbslwXfkhz8s2W8saLF9HmSQNXNLdoXc0H20vth8vecpBA_DuGORG0FNo0TDaH0F8rveanidGkPoEPuvWqe6Yvx58TRMRt1t1BeR8ZT0QO81FmswZnGoBaKgt7Kbzms/s320/004-1959.05PB-CindyFuller%252B+copy.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">May 1959 Playmate of the Month posed at a record party</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And
sometimes undressed, tripping out on music and wine:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoATQ_XIMQj2TbniaZ_tcWgtnKhMTQ7A5107GgOJ2sFaXefLZWqG79VT5WTFebWRqUiyMdgjaQ7_FlHPSh7b434nzrrJPlQMcZLK6nIfEM4jBcrfdwz3XaH6xze9k_9fUbOoUaQ4jvmsM/s1600/005-1959.07PB-YvetteVickers.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="525" data-original-width="792" height="212" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgoATQ_XIMQj2TbniaZ_tcWgtnKhMTQ7A5107GgOJ2sFaXefLZWqG79VT5WTFebWRqUiyMdgjaQ7_FlHPSh7b434nzrrJPlQMcZLK6nIfEM4jBcrfdwz3XaH6xze9k_9fUbOoUaQ4jvmsM/s320/005-1959.07PB-YvetteVickers.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">July 1959 Playmate Yvette Vickers listening to jazz</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Modern
jazz had been around since the late 40s, but was an esoteric scene and fell
into the background in the mid-50s with the explosion of popular rock ‘n
roll.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hefner pushed jazz as a more
adult and upscale version of hipness, featuring regular jazz reviews and
sponsoring jazz festivals. Since jazz musicians were heavily black, Hefner’s
parties became a beacon for social integration at the time of the civil rights
movement-- and gave legitimacy while the magazine was moving the nudity
frontier. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Literature: </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It became something of a joke to say that you read a men’s
magazine for the articles. But in fact Esquire was one of the chief literary
magazines of its day, publishing Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck, and
André Gide.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Playboy carried on,
publishing short stories by the new generation-- Ian Fleming, Vladimir Nabokov,
John Updike; sci-fi writers like Arthur Clarke; feminists Doris Lessing and
Margaret Atwood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Esquire kept pace
with Playboy for a while on the sex front, but as nude photos became more
prominent, Esquire switched course and in the 1960s became the exponent of
so-called “New Journalism” blending reportage and first-person fiction
techniques by writers like Norman Mailer, Tom Wolfe, and Tim O’Brien. The
magazines were dividing into separate niches.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cartoons and pin-ups: </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But not yet in the mid-50s. Esquire had been running risqué
cartoons for years. Now they morphed into Playboy’s photographic version of the
same scenes:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDCHQWiLmCKE_JsAYs67zX7Bq_l2hyphenhyphenbkIyG3Gf6vNYHz_W_WQqDl-bqZCiSD8BU3pXPPCe67vFfyX8ku4Hk-We4XnMdmU2YUrDyyPsVgOhhkJq6wVnh6osHNkfEjzydKU7IJgGr9Dqbr0/s1600/006-1954ESQ%252C1955PB-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="677" data-original-width="838" height="322" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgDCHQWiLmCKE_JsAYs67zX7Bq_l2hyphenhyphenbkIyG3Gf6vNYHz_W_WQqDl-bqZCiSD8BU3pXPPCe67vFfyX8ku4Hk-We4XnMdmU2YUrDyyPsVgOhhkJq6wVnh6osHNkfEjzydKU7IJgGr9Dqbr0/s400/006-1954ESQ%252C1955PB-.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1954 Esquire cartoon; 1955 Playboy
centerfold</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
1940s, Esquire regularly carried sexy pin-up art by famous artists Alberto
Vargas and George Petty. Up through the late 1950s, it produced an annual
calendar, with a pin-up for each month.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Playboy continued to feature not only sexy cartoons but some of the same
artists:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0veoy-ZNikEems8CHdC5noH5I-RJc6_OspW_Nue7bhV4ZKhl4RQOjY6CnhGRRqKzqcb3WPisZHIprSi_aUG0WEMtYm5hZnm-fDxLFljsLuSzEnnTo7AbIJFbNYWVb19totiacUbZJXrM/s1600/007-1954ESQ-calendar%252C1971PB-Vargas-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="592" data-original-width="556" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0veoy-ZNikEems8CHdC5noH5I-RJc6_OspW_Nue7bhV4ZKhl4RQOjY6CnhGRRqKzqcb3WPisZHIprSi_aUG0WEMtYm5hZnm-fDxLFljsLuSzEnnTo7AbIJFbNYWVb19totiacUbZJXrM/s320/007-1954ESQ-calendar%252C1971PB-Vargas-.jpg" width="300" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1954 Esquire calendar; 1971 Playboy pin-up art by Vargas</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It was
the pin-up connection that created Playboy’s sensational debut in December
1953. In a later interview, Hefner said everyone had heard about Marilyn
Monroe’s nude calendar, but no one had seen it. It had been shot in 1949 when
she was a bit-part actress, and printed by a company that made hang-up
calendars carrying custom-made local advertisements. By 1952 Marilyn was a
rising star with a buzz about her early nudity. Hefner found out that her
photos were owned by a calendar company in the outskirts of Chicago, and talked
them into selling the rights for $500 (about $4500 in today’s dollars).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Playboy’s first issue, with Marilyn as
centerfold, sold out at 50,000 copies. Her career as a sex star rocketed, as
did Playboy’s reputation-- the following issues selling even better as
distribution expanded. </span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhthWoslJwVl4Z999jPl_DEM5PeLeOfehRXC5xugeaDRoR0e6Hx9AQGeMW5nMqGISarkcqu8o-MODIvHiLGebXlimBA1Tw30mdmkFijZ_zEyDKaxNfLpqRRv_cuUgtFfFK_Uhkn0zKwblg/s1600/008-1946Varga%252C1949%253A53MM.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="818" data-original-width="1140" height="229" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhthWoslJwVl4Z999jPl_DEM5PeLeOfehRXC5xugeaDRoR0e6Hx9AQGeMW5nMqGISarkcqu8o-MODIvHiLGebXlimBA1Tw30mdmkFijZ_zEyDKaxNfLpqRRv_cuUgtFfFK_Uhkn0zKwblg/s320/008-1946Varga%252C1949%253A53MM.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1946 Varga pin-up in Esquire calendar;
1953 Monroe centerfold</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There
were network connections on both sides. Marilyn’s pose-- torso in profile, arm
up, head back as if gazing out over her bare armpit-- is virtually the same as
Vargas’ pin-up from 1946. Tom Kelley, the Hollywood photographer who did the
shoot with Marilyn in 1949 had no doubt seen Vargas’ work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marilyn posed extensively both for
photographers and pin-up artists in her early career: </span></div>
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<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLUUsDCyJ1PIBpullZ0yrcXepRONQoN3KZVpM778qQNGYcks4-khpbJ6Ep4p5gQmkAaq_Gkosb2HG0wtUul7T5Owp9Q-vtwZHjrDxJH_3hQ6pKwbVKRbxroO1aCSxjh2gS10JklOdH2Xg/s1600/009-1952-MM-pinup-posing-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="771" data-original-width="940" height="262" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhLUUsDCyJ1PIBpullZ0yrcXepRONQoN3KZVpM778qQNGYcks4-khpbJ6Ep4p5gQmkAaq_Gkosb2HG0wtUul7T5Owp9Q-vtwZHjrDxJH_3hQ6pKwbVKRbxroO1aCSxjh2gS10JklOdH2Xg/s320/009-1952-MM-pinup-posing-.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Marilyn posing for Earl Moran
pin-up </span></td></tr>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Marilyn
had even posed for<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a 2-page color
photo in Esquire in 1951. (Playboy’s centerfolds would be 3-page.) But it
attracted no particular attention; it wasn’t nude, the color wasn’t
particularly good, and there was no publicity build-up around it. When Hefner’s
turn came, he made a point of telling wholesalers and distributers nationally
that “some of the guys from Esquire had stayed behind and were creating this
great new magazine” (2003 interview) and that it would include the Marilyn
Monroe calendar pictures. </span></div>
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEJ7okVm59hwgL4Ke81a_MhpyULJ-PIJjN4pZwzVGaQvQVPFxzOw-mJdF2YFHELZY9vn0ik8kyPtXylxh0C_Bz3P8RxPLosHux3qqHFEORisDrt2qcDjrQQeqIw88cSxuOvPeUlR9_6Ik/s1600/010-1951.ESQ-MM-cfold-hz-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="695" data-original-width="809" height="274" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiEJ7okVm59hwgL4Ke81a_MhpyULJ-PIJjN4pZwzVGaQvQVPFxzOw-mJdF2YFHELZY9vn0ik8kyPtXylxh0C_Bz3P8RxPLosHux3qqHFEORisDrt2qcDjrQQeqIw88cSxuOvPeUlR9_6Ik/s320/010-1951.ESQ-MM-cfold-hz-.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Esquire 1951 photo of Marilyn</span></td></tr>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So how
did Hefner know how to locate the original rights? He had been working for
Esquire in promotion, but quit when the magazine headquarters moved from Chicago
to New York. Hefner became circulation manager for Chicago companies that
produced a variety of magazines, including art photography and men’s magazines.
These gave him the crucial links-- the big hurdle for any new product being
distribution. But what did he have to sell? The same grapevine brought him the
info that rights to the Monroe calendar were owned by a local company. This too
was not an accident, as many of the notable pin-up artists of the time worked
in Chicago, and the main distributers of calendars were in the same part of the
country. Hefner came up at the heart of a dense network. And he started early,
producing a high school magazine about movies and radio shows, and editing a
college humor magazine at University of Illinois. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Such were
the ingredients that came together at Chicago at the turn of the 1950s: a
publishing center for many national magazines; a center for magazine and pin-up
artists and calendar publishers; a famous men’s magazine, Esquire, that had
successfully fought government censorship over semi-nude pin-ups, and whose
employees included some ready to go in a new direction.</span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhSXPWZWKGpv2JWK_FXJO7mA2Bu6XW4HdX_02i_rmcXpGz9eQcN2mW-aWHlIRczRDY02J5PftT_O7YKP2Uz1C_F5tlBW2MSLbvXcDxJgrQQWpckNK6ismqxvI444hg4r6LaoLoSWjqV64/s1600/0011-1946.pinup.trial-USattny%252CMethodistBishop.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="522" data-original-width="701" height="238" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhhSXPWZWKGpv2JWK_FXJO7mA2Bu6XW4HdX_02i_rmcXpGz9eQcN2mW-aWHlIRczRDY02J5PftT_O7YKP2Uz1C_F5tlBW2MSLbvXcDxJgrQQWpckNK6ismqxvI444hg4r6LaoLoSWjqV64/s320/0011-1946.pinup.trial-USattny%252CMethodistBishop.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1946 trial: Attorney for U.S. Post
Office asks Methodist bishop for opinion about obscenity of Vargas pin-up</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
public atmosphere was changing. The Kinsey reports, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sexual Behavior in the Human Male,</i> came out in 1949 (reviewed by
Hefner in his college magazine), with the second volume <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sexual Behavior in the Human Female</i> in 1953.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was becoming legitimate to talk
about sex.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">One more
factor coincided in the mix: color photography was starting to come into its
own. News and art photographers had used black and white since the beginning of
the 20th century; as in movies, color photography was expensive and the colors
were garish and unnatural. Printing on glossy paper was expensive. (Pin-up
calendars used cheap paper.) For technical reasons, even pin-up artists like
Gil Elvgren who took color photos of the model referred to them in order to do
his painting, which in turn would sell as pin-ups but also for advertisements
(like Coca-Cola) and for mainstream magazine covers. By the mid-1950s, it was
feasible for Playboy to print a glossy color fold-out, but too expensive to
have more than one full-size color photo per issue. The rest of Playmate of the
Month feature (on the back side of the fold-out) would consist of
black-and-white photos-- in Hefner’s marketing ploy, these were not sexual but
showed her in ordinary scenes such as a college girl. As the 60s wore on, color
photography became less expensive, and the quality improved to where it could
out-do the best black-and-white photographs. The number of photo features in
Playboy began to increase. This would be a major point of competition when it
faced a new set of rivals in the 1970s.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Life-spans of US magazines and
generational die-offs</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Magazines
are born; the successful ones expand, reach a peak, and eventually decline and
disappear. The beginning and end points tend to cluster, implying something
external is happening to the entire field at particular historical moments. </span></div>
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz4gYeWQYU-IXyvA9tdK-r2IHAO9Wz_xYHvBLZFc3pIihDp8XPZNh1TmDXe0c8Y0YI75L-Acxo7zpc1YtFB-06RkcQmxh2cBiHDat6Os5-FNq6n6G29ODaJ0cqquiMS9Z0ZhictD68Ta4/s1600/012-USMags-timeline.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1399" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjz4gYeWQYU-IXyvA9tdK-r2IHAO9Wz_xYHvBLZFc3pIihDp8XPZNh1TmDXe0c8Y0YI75L-Acxo7zpc1YtFB-06RkcQmxh2cBiHDat6Os5-FNq6n6G29ODaJ0cqquiMS9Z0ZhictD68Ta4/s640/012-USMags-timeline.jpg" width="556" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">US general interest magazines timeline</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The big
mass-circulation magazines clustered in two generations. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Collier’s Magazine </i>and<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Saturday Evening Post</i> started in
the late 1800s, and rose to over 1 million per issue in the beginning of the
20th century. Up through the 1930s they competed over the top position at close
to 3 million. Both had famous artists doing their covers and illustrations
(Norman Rockwell at Saturday Evening Post; Charles Dana Gibson, creator of the
Gibson Girl pin-up, at Collier’s). Famous writers provided short stories or
serialized their novels-- Sherlock Holmes stories, Jack London, Faulkner, Scott
Fitzgerald, later Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger; humor from Ring Lardner and
P.J. Wodehouse; science fiction from Ray Bradbury; mysteries from Agatha
Christie; cartoonists like Charles Addams and Bill Mauldin. Winston Churchill
reported on World War I, Hemingway on WWII. After the war these family
magazines started losing money and readers, and closed in the late 1950s and
60s. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
mid-1930s came another burst: Esquire in 1933, Life in 1936, Look in 1937. The
latter two were photojournalism, with large staffs of photographers covering
news, entertainment celebrities, and human interest, publishing weekly in
black-and-white. In the 1940s and early 50s Life boomed to 13.5 million. Its
close imitator Look lagged behind but in the 1960s both leveled out around 8
million. Losing advertisers and readers, their circulation were still an
impressive 5.5 - 6.5 million when they closed down in the early 1970s. </span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYj4_r7MNyUxCcOJ5WSvDpn1s2Vbc5SXuxdA8YDh9qokK2q0wB7NEi9IY7NJJ7FDruuEtGv61ee29r57UM8VdV2o-9uTfBtfoDj9YTwdsfsFh7u-pMpKrkUHgTl5V8D6HSjSlyQK09w8Y/s1600/013-1954.MM-Life-issue%255B1954skirtblow%255D-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="790" data-original-width="594" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgYj4_r7MNyUxCcOJ5WSvDpn1s2Vbc5SXuxdA8YDh9qokK2q0wB7NEi9IY7NJJ7FDruuEtGv61ee29r57UM8VdV2o-9uTfBtfoDj9YTwdsfsFh7u-pMpKrkUHgTl5V8D6HSjSlyQK09w8Y/s320/013-1954.MM-Life-issue%255B1954skirtblow%255D-.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In a
separate category was Reader’s Digest, a monthly that excerpted books and other
magazines. It started slowly in the 1920s, but by the 1980s led all magazines
at around 18 million, and was still on top as it declined in the 1990s and went
bankrupt in 2009 with a still impressive 5.5 million. Reader’s Digest was
immune to generational trends, buffered by sampling what others were publishing
at the time, which made it into a kind of index fund of the publishing
business.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
dying off of Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post was widely attributed to
television becoming almost universal during the 50s. (TV also brought the
demise of national radio networks and their comedy and drama shows. This in
turn freed up radio for independent stations, which now promoted rock ‘n roll
and the youth culture of the late 50s and 60s.) Despite TV, the second wave of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>magazines, the photojournalism founded
in the mid-30s, did well into the 60s, before collapsing in the early 70s. The
outburst of men’s sex magazines in the early 70s coincides with this dying off.
The new men’s mags were photo magazines too, except in color instead of
black-and-white; and with a decidedly different kind of appeal than family
magazines. *</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* The
older men’s magazines like True, Argosy, and Stag were about hunting, fishing,
and outdoor life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That
“male” world was declining, as farms disappeared and population became increasingly
urban and college-educated.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
decline of Collier’s and Saturday Evening Post reflected a shift in public
ethos. The latter’s conservative politics and glorification of old fashioned
small-town lifestyle attracted a diminishing number of readers. Popular authors
moved to other magazines (like Esquire), and the older magazines economized by
publishing more on current events (bringing them into competition with news
magazines) and replacing artists’ illustrations with photos for covers and
advertisements. This is the same as the shift away from pin-ups and cartoons in
men’s magazines; underlying both was less the growth of TV than the maturing
techniques of color photography and color printing. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Collapse
of the big photojournalism magazines also came from being caught in a cultural
transition. Life see-sawed as it lost revenue, publishing articles in the late
60s describing LSD and the psychedelic youth culture, but this alienated their
conservative readers and advertisers. It also had trouble covering the civil
rights movement, the assassinations and riots of the mid-60s onwards, and the
anti-Vietnam War movement. Exposés offended traditionalists accustomed to the
uniform patriotism of World War II and its aftermath. Damned if you print and
damned if you don’t, either way photojournalism lost.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
failing magazines still had quite respectable circulation while they went into
financial crisis; some, like Life and Look, went out with closing numbers above
the peak of virtually all magazines in U.S. history. In a business where
advertising is the income difference-maker, gross numbers are less important
than any downward trend. Ad agencies are above all a network of the buzz,
driven by crowd-following emotional flows, and are the first to desert a sinking
ship.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Evolution in the men’s magazine
niche</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Among
the generational births and die-offs, Playboy is an anomaly, starting in 1953
during a trough for other successful start-ups. But we can see it as a spinoff
and continuation of Esquire, of the mid-1930s generation. For a while they
share the same sex-plus-literature-plus-lifestyle niche, but in the 60s Esquire
becomes the hot center of current literary movements, while Playboy becomes a
sex mag. Esquire dying in 1977 (to be sold and later reinvented in various
forms) fits the die-off pattern of the older generation magazines. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hefner
made his way cautiously through the 1950s, while a sexual revolution was slowly
building up. One sign was the growing divorce rate: by the 1960s half of all
marriages were ending in divorce. The Kinsey Reports revealed that even earlier
a substantial portion of Americans had sex before marriage, although they kept
it hidden. Sex was separating from marriage. Sex was already much looser in
Europe, especially in Scandinavia. Erotic literature was published in Paris,
even when people had to sneak it through customs into English-speaking
countries. Around 1960 censorship relaxed and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lady Chatterly’s Lover</i> and Henry Miller’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tropic of Cancer</i> were published in the US. Hemingway had already
published his “the earth moved” sex scene, and James Baldwin had written about
homosexual and interracial love. In this respect, mass magazines were the last
medium to join the sexual revolution.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In 1959
Hefner set up the first Playboy Club, where cocktail waitresses wore bunny
costumes (basically a one-piece bathing suit), and launched a late-night TV
show starring himself with a array of cool guests. He began to cultivate a
public image, surrounded by his Bunnies and Playmates, wearing three-piece
suits, smoking a pipe, and flying in a fur-lined plane. (Was this what Jane
Fonda was satirizing with her fur-lined space-craft in the Brigitte
Bardot-inspired 1968 film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Barbarella</i>
?)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT9xKc6U0beZcuJR8Zd7jH-mlVusvYgSTc4oAJE0fgWFUjHJM4uriJLHmJPyExxkF8XtQENNkmpoRj4UCjtvHaUdvEWqGxQcil1f6H_nLfMXp0n_B2Tbqmv0RliB6tVbes3To3NGSqFtc/s1600/14-1966%252C1970-Hefner%252Cbunnies%252Cplane-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="846" data-original-width="1437" height="188" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgT9xKc6U0beZcuJR8Zd7jH-mlVusvYgSTc4oAJE0fgWFUjHJM4uriJLHmJPyExxkF8XtQENNkmpoRj4UCjtvHaUdvEWqGxQcil1f6H_nLfMXp0n_B2Tbqmv0RliB6tVbes3To3NGSqFtc/s320/14-1966%252C1970-Hefner%252Cbunnies%252Cplane-.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hefner with Bunnies and girlfriend:
1966, 1970</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Through the
1960s, Playboy gradually showed more nudity. A capsule summary of the
progression is illustrated by the annual New Year’s covers, in which the
Playboy rabbit displayed Playmate shots of the year as an art gallery.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first such cover in 1956 showed the
rabbit looking at a real art gallery, basically of Renoir-era nudes. Having
implied that it is all a matter of high (European) art, Hefner went on to
equate it to his centerfold art. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWN55cNrwbcruujRC1_ViKZSFbHhRHcfx8jgBTJRRKisRle9bYxF6tindqn_3wv2PKVxrvLM24tYhXYPPiBK9xPSLjKuBT-LibajsQgv4PHWr1v_GxWHJ8yI0zgrKwocMoVJnLI_4N4pI/s1600/015-1956%252C1958-PB-cvrs-gallery-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="481" data-original-width="717" height="267" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgWN55cNrwbcruujRC1_ViKZSFbHhRHcfx8jgBTJRRKisRle9bYxF6tindqn_3wv2PKVxrvLM24tYhXYPPiBK9xPSLjKuBT-LibajsQgv4PHWr1v_GxWHJ8yI0zgrKwocMoVJnLI_4N4pI/s400/015-1956%252C1958-PB-cvrs-gallery-.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy annual art gallery covers: 1956, 1958</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Over the
next two decades, there was progressively less coyness, cover-up, and tease.
Leaving this aside for the moment, notice what happens to the Playboy
rabbit.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 1968 he is still
wearing a tuxedo-- proper evening dress. By 1971, he wears a cross between an
old-fashioned smoking jacket and lounging pajamas:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0dPa248LH_2LYj6G5Hr5SQ7uDdfQRuWml3edxNZmiVTyHrlTPy5HNuRgQK2WaOhSoyHuHmeO43YjZe0ulT_XNoK1MJNFFCou3tPGZAGGZPDZYmrmG8f65HQpB1nZoXX4W8F2yV6ih6QY/s1600/016-1968.1%252C1971.1PB-540k.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="799" data-original-width="1290" height="247" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh0dPa248LH_2LYj6G5Hr5SQ7uDdfQRuWml3edxNZmiVTyHrlTPy5HNuRgQK2WaOhSoyHuHmeO43YjZe0ulT_XNoK1MJNFFCou3tPGZAGGZPDZYmrmG8f65HQpB1nZoXX4W8F2yV6ih6QY/s400/016-1968.1%252C1971.1PB-540k.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy gallery covers: 1968, 1971</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">By 1973
the necktie is gone, and the rabbit is wearing a gold chain, open-necked shirt
and jacket-- the lounge lizard look. In 1977-- the last time Playboy ran its
annual gallery or had a full-sized rabbit on the cover-- he looks like a
mafia-type stud.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioQX-PLL9vVD_kGeTu9gJv5ya4NSspIU31PsYjzDn5-zhEe-CE2QaO0jRJQzgb0d52HNePq-CinxNLtOSQ-YFRxV3RTY25kfF76FwHNUa7TOkwUrEZ6Qaom4UIqCbr4-NOmvf4-qI_Qjg/s1600/017-1973.1%252C1977.1PB-448k.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="847" data-original-width="1325" height="255" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioQX-PLL9vVD_kGeTu9gJv5ya4NSspIU31PsYjzDn5-zhEe-CE2QaO0jRJQzgb0d52HNePq-CinxNLtOSQ-YFRxV3RTY25kfF76FwHNUa7TOkwUrEZ6Qaom4UIqCbr4-NOmvf4-qI_Qjg/s400/017-1973.1%252C1977.1PB-448k.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy gallery covers: 1973, 1977</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What
happened during the late 60s and 70s was informalization.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Old-fashioned formal clothing
disappeared. Being casual and counter-cultural became the high status look,
then the new normal. Hefner’s image of the playboy-- the old Esquire
man-about-town, the millionaire with the sports car and the yacht-- was superseded.
Not that rich people weren’t still there, but they struggled like everyone else
to keep up with the fashion change. More than a fashion change, it was a change
in social manners and prestige-- looking like a rebel was the thing to be, even
if everyone else jumped onto the same rebel trip. In fact, the first move in
the style rebellion might have been started by women. The mini-skirt of the
late 1960s was a way to flaunt convention, and to shock prudish old ladies as
well as conservative men:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiASYouZTDUfSdZqkF1FyKcbqGDHOi7FpSYlbjcxUUooj5QrJLEI3JJn_H_7Q8_xgZuYPczStMiI8oT8-9vGvPmyCLyA38FYrAXVsRKYRaAMQHH7o1zNrN0N2Qxxt2XU-c-VjKfdqkBtkI/s1600/018-1969--toplessBathing%252CMiniskirt-440k.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="825" data-original-width="1420" height="231" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiASYouZTDUfSdZqkF1FyKcbqGDHOi7FpSYlbjcxUUooj5QrJLEI3JJn_H_7Q8_xgZuYPczStMiI8oT8-9vGvPmyCLyA38FYrAXVsRKYRaAMQHH7o1zNrN0N2Qxxt2XU-c-VjKfdqkBtkI/s400/018-1969--toplessBathing%252CMiniskirt-440k.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Topless bathing, mini-skirt, and disapproving looks: late 1960s</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This may
be a reason why young women in the second-wave feminist movement, challenging
convention by wearing tight jeans, living in hippie communes and flashing
nudity at rock concerts, threw themselves at first into the outburst of public
eroticism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Probably the most
widespread taboo to be broken during the years 1968-71 was living together
without being married. This used to be called “living in sin” and before 1950
it could get you blackballed by the kind of people who read the Saturday
Evening Post. But the change to what became called cohabiting was accepted with
amazing speed. Sociologists figured out it was similar to being married in most
respects except these couples didn’t have children, and they broke up even
faster than the rising divorce rate. The new pattern was serial monogamy; young
middle-class people had sex with a number of partners but usually just one for
each period of time. A few short-lived communes tried to practice free love,
but those quickly broke up over jealousy. Within a few years cohabiting couples
were accepted by their relatives and everyone else as the new normal. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
ramifications of this sexual revolution would go on into following decades.
Until the 70s, children born out of wedlock were called “illegitimate”, and
this was considered the biggest of all scandals. But the taboo was already
broken in Scandinavia, with its socialist welfare for unemployed women and
their children. Gradually middle class white women started having children on
their own; in the lower classes, both white and black, this was already common
but now it affected the majority of children born. The practice was legitimated
by the radical feminist movement (although not initiated by them-- they were
just adding an ideological reason for an existing trend). The movement for
openly gay sex and gay partnering extended the sequence of liberalizations in
the 80s and 90s.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In this
atmosphere, it is not too surprising that sex magazines of the 1970s were breaking
taboo after taboo of what could be displayed in photos. Who knows where it
would end?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxkxnwTpA5biANjBBenMmw9X-MTbGC6i0wU4tgO7KUbDDAX6U6JuzFVLiTAvk0F2Xb3MOYZFgmG7sDxYq8z7wOk4IvyOcoJmMlYw0lHEqtXWj2UoLc_cH9WDhyphenhyphenzBMK7mujAP9zGjXURuk/s1600/MensMagsTimeline-RVZ.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1494" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxkxnwTpA5biANjBBenMmw9X-MTbGC6i0wU4tgO7KUbDDAX6U6JuzFVLiTAvk0F2Xb3MOYZFgmG7sDxYq8z7wOk4IvyOcoJmMlYw0lHEqtXWj2UoLc_cH9WDhyphenhyphenzBMK7mujAP9zGjXURuk/s640/MensMagsTimeline-RVZ.jpg" width="595" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">US sex magazines timeline and circulation</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy’s
monthly circulation had risen to 4 million by the end of the 1960s. A British
magazine, Penthouse, decided to enter the US market in 1969, after its owner
Bob Guccione discovered that he was outselling Playboy among American troops in
Vietnam. Within a year Penthouse was selling over 1 million and rocketed to 3
million by 1972.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Journalists
started referring to the contest as the “Pubic Wars” in a pun on the Punic Wars
between ancient Rome and Carthage. Up to that time, the borderline between
nudity and obscenity was considered to be whether the photo showed pubic hair.
Penthouse began to encroach on this zone, at first with coy shots in mirrors,
strategically placed flowers or towels, side-angle views, by 1972 arriving at
full frontal nudity. Closely following suit, Playboy was surging in the
competition. In late 1972, it sold 7.2 million copies-- the second highest
circulation of any American magazine of any kind except TV Guide.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">By 1973,
competition shifted downward. Legs started spreading for the camera, pubic hair
led to outer labia. Penthouse photographers became known for soft focus shots,
showing what might be obscene through blurred lenses and shadows. Guccione had
been an aspiring painter, from an Italian family in Brooklyn; he had tried
painting in Italy, then became a cartoonist and eventually editor of an
American weekly newspaper in London. He hooked up with the sex market when he
married a former dancer from a London strip club, who ran a business selling
pin-ups. In 1965 Guccione started Penthouse, using London club workers and
models, and recruiting uninhibited Scandinavians and Continentals. Lacking
funds to hire professional photographers, he taught himself photography, using
classic painting techniques of lighting and shadows and modeling himself on
Degas. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Penthouse
intruded into Playboy’s niche, with beautiful photographs, luxury settings made
lush with flowers and feminine fashion. Hefner claimed that Guccione had lifted
the title from his TV show, Playboy Penthouse. There was a change in emphasis.
Playboy’s centerfold shots-- initially the only full-color nudes in an issue--
were done in a studio, with elaborate lighting, luxury backdrops, beautiful
hair-dos and clothing. On the whole, they were smiling faces, a wholesome look
designed to contrast with cheap pornography. Any bodily flaws-- not just pubic
hair-- were carefully airbrushed away. Hefner had said from the outset his aim
was to show nice girls have sex lives too.* The black-and-white photos
surrounding the centerfold illustrated this by shots of the model in everyday
life, even pictures with her family while growing up.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Penthouse, in contrast, was about sex all the time, showing
each model in a set of color photos, usually in an erotic (or auto-erotic)
reverie. The typical Playboy model was statuesque, strikingly beautiful, with
large and shapely breasts and perfect figure. Penthouse models, especially
before the magazine became rich, were less stunning but looked artistically
erotic through the combination of lush photo technique and pushing the pubic
frontier.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* The
classic good girl/bad girl contrast ran throughout the business of photography,
literature and film. Marilyn Monroe was initially type-cast by Hollywood as a
bad girl (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Asphalt Jungle, Don’t
Bother to Knock, Niagara</i>). Her breakout came when she started getting roles
as a dumb blonde (neither of which she actually was), sexy but good-hearted (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Seven Year
Itch, Some Like It Hot,</i> and the late, neglected film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Prince and the Showgirl</i>). The “girl next door” cliché
popularized by Hefner was essentially the good girl type.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy
now was going the same route. Both magazines started showing couples making
love, the men always very handsome and fit and elite, in exotic locations and
costumes. Some were stills from film, some celebrity couples. Combined with
shadows and soft focus, couples sequences made the photos more erotic while
leaving the genitals covered because the bodies were in the way. By 1973, men’s
penises were being shown (although erections would be taboo for another
decade). Lesbian sex photos also became popular in both Penthouse and Playboy,
sometimes showing oral sex but at a distance and obscured by the position of
the bodies. Playboy tended to make its female duos playful and to bill them as
sisters (keeping up its nice-girl theme).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Using the same formula, in 1973 Penthouse launched a women’s magazine,
Viva, while a Playboy imitator launched Playgirl, mixing fashion with male
nudity. These never proved financially successful.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As the
market became increasingly erotic, Playboy worried about keeping its clean-cut
image, and decided to launch an edgier magazine to appeal to younger readers.
The plan was it would protect Playboy from going down the path where Penthouse
was heading, while giving access to its revenue. Oui was launched in 1972 as an
American version of the French magazine Lui, combining French content with recycled
Playmates in more revealing poses. Oui was an immediate success, jumping to 1
million. But the rest of the plan did not work out. Oui never made a profit on
the large amounts invested; it didn’t take market share from Penthouse, which
kept on growing; and it didn’t protect Playboy from being pulled into the
Penthouse path.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Competition
was becoming multi-sided, as more magazines entered the US market. Also in
1972, Gallery was launched. It was virtually a clone of Playboy, published in
Chicago, in a building right across the street. The owner even copied
Hefner’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>mansion and lavish
lifestyle. It also had a celebrity tie-in, the co-owner being<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>F. Lee Bailey, a famous criminal lawyer
who defended the Boston Strangler and later O.J. Simpson. Gallery was soon<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>overwhelmed with expenses and was sold
in early 1974; it survived in a modest niche, and prospered in the 1990s in the
beauty/luxury slot when other magazines were turning to hard-core and quirky
sex variations. More fatefully, the Gallery start-up attracted the attention of
Larry Flynt, a working-class type who owned a string of strip club bars in
Ohio, patronized by factory workers going off shift. Flynt already had a cheap
black-and-white newsletter carrying photos of strippers at his clubs; and its
circulation was growing in the sex-charged atmosphere. His potential investment
in Gallery did not pan out, so Flynt started his own magazine in summer 1974,
Hustler. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">By this
time, Penthouse and Oui (and less frequently Playboy) were publishing photos
that showed women with their legs spread and less air-brushing and shadows
between them.* Flynt brazenly advertised his new magazine as showing fully lit,
real women rather than retouched images, including “showing pink” -- labia in a
state of arousal.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Advertisers
stayed away, but Flynt had plenty of cash flow from his profitable clubs; it
was even an advantage since advertisers could exert no pressure on what he
published.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
Playboy showed more in feature articles such as reviewing sex in cinema (including
X-rated films), and “The Year in Sex” showing nude night clubs, beauty
contests, and nude beaches. It thought it could get away with this because the
photos were small rather than full page, “news” rather than original content,
while the iconic centerfold remained conservative by comparison.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
first 12 months were a rocky beginning. Hustler could not afford good quality
paper or photography, and its models although sexually explicit were not
particularly attractive. Flynt aimed for a working-class atmosphere without
luxury settings, although as he got more money, he would waver back and forth
imitating Penthouse. By spring 1975, Hustler was running out of money and
almost folded. From a friend in the porn business, he heard about paparazzi
photos taken with a telephoto lens of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis sun-bathing in
the nude, showing her pubic hair. Flynt bought the photos for $18,000 (about
$85,000 today) and published them in his July issue. It sold a million copies
and created a media flurry. Flynt had replicated what Hefner had done with the
Marilyn Monroe calendar in December 1953. Flynt was suddenly rich, and Hustler
was on its way to a peak circulation of 3 million at the end of the 1970s. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
booming sex market attracted more magazines, growing to as many as 40
competitors. Most successful of the new entrants was Club, another British
magazine that entered the US market in 1975.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Its publisher Paul Raymond ran a Paris-style nightclub in
London while ripping off the Playboy bunny motif. He had plenty of photo
material from his British clubs and magazines, while saving money by cutting
down on the articles and literature that Hefner and Guccione bought to keep up
their image. Club would become 4th or 5th in circulation behind the big three sex
mags.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Club pushed the others by
expanding to four or more nude photo features per issue, with plenty of crotch
hair and open labia.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">An even
more blatant way of testing public acceptability was Hustler’s monthly “Beaver
Hunt,” a contest in which readers sent in nude photos of girlfriends and wives
(and sometimes of themselves). In 1977 Gallery started a similar contest called
“The Girl Next Door ” with the winner getting $500 ($2000 in today’s dollars)
for a full-length layout, and a chance at the yearly Grand Prize of $5000
($20,000). Hustler offered $50 ($200) for a published picture, $750-1000
($3-4000) for a pictorial. Neither magazine had any lack of entries pushing the
boundaries of genital display.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy
was riding high with 7.2 million sales of its November 1972 issue. But the peak
was passed, and by spring 1973 its circulation had declined to 6.7 million. By
1977, Playboy and Penthouse were tied at 4.5 million, the former falling, the
latter approaching its peak. (A single issue of Penthouse in September 1985
sold 5.4 million copies, containing old nude photos of the current Miss
America, made earlier in her life.) By the 1980s, everyone was declining.
Playboy held on better than the others, with 4.2 million in 1985, number 11 on
the list of best-selling US magazines, just below Time Magazine, and ahead of
Newsweek, Cosmopolitan, and Sports Illustrated. The same year Penthouse was
number 14, at 3.2 million. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
1980s, virtually all the sex magazines were losing advertising. Most now
carried nothing but ads for phone sex services. Through the 1990s, they relied
on the old formula of pushing the edge: now erections, close-ups of oral sex,
intercourse with explicit penetration, even pissing shots. It was a vicious
circle. The more extreme they became, the less advertising they got; their
circulations declined; they tried for something even more sensational. Long
before the Internet and its plethora of free sex sites, they were caught in a
spiral downward. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
nearest to an exception was Playboy, whose circulation was still a respectable
3.1 million in 2004-- enough to be number 18 on the list of national magazines,
only a few slots below Time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Playboy’s moment of crisis came early. In 1975, it published a cover
with a woman-- not nude-- but her legs spread in what would be a pornographic
pose, and her hand in her shorts while eating popcorn. Ostensibly it went along
with a feature on sex in the movies. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy’s
executives had worried about the cover. Now they were concerned that retail
chains might refuse to display the magazine. This was a warning shot for
Playboy, which shifted back to more conservative covers, although its inside
pages continued, with some wavering, to keep not too far behind Penthouse. But
it had reached a frontier beyond which it would rarely go: essentially the
crotch-tease shots of Penthouse (and Playboy itself) around 1973. Into the
1980s and 90s Playboy published very beautiful women topless or in leg shots
like old-fashioned cheese-cake, avoiding the labia shots that filled rival
magazines. Advertising held up, running the same ads for liquor, cigarettes,
and music equipment that Playboy had since the 60s (and that Penthouse once
had-- but never Hustler). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">By the
1990s and early 2000s, Penthouse was keeping itself going by selling Special
Editions consisting of models from previous years. Essentially without ads,
they kept expenses down by recycling their photo archives. By the late 90s,
Playboy was doing the same thing. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sex-work markets</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">One
reason all the magazines had tended to converge on a similar erotic edge was
because their personnel circulated between them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Top photographers worked for several magazines. Jeff Dunas,
a master of the Penthouse style of diffused-light romantic pornography, left to
become chief photographer for Oui, in the rival Playboy stable. Playboy
photographer Suze Randall, who would get her models in the mood by stripping
along with them during a photo shoot, moved to Hustler and contributed photos
of herself made with a remote camera cord;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>later she worked for Penthouse.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some photographers, especially in Europe, would sell
pictures from the same photo shoot to different magazines by giving the model
different names. Particularly as the photos became more erotic, the bolder
models would move from Playboy to Penthouse, and vice versa, as well as
appearing in the now-numerous British magazines, and the foreign-language
editions that both magazines sold throughout Europe.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfs9WKPUbtQ1siD4tl7cxvJh8FtwXaamZrmV7jVpxFOscJHqHqKB519DMtIimJbEdKgnTE2koYyI5ulWpU11oI77ryy7B1_I8VQVRVJzi2og94-lbSbvbvmFixbR4_KVcnOnFRO4gysY0/s1600/020-1958.BunnyYeager%253B1976SuzeRandall-PBphotogs-333k.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="741" data-original-width="1009" height="235" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfs9WKPUbtQ1siD4tl7cxvJh8FtwXaamZrmV7jVpxFOscJHqHqKB519DMtIimJbEdKgnTE2koYyI5ulWpU11oI77ryy7B1_I8VQVRVJzi2og94-lbSbvbvmFixbR4_KVcnOnFRO4gysY0/s320/020-1958.BunnyYeager%253B1976SuzeRandall-PBphotogs-333k.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy photographers Bunny Yeager (left, 1968); Suze Randall (right, 1976)</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some
photographers started out in women’s high fashion magazines, doing
advertisements, covers and “editorials” (photo features). Stan Malinowski,
whose photos and covers appeared in Vogue and Cosmopolitan, worked for Playboy
and Penthouse in the 60s through the 80s. * The publisher of Lui (French
predecessor to Oui) began as a fashion photographer, moved successively to
radio, music producer, publisher of music magazines, and finally a sex mag.
Helmut Newton, a photographer for Vogue and other international magazines,
brought out a book of very pubic (but arty) black-and-white photos in 1982-- a
sign of the hyper-sexual atmosphere at the end of the 70s. Such cross-overs
help explain why photos in women’s fashion magazines in the 80s and 90s started
looking like pornographic poses, using the cover-up devices of men’s magazines
from the mid-70s. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
Malinowski also did the Opium perfume ads of the 1980s, in the period of
“heroin chic.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyjOOeCpLLdANke00tXWftzD83K48cf6FGsSzcfyqXoSpQH07CiF6MbNzy_BkigmEsK8vbnis3EG6qma7RZ3Ylu19H2JrhpTfYYTjYofMlHd2ur7j-2I-_PJYMntdDN01LVFH56HGcWOM/s1600/021-1995%252C2004-Fmag-advs-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="590" data-original-width="1182" height="159" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiyjOOeCpLLdANke00tXWftzD83K48cf6FGsSzcfyqXoSpQH07CiF6MbNzy_BkigmEsK8vbnis3EG6qma7RZ3Ylu19H2JrhpTfYYTjYofMlHd2ur7j-2I-_PJYMntdDN01LVFH56HGcWOM/s320/021-1995%252C2004-Fmag-advs-.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">High-fashion advertisements: 1995, 2004</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How did
sex-content producers get women to pose in a less-than-honorable but
high-visibility job? How is best answered, where did they recruit their
models?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>From the network of
adjacent types of sex work. If we define “sex work” as selling sexual
attraction for money, the field includes not just prostitutes and porn actors
but cocktail waitresses, fashion models, actors, singers, dancers and
showgirls; and these connected with networks in theatre, night clubs, film,
entertainment production and publicity. It was a community that normalized sex
work for at least part of the spectrum, facilitating gradual transition from
one type of sex work to the next. *</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
Marilyn Monroe, out of work in Hollywood in the late 1940s when her bit-part
film contracts were not renewed, sometimes traded sex for meals, temporarily at
the prostitution end of the sex-work spectrum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A 1996 Penthouse Pet had been a prostitute in the early 90s
in a (legal) brothel in Nevada, after starting out as a bikini-clad model at
NASCAR races. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A grocery
checkout clerk moved to London to try out for a job in the Playboy Club as a
Bunny. The club manager took nude photos of her and sent them to Hefner, who
flew her to Chicago. She became Playboy’s first full frontal nude centerfold in
1971, alternating as girlfriend to both Hefner and her London boss and
eventually marrying the latter. Another Bunny at the same club became
girlfriend of a famous disk jockey and later an American singer, and posed in
1971 Penthouse for a crotch-tease pubic shot.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Penthouse’s earliest pubic bush shot was provided by a
fashion model married to photographer Clive McLean, who later went on to work
for Hustler. In 1975, a Playboy Books editor working on a collection with staff
photographer Pompeo Posar (a former colleague of Salvador Dali), posed for him
in the most explicit crotch shot Playboy would run. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some
came from low-paying jobs. A Swedish woman with a 40-24-36 figure, working as a
nurse at London hospital, posed for Penthouse in 1973 with legs spread in broad
daylight on a deserted beach. Her picture was carried in subscription ads with
her bright red bathing suit rolled down to her waist. Suze Randall was another
London nurse who answered an ad for nude modeling, then decided to become a
photographer after discovering she wasn’t making a lot more money dancing in
clubs. She was 30 years old when she made the big time working for Playboy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Penthouse
often got breakthrough photos to move through the stages of the Pubic Wars by
using hard-core porn actresses, under different names and dialing back from
what they did on screen. Playboy followed the same strategy in auxiliary
features on famous porn stars Marilyn Chambers and Linda Lovelace. Deborah
Clearbranch moved from rural Georgia to California “trying to break into movies,”
became a topless go-go dancer and provided Penthouse with its first spread-legs
crotch shot. Next year she posed for brand-new Hustler with a black man with a
huge penis (probably a porn film performer himself). The pictorial got Larry
Flynt shot by a segregationist. She changed her name to Desirée Cousteau and
made hard-core films into the 80s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some
women moved from theatre into sex modeling. Demi Moore acted on Broadway, posed
for the cover of Oui and (under an assumed name) for a layout in a European sex
magazine in 1981 before getting the squeaky-clean TV role on the Demi Moore
show. Lori Wagner acted on Broadway, posed under an assumed name in
boundary-breaking shots for Penthouse in 1975, then quit her Broadway gig to
fly to Rome for a part in <i>Caligula</i>. She lost most of her speaking lines but got
a passionate lesbian oral sex scene. Hostile reaction to the film effectively
ended her career. Her co-star Anneka di Lorenzo struggled to get into
mainstream film, but her notoriety closed her out. She had been Penthouse Pet
of the Year in 1975, leading the way through a series of Punic War stages. “How
famous do I want to be?” she said. “Let’s just say I’m going to be the sexiest
woman in the world.” [IMDB bio]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The big
sex magazines claimed their models appeared in their own pages exclusively, but
in fact the most daring ones circulated among Playboy, Penthouse, Oui and
others. Early photos in British publications like Mayfair and Page Three didn’t
count, since these were considered minor league.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Models
for sex photos were often badly paid (Marilyn Monroe got $50 (about $500 today)
for her 1949 nude shots; photographer Tom Kelley got $500 ($5000); Hefner
parlayed it into millions. Fifty years later, a Playboy Playmate of the Month
got $25,000, and a chance for $100,000 as Playmate of the Year. At the extreme
end of the spectrum, Guccione paid Joanne Latham 70,000 pounds (about $600,000
today) because he wanted someone exceptional for Penthouse’s Tenth Anniversary
issue in 1979. Latham was a busty Brit who was currently the subject of a media
frenzy in England, repeatedly appearing as the Sun newspaper’s Page Three Girl,
and pursued by many magazines. Guiccione no doubt got carried away by the
English buzz, and he was bidding against Playboy at the height of Penthouse’s
circulation and income. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sex
photos in major magazines held out prospects. Few models made it to the top,
but those who did publicized the possibility of rapid ascent. In this respect,
sex modeling was like fashion modeling, where large numbers of beautiful young
women congregated in Manhattan or London, attending runway tryouts and casting
calls. Ashley Mears’ book describes how aspiring models lived off hand-outs and
rent subsidies from agents, and in return were expected to provide publicity
and atmosphere at glitzy restaurants and clubs-- by being there on display, and
ceremonially carrying in huge bottles of champagne when the establishment was
entertaining a “whale” on a big expense account. Competition was especially
high since models tend to rapidly age out of their beauty peak, both in fashion
and in Playboy style. But even if one’s career never took off, they had a
period of adventure near the center of the action. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Not all
models were from the lower classes. In England, some of Penthouse’s boldest models
were from the aristocracy, attracted not by money but by membership in the hip
elite of the 70s, centered on drugs and antinomian self-presentation generally
(AKA the counter-culture). One was Sigmund Freud’s great-granddaughter.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some sex
models moved to the other side of the camera. British model Joanie Allum
married a photographer and became a photographer herself, working for Club,
Mayfair, Gallery and others, with a knack for making fairly ordinary women look
highly erotic. Bob Guccione’s wife, Kathy Keeton, went from being a club
stripper, to Penthouse’s first advertising manager, to running the entire
business while Guccione concentrated on the photography. Husband/wife teams
were prominent in the sex business. Tom Kelley’s wife made up Marilyn Monroe
for her 1949 shoot, arranging the red drape background while Tom took the
photos from a 10-ft. ladder.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In
1973 Playboy photographer Russ Meyer posed his wife, actress Edy Williams,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in a famous spread-legs swimming pool
shot.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Erotic
sequences of celebrity couples making love, prominent during the breakout period
of the mid-70s, featured people like an Andy Warhol “star” with
girlfriend;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a TV action-series star with
wife; a former Swiss ski champion with his actress wife. Sometimes it was a comeback
in a declining career: a dancer from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">West
Side Story</i> in the 1950s, Hollywood film in the 1960s, doing a couples shoot
to show he still had it at age 40. A 15-year old actress in 1965 in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sound of Music</i> appeared nude in
Playboy in 1973 to try to change her image.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some sex
models moved up because of the access it gave to high-level dating
markets.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Attending parties and
publicity events with celebrity athletes, movie people, and the glitzy elite,
led sometimes to meeting film producers and lining up jobs; sometimes to
acquiring boyfriends and husbands. A 1972 Playmate became girlfriend to a noted
British stage director. Playboy’s receptionist married a Chicago Bears
quarterback whom she met during her nude photo shoot. Playmate of the Year 1993
Anna Nicole Smith married an aging Texas millionaire, after meeting at a
nightclub performance; this would touch off an inheritance battle with his
60-year-old children. Melania Trump was the most successful at the marriage
route; starting as a fashion model in Europe and New York, with a bit of nude
photographs, before marrying a real estate developer, boxing promoter, and TV
reality show host.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A few
sex models made it through to become mainstream film or TV stars. Marilyn
Monroe, of course; Playmates Stella Stevens, Dollie Reed, Barbara Edwards and
others. English actress Helen Mirren posed for Oui early in her career, and had
a speaking role in Guccione’s orgiastic film <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caligula</i> (1979); this did not prevent her from later playing Queen
Elizabeth II. Playboy had film celebrities in their pictorials as much as
possible, although their nude shots were generally rather modest. Jayne
Mansfield appeared in Playboy in 1955, part of her campaign to challenge
Marilyn as the great bosomy sex star. It was the right strategy; Jayne’s next
films made her famous. Established stars joined the procession. Brigitte Bardot
posed in 1958; Raquel Welch in 1979 in a bikini bottom, but kept her arms
crossed over her breasts. Madonna posed nude in 1985, which was in her
repertoire anyway. Posing had become an accepted part of Hollywood publicity.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The last
big star to come up this way was Pamela Anderson. She got her start with a
Playboy cover in 1989 and Playmate of the Month layout in 1990, preceding her
career role in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Baywatch</i>, 1992-1997.
She was discovered when stadium video cameras spotted her in the crowd at a
Canadian League Football game wearing a beer company’s T-shirt, and flashed her
on the Jumbotron screen. Signed by a modeling agency, she moved to L.A. and had
two breast-enhancement operations.* Even as a film star, sex mag photos for
Pamela were not a one-and-done; she kept appearing for covers and features in
Playboy and Penthouse through the 90s and later, leveraging her stardom in both
directions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* There
was also a lot of cosmetic surgery in Hollywood in the 1940s. Marilyn Monroe
had her hairline changed and went from<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>strawberry-brunette to golden blonde before her career took off.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifPqvVFLWyn8mH7kDL2siXrbm9sCE55RxgiJcNPZh8GUXP5zKLYR1aZjZkekLeZxmcxY00IkcAeyNIGFPqWtScnmR-sK1Q6x2msY835tBNMjshAJ1_H2Ulde7754qzwmxigZGGqyQgIp4/s1600/022-1945NormaJeanDougherty.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1202" data-original-width="917" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEifPqvVFLWyn8mH7kDL2siXrbm9sCE55RxgiJcNPZh8GUXP5zKLYR1aZjZkekLeZxmcxY00IkcAeyNIGFPqWtScnmR-sK1Q6x2msY835tBNMjshAJ1_H2Ulde7754qzwmxigZGGqyQgIp4/s320/022-1945NormaJeanDougherty.jpg" width="244" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Norma Jean Dougherty in 1945 before
going blonde</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Symbiosis between sex mags and
film</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Film
stardom is the career allure of sex work. The San Fernando valley, just outside
Hollywood, was the center for porn films, because of the glut of models and
actors. For a long time, porn films were very low-budget, since they could not
be shown in theatres, and made small income from rentals and sales for private
showings. L.A. was also a center for “glamour” photographs of the stars, sold
to tourists as well fan magazines. This was the backdrop for the surge of
pin-ups for troops during WWII, continued in calendars for hanging in male
places like barbershops and garages. As we have seen, photographers and artists
and their models traveled between mainstream advertising and national
magazines, film publicity, and men’s sex magazines. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The sexual
revolution in visuals was helped along by an economic crisis of the film
industry. In the 1960s, film audiences had dropped to less than half the 1950s
level (and still further below the 1940s peak). Half the movie theatres in
America had closed. The number of films made fell to an all-time low. This was
a reaction to the coming of TV in the 1950s. For a time Hollywood staved it off
by concentrating on big blockbuster films, based on Broadway musicals and
classic novels (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sound of Music;
Ben-Hur</i>) all done in overpowering Technicolor (early TV being
black-and-white). A side-effect was to eliminate other genres, like film noir
and serious dramas that came across well in atmospheric black-and-white. The
die-out paralleled the disappearance of magazines carrying literary short
stories and serialized novels. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Starting
in the 60s, the major studios became targets for take-overs by corporations,
perpetually thereafter churning through a series of mergers and realignments.
The family dynasties that controlled the major studios disappeared, giving way
to independent producers who used the studios mainly for distribution. The
Motion Picture Code, set up in 1934 under religious pressure, had censored sex
and violence on the screen and required evil always to be punished in the end.
It was replaced in 1968 by a rating system, ranging from G for general
audiences, M for mature audiences, and X for no one under 16. This brought a
huge difference in how films were made. The Code office reviewed film scripts
in advance and demanded changes; the rating system merely labeled finished
films, leaving choice to the discretion of audiences and parents. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">More
sexually explicit films had already been coming in from Europe in the 1950s,
underming the code. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate,</i>
which somehow made it through the Code office at the end of its tenure in 1967,
depicted a young man having affairs simultaneously with his girlfriend and her
mother. It was the surprise hit of the year. It contained a scene where
middle-aged Anne Bancroft seduces Dustin Hoffman by opening her legs at him in
a most unlady-like way. With the Code gone, it was followed by even more erotic
films like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Clockwork Orange</i> (1971),
about a gang of British rapists, directed by Stanley Kubrick. (The star of this
film, Malcolm McDowell, would go on to play the title role in Guccione’s
Penthouse production, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caligula</i>.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh25fmoeHzyFr9wOOJfKsHCIECeAIUC0q5Jyd9aJvATgnNEX1BPfNyYkWRIfnNoV9U-U-Cb7WSaChPl2z62zB-5x3m7XSpDpOFjWrufjqCUhUfTEemXcBnkoCB7vdKvcVeJpyo1sAfTvE0/s1600/023-1967TheGraduate-AnnBancroft%252C2005adv.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="567" data-original-width="1146" height="197" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh25fmoeHzyFr9wOOJfKsHCIECeAIUC0q5Jyd9aJvATgnNEX1BPfNyYkWRIfnNoV9U-U-Cb7WSaChPl2z62zB-5x3m7XSpDpOFjWrufjqCUhUfTEemXcBnkoCB7vdKvcVeJpyo1sAfTvE0/s400/023-1967TheGraduate-AnnBancroft%252C2005adv.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mrs. Robinson’s come-on in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i>, 1967; 2004 Fashion ad</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The way
was open for sex to merge with mainstream films, as well as to exploit its own
niche. Playboy photographer Russ Meyer had already pioneered this path, with
underground cult films like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Faster,
Pussycat! Kill! Kill!</i> in 1963 (big busted go-go dancers driving around in
fast sports cars and beating up men); in 1970, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Beyond the Valley of the Dolls</i> (featuring former Playmates, set in
the Hollywood drug scene). X-rated films became an advertising come-on,
attracting buzz and a rush of audiences to theatres showing pornographic films.
The first big hit was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deep Throat</i>
(1972), with a plot line about a woman (Linda Lovelace) who had her clitoris in
her throat. The title became notorious as a nickname for the government
official who secretly leaked information about the Nixon administration during
the Watergate scandal of 1973. Audiences also rushed to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Behind the Green Door</i> (1974) because it
starred Marilyn Chambers, who had been widely viewed on TV advertising Ivory
Snow detergent.*</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* The
title came from a popular song (“Don’t know what they’re doing, but they laugh
a lot, behind the green door...”). The film also included an Oakland Raider
lineman as bouncer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hollywood
came out of its economic difficulties in the 1970s. Rotating stars between sex
magazines and movies was increasingly legitimate. It was in this less
restrictive atmosphere about visual taboos that the pornographic revolution of
the sex magazines took place. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
introduction of video cassettes in the 1980s furthered the trend. Played in the
privacy of the home, explicit porn of any kind could be viewed, along with the
entire spectrum of films. This would play its part both in the normalization of
visual sex, but also the decline of sex magazines at the turn of the century. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Summary of sex models’ career
patterns</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Altogether,
484 women were Penthouse Pets between 1969 and 2009. Of these, 80 were noted
for something else besides their magazine appearances. The percentage rose
steadily from 8% in the 1970s, to 26% in the early 2000s. The main area of
career success was film, TV and video. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Usually
they started in B-movies, horror films and sex comedies. Aside from Marilyn
Monroe and Pamela Anderson, the biggest success was probably 1974 Playboy cover
girl Debbie Shelton. A former Miss USA and Miss Universe runner-up, she
appeared in multiple episodes of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dallas</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the 1980s. A 1973 Penthouse Pet was
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jaws</i> (1975) as a nude swimmer who
gets eaten by the shark. Playmate of the Year 1973 Cyndi Wood played more or
less herself in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Apocalypse Now </i>entertaining
soldiers in Vietnam. Other models played opposite Burt Reynolds and Sylvester
Stallone, appeared on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Magnum P.I.</i> or
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Batman</i>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A much
more typical post-photo career was soft-core films and videos, often
proceeding to hard-core porn.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Even
models from more respectable Playboy went this route:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Terri Weigel, a centerfold in 1986, went on to Penthouse in
1992 and to star in porn films.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
the 90s and early 2000s, porn film performers were a major source of
recruitment for magazine photos, and vice versa. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Very few
made the reverse route from porn to mainstream. Ironically, the most successful
of these was Traci Lords. She was an early-developing teenager, who got a fake
driver’s license showing she was 22 when she was only 15, dropped out of high
school, answered a newspaper ad for a modeling agency, and posed in the
mid-1980s when open genital shots were the fashion. After a number of minor
magazines, she was in Penthouse in 1984, and acted in pornographic movies. In
1986-- when she was 18 and finally legal-- news got out about her underage
photos and films, resulting in a huge scandal, criminal charges against the
producers, and retraction of a great deal of material from the market. Traci
now went to acting school, and began performing mainstream films. In the 1990s
and 2000s she recorded a breakthrough music album and had many roles in TV
series. Her success illustrates the Hollywood line “It doesn’t matter what they
say about you as long as they spell your name right.” But this is not generally
true for work in porn; more likely Traci benefitted from sentimental support
for going straight and getting a second chance.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A
half-dozen sex models made the transition to management, mainly by directing
porn films and sometimes producing them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Other
common patterns: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A large
number of Pets and Playmates got their start as beauty contest winners. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A few
started as athletes: Pamela Anderson was a gym instructor. Penthouse’s 1993 Pet
of the Year was a six foot one inch athlete who danced in a Las Vegas chorus line
(where tall women were preferred). She eventually married the producer of Teenage
Mutant Ninja Turtles.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 2000 Pet
of the Year was a professional gymnast, a member of the Czech national team;
she took her own initiative in sending nude photos to Penthouse. (Sex workers
of all kinds moved to the West after the collapse of the Communist bloc, where
such work was often admired rather than stigmatized.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some trained
as ballet dancers: Joanne Latham, who shifted from TV commercials to a huge
payout from Penthouse in 1980. Delia Sheppard danced in Denmark and Paris
(where she did fashion modeling for Dior); after injuring her back, she became a Las
Vegas showgirl, a Penthouse Pet in 1988,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>and broke into mainstream film and TV. (We could add Bridget Bardot, who
got her break via ballet in the late 1940s.) Ballet was also the entry point
for French model Christine Haydar, who did a highly erotic shoot for Penthouse
in 1977 photographed by her husband; the couple moved to Turkey where she
became a top film star. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some
came from the hippie milieu. Oui in 1975 featured a German actress and film-maker
who lived in a Munich commune of five women and one man; she eventually became
a yoga teacher. The same year, Penthouse featured a Munich photographer who was
simultaneously Professor of Fine Arts and member of a rock band. He and his
wife (subject of the photos), moved to Hollywood, where they did portraits of
rock stars, pictures for men’s magazines and advertisements for corporate
clients. His wife now styles herself High Priestess of alternative lifestyles,
healing arts, and sacred sites of elves and fairies. An English woman who
pushed the Pubic Wars frontier for Penthouse in 1972<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was a screamer for Rod Stewart’s band. Anneka di Lorenzo
started in L.A. as a rock-band groupie.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Most
famous of the hippie background was Tera Patrick, whose Thai mother married a
US soldier in Vietnam, returning to Thailand while Tera was raised in San
Francisco by her hippie father. At age 14 she signed with a Japanese modeling
agency, and spent two years in Tokyo, having sex with the photographer and
getting addicted to Valium. Her father brought her back to the US, where after
college she went back into modeling because she needed money. She became a
Penthouse Pet in 2000, going on to features in Playboy and many other sex
magazines while making hundreds of porn videos. She married a fellow porn actor
and then a Hollywood special effects artist. Crossing over to the business
side, she created a talent agency, a video production company, lines of
clothing and herbal products.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some
came to bad ends. In the 70s several Penthouse Pets died of drug overdoses. A
1989 Pet made a career in British TV, but was subject of stories at age 33 that
she was homeless and addicted. A 1998 Penthouse Pet of the Year was later
arrested for assault on her husband, and sent to prison for tax fraud. After
release, she became a kindergarten teacher.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1980
Playboy Playmate of the Year Dorothy Stratton was murdered by her jealous
boyfriend. She had sold ice cream at a Dairy Queen in Vancouver when she was
hustled by a car show promoter, who sent nude photos of her to a Playboy
competition. Hefner put her up in the Playboy Mansion guest dorm, and got her
parts in films and TV, aiming to make her a big star. The boyfriend stalked
her, took her earnings, and got her to marry him while on tour in Las Vegas.
When she filed for divorce, he killed her and committed suicide. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Many
just disappeared back into ordinary life. Exquisitely beautiful Lilian Müller,
discovered by Suze Randall (and effectively launching her photography career),
appeared on three Playboy covers in the 1970s. Eventually she became a local
celebrity in Norway as a motivational speaker. A 1974 Penthouse Pet, discovered
during a film casting call in Sweden, made soft-core films for a couple of
years, but unable to break into mainstream, she opened a jeans shop and retired
to private life. Joanne Latham, presumably after spending her money, became a
yoga teacher. The statuesque Penthouse Pet of the Year 1997 made Penthouse
videos, moved back to Missouri and opened a tattoo and piercing parlor. The 1998
Pet of the Year did advertising tours for Kia, moved home and married a
pharmacist. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Two dimensions of porn: How much
sex; Beauty / wealth</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">We may
be inclined to think that the direction of innovation in an cultural field is
always towards the increasingly edgy. Breaking with existing standards and
taboos creates attention, initially a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">succès
de scandale,</i> which then becomes normal and is outdone by something further.
Pierre Bourdieu asserted this as the principle of development in art fields,
illustrated by the scandals of the early Impressionists. But this does not
accurately describe the history of visual sex markets. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Pornography
existed in the era of painting (back to the 1700s at least) and in photography
(dirty postcards of the early 1900s).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>These showed erections, oral sex both cunnilingus and fellatio,
intercourse with penetration, even pissing. Essentially these included all the
variants and perversions that sex mags were pushing as their circulation
declined in the late 1980s and 90s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The extreme edge was the same throughout; what changed was what could be
shown in public.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What
concentrating on edginess leaves out is another dimension: how beautiful the
images are, which in turn relates to how much money and cultural capital the
producers have.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cheap
porn mags existed in the 1940s and 50s, printed on cheap paper, with grainy
black-and-white images. They were shot on cheap sets, often in motel rooms, and
the models were rarely beauties. The main exception were professional<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>strip-club performers (Lily St. Cyr,
Tempest Storm, Sheree North), but here the principle tended to apply: the
better-known names showed less flesh, confining themselves to their stage
routines (at most topless dances and G-string teases). There was an inverse
relation between how much sex shown and how much beauty. It was a vicious
circle: underground markets with limited sales and income meant inability to
hire the best models and photographers, and to market an attractive product. It
was edgy but it didn’t move the field.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As
public tolerance changed in the era of mass circulation men’s magazines, both
dimensions-- how much sex and how much beauty-- were for a while being
traversed. Hefner’s Playboy in the 1950s explicitly aimed to counter the
low-quality porn image. As his revenue increased into the 1960s, he emphasized
beautiful models, in beautiful settings and (to the extent they wore them)
clothes; carefully and elaborately photographed in lengthy studio sessions with
attention to lighting and retouching; printed on glossy paper in the best
color. (This explains why for the early decades Playboy had only one glossy
photo set per issue.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Penthouse
entered the market led by an editor coming from a background in classical
painting, who transposed art techniques into photography. He simultaneously
pushed the sexual edge: taking off from existing images of bare breasts and
buttocks, to showing pubic hair, crotches, genitals in various stages of
arousal, sexual acts with self and others. Initially Penthouse models were less
beautiful than Playboy’s, but made up for it by combining luxurious settings,
artistic photography, plus the leading edge of sexual display. At its height of
popularity, Penthouse was moving on both dimensions, followed by its imitators
depending on how much money they had. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A
side-dimension was arty nudes, which both Penthouse and intermittently Playboy
in extra features used as protective legitimation. Art nudes could be
recognized (if the accompanying text didn’t tell you) by unrealistic color
tints, abundance of form-shaping shadows, surrealism and bizarre props. The
effect of arty nudes was generally neither beautiful in the sense of pretty, nor
erotic. Some photographers following contemporary art movements used
deliberately ugly models or effects (as in paintings by Lucian Freud).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Nevertheless, I would include art nudes
in the beauty/wealth dimension, since the common denominator here is high
cultural capital in Bourdieu’s sense. Above all, art was the link to
traditional respectability and immunity from legal prosecution.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hustler
sought out a distinctive niche, both by pushing the edge of the genital
frontier, and by repudiating the fantasy upper-class, luxury image of both
Playboy and Penthouse. Nevertheless, Hustler featured beautiful women when it could
afford them. Mainly, it rejected high cultural capital (AKA “good taste”). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy,
like Esquire before it, sold the combination of beauty, wealth, and tasteful
sex. The upper-class/ tasteful components were devalued with the antinomian/
informalization trend of the 1970s and 80s. Nevertheless, Hefner stuck to his
mission. By the end of the 70s, Playboy ceased to follow Penthouse in
high-profile genital shots. Nor did Penthouse follow Hustler in the low-taste
route. For over 10 years, Penthouse had a fairly stable market, without pushing
further on the sexual edge, working out the erotic and aesthetic possibilities
of techniques accumulated over past years. Playboy’s mix of old-fashioned
pin-up poses and modest pubic shots kept up high circulation longer than any
other magazines. It was the sexual edge-pushers who lost market share most
severely in the 1990s.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Who made the big fortunes in sex?</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">At the
peak of his career at Penthouse in the early 1980s, Bob Guccione was listed in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Forbes</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>400 richest persons in America, at about $400 million ($1.6
billion today). Hugh Hefner was a multi-millionaire since the late 1950s,
owning a huge Chicago mansion, and buying Playboy Mansion West in L.A. in 1971
as revenue approached its peak. Larry Flynt first became a millionaire in 1975,
and by 2014 had about $500 million-- the figure came out in October 2017 when
he offered $10 million in a full-page newspaper ad to anyone producing
information leading to impeachment of President Trump. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">These
fortunes did not necessarily last. Guccione went bankrupt in 2003, in debt for
over $25 million dollars. He was largely self-financing, and always took big
risks with his money.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
early 1960s, unable to attract investors for his Penthouse start-up, Guccione
decided do it himself. Thereafter he would never take on co-investors or
partners. He came from a small business entrepreneurial background. His parents
were Sicilian immigrants to New York; his father the accountant for a small
factory owned by his wife’s brother. Later, when Penthouse became a $140
million per year operation, he ran it like a family business: his father as
treasurer; sister, daughters and son for office manager, circulation and
marketing, with his wife unofficially overseeing everything. As circulation
rocketed in the 70s, Guccione bought adjacent townhouses in Manhattan and razed
them to build a nine-story mansion, the largest private residence in New York
City, importing Italian architects to do the marble and create a atmosphere of
Caesaresque grand luxury. Completed, the house cost $5 million a year to
maintain. He filled it with a $60 million art collection ranging from
Botticelli to Van Gogh to Picasso. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Guccione
started a Penthouse Club in London in 1970, but lost its casino license the
next year. Unfazed, he built the Penthouse Adriatic Club in Yugoslavia (a
cheap-labor Communist country then opening to the West), and flew in Penthouse
Pets. It went bankrupt within a year, after Guccione had sunk $45 million of
his own money ($225 million today). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Ambitious
to have his own movie studio, he invested in Hollywood films (including Roman
Polanski’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chinatown</i> ). In 1976 he
launched the first-ever big-budget X-rated porn film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caligula</i>. Gore Vidal was commissioned to write the screenplay,
actors John Guilgud and Peter O’Toole had major speaking roles, along with
Penthouse Pets for the sex scenes. It took three years to complete, at the cost
of $17 million to Guccione (about $85 million today). But distributers refused
to show it, so Guccione rented a Manhattan theatre to show it himself. He
grossed $20 million, for a modest profit. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Meanwhile
he bought an Atlantic City property and proceeded to build a hotel/casino. But
he was unable to get a license, lenders backed out of financing, and by 1980
construction stalled. It sat empty until bought by Donald Trump in 1993.
Guccione lost $145-160 million. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Thinking
still bigger, in the early 1980s Guccione funded a research laboratory in San
Diego, hiring 80 nuclear physicists to produce the world’s first nuclear fusion
reactor. It was to be the solution to the world’s fossil fuel crisis and clean
air. It lost $20 million. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In 1985,
things started to go seriously wrong. The IRS claimed $45 million back taxes,
forcing him to sell the casino and close the nuclear-fusion lab. Guccione also
had spent a lot of money over the years on new magazines: Viva in 1973, running
nude males and fashion for women (closed in 1979 with a dearth of
advertisements); Omni, a science and science-fiction magazine, in 1978; Longevity,
a health magazine dedicated to the quest to live forever; these closed in 1996,
having lost $100 million. Loans to support his magazines built up heavy debts
in the 1990s. In 1993 Guccione tried to finance his way out, selling $80
million in bonds on his holding company, to be repaid at 10% interest in 7
years. It turned out to be a risky gamble when the markets collapsed in
2000.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Guccione had to sell his art
collection, put up as collateral for tide-over loans.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The last
straw was the coming of the Internet in the late 1990s, providing plenty of
free sex photo sites, on top of sex on cable and pay-per-view TV. Penthouse
sales plummeted to 600,000, and Guccione’s role at playing Caesar (Augustus?
Nero?) was over. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hefner
was also a big spender, once he had the money. He started Playboy with $8000
(about $70,000 today) in personal loans from family and friends, including his
brother who worked in television. At first he did everything himself. Like
Guccione, he found that professional photographers were too expensive, so the
first year Playboy ran nude photos bought through the grapevine. The Playboy
Clubs, which Hefner started in 1959, did not actually make a profit. But they
gave prestige and publicity, with the Bunny outfits creating an iconic presence,
establishing Playboy and Hefner himself in the celebrity circuit (and also
providing more of a continuous career path for sex models than a rare photo
shoot). Clubs of this sort were imitated by all the major players in the sex
entertainment field, and became a basis for networks recruiting new sex models.
But Playboy Clubs lost out as center city locations deteriorated when commerce
moved to suburban malls; most of their income came from the London club, which
had a casino. Playboy hotels, records, movies and books rarely made money.
Spinoff magazines were money sinks, and Oui was sold off in 1981.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playboy’s
circulation continued fairly strong (compared to all other magazines) in the
1990s. But in 2000 the company’s value started to fall, from $1 billion to $185
million in 2010. Hefner took the company private and held on until his death in
2017. By this time it was making most of its income from licensing rather than
Playboy itself. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Larry
Flynt came from a lower class background than Hefner and Guccione. Using his
savings from serving in the Navy, in 1965 he bought his mother’s bar in Dayton,
Ohio for $1800. He upgraded it and starting taking in $1000 a week, which he
used to buy two more bars. Upgrading again, in 1968 he opened the Hustler Club,
with nude hostess dancers. Soon he had eight clubs in Ohio cities, each
grossing $250,000-$500,000 a year (altogether, $10-20 million today). Building
on a publicity newsletter, he began publishing black-and-white photos of the
dancers in 1972. By putting off paying sales taxes on his clubs, he funded his
Hustler Magazine start-up. After a rocky start, his $18,000 investment in nude
photos of Jackie Kennedy Onassis put Hustler on the map and made him rich. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Flynt
leveraged the fame of Playboy and Penthouse by announcing he would take the
revolution in sexual explicitness well beyond them. Rivalry with established
competitors not only created new contents; it also was a deliberate move to
draw attention to oneself as a new niche in a recognized field. Guccione had done
the same thing when he brought Penthouse to America in 1969, taking out a
full-page ad in the New York Times declaring “We’re going rabbit hunting.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Flynt’s
campaign for publicity had another moment at the center of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>sensational attention. In 1977, while
Flynt was on trial in Georgia for obscenity, he was shot by a white southerner
enraged at a photo sequence Hustler had published showing a black man with a
white woman. Flynt ended up permanently in a wheelchair, while Hustler’s
position as the number three-selling sex mag was assured. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Flynt
turned out to be a better businessman than Guccione or Hefner. He had a clear
eye for losing operations. In his early years in Ohio, he closed down an
unprofitable vending machine business. Staying closer to his home field, he
created several spinoff magazines of Hustler in specialized sex markets, but
shut down the experiments when they didn’t pay their way. His privately owned
holding company, set up in 1976, included publishing as well as distribution.
Monitoring his ventures closely and living a relatively modest life-style,
Flynt kept overhead down and anticipated the decline of print pornography by
licensing the Hustler name. Branding rights kept his company solid from the
late 90s onwards, leaving Flynt as the richest of the big three magazine
owners.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He may
have been outdone by the comparatively unknown Paul Raymond. An Englishman of
Hefner’s age (thus 5 years older than Guccione and 17 years older than Flynt),
Raymond began as a small-time carney operator and street entertainer. In the
late 1950s, he started one of the first legal strip clubs in London, mixing
Parisian dance revues with Playboy look-alike Bunny waitresses. In the 70s he
purchased theatres and produced sex comedies, reinvesting in property in Soho,
London’s entertainment center, as well as posh districts elsewhere. Raymond’s
early efforts at adult magazines failed, but in the 70s he followed Guccione’s
example by bringing his Brit-filled Club magazines to the US. He went on to buy
Mayfair and most of the other leading sex magazines in Britain. At the time of
his death in 2008 he was worth 650 million pounds or a billion dollars. Most of
this was from real estate while property values soared. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So how
is money made in the sex business? The female models and performers are the
lowest paid (though information is lacking about the pay of male strippers).
Women did better if they moved into photography or management at successful sex
magazines. * They did particularly well if they played their opportunities on
the marriage market (as Kathy Keeton did with Guccione, and a series of
Playmates did with Hefner). A select few made it through the intense
competition to become highly paid film and TV stars. Even here, top actors make
less than big film producers-- a pattern paralleled in sex magazines. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* Dawn
Steel moved from secretary to merchandising director at Playboy, to running the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Star Wars</i> merchandising, to head of
Paramount Pictures. Anna Wintour started as fashion editor for Penthouse’s Viva
spinoff, and became editor-in-chief of Vogue. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
underlying mechanism is that beautiful bodies are more perishable than images
recorded of them. A brief photo-shoot results in sales that depend on how
widely the product is marketed. Fame as sex stars in the dishonored porn
economy do not parley into very lucrative careers; and turn-over of top photo
models is very rapid, the longer careers covering 5 or 6 years at most. Fame in
the mainstream mass entertainment world can last longer, but least so as a sex
star. Marilyn Monroe drank and drugged herself to death when she felt her looks
were going at age 36 (having been a top star for 9 years, since she was 27).
Jayne Mansfield’s movie star career lasted only 2 years, although she rode her
fame on the night-club circuit for another decade. (She famously said, “Is it
possible to go back to being a starlet?”) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The top
money competition was among the men. They made money by closely monitoring
their rivals; concentrating on access to the most willing models and the best
photographers. Hefner and Guccione both began with experience in periodical
distribution. Flynt and Paul Raymond began by expanding their sex-oriented
clubs and managing their own publicity. All of them were essentially
self-financed, which kept profits from being eaten up by financial
professionals, and gave them a free hand without someone looking over their
shoulder concerned with mainstream respectability. But they lost money when
they ventured into areas they did not know well (casinos, hotels, nuclear
power, or magazines that had nothing to do with sex). Guccione shows that
following one’s own personal interests, when flush with new-found money,
results in keeping pet projects going even when they become a drain. Paul
Raymond (and for that matter another fringe-player in such markets, Donald
Trump) did best because they combined glitz with a concentration on booming
real estate.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Does creativity work the same way
in all fields?</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Let us
define creativity as successful innovation. It’s not enough to have the idea,
people have to carry it through to realization. This is not merely an
individual process.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Is the
creative process the same in all fields? Tracing networks of scientists and
philosophers, we have found the most successful were protégés of the eminent
thinkers and researchers of the previous generation. They also honed their
creativity by rivalry with their contemporaries, keeping up with the latest
techniques personally or by close intermediaries. Shakespeare began as an actor
in the same networks who performed early hits by Marlowe and Kyd, and learned
playwriting by collaborating in theatre companies that spun off from each
other. Later an actor in Shakespeare’s troupe, Ben Jonson, spun off to become
the success story of the following generation. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
business world of high tech, Steve Jobs collected the most creative contacts in
Silicon Valley, and lured many away to work for Apple. He wormed out of Xerox
the bit-mapping technique that turned personal computers from typewriters into
touchable/ clickable screen images. This in turn was snapped up by Steve’s
sometime collaborator Bill Gates, who made Microsoft into a giant by switching
alliances to the old-guard enemy, IBM. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
formula for innovative entrepreneurs thus includes: apprentice-like contacts
with the leaders of the previous generation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Spinning off new organizations using new techniques. Keeping
close contact with your rivals,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>imitating/stealing from them; hiring their personnel; and shaping a
niche that is close enough to reflect their halo of fame, but distinct enough
to make your own identity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Is the
path to success the same in every field? (Does it work in all branches of
business? in politics?? in the military??)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The only way to find out is to investigate, field by field.
The research on all of these has not yet been done. But this is what it looks
like:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The sex
entertainment field probably generalizes to other fields of popular
entertainment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
basic processes of creativity have been operating throughout history for scientists
and intellectuals-- this is where the network patterns were discovered.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Business
entrepreneurs again fit the checklist. But as French sociologist Michel
Villette emphasizes, stalking your rivals, keeping up potentially treacherous
contact with them, and stepping in at moments of weakness to take over their assets is particularly prominent in business.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Politics
and social movements fit the general pattern to an extent, operating as
networks of niche-seeking rivals creating the field of political issues. But
politics is a field where outsiders from beyond the established networks are
most frequent, probably because politics and social movements are intrinsically
contentious; and they aggressively attempt to promote generational die-off of
incumbent power-holders.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stay
tuned as research progresses.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">References</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Carlye
Adler and Hugh Hefner. Interview, Sept. 1, 2003. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fortune Small Business</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">John
Colapinto. “The Twilight of Bob Guccione.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rolling
Stone,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>April 1, 2004.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">Venus Revealed: The Pubic Wars</span></i><span style="color: black;">. Parts 1-13 (1953-1981). posted Oct. 16, 2008 - Nov. 1,
2016.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>venusobservations.blogspotcom</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Wikipedia
articles on specific magazines, publishers and models.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">IMDB
biographies.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Charles
Martignette and Louis Meisel. 1996. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Great American Pin-Up.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Francis
Smilby, 1981.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stolen Sweets: The Cover Girls of Yesteryear.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Robert
Sklar. 1993.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Film. An International History of the Medium.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Edward
O. Laumann et. al. 1994.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Social Organization of Sexuality.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Philip
Blumstein and Pepper Schwartz. 1983.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">American Couples.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lewis
Yablonsky. 1968. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hippie Trip.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Ben
Zablocki.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>1980. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alienation and Charisma. A Study of
Contemporary American Communes.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">David
Halle. 1984.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">America’s Working Man.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">David
Grazian. 2008.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Ashley
Mears. 2011. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pricing Beauty: The Making
of a Fashion Model.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="tab-stops: center 3.0in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">on creativity and
careers: <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Pierre
Bourdieu. 1993. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Field of Cultural
Production.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Randall
Collins. 1998. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sociology of
Philosophies.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">--<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Shakespeare’s self-creating networks.” <a href="https://creativity-via-sociology.blogspot.com/2017/07/">https://creativity-via-sociology.blogspot.com/2017/07/</a></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- and
Maren McConnell. 2016. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Napoleon Never
Slept. </i></span><br />
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot. 2009.</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> From Predators to Icons: Exposing the Myth of the Business Hero.</span> </i></span></div>
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-33350168965250073742017-07-03T23:36:00.000-07:002020-01-22T16:03:12.494-08:00SHAKESPEARE'S SELF-CREATING NETWORKS<style>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">All
creativity, even the most famous, can be explained. To call it genius is just
rhetoric, a way of evading explanation. Shakespeare, like everyone else, had to
go through the process of getting it done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That means day by day, in a sequence of years that started
when he wasn’t a genius, and built up as he did the things that made his
reputation. There were times when it didn’t click and the products weren’t so
great.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This is our material to
analyze.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sociology of Philosophies, </i>I used
the micro-sociological method to analyze philosophers and mathematicians: both
where creativity happens, and the kinds of things that get created. Two key
ingredients are networks and internalized techniques.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Being
creative is having the techniques to make something that becomes famous. Where
do the techniques come from? In part, they come from the network-- one’s
immediate predecessors, collaborators and rivals. In part-- because to become
creative on your own is to make new techniques. This is done by combining
techniques from the past, or reversing some into their opposite, thus creating
new effects. Close acquaintance with the network of previous creators is
important because you need to internalize their techniques, until you can roll
with them, generating a flow of emotional energy. This internal process is what
outsiders can’t see and what impresses them as overpowering genius. And it is
why the most creative persons come out of a network of other creative persons. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I will
give several examples of Shakespeare’s techniques for writing plays, and how he
built, not only on predecessors’ work, but on his own previous plays.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Roadmap:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I.
Shakespeare’s techniques for transforming earlier plays into new plays</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Creativity
by reversal and recombination</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
enters the playwright network</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">From
simple to complex villain to self-destructive tragic hero</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Early
success in the blood-and-gore market</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Promoting
the subplot: creating complex characters on the border of comedy</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
the text-searching scholar</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How
Shakespeare could write a bad play</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">II. The
networks that launched Shakespeare</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How
Shakespeare became a great poet</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
actor/playwright network</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Chronology of Shakespeare’s and
contemporaries’ plays</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shakespeare’s techniques for transforming
earlier plays into new plays</i></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Creativity by reversal and recombination</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Two of
Shakespeare’s most famous plays, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth</i>, have the same basic
plot: A king is killed, the murderer takes his place, the king’s son seeks revenge
and finally kills the usurper. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth</i>
is written about five years after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i>,
for the new monarch from Scotland, James I. For this command performance,
Shakespeare takes his previous best play and reverses several basic
elements.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i> is presented from the point of view of the son, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from the point of view of the murderer. The character
Macbeth is like Claudius, if the scene where the King is praying for his sins
is magnified into an entire play about guilt. The character of the avenging son
shifts drastically, from the moody Hamlet to the bland character of Malcolm,
who gets defocused by shifting away from his side of the story. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
other major plot devices remain the same: bracketing the story with the
supernatural (the ghost in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i>, the
witches in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth</i>); a revelation
scene where the murderer freaks out guiltily in front of his court. And the
power of psychological drama that Shakespeare has discovered with Hamlet-- the
complexity of his self-examination, the self-doubts and torments-- are shifted
over to Macbeth and his wife, who now get the famous soliloquies: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“To be or not to be…”</i> becomes<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Out,
damned spot!”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Tomorrow
and tomorrow and tomorrow…”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Ghosts
had been used before. Thomas Kyd’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spanish
Tragedy</i> has the ghost of a murdered man on stage throughout the play, but
he does not communicate with anyone but the audience. Shakespeare uses ghosts
(Hamlet’s father; the murdered Banquo) to bring out the protagonist’s inner
voices. Ghosts become a visible means to depict on stage the drama going on
inside someone’s mind. Whether Shakespeare consciously intended his ghosts for
this purpose is dubious; he was just working his way forward rearranging his
materials. When he hit on something that generated more dramatic scenes, including
the new psychological dimension, he used it again.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
doesn’t invent everything anew; he rearranges key elements to generate new
effects.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The basic plot of
virtually every play Shakespeare wrote can be traced to a previous source,
historical narrative, story or earlier play. The main elements of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i>-- the murder, the ghost and the
assumed madness as a strategy for revenge-- already existed and had been staged
as recently as 1594. The device of a play-within-a-play that confirms
Claudius’s guilt comes from the most famous early Elizabethan drama, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Spanish Tragedy</i> (1587), but there
the play-within-a-play provides cover while the revengers stab the murderers to
death.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare takes the
device in a new direction by shifting the dramatic emphasis and the timing. By
having Hamlet delay and equivocate with himself, Shakespeare develops a new
form of plot tension. This too is a reversal of a previously dominant style,
the blood-and-thunder tragedies of non-stop treachery and carnage. This element
isn’t discarded but displaced to the end: a matter of rearrangement. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Another
innovation on the Hamlet story is to weave in a subplot. As everyone knows now,
a subplot provides comic relief and suspense by retarding the main action;
compare <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare's early plays
like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titus
Andronicus</i> to see what non-stop, single-file action felt like without it. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i> is as structurally satisfying as
a Wagnerian musical climax because the subplot eventually merges with the main
plot and drives it towards its conclusion. Hamlet equivocates, pretends
madness, gets proof of guilt, but fails to kill Claudius. Now what? The play is
stuck, except that Polonius, who has been the main comic relief, gets himself
killed as a busy-body snooper. Since he has been interfering with his daughter
Ophelia’s affair with Hamlet, this murder drives her to her death, and her
hot-head brother Laertes returns to challenge Hamlet in the comic-then-dramatic
graveyard scene. The Polonius-Ophelia-Laertes subplot is not in Shakespeare’s
sources, but it is the key structural innovation. Other plot elements in the
second half of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i> are banal:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the stock devices of a letter with
instructions to execute someone, the chance boarding of a pirate ship, and the
mixup of swords, poisons and drinks that brings the action to a conventionally
bloody end. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
is not above using tired old devices. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Othello</i>
still hinges on dropping handkerchiefs. Think of Shakespeare rushing onward
into each new play,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>rearranging
available materials, some old, some his own invention. At the time of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i>, further moves remain to be
taken. Shakespeare is more thoroughly innovative 5-6 years later with the
ending of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lear</i>. His sources provide a
happy ending, but Shakespeare now knows the power of a tragic ending as the
destination of an inner character conflict. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lear</i>
is like a transformation of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titus
Andronicus</i>, his first big hit, into a psychologically sophisticated
version.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Creativity
by reversal and recombination is a main process of innovation in the history of
philosophy and mathematics.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Invention by negating one element and recombining the rest is a
technique for discovery. That means that discovery and creativity is not
mysterious. Once you see how to do it, you can keep on doing it by applying it
to further materials. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare enters the playwright
chain</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Step
backwards now to about 1590. A no-longer-young actor, with 5 years or so of
experience in London theatre, joins with his colleagues in writing plays.
Histories of the kings of England have recently been published; “tragical
histories of the death of kings” reverberate well on the stage, as Marlowe
proved with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tamburlane</i> (1587) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edward II</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(1592). Shakespeare goes to the same material and the same
techniques. His first such venture (apparently a joint production, like a
typical Hollywood rewriting confabulation), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry
VI,</i> is a blow-by-blow account of the War of the Roses, so long that it
takes up three separate plays. There is a lot of material, conspiracies,
rebellions, battles, trumpet flourishes and grand speeches. The trouble is
there is so much of it that plot tension lags; and there are so many characters
that none stand out, especially since none of them drives the plot. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In fact <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI part 1</i> had promising materials,
much of it being devoted to the story of Joan of Arc (here called Joan la
Pucelle). This could be great psychological and political drama, and
Shakespeare includes all the famous historic scenes like Joan picking out the
Dauphin hiding among his courtiers and Joan facing her captors who are going to
burn her at the stake. But the French are the bad guys and the focus is on the
English heroes. So Joan gets depicted as at best a fool deluded by her voices
and at worse an actual witch; and contrary to historic sources she is depicted
as a foul-mouthed slattern cursing her captors-- standard English propaganda
but hardly insightful psychology of a spiritual charismatic leader. With better
technique this material could have been a tragedy of Saint Joan (which George
Bernard Shaw wrote 300 years later), but Shakespeare (or whoever wrote this
part) passed up the opportunity to make a great play out of one of the most
famous women in history. Proof that having great raw material is not enough to
make a great play. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Henry VI mini-series only comes alive in the very last act of Part 3. We have
just gone through the climactic battle of the War of the Roses, when one of the
numerous characters, Richard of Gloucester steps to the front of the stage and
delivers the first truly dramatic soliloquy in these plays.* He tells the
audience his intention, not to let his elder brothers reign, but to eliminate
them one by one until he is on the throne. One might tab Richard as the stock
character of the plotting villain, but the next play, Richard III, has a radically
different structure and focus. Virtually the same soliloquy resumes-- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Now is the winter of our discontent--”</i>
but Richard starts analyzing himself, blaming his physical deformity, despising
the courtiers and joys of peace. Has Shakespeare discovered psychology? More
likely he has figured out that simplifying the plot and focusing on the
villain’s point of view is more dramatically effective than nonstop violence
and loud declamatory speeches. With this structure, psychological complexity
had to grow. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* There
is one other long soliloquy in the three plays: one act before Richard’s
soliloquy,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>King Henry VI,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a timid figure, muses on the
battlefield that he would rather live the life of a shepherd, delivering many
lines in the idealized conventions of pastoral poetry. He witnesses a son who
has killed his father, and a father who has killed his son, a contrived and
maudlin depiction of the civil war, to which the king gives chorus-like
comments. The scene has an artificial masque-like quality, although it gives
the first hint of inwardness in these plays. Richard’s soliloquy takes it much
further.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
early plays, a scene often ends with one character remaining on stage and
explaining what he will do next. These are not soliloquies in the psychological
sense, but devices to inform the audience about offstage action between scenes.
Since the theatre stage had no curtain, breaks between one scene and another
were announced this way, as well as changes of venue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sometimes a major character speaks of his secret plotting
that he will put into action. Richard is not the only schemer in these plays
(<i>Henry VI part 2</i> is full of them); what is new is the self-analysis.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The convention of speaking directly to
the audience morphs into a device for revealing the psychology of inner
dialogue.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">From simple to complex villains
to self-destructive protagonists</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><i>Richard
III</i> is the biggest single step in Shakespeare’s playwriting career. He has a
model that he will vary and recombine into his greatest tragedies. He has
learned to make complex villain-centered drama. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
result is a series of dramas where the prime mover of action, and the most
impressive character, is the villain.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Merchant of Venice </i>(about
1595)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is a remake of Marlowe’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Jew of Malta </i>(1590), but Shylock is
a much more memorable figure than Marlowe’s Barabas. He is more villainous:
instead of political treachery of selling out his city, he makes the infamous
pound-of-flesh contract for a loan. But also he gets to plead eloquently for
his humanity: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Hath not a Jew eyes?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>... If you prick us, do we not bleed?
If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?” </i>The
contract dispute allows Shakespeare to build a new plot twist around Portia as
the lady lawyer. Once Shylock has been bested in court, he disappears from the
stage, leaving the last part of the play rather flat, relying on clichéd
devices like rival suitors with tricks about disguises and tests of lovers’
fidelity.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Like an experiment, it
proves that such villains are the centers of emotional energy, dominating both
the other characters and the audience. The famous actors of the Elizabethan
stage-- Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage-- played the juicy parts, like
Barabas,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Richard III and Shylock. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
does it again with the villain-centered dramas of Macbeth and his wife, and
Othello’s secret nemesis, his lieutenant Iago. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Othello</i> is structurally a descendent of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Richard III</i> , stripped down even further to a few characters,
giving it the dramatic concentration that lets it become the most successful
Shakespeare-based opera. Othello is an imposing masculine figure and is given
wonderful poetic lines, but he is essentially a pawn of Iago, who contrives the
plot like an on-stage director. Iago’s character is an extension of Richard,
delivering a series of self-scrutinizing soliloquies that leave his motivations
mysterious, even to himself.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The most
complex figures are the tragic protagonists who are their own worst enemy,
Hamlet and Lear. Hence they tend to be regarded by intellectuals as
Shakespeare’s most serious plays. They also fit the classic Greek theory that
the greatest catharsis comes from witnessing the fate of heroes with a fatal
flaw. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King Lear</i> in particular can be
regarded as a drama of self-discovery, and some have judged it Shakespeare’s
greatest achievement.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Generations
of critics have analyzed these characters as if they were real people, whose
psychological complexities are exposed for us to understand. Is it paradoxical
that no one agrees on what drives Hamlet, or Iago, or Lear?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here is a sociological interpretation
that none of the psychological interpreters will like: These are not real
persons, whom Shakespeare observed or intuited, but characters developed in the
process of writing a series of plays. Why can’t Hamlet kill the king? Because
if he kills him in Act 3, the play is over; its main plot device is<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>finding reasons to delay. Hamlet’s
character is generated in the process of writing the play. The device of the dramatic
self-regarding soliloquy that Shakespeare pioneered with Richard III, enables
him to have Hamlet speak wonderfully poetic speeches to himself. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It is
not at all clear that persons like Hamlet existed before; but as literature resembling Shakespeare’s propagated downstream, real people (or some of them) modeled
themselves on this kind of endless self-reflection.*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not all life is an imitation of literature, of course,
but some of the processes are analogous. Shakespeare created newer and more
interesting drama by making villains more complex, then more self-conscious;
reaching a point where it is no longer necessary to have bad guys drive the
plot, when the good guys create dramatic tension for themselves.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Out in the so-called real world, one of
the things modernity means is social life gets more complicated, and
individuals become more self-conscious as their thoughts reflect more points of
view circulating through their tangled networks. Shakespeare is not at all
modern in most things (more like a relic of waning feudalism), but he made
striking jumps in recombination and reflection on literary techniques. He
created complex literary personalities in the same way that social history
creates more complex people.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*T.S.
Eliot’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Prufrock</i>: “Do I dare to eat a
peach? I will wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach. I have
heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think they will sing to
me...” Allen Ginsberg’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Howl:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>“I saw the best minds of my
generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked, dragging themselves
through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix...” And plenty of
real-life beatniks, punks, and antinomian rebels who practice negation and
sardonic reflection as their social niche. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">An early success in the blood-and-gore
market</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The big
successes of the theatre market in the years when Shakespeare was an apprentice
actor were Kyd and Marlowe. Marlowe wrote flamboyant scenes: especially famous
were Tamburlaine cracking his whip over conquered kings pulling his chariot; or
Faustus inviting the devil into his study. But his plots are often jumbles,
lacking plot tension and petering out in the later acts. Marlowe was a better
dramatic poet than a playwright. Enter Shakespeare.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Titus Andronicus</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> must have been written around
the same time as the collaborative work <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry
VI</i>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but it was under
Shakespeare’s name and made his reputation by 1592 as “the only Shake-scene”
with a “Tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide” (parodying a line from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI</i> part 3).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It was extremely popular
throughout Shakespeare’s life (as was Kyd’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spanish
Tragedy</i>) which tells something about contemporary taste; for us, its
interest is in showing how he would change to create his signature style. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Titus</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> is non-stop atrocity and
violence all the way through.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It
begins with a brawl between two sons of the dead Roman Emperor over the
succession. Victorious General Titus, just back from the wars, decides for the
older brother, who rewards him by announcing he’ll marry Titus’s daughter. The
losing brother declares No! she is betrothed to him, and carries her off, aided
by Titus’s own sons. For their disobedience, Titus kills one of his sons. The
new Emperor then changes his mind and declares he will marry the Queen of the
Goths, whom Titus has brought back captive. The new Queen-Empress urges Titus
and the Emperor to reconcile--<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"> </b>but
in an aside she reveals it is all a ruse to get rid of Titus and his sons in
due time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She has another motive
of revenge, since Titus has just had her son hacked to death as revenge for the
sons he has lost in the Goth wars. Score for the first scene: one son killed by
father, another son executed after his mother had pleaded for his life.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
following Acts, we witness: the Queen’s remaining two sons, egged on by her
secret lover, rape Titus’s daughter. They also kill her fiancée (the Emperor’s
brother) and by a forged letter, turn the blame on two of Titus’s sons. To add
insult to injury, they offer to have the “murderers” pardoned if Titus will
sacrifice his own hand; he does, but they send back his sons’ severed heads
with his rejected hand. The rapists/murderers had cut off the girl’s hands and
tongue to keep her from naming them, but she finds a way to convey the story by
pointing it out in a book with her stumps. Titus now counter-attacks by
stirring up the Goths to attack Rome; while he personally captures the Queen’s
sons, cuts their throats, pours out their blood and grinds their bones to make
a pie for her to eat. He then invites everyone who is still alive to dinner, at
which: Titus stabs his own daughter-- because he can’t stand the sight of her
mutilation; stabs the Queen; and is killed by the Emperor, who is killed by
Titus’s last surviving son. By the end of the play, 12 of 14 principal players
are dead and 6 have been mutilated or tortured. Most of this is shown onstage,
and the off-stage atrocities are vividly recounted and the bodies (or
body-parts) displayed. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The tone
throughout is what we would see today as a grade-B horror movie, but with
passages of recognizably Shakespearean verse. In one scene, there is a lugubrious
quarrel between Titus, his brother, and his son over which of them will have
the honour of cutting off his hand to save the others. After the bad guys have
thrown back the severed heads and hand, and the daughter arrives to show off
her stumps, they swear revenge and we get the following:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">TITUS:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Come
brother, take a head,</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And in this hand the other will I
bear.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And Lavinia...</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bear thou my hand, sweet wench,
between thy teeth.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">... Let’s kiss and part, for we
have much to do.</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This may
well be the most tasteless scene of all time. Shakespeare has demonstrated his
ability to shock. He has gone beyond Kyd’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spanish
Tragedy</i> and the most ringing bombast of Marlowe and Lyly.* Audiences loved
it. Why does Shakespeare now change his style? Probably because he recognized
he couldn’t outdo himself in that direction. The action in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titus Andronicus</i> has no turning point; it is just one atrocity
after another, punctuated by bombastic laments. In his further plays
Shakespeare slows it down and establishes a more interesting pace and deeper
dramatic effects. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The goriest part of Kyd’s play is where
Hieronimo bites out his tongue to keep from talking under torture; while his
imprisoned daughter writes a letter in her own blood.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The play also features a series of hangings, stabbings,
suicides, and burning at the stake. Several characters go mad on stage when
they learn what is happening. Toned-down versions of such mad scenes are used
by Shakespeare with Ophelia and Lear. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I have
already noted how in the sequence between the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI Part 3</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Richard
III, </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare modified the
conventional soliloquy from the task of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>scene-setting and clueing-in the audience about the plot direction, to
inner psychological drama. Thereafter Shakespeare’s characters acquire depth
and complexity. They certainly lack this in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titus
Andronicus</i>. The characters just move around according to the needs of the
plot, changing their trajectories without real motivation. Titus’s towering
rage in Act I when he kills his son gives way to accepting the new status quo,
and ends the Act by inviting everyone to go hunting with him. Why? just a
convenient way of getting everyone dispersed in the countryside where the next scenes
of rape and murder can happen. The Queen’s two sons are about to fight each
other over their love of Lavinia, but they are easily persuaded to jointly rape
and mutilate her. The Queen decides to visit Titus disguised as the mythical
figure Revenge, which serves no purpose except to reprise a famous scene from
Kyd’s<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Spanish Tragedy</i>, and for Titus
to have the opportunity to kill her two sons who have accompanied her, also in
supposed mythical disguises. The Queen suggests the idea of inviting everyone to
dinner, although she has nothing to gain by it. And so on. Her evil lover, a
Moor, contrives the worst dirty tricks; when he speaks out in his own voice, it
is just to vaunt his diabolism-- he is a conventional devil-figure. Titus gets
some speeches where he can pour out Shakespeare’s poetry expressing lament and
revenge, but merely as the kind of declamatory rhetoric that leading actors
loved to deliver.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
could change his style because he had other directions to pursue. Some of these
techniques came from comedy, which he was also writing and performing at the
time. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titus</i> has no subplot, just the
continuous escalating of atrocities from one side to the other. This is one
reason why the emotional level, although intense, is monotonous. By the time of
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Romeo and Juliet</i> (about 3 years
later) Shakespeare builds suspense by intruding low-comedy characters into the
tragedy, as well as having his main characters engage in the word-play of wit
and repartee. This also makes the tragic characters more likeable or at least
more impressive (like Hamlet and Romeo), which they definitely are not in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titus</i>. Most of Shakespeare’s
predecessors in writing tragedy stayed strictly in that genre; his combination
with comedy (which he apprenticed in by adapting old plays like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Comedy of Errors </i>from Plautus) gave him
techniques for making a new kind of tragedy.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Titus Andronicus</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> is skillful at what it set out
to do, assuming that was to overtake the number one hit (Kyd’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spanish Tragedy</i>) at its own game. By the
standards of pacing in comedies, it is clumsy. It doesn’t even handle its own
horrific conclusion for maximum effect. After everyone is dead, there is a long
anticlimax of 130 lines during which Roman officials explain what has happened
and choose Titus’s remaining son as Emperor. This rounds out the play,
considering that it started with a quarrel over choosing the Emperor, but it is
in the wrong emotional tone; no one sounds shocked, no one expresses a real
reaction to what has happened. Compare the ending of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i>, where the stage is similarly littered with bodies: a brief
recognition of the inexpressible; the rest is silence.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Promoting the subplot: creating
complex characters on the border of comedy</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Let us
go back to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI,</i> before
Shakespeare acquired his own technique. In Part 1 there is a minor character,
Sir John Fastolfe, who is a coward and a buffoon. He has no subplot of his own,
but he does provide a bit of comic relief. When Shakespeare recognizes the
importance of subplots in his serious plays (probably transposing the devices
of plot complication in comedies), he turns this character into Sir John
Falstaff. This happens in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry IV</i>
parts 1 and 2 and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry V,</i> which are
a prequel to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI-Richard III</i>
sequence. Shakespeare’s English history plays have the Hollywood quality that
once you are onto something, keep the franchise going. Henry V was the father
of Henry VI, which is where we came in. But the Falstaff series, written in the
mid-to-late 1590s, before Shakespeare concentrates on his dramatic
psychological tragedies, show another advance in technique. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There is
a lot of tumultuous history and famous battles, but he slims down the
military/political plot. Instead, he relies on the subplot, which is now the
braggart-buffoon-merry prankster Falstaff with his young buddy, Prince Hal.
This proved to be so popular that Queen Elizabeth called for a further play
about “the fat knight,” which became <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Merry Wives of Windsor</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Shakespeare is adopting the low-life layer of light comedy into the aristocratic
high politics of the history plays. Having done so opens up a further move:
Prince Hal grows up, becomes King Henry V, and leaves his old midnight playmate
behind. It is poignant; comedy too becomes humanized. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry V</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i> are
created about the same time, around 1599-1601. From now on, Shakespeare has all
the tools for constructing his most mature characters.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare the text-searching
scholar</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
works almost entirely with pre-existing materials. The creativity of his plays
are in the combinations. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth</i>
combines two different murders from Scottish history, together with
Shakespeare’s own devices from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King
Lear</i> is a combination of plot and subplot from legendary history with
fragments from an English translation of Italian romances. In creating a new
play, Shakespeare begins by scanning possible texts and forming them into a new
gestalt. His method involves much reading-- or more likely skimming-- the
available literature. He relies heavily on compilations-- Holinshed’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and
Irelande</i> (1587); a 1579 translation of Plutarch’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Parallel Lives</i>; Sir Philip Sidney’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arcadia</i>, a melange of tales within tales from Italian sources
(published 1590 and 1598).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">To
appreciate Shakespeare, just read his sources. Shakespeare extracted plot lines he
could make into scenes, adding dramatic dialogue-- for instance, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Julius Caesar </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>follows Plutarch fairly closely, but Mark Antony’s famous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Friends, Romans, countrymen! Lend me your
ears!”</i> speech is Shakespeare’s invention, and it becomes the turning point
of the play. It took a professional eye to cull from a morass of materials the
parts he could combine into maximally concentrated drama.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare’s creative skill was to
discern what the original writers could not.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">We
imagine Shakespeare at the Mermaid tavern, writing out parts for his acting
company to perform, drinking and engaging in exchanges of wit. Even more
important must have been the withdrawn part of his life, where he borrowed
texts, pored over them, and extracted materials he could use. He gets
successively better at this: compare the straight-forward rendering of
chronicled battles and rebellions in the strung-out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI</i> series, with the surgical extractions that go into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lear</i>. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
makes himself into an accomplished scholar. He knows what is published; he
keeps up with the book market. And he scans it professionally, from his own
point of view. He is no pedant of a scholar; but a creative one, the creativity
residing in a vision of what to look for.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Becoming a great writer, in this regard, is concomitantly a task of
becoming a great reader. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black;"><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Piecing together King Lear</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black;">Shakespeare takes the main plot of
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King Lear</i> from Holinshed, about the
division of his kingdom among his daughters. For a subplot, he locates a story
in Sir Philip Sidney's <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arcadia</i> about
a king who has two sons, a good son of legitimate birth, the other an evil
bastard who first turns the father against his brother, then deprives the king
of everything, including his eyes. Here are extracts from the first 3 pages:</span><span style="color: black;"><i> </i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; font-size: 12.0pt; font-weight: normal;">It was in the
kingdome of Galacia, the season being (as in the depth of winter) very cold,
and as then sodainely growne to so extreame and foule a storme, that never any
winter (I thinke) brought foorth a fowler child: so that the Princes were even
compelled by the haile, that the pride of the winde blew into their faces, to
seeke some shrowding place within a certaine hollow rocke offering it unto
them, they made it their shield against the tempests furie.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And so staying there, till the violence
thereof was passed, they heard the speach of a couple, who not perceiving them
(being hidde within that rude canapy) helde a straunge and pitifull
disputation... </span></i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">There they perceaved an aged man, and a young, scarcely come
to the age of a man, both poorely arayed, extreamely weather-beaten; the olde
man blinde, the young man leading him...</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black;">[The son speaks first:] <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">This old man (whom I leade) was lately
rightfull Prince of this countrie of Paphlagonia, by the hard-harted</i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="color: black;">ungratefulnes of a sonne of his,
deprived, not only of his kingdome... but of his sight, the riches which Nature
graunts to the poorest creatures. Whereby, & by other his unnaturall
dealings, he hath bin driven to such griefe, as even now he would have had me
to have led him to the toppe of this rocke, thence to cast himselfe headlong to
death...</span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">His father began to speake, Ah my sonne (said he) how evill
an Historian you, that leave out the chiefe knotte of all the discourse? my
wickednes, my wickednes...</span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="color: black;">I
was carried by a bastarde sonne of mine (if at least I be bounde to beleeve the
words of that base woman my concubine, his mother) first to mislike, then to
hate, lastly to destroy, to doo my best to destroy, this sonne (I thinke you
thinke) undeserving destruction. </span></i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">What waies he used to bring me to it, if I should tell you,
I should tediously trouble you with as much poysonous hypocrisie, desperate
fraude, smoothe malice, hidden ambition, & smiling envie, as in any living
person could be harbored. But I list it not, no remembrance, (no, of
naughtines) delights me, but mine own... But the conclusion is, that I gave
order to some servants of mine, whom I thought as apte for such charities as my
selfe, to leade him out into a forrest, & there to kill him.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black;"><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">But those theeves (better natured to my
sonne then my selfe) spared his life, letting him goe, to learne to live
poorely: which he did, giving himselfe to be a private souldier,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in a countrie here by. But as he was
redy to be greatly advaunced for some noble peeces of service which he did, he
hearde newes of me: who (dronke in my affection to that unlawfull and
unnaturall sonne of mine) suffered my self so to be governed by him, that all
favors and punishments passed by him, all offices, and places of importance,
distributed to his favourites; so that ere I was aware, I had left my self
nothing but the name of a King: which he shortly wearie of too, with many
indignities (if any thing may be called an indignity, which was laid upon me)
threw me out of my seat, and put out my eyes; and then (proud in his tyrannie)
let me goe, nether imprisoning, nor killing me: but rather delighting to make
me feele my miserie; miserie indeed, if ever there were any; full of
wretchednes, fuller of disgrace, and fullest of guiltines. </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black;">Sidney's narrative then goes on to
tell how the Princes, after hearing this story, fought off a troop of soldiers
led by the bastard son who are pursing the father; then other knights ride to
the aid of the bastard; still others happen along to support the deposed king,
with further battles until the king recovers his power and puts his good son on
the throne. And the knights ride forth for further adventures. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black;">Shakespeare pulls out three main
plot elements: the good and evil brothers (who become Edgar and Edmund, sons of
Lear's supporter the Earl of Gloucester, whose degradation parallels Lear's at
the hands of his evil daughters); the expression of guilt by the deposed King
(which Shakespeare transfers to Lear, giving <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King Lear</i> the humanistic depth that became so admired by critics);
and the scene in a storm, where the loyal son prevents his father from
committing suicide by jumping from a rock. Shakespeare's task is to turn this
summary narrative into scenes and dialogue. The only scene Sidney actually
presents is the storm, but this is merely a backdrop where the wretched victims
can tell their story. Shakespeare uses it as the play's dramatic peak in Act 3
Scene 2, where Lear is cast out on the moor: <br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
<br style="mso-special-character: line-break;" />
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow!</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks...</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">Crack nature's molds, all germens spill at once</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black;">That make ingrateful man. </span></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black;">The storm is also where the main
plot and subplot merge, when Lear encounters Edgar, on the run and disguised as
a madman (an improvement on Sidney, who had the good son disguised as a
soldier). A series of poignant scenes follow, as the arrogant Lear humbles
himself and for the first time in his life takes pity on someone else-- who in
turn becomes his champion who will bring about the downfall of the evil-doers. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="color: black;">We get a sense of Shakespeare as
the text-searching reader, scanning for things he can use.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He locates the 600 words I have
extracted here, out of Sidney's 3600 word chapter, itself submerged in a
compilation of dozens of such stories over hundreds of pages. From bare
summary<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>--<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"What waies he used to bring me to it...with as much poysonous
hypocrisie, desperate fraude, smoothe malice, hidden ambition, & smiling
envie..." </i>Shakespeare creates actual incidents on the stage, gives
them a pace and rhythm totally lacking in Sidney, as well as a series of
dramatic situations his actors can exploit. Probably what first caught
Shakespeare's eye was the deposed king blaming himself (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"the chiefe knotte of all the discourse.. my wickednes, my
wickednes..."), </i>an unusual note in stories of knightly exploits; and
the dramatic stage-setting of the storm (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"compelled
by the haile, that the pride of the winde blew in their faces" </i>). What
makes these into elements of high tragedy is provided by Shakespeare's
now-considerable technique.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Crafting Macbeth</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Creating
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth</i> was an easier task of
scholarship than many other plays, since Holinshed’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chronicles of Scotland </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>already has an eye for dramatic incidents. Several key elements of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth</i>
<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are clearly presented: Makbeth and
Banquo, generals of King Duncane against foreign invaders and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>rebellions of Scottish nobles,
encounter three weird sisters who prophecy their futures. Shakespeare uses
their words almost literally (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“All haile
Makbeth, thane of Glammis” </i>etc). And later, after Makbeth is king, a witch
gives him confidence by telling him he would never <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“be slaine by a man borne of woman”</i> nor vanquished <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“till the wood of Bernane came to the
castell of Dunsinane.”</i> It is a riddle, whose answer we get later in
Holinshed, that a man (Makduffe) born by Caesarian section is not born of
woman, and the army attacking Dunsinane covers itself with boughs from Birnam
wood. All this Shakespeare uses nearly verbatim. But Scottish history was full
of kings being murdered by rebellious lords, often with good cause such as
resisting taxation or revenging slain kinsmen. Shakespeare extracts and
combines several instances: King Duff’s murder when lodging in the castle of
Donwald, who carries it out by getting the king’s servants drunk, sending his
own servants in to do the killing, while establishes his alibi by hanging out
all night with the castle watch, and then going into a frenzy of killing the
drunken servants. Shakespeare transfers this incident to Macbeth’s rebellion
against King Duncan. Holinshed just says briefly that Makbeth and his
friends-- including Banquo-- killed Duncane (presumably in battle), whereupon
Makbeth had himself proclaimed king. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">By
combining the two narratives (Donwald murdering King Duff, Makbeth killing King
Duncane), Shakespeare gets to use the weird sisters and the prophecies. And he
makes the murder of the king much more dramatic, by having it happen by an
elaborate plot at night in Macbeth’s castle. Having Macbeth and his wife do the
bloody work themselves makes for further dramatic scenes of obsessive guilt and
hallucination. Since there were rebellions going on much of the time in 11th
century Scotland, killing a king to replace him with another would be nothing
special-- just another version of the War of the Roses events that march
through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Makbeth’s murder of Banquo is in
Holinshed, but Shakespeare invents the banquet scene where Macbeth is
frightened by Banquo’s ghost, borrowing from his own dramatic turning point in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i> at the play-within-a-play. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Where
there is good dialogue and dramatic confrontation, Shakespeare lifts it; where
there are plot elements that can structure the action, he discerns them even if
the original author did not.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>To
call it plagiarism is to fail to understand that recombining and
recontextualizing is the major technique of creativity. Yet the translators and
compilers deserve a place in the sequence creating Shakespeare; without them,
it could not have been done.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How Shakespeare could write a bad
play</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dramatic
materials do not guarantee literary creativity. Shakespeare blew it with Joan
of Arc, and his late collaborative play, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry
VIII</i>, was mediocre, even though his subject was the most colourful of all
English kings. Shakespeare’s effort to dramatize the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i>, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus and
Cressida</i> was no great success, even though he wrote it at the
height of his skills, in the years<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>around 1600-1602, between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Julius
Caesar</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on one side, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Othello</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lear</i> on the
other. The flip side of the creative process is revealed by analyzing why a
writer who clearly has the technical skills also sometimes produces failures. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Is it
just that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus</i> is a deliberately
anti-heroic play? Recent critics hold that it was written to satirize wars,
warriors, and the heroic conventions generally. But in Shakespeare’s retelling
of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i>, it is only the Greek
heroes Achilles and Ajax who are portrayed as buffoons. Hector, the Trojan
champion, is presented as a courtly knight; and Troilus the Trojan prince as a
youth who grows up to become the conventional warrior hero.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
weakness of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus</i> is in the
under-development of the Troilus-and-Cressida love story. They rarely show much
of the psychological depth that makes <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i>
and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>famous (there is only one flash of introspection, in Act V
scene 2, Troilus’s outburst after he overhears Cressida jilt him).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Obviously Shakespeare knew how to portray
inner conflict; he just didn’t provide it for these characters. The real
problem is in how the plot lines are structured, that makes the
Troilus-and-Cressida love story (the lovers are are separated because she is
traded to the Greeks in a prisoner swap) a minor, mechanical feature of the
play. Shakespeare follows his usual device of alternating sub-plots, but the
time devoted to each is disproportionate, and the T-and-C plot virtually
disappears for long stretches of the play, depriving the action of plot tension.
Where <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Romeo and Juliet</i>-- which <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus</i> superficially resembles-- moves
along at breakneck speed, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus and
Cressida</i> is slow all the way through. In Shakespeare’s most powerful plays,
the subplots merge and culminate in a tremendous climax; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus</i> they never connect. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
does not fail for lack of skill. His verse writing is still at its peak; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus</i> just has unusually long
stretches of prose, obviously meant to be deflating and humorous. If the
problem is structural, this can be understood from how Shakespeare worked. His
method of creativity also reveals why sometimes the result was not a success.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The key
to Shakespeare’s technique was to search out promising plots and characters,
and transform them into something new and distinctive. In the case of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus</i>, he takes for his sources the
two most famous narrative poets among his predecessors: Homer and Chaucer. By
1600, Shakespeare is certainly aware that he is being regarded as the modern
rival to the greatest of all time. So how is he going to rewrite the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i>, the most famous piece of world
literature? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Troilus</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">, in fact, does present the
entire plot of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i>, from
Achilles’ quarrel with Agamemnon, to the death of Patrocles and Achilles’
revenge on Hector. But Shakespeare was not merely going to imitate Homer.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>True, Shakespeare sometimes closely
followed his sources. He repeated the main incidents from Plutarch’s history in
writing<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Julius Caesar</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Antony and
Cleopatra</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Plutarch did
not write poetry, nor provide hardly any dialogue, whereas these are Homer’s
celebrated accomplishments. Thus the most famous lines in Caesar’s
assassination—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Et tu, Bruté!”</i> and
Antony’s funeral address-- are Shakespeare’s invention. But for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i>, Shakespeare had to avoid using
Homer’s words. He solves this by changing the main characters, his usual device
of reversal and recombination.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So
Shakespeare takes Homer’s central character, Achilles, and changes him from a
proud, lofty figure into a buffoon, devoted to pleasure and clowning
around.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Homer’s Achilles is the
epitome of the tragic hero, noble in his fatal flaw of dignity and pride.
Shakespeare’s Achilles does not withdraw from combat because he has been
insulted by Agamemnon, but because he is frivolous and cowardly. Shakespeare
brings him down even further by pairing him with another Homeric champion,
Ajax, who is even stupider and also lazes around without fighting. So
Shakespeare invents the plot line that Agamemnon, Ulysses and the other Greek
leaders strategize how to get their two missing heroes back into action by
arranging a duel with Hector, trying to build up jealousy between them.
Shakespeare’s Achilles, far from being self-contained and brooding, is
hyper-sensitive to what other people think of him; he wants to be noticed and is
shamed when the Greek leaders casually pass him by in a deliberately off-hand
manner. (Oh hi, Achilles, didn’t see you there. No time to chat.) By the time
the plot action gets going in Act IV, Achilles has forgotten his feud with
Agamemnon and is hanging around with the other Greeks, meeting Hector and other
Trojans for courtly visits and hosting dinner parties. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
result is a long, rather boring plot line of the Greek leaders scheming, making
dinner invitations, and engaging in knightly protocol with the Trojans. The
ferocious berserker warriors depicted by Homer are transformed into very
conventional courtly knights, who exchange compliments and fight duels, not to
the death but just as a form of jousting. None of this generates any plot
tension, but it takes up most of the action on stage. Finally, Homer’s plot
comes back in a flurry at the end of Act V (taking up 175 lines of this
3500-line play-- about 5% of the whole): battle scenes in which Patroclus is
killed, Achilles fights Hector, and finally Hector is killed. Shakespeare
leaves out the emotional climax of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i>,
when Achilles in his anger desecrates Hector’s corpse by refusing to give it
back to his family for burial; and King Priam comes to beg for it, finally
bringing Achilles to the realization of what it is to be truly noble. Instead,
Shakespeare has Achilles fail to defeat Hector in single combat, so instead
Achilles gets his troops to surround and kill him after the end of battle when
Hector has taken off his own armor. So Achilles takes false credit for his
victory, and is just a slob all the way to the end.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Yes,
it’s really different than Homer, but it isn’t dramatic, interesting, or even
memorable. As an effort to rewrite the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i>,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it is a failure. Could the play be
saved by the other plot line?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
decided to frame or decenter the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i>
story by combining it with the plot line from Chaucer’s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus
and Cressida</i>. This was Chaucer’s most accomplished narrative poem, but its
weakness, for a stage play, gives Shakespeare the opportunity to lift its
characters and action straightforwardly.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Chaucer’s poem does not have much action or plot tension. Cressida
learns she is going to be sent away in a prisoner exchange; Troilus suggests
they elope but she points out it wouldn’t be very practical during a war.
Instead Cressida promises to deceive her father once she has arrived in the
Greek camp, and to escape back to Troy. But once there, she realizes her plan
was unrealistic, and accepts a Greek hero as a lover. Troilus gets the message
and that’s it, ends cursing his ill Fortune. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
fleshes out this meager plot line by elaborating the characters. Pandarus the
go-between is turned into an obscene comic character, who tends to overshadow
the lovers, and makes the word “pandering” the most famous thing to come out of
this play. Cressida, who is a rather practical person in Chaucer and his
earlier source, Boccaccio, acts quite differently in the few scenes Shakespeare
gives her. When first introduced in Act I, Cressida talks in bawdy innuendo (as
if this is the low-life subplot); later, when the lovers finally come together
in a night scene (Act III), she sounds like Juliet; but in Act IV and V, in the
Greek camp, she flirts and exchanges kisses with everyone, and plays both coy
and romantic with her Greek lover. It is unclear what character Shakespeare
intended her to be. She is intermittently the bawdiest of Shakespeare’s
heroines, a combination of Juliet and her nurse; she changes suddenly and with
no apparent motivation between adjacent appearances. Perhaps Shakespeare
decided to script her for light comedy, which implies that for him the
Troilus-and-Cressida plot was just comic relief from the Iliad plot. The
trouble is both plot lines end up feeling like subplots for the other. Neither
has any dramatic momentum; and although some of the scenes come off, the whole
falls flat. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So how
could Shakespeare, at the top of his game, write a bad play? By tinkering with
a masterpiece fully as strong as his own best creations. He could make the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Iliad</i> different, but he couldn’t make it
better. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus</i> is billed as a
tragedy, but it plays like a comedy, except it isn't funny. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the medium of the stage play, where pacing
all-important, messing around with the dramatic elements is fatal. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><i>Troilus and Cressida</i> was rarely performed, during Shakespeare's lifetime or later. It is among the few Shakespeare plays never filmed. Given the ambitious project, it was Shakespeare's biggest flop.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">II.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Networks that Launched Shakespeare</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How Shakespeare became a great
poet</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare’s
creativity as a poet was a big part of his success as a playwright, since his
network wrote plays in verse. Shakespeare not only wrote the best plays but the
best poetry; and the power of his dramatic scenes, especially the great
soliloquies, hinge on their poetry. If he is already a leading dramatist at the
time of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Richard III</i>-- in the
early/mid 1590s--- and soon after in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Romeo
and Juliet</i>, he has his poetic technique fully worked out. He could go it
alone as a poet, as he did during 1593-4 when the theatres were closed, when he
wrote his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonnets</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Venus and Adonis</i>. The two kinds of
techniques may have come at the same time, although they are not the same;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare kept on innovating as a
playwright while his poetic style had already hit its high plateau.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare’s
skill as a poet came fairly early. How did he get it? As an actor in the first
years of his career, Shakespeare must have memorized a great deal of verse. He
could probably think in verse, talk to himself in verse. After a while he would
get to the point of being able to say anything extemporaneously in the verse
rhythms used in plays. Shakespeare acquired great facility with the poetic style
of his contemporaries in the same way as the 20th century song-writer, Irving
Berlin—as a street performer and singing waiter from age 13 to 23, he knew all
the popular songs by repetition before writing his first hit song.*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>For both Shakespeare and Berlin,
their early careers involved the most intimate process of internalizing what
the rest of the field did, by performing it constantly.**</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* Berlin
started even younger, as a newspaper hawker shouting out catchy headlines. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And a new medium was opening up: phonographs
that could play a 4-minute song were just appearing at the time of young
Irving’s street-apprenticeship, 1901-13. Once launched in the new song
recording business, he went on to compose 1200 songs, of which several dozen
were hits. He could literally write a song overnight by staying up and grinding it out.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">** A
similar process is shown in Jooyoung Lee’s ethnography of rappers improvising
in street-corner competitions in Los Angeles. Some aspiring rap artists
practice in their daily lives by trying to say everything in rhyme.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So our
first answer is that Shakespeare acquires great facility with the poetic style
of his contemporaries. How does he go beyond them? Which means: when? by what
steps?<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;">
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<span style="color: black; font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare's
life is undocumented from 1585, when he was 21 and still in Stratford-on-Avon,
until 1592 when his success in London theatre was noted. He did not necessarily
start his acting career in London. There were wandering troupes of players
performing at country houses-- in fact these preceded the rise of public
theatre in London in the 1580s. Near Stratford, there had been performances in
1575 at Kenilworth Castle, when Queen Elizabeth visited her current favorite,
the handsome Earl of Leicester. There were days and nights of outdoor pageantry,
the gardens full of costumes, mime and song, and reciting of poetic verses. The
eleven-year-old Shakespeare could well have been among the gathering of local
onlookers with his father. (Quennell 23-5) Traveling players are featured in Shakespeare's
early play, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Taming of the Shrew,</i>
which is depicted as a play-within-a-play performed at a country house near
Warwick-- a few miles from Stratford. And of course the traveling players in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet.</i> Since such players focused on
country houses, joining such a band (perhaps temporarily at first) would have
been simultaneously a way to learn the actor's craft and to meet aristocratic
patrons. </span>
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare’s
poetry resembles his predecessors’.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Sir Philip Sidney, around 1580, turned traditional slow-moving six-beat
verse into iambic pentameter, popularizing the sonnet, and opening the way for
the ringing five-beat line of Marlowe’s plays. Shakespeare knows the new poetry
intimately, both through his network contacts and by memorizing and performing
this kind of verse. His greatest poetry is in his plays because the new kinds
of characters and situations he developed gave his poetic technique more subtle
and dramatic materials to put into spoken lines. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare’s
aristocratic patrons formed his poetry. His Stratford neighbour, Fulke
Greville, himself a well-known poet, was a friend of Sir Philip Sidney, the
poetic innovator who popularized the sonnet sequence. Sidney died young, and
his poems circulated by hand; at the center of the circle was his former
mistress, the beautiful sister of the Earl of Essex, a patroness of literary
men. Another of Essex’s friends was Shakespeare’s patron, the Earl of Southampton,
the object of Shakespeare’s own sonnet sequence. Shakespeare’s Sonnets,
patterned on Sidney’s, circulated in the elite literary network even more
effectively than by publication, which did not occur until 1609.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the network of patrons and poets
(below) we see that Shakespeare was two links away from Sidney, via two
different connections, and would have heard a great deal about him and probably
seen his not-yet-printed poems.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyFL2kT0eNccjkFJVV68UZgA4dAXUrlhyphenhyphenbqow2JCBqMCNhbpdGW5J3uVK1fVtNBegUAc4gFAfMo44hj0tFO7-g3OJmY8IgRBETq7Lf_c0B19GGY1xbU3HR0v0613Gua0Cd-vrH8eEmgz8/s1600/Shakes-net1z-poets%252Cpatrons-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="278" data-original-width="488" height="182" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgyFL2kT0eNccjkFJVV68UZgA4dAXUrlhyphenhyphenbqow2JCBqMCNhbpdGW5J3uVK1fVtNBegUAc4gFAfMo44hj0tFO7-g3OJmY8IgRBETq7Lf_c0B19GGY1xbU3HR0v0613Gua0Cd-vrH8eEmgz8/s320/Shakes-net1z-poets%252Cpatrons-.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare’s
network: aristocratic patrons and poets</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">During
the 1593-4 season when the theatres were closed, Shakespeare likely visited
country houses of his patrons and their friends, where he was inducted into the
network circulating handwritten poems. This was a medium of “publication” used
by all the famous English poets from Sir Thomas Wyatt in the 1520s through John
Donne in the early 1600s. The network would have been both informative and
motivating, with gentlemen-courtiers acquiring reputations as wits, and pushing
the boundaries of witticisms through new devices. The entire network hit its
peak density in the 1590s, when a considerable number of top poets (as judged by posterity)
were writing.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the time of Donne
the march of verbal cleverness had generated complex poems even beyond
Shakespeare’s. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The actor/playwright network</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare
acquired his skills from two networks: his aristocratic poetry-loving patrons;
and his fellow actors,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>playwrights, and business associates. Edward Alleyn played the
flamboyant, over-the-top roles that made Elizabethan theatre a sensation from
1587 on: Thomas Kyd’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Spanish Tragedy</i>,
and Marlowe’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tamburlaine</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dr. Faustus</i>, and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Jew of Malta</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Before Shakespeare rose to prominence, there was already a
playwright-actor nexus, each feeding on the other in building the new style.
Alleyn, along with Shakespeare’s fellow-actor in the great tragic parts,
Richard Burbage, were theatrical entrepreneurs. Failing in negotiations to
unite the two leading companies (the Lord Admiral’s Men, the Lord Chamberlain’s
Men), they formed rival companies, with Shakespeare as a principal share-holder
of the latter. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marlowe and Kyd
(who at one time were roommates) both wrote for an earlier troupe, Lord
Strange’s men; and Shakespeare’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titus
Andronicus</i> were performed under Strange’s patronage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The most famous comic actor, William
Kempe, was both in Strange’s company and Shakespeare’s, contributing to his
string of successful comedies, and vice versa. The networks of actors and
playwrights intertwine; Shakespeare’s company performed both his own plays and
those of others, launching the early successes of Ben Jonson in the late 1590s.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ7LJLLKG-48GPrAr5wIpMtX4O_woIu1sccMXB4HIvUwzg6N0dDvsHVrAWHDks7qofB6CbFQjU-xYpBHLYSBdfxWAm1RRBzyXNc7njlJGRFq1WR2T-z73Q0RlqE1axpJwTr3B_VcO5N0c/s1600/Shakes-net-actors-4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="416" data-original-width="526" height="253" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiJ7LJLLKG-48GPrAr5wIpMtX4O_woIu1sccMXB4HIvUwzg6N0dDvsHVrAWHDks7qofB6CbFQjU-xYpBHLYSBdfxWAm1RRBzyXNc7njlJGRFq1WR2T-z73Q0RlqE1axpJwTr3B_VcO5N0c/s320/Shakes-net-actors-4.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare’s
network: actors and playwrights</span></div>
</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As we
see in the network of actors and playwrights, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare had a 2-link tie to Marlowe through several
intermediaries, and collaborated with Kyd in the early 1590s on minor plays,*
and with several writers on the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry VI</i>
series, before striking off on his own.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
Besides <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edward III,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>co-written by Kyd with Shakespeare,
many scholars believe Kyd wrote an early <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King
Leir</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These essentially followed the older sources, and lacked
Shakespeare’s innovations in character and subplot. But our concern is not to
establish priority. If these attributions are true, Shakespeare’s connection to
the literary network via Kyd gave him even more impetus towards his greatest plays.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Burbage
played the titles roles in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hieronimo</i>
(another name for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Spanish Tragedy</i>,
revived several times in the 1590s), as well as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Richard III, Hamlet, Othello,</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lear.</i> Shakespeare probably chose plots and created roles to feature
Burbage, just as he did for Kempe, the star attractions of their theatre
company. This is not just an incidental fact;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>actors were the carriers and inheritors of techniques from
earlier pioneers like Kyd and Marlowe. In the same way, Shakespeare’s younger
fellow-actors learned by acting in his plays, before striking off on their own.
Ben Jonson was an actor for several years (reputedly also playing Hieronimo)
before he began writing his distinctive contemporary comedies based on his
theory of humours; Shakespeare acted in one of them in 1598. The network
continued to propagate itself.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shakespeare’s
role-models died as he was acquiring his own techniques: Sidney in 1586,
Marlowe in 1593, Kyd in 1594, leaving a vacuum to step into. The network,
passing along its techniques to those best energized to develop them, is truly
the actor on the literary stage. My title should be: How Shakespeare’s network,
internalized in Shakespeare, created Shakespeare.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Loose
ends: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I have
not addressed the creative innovations of Shakespeare’s comedies. This will be
the subject of a further post.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Chronology of Shakespeare’s and
contemporaries’ plays </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">c.1587<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thomas Kyd, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Spanish Tragedie</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(most popular play of Elizabethan era; frequently revived)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1587<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marlowe, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tamburlaine, part 1</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1588<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marlowe, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tamburlaine, part 2</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">c.1588<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marlowe, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">c.1590<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marlowe, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Jew of Malta</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1588-94<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Comedy of Errors</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1589-94<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Two
Gentlemen of Verona</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1589-94<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Titus
Andronicus</i> (probably with collaborator)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1589-92<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry
VI, parts 1, 2, and 3</i> (multiple collaborators)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1592<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Marlowe, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edward II</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1592-3<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Edward III</i> (majority of text by Kyd)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1592-3<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Richard III</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1593-4<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Taming of the Shrew</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1593-6<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Love’s Labour’s Lost</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1593-4:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>London theatres closed for months during
plague</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare composed and
circulated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Venus and Adonis</i> (1592-3),
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Rape of Lucrece </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1593-4), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonnets</i>
(1593-1600)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1594<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lord Chamberlain’s Men, theatrical
company formed with Shakespeare as share-holder, along with actors formerly
performing Kyd and Marlowe plays</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1594-6<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Romeo and Juliet</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1594-7<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Merchant of Venice</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1595<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Richard II</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1595-6<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Midsummer Night’s Dream</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1596-7<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King John</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1596-7<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry IV, part 1</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1597<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Merry Wives of Windsor</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1597-8<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry IV, part 2</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1598-99 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry V</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1598-99 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Much Ado About Nothing</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1598<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Shakespeare
acts in Ben Jonson’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Every Man in his
Humour</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1599<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Julius Caesar</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1599-1600<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">As
You Like It</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1599-1600<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Twelfth
Night</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1600-1<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1600-2<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus
and Cressid</i>a</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1602-5<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">All’s
Well That Ends Well</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1603-4<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Othello</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1603-4<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Measure
for Measure</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1605-6<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King
Lear</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1605-6<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1606-7<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Antony
and Cleopatra</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1606<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ben Jonson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Volpone</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1606<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thomas Middleton, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Revenger’s Tragedy</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1605-8<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Timon
of Athens</i> (possible collaboration with Middleton)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1607-8<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coriolanus</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1607-8<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pericles,
Prince of Tyre</i> (partly by Shakespeare)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1609-10<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cymbeline</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1609-11<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Winter’s Tale</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1611<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tempest</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1612-13<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry
VIII</i> (with collaborator)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1612-13<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cardenio</i>
(Fletcher and Shakespeare; lost play based on a chapter in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Don Quixote</i>) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">1613<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Two Noble Kinsmen</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Fletcher and Shakespeare)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">References</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Randall
Collins. 1998. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sociology of
Philosophies</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">William
Marling. 2016. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gatekeepers: The Emergence
of World Literature and the 1960s.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Peter
Quennell. 1963. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shakespeare: A Biography</i>.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Alan
Posener. 2001.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">William Shakespeare</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">William
Farnham. 1970. “Introduction” to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Kenneth
Muir. 1984. “Introduction” to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Macbeth.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen
Orgel. 1999. “Introduction” to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">King Lear.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Barbara
Mowat and Paul Werstine (eds.) 2007. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Troilus
and Cressida.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Charles
Nicholl. 1992. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Reckoning: The Murder
of Christopher Marlowe</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Susan
Doran. 2008. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tudor Chronicles,
1485-1603.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lawrence
Stone. 1967.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Jooyoung
Lee. 2016. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blowin’ Up: Rap Dreams in
South Central.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Wikipedia
articles on particular plays and sources.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-64011440871505029752017-03-20T12:37:00.001-07:002017-03-23T07:02:02.238-07:00SEQUELS AND FAILURES OF FANTASY CLASSICS: from ALICE to OZ to YELLOW SUBMARINE to MIYAZAKI<style>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Classic
fantasy is a cross-over: children’s literature for adults too. Star examples of
the category are the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice in Wonderland</i>
books (1865 and 1871), the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wizard of Oz</i>
books (1900-20), the films made of both (1939, 1951), the cartoon films <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow Submarine</i> (1968) and Miyazaki’s
masterpiece, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spirited<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Away</i> (2001).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All are parts of an ongoing sequence,
which is how classic fantasy gets created. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How did
Lewis Carroll go about writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Through
the Looking Glass</i>, after writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland</i> ?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By
transforming the earlier book into the later. The materials that made up <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice</i> get used again, with different
variants and characters. The first book’s plot action -- to the extent that it
has a continuous plot-- is driven by playing cards come to life; the second
book makes each chapter a move in a giant chess-game. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonderland</i>, Alice grows larger and smaller; in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Looking Glass,</i> Alice experiences reversals in space and time; for
instance, since she is in a mirror universe, she can never get somewhere by
walking straight toward it, but must go in the opposite direction. Other
elements, such as Alice’s frustrating conversations with the fantastic characters
she meets, continue through both books. The later text is made by reversing and
recombining devices from the earlier text.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">All
books are sequels to something. An author can write another book;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>new books can be created by new authors
using previous authors’ devices. I will proceed on the plan that there is no
real difference in the methods of creative recombination used when an author
creates a sequel to a successful book, or when an author creates a successful
sequel to someone else’s books. There must be millions of readers who started
out to imitate a classic book; but we don’t know much about the failures
outside the few that succeeded. In self-sequels, we have the advantage that a
famous author will have followers who dig up their lesser and failed works as
well. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Why care
about minor failures when we can focus on the great works? Because both were
produced by a similar creative process. Comparisons illuminate causes. We can
trace how Lewis Carroll wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice in
Wonderland</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but also <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno</i> ; and why L. Frank Baum
was a long-term success at Oz books, not at Oz films, nor his other fantasy
books. We hold constant the author and social setting, and isolate the
technique of making a success in the fantasy classic niche.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Generic features</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The classic
crossover fantasy genre uses these devices:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">An alternative universe</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> or magic garden, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">entered by a portal</i> from the ordinary
world. Alice goes down a rabbit hole or through the mirror over the
mantlepiece; Dorothy’s house is carried away in a tornado; the Beatles are
picked up from Liverpool in a yellow submarine; Miyazaki’s child-heroine goes
through a tunnel into an abandoned theme park. The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chronicles of Narnia</i> start when a child pushes through the clothes
at the back of the closet.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
magic portal is a modern device; traditional fairy tales just start in the
enchanted world, and their protagonists live there happily ever after instead
of returning to an ordinary home. In the era of religion when magical ritual
was practiced daily, there was no banal ordinary world from which to leave.
Banality came with the disenchantment of the world by commerce and bureaucracy
that defines modernity. It also created a platform for portals to an
alternative universe.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A naive child protagonist</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">, especially a little girl. This
sets up the possibility of cross-over effects, where the mature reader can see
things in the text that the protagonist does not understand. The writer can
play around with spacey philosophical concepts, like time speeding up or going
backwards<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Quasi-meaningful humorous
nonsense</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lewis Carroll likes to use verbal<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>misunderstandings, nonsense words or
verse. Films can do nonsense in images, like direction signs pointing every way
at once (used in both the 1951 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow Submarine</i>). </span></div>
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvLWJrmYbVJMNr-hVy5ywt-Qyd7lXLBdTniUHmBr-gL2FVVZRhPmHlfUlGOP46bKy6z2mf6jXC1waJ2BsGwnxnOIUGgSxT0a0t9KF9S_G_wKbDmtU56MXZ1TKFE187u2_MNG7mopkBtkc/s1600/02-Alice-signs.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="309" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjvLWJrmYbVJMNr-hVy5ywt-Qyd7lXLBdTniUHmBr-gL2FVVZRhPmHlfUlGOP46bKy6z2mf6jXC1waJ2BsGwnxnOIUGgSxT0a0t9KF9S_G_wKbDmtU56MXZ1TKFE187u2_MNG7mopkBtkc/s320/02-Alice-signs.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A picaresque plot line</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">: a series of discrete adventures
strung together by the protagonist on a journey. Picaresque is a very old plot
form, going back to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Odyssey</i> and
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Voyage of the Argonauts</i>. It is
convenient for packaging a collection of older myths and characters. The
picaresque structure of classic fantasy makes the genre especially inviting to
repackaging earlier classics-- a central method by which each new version is
created. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Other
major literary forms are not picaresque: tragedies are a compact web of
characters tied by strong emotions-- just the opposite of the light and
carefree tone of children’s classics.* Situation comedies, too, tend to be in
the real world and play on a repeatedly interacting web of characters.
Picaresque is especially suited for fantasy; introducing more complex character
interaction into it is usually a way to make it fail-- as we shall see from
Lewis Carroll’s failed efforts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* A
naive child protagonist also rules out sex in the plot. There is a slight love-interest
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spirited Away,</i> between the heroine
and her boy-ally (who is also a dragon, thereby cutting out erotic
possibilities, unless you wanted to get really kinky). This isn’t bowdlerizing,
but the ingredients of the genre. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow
Submarine,</i> all the named characters are male; John’s erotic fantasy “Lucy
in the Sky with Diamonds” is very tame and subject to other interpretations. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spirited Away</i> is set in a pre-modern
bathhouse; this is modeled on the luxury brothels of the Yoshiwara district of
pre-modern Edo, but there is no hint of prostitution in the film version.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If you
lived in 1860, or 1900, or 1965, or 2000+, how would you create a new fantasy
classic? By following these generic techniques, adding new materials, and
recombining.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Upstream from Lewis Carroll</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How did
Charles Dodgson, Oxford mathematics lecturer, create the first <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>book? By telling a story to three little girls rowing a boat
through the neighbouring countryside. The story must have begun by imagining a
rabbit in the nearby meadow, dressed like a human, holding a watch and
disappearing into a rabbit-hole that turns into a deep well, with more
adventures at the bottom. It took Dodgson almost two-and-a-half years to
complete the book, adding episodes later on like the Cheshire Cat and the Mad
Tea Party. Presumably he expanded the dialogue, with its double-leveled
nonsensical repartee, and wrote verses that parody older children’s rhymes. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Like
most successful creators, he was already in a network of important people: the
Pre-Raphaelite painters; high-society persons who provided unwitting material
and spread his reputation; a writer of children’s fairy-tales who acted as a
sounding board; links to a prestigious publisher. *<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Looking for an illustrator, he enlisted John Tenniel, the
political cartoonist for <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Punch, </i>England’s
leading satirical magazine -- guaranteeing an adult cross-over.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland</i> was no casual production, but heavily worked-over.
</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* C.S.
Lewis, who wrote the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Narnia</i> series
(1950-56), and his friend J.R. Tolkien, who wrote <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Hobbit </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Lord of the Rings</i> series (1937,
1954-5) were, like Dodgson, Oxford Fellows. Cross-over fantasy became something
of a local specialty in this network.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What was
the literary upstream that Dodgson/Carroll could draw upon in 1862-4?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Most
immediately, Edward Lear, whose <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Book of
Nonsense</i> came out in 1846, when Dodgson was 14 years old. The book was very
popular, a break-out book for the genre. It contained the kind of materials
that young Dodgson would use in family entertainments, and in poems he
published in magazines for children in the 1850s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The 1840s<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>were
the decade literary nonsense took off in Europe, especially in Germany,
considered<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>at the time the center
of avant-garde intellectual life. In 1844 Heinrich Heine, Germany’s most
popular poet, published “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Symbolik des
Unsinns”</i> --<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“symbolism of
non-sense”. In 1848, Ludwig Eichrodt set off a wave of humorous
cartoon-illustrated poem sequences; followed in 1865 by Wilhelm Busch, an
artist-turned-cartoonist who wrote the wildly popular bad-boy poem-stories <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Max und Moritz.</i> German philosophy,
science and literature were very much in the English eye, and not only because
Queen Victoria had married a German prince. The middle-class publishing market
was exploding as schooling expanded; children’s literature became
simultaneously more child-centered rather than a vehicle for adult moralizing,
and more sophisticated, with an ironic tone that appealed also to adults. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This
ironic-reflexive turn built on the older generation of children’s poems, which
it recycled through parodies, generally much more palatable and amusing than
the originals. Lewis Carroll’s technique, in each chapter where Alice meets an
odd character, is to have someone recite a poem, which invariably would be
familiar verse turned on its head. Carroll mainly does this in chapters where
not much physical action is happening<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>(like falling down the rabbit hole or playing croquet); his standard
method in the static chapters is conversation at cross-purposes, plus reciting
poems. This replicated a popular domestic entertainment in Victorian
households, in an era before recordings or electronic media of any kind, when
children of Alice’s age were trained to memorize verses for such occasions.
Carroll simultaneously makes fun of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>polite manners (literally making it more fun), and of the contents of
older children’s literature.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Thus the
caterpillar makes Alice recite “Old Father William” (a poem by Robert Southey
originally published in an Evangelical Christian magazine, and full of pious
platitudes); Alice’s version comes out garbled, replacing the adult voice with
what henceforth could be called “childishness.” The larger movement shared by
Edward Lear, Wilhelm Busch, and Lewis Carroll, is part of the modern invention
of childhood. *</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes </i>were first
published in the 1780s. Many of them originated as satirical political poems
for adults, before being transformed into purely children's entertainment.
Humpty Dumpty, for instance, refers to a battle in the War of the Roses. These
rhymes became part of Carroll’s upstream poetic capital.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The next
chapter, a visit to a kitchen where a Duchess is sneezing and nursing a baby,
features a lullaby that involves shaking the baby rather than soothing it:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Speak roughly to your little boy,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
beat him when he sneezes:</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He only does it to annoy,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Because
he knows it teases.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The baby
howls and the adults join in the chorus:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wow! Wow! Wow!</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
satire (of a poem called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Speak gently to
your little boy”</i>) is certainly on the adults here, although the edge is
taken off when the baby is transformed into a little pig that wanders away. The
Duchess is the first really negative character in the book; she reappears
later, both in person and as the prototype of the Queen of Hearts. This is the
formula for the genre: the villains are (more or less human) adults, the
protagonists children, their helpers transformed animals or magical creatures,
plus silly quasi-adults.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How semi-meaningful nonsense
poems are constructed</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">These
examples are made nonsensical by changing some words into their opposites. A
more advanced form of nonsense is “Jabberwocky,” which Carroll introduces at
the end of the first chapter of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Through
the Looking Glass.</i> Alice has found a book which she can’t read, until she
holds it up to the mirror so the direction of the letters is reversed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Twas brillig, and the slithy
toves</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Did
gyre and gimble in the wabe:</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">All mimsy were the borogoves,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
the mome raths outgrabe.</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How does
one create successful nonsense, that is, nonsense that is enjoyable? By partial
transformation, making it semi-meaningful.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The first stanza, without the strange words, would read:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Twas </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[adverb]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, and the </i>[adjective]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>[plural
noun]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Did
</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[verb]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> and </i>[verb]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in the </i>[noun]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> :</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">All </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[adjective]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> were the </i>[plural noun]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">,</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
the </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[adjective]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>[plural noun] [verb]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The poem
is obviously English, with conventional grammar; even the nonsense words follow
standard forms for plurals, for instance. And the elements of the nonsense words
are English syllables-- not Japanese or some other language-- so that the
reader can call up word associations for something like “mimsy.” The poem is
further structured by its lively four-beat rhythm and its easy rhyme scheme,
which the nonsense words strictly follow. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Half the
words in the first stanza are nonsense, but it gets easier in the other
stanzas. The next stanza, for instance, </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Beware the Jabberwock, my son!</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
jaws that bite, the claws that catch!</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
frumious Bandersnatch!</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- has
only four nonsense words, and three of them are obviously names of fantasy
animals (supported by the accompanying drawing). The fourth, “frumious” is
anybody’s guess, but on the whole the rest of the poem is easy to follow, mostly
English with a smattering of nonsense words to give a whimsical tone to a
rather conventional dragon-slaying story.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A
nonsense poem is not something to decipher. It has no intended meaning. The
author’s intentional work of constructing it is to make just these kind of
substitutions in an otherwise strict poetic frame. Much of its appeal is its
word-music. Compare a straight version, Shelley’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To Night:</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Swiftly walk over the western
wave,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Spirit
of Night!</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Our of the misty eastern cave</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Where all the long and lone
daylight</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Thou wovest dreams of joy and
fear</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">That make thee terrible and dear</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Swift
be thy flight!</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shelley
makes more sense than Jabberwocky, but it is mostly mood, blended with the
word-music. The all-out nonsense poem creates its pleasure out of silly
distortions that fit the word-music anyhow.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nonsense
literature depends on using strict forms into which on-the-edge-of-meaning
nonsense can be inserted. This implies it is easier to write successful
nonsense poems by altering very formal verse than it would be in loose
modernist poetry. Would a nonsense version of T.S. Eliot’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wasteland</i> be appealing to anyone? At most, to a very esoteric
audience of specialists. Joyce’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Finnegan’s
Wake</i>, downstream in this technical tradition, tends to prove the point.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Creating episodes</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Carroll
creates one episode after another using the same formula. Alice encounters an
odd character-- a mouse her own size, a caterpillar smoking a hookah, a frog
dressed as a footman, a cat that floats in the air, a duchess, a pack of live
playing cards; in the sequel, flowers that talk, nursery rhyme characters like
Tweedledum and Tweedledee or Humpty Dumpty, chess pieces come alive. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">They
converse at cross-purposes. Alice always tries to be polite and mind her
manners as she has been taught, but it never goes well. To the Mouse she tries
to make conversation about her pet cat and gets an outraged response. The
Caterpillar answers all her efforts abruptly: “I don’t see.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“It isn’t.” “Who are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i>?” When Alice tries to explain, “one
doesn’t like changing so often, you know.” The caterpillar responds “I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">don’t</i> know.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Figures of speech are taken literally. When Alice tries to
get the attention of the frog footman with “How am I to get in?” he answers, “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Are</i> you to get in at all? That’s the
first question, you know.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“It
was, no doubt: only Alice did not like to be told so. ‘It’s really dreadful,’
she muttered to herself, ‘the way all these creatures argue. It’s enough to
drive one crazy!’ </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
footman goes on: "‘I shall sit here, on and off, for days and
days.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘But what am <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I</i> to do?”’ said Alice.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Anything you like,’ said the footman.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Oh, there’s no use talking to him,’ said Alice desperately: ‘he’s perfectly
idiotic!’ And she opened the door and went in.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And so
it goes. Alice keeps on trying to be polite, gets snappish replies, and loses
her temper a bit. The Mad Tea Party ends:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Really, now you ask me,” said Alice, very much confused, ‘I don’t think---’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Then you shouldn’t talk,’ said the Hatter.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“This
piece of rudeness was more than Alice could bear: she got up in great disgust,
and walked off.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It gets
worse. She meets the Queen of Hearts, with her constant refrain “Off with their
heads!” In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Through the Looking Glass</i>,
Alice starts off in a beautiful flower garden, where the flowers criticize her
manners and appearance. Finally Alice says, “If you don’t hold your tongues,
I’ll pick you!” Tweedledee and Tweedledum answer most of her efforts with
“Nohow!” and “Contrariwise.” Humpty Dumpty contradicts whatever she says.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Don’t stand chattering to yourself like that,” Humpty Dumpty said, ‘but tell
me your name and your business.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘My <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">name</i> is Alice, but---”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘It’s a stupid name enough!’ Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. ‘What does
it mean?’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Must</i> a name mean something?’ Alice
asked doubtfully.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Of course it must,’ Humpty Dumpty said.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">At the
end of the chess game, when Alice reaches the last square and is promoted to
Queen, the plot tension of the story is over. Carroll winds up with a final
episode: the White Queen and the Red Queen refuse to recognize her as another
Queen (“ ‘Speak when you’re spoken to!’ the Red Queen interrupted her.”) until
she has passed “the proper examination.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>This becomes a parody of school quiz: “ ‘Can you do division? Divide a
loaf with a knife-- what’s the answer to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">that</i>?’
” Alice gets everything wrong. When the chess Queens invite each other to a
dinner-party Alice is giving, Alice objects that she should be the one doing
the inviting, and the Red Queen replies “ ‘I daresay you’ve not had many
lessons in manners yet!’ ”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She
finds a door marked “Queen Alice,” but the frog footman (reprising the earlier
version) is very unhelpful: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘To answer the door?’ he said. “What’s it been asking you?’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ she said.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘I speaks English, doesn’t I?’ the Frog went on. ‘Or are you deaf? What did it
ask you?’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Nothing!” Alice said impatiently. ‘I’ve been knocking at it!’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Shouldn’t do that--’ the Frog muttered. ‘Wexes it, you know.’ Then he went up
and gave the door a kick with one of his great feet. ‘You let <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it</i> alone,” he panted out, ‘and it’ll let
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i> alone, you know.’ ”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
dinner party is a grand ensemble of animals, birds and flowers. The two Queens
flank Alice at the table and shout orders.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘You look a little shy: let me introduce you to that leg of mutton,’ said the
Red Queen. ‘Alice---Mutton: Mutton---Alice.’ The leg of mutton got up in the
dish and made a little bow to Alice.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘May I give you a slice?’ she said, taking up the knife and fork.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Certainly not,’ the Red Queen said very decidedly: ‘it isn’t etiquette to cut
any one you’ve been introduced to. Remove the joint!’ And the waiters carried
if off.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Alice is
hungry and defies the Red Queen by cutting a slice of the pudding. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘What impertinence!” said the Pudding. ‘I wonder how you’d like it, if I were
to cut a slice out of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i> , you
creature!’ *</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘Make a remark,’ said the Red Queen: ‘it’s ridiculous to leave all the
conversation to the pudding!’ ”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* This
is repeated in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wizard of Oz,</i> when a
tree resists having its apples picked, retorting, “How would you like it if
someone pulled something off you?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
dinner turns into a version of the Mad Tea Party, with the guests lying on the
table and the food and dishes walking around. So Alice ends the story just as
she does at the end of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonderland,</i>
standing up and shaking everything off, and then waking up.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Each
episode combines conversational etiquette that fails through the interlocutors’
rudeness, wordplay, deliberate misunderstandings of figurative expressions and
multiple meanings. This would likely become annoying to the reader except that
Carroll lightens it with parodies and puzzles. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Here the
deeper level of these books comes in. For instance, midway through <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Looking Glass, </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Alice goes into a shady woods where
nothing has a name. She can’t think of her own name, except<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“ ‘L, I <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">know</i> it begins with L!’ ” She meets a Fawn but it can’t tell her
what it is called either: “ ‘I’ll tell you, if you come a little further on,’
the Fawn said. ‘I can’t remember <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">here</i>.’
” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dodgson/Carroll,
the Oxford logician, creates his most memorable lines for adult readers in this
way. Humpty Dumpty: “ ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to
mean-- neither more nor less.’ ‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can
make words mean so many different things.’ ‘The question is,’ said Humpty
Dumpty, ‘which is to be master-- that’s all.’ ”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Carroll’s
formula throughout is to transform familiar things into fantasy objects. This
is undoubtedly how he created the first version of his tale to the girls on a
picnic. The rabbit they see in the meadow becomes dressed up and acts like a
human; when Alice falls down the rabbit hole it is meant to take a long time,
so he describes things she sees on the walls as she falls: cupboards,
book-shelves, maps and pictures; she takes a jar of Orange Marmalade and puts
it back.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>These are rooms in an
upper-middle class home; the beautiful garden that she tries to reach is one of
the Fellows’ gardens hidden behind college gates and reserved for College
Fellows like Dodgson.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">On the
whole, these are beautiful settings of a leisure society, with even an
aristocratic side when Duchesses and Queens come in. They are the chief
villains moving the plot (the upper-middle class looking upwards with a
critical eye at the declining monarchy). All the activities are polite middle
class pastimes-- tea parties, lawn croquet, conversation, poem recitations,
cards and chess games, formal dinners and speeches. It is a very nice world,
probably above the social experience of most readers. In reality this familiar
world is somewhat boring; the fantasy transformation makes it delightful. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dodgson/Carroll
creates his ideas, episode by episode, by taking things in his own familiar
environment-- the meadow, the garden, children reciting poems in family
parlors-- and applying his transformations: English-speaking non-humans, failed
etiquette, double-meaning conversations, and parodies of past children’s
literature.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Alice in Wonderland </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">is more memorable than <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Through the Looking Glass.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He launches his first effort with the
device of growing smaller and larger, and then repeats each half a dozen times
altogether; this supplies more dramatic action than in the later book; and it
leads naturally to the denouement where full-size Alice can declare “You’re
nothing but a pack of cards!” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
chess game provides little plot tension, and the second book’s episodes tend to
recapitulate the devices of the first. But the pair of books were crucial in
supporting each other’s reception. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice
in Wonderland</i> was well received, but it didn’t become a children’s
classic-- nor an adult cross-over -- until after <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Through the Looking Glass</i> was published 6 years later. With less action,
it focused attention more on the embedded philosophical puzzles. As often
happens, one great book makes another great-- the formulation does not beg the
question, if one thinks of the feedback processes by which literary reputations
are made.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lewis Carroll’s failures</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">One
sequel was a great success. Lewis Carroll tried for another, and failed.
Between <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice</i> (1865) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Looking Glass</i> (1871) he wrote a couple
of short stories (1867) about fairy characters called Sylvie and Bruno. But he
kept this material separate when he produced <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Looking Glass</i> as a pure sequel to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice.</i> By 1874 he was projecting a longer book called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno, </i>but was unable to
complete it until 1889, by which time it was so long that he had to split it
into two volumes, the second appearing in 1894. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice,</i> which took 2.5 years to write, was a great publishing
success; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno,</i> which took
20 years, was not. Not surprisingly, since the first flowed better and was
carefully crafted, whereas the latter was a struggle. Of course, Rev. Dodgson
still had his day job, and published on advanced topics from the world of
German mathematics during these years; but that was true in his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>years as well. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Why did <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno</i> fail? It violated the
rules of the fantasy classic genre listed above. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(1) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">An alternative universe entered by a portal
from the ordinary world</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno, </i>there are at least two
alternative worlds: Outland, which resembles an Oxford college; and Fairyland,
a true magic garden. There is also a real world, with a plot involving a sick
man, a doctor, and an aristocratic lady and the choices she goes through in
getting married. The story line switches among these worlds numerous times:
when the narrator (the sick man) falls asleep and dreams an alternative world
(making explicit the framing device that Carroll used at the end of both Alice
books); sometimes he dreams a song, containing a character who knows a portal
into a magic garden; sometimes the narrator travels on a train from London to
the countryside, where he reaches some fairy-land destination (a device used in
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harry Potter </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>stories.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Favored characters can also enter Fairyland by an Ivory Door
in a professor’s study, and by other transformations. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Outland
is a place where the head of the College, here called the “Warden”, is
overthrown in a plot by subordinate college officials called the “Chancellor”
and the “Sub-Warden.” This is a satire on academic politics; C.P. Snow (who was
a Fellow of a Cambridge college) wrote a straight version in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Masters</i> (1951).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ousted Warden is the father of
Sylvie and Bruno; they all get promoted into fairy characters when they are in
Fairyland (where the Warden is the Monarch). This gives a two-layer ranking of
imaginary characters who sometimes become fairy characters. Dodgson/Carroll was
still squeezing his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>materials, since the real-life Alice
was the daughter of his own College head. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
failure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>points up something that was only
implicit when I listed the generic features above. An alternative universe from
the ordinary world needs to be a binary; too many different worlds, and too
many portals connecting them, is psychologically unsatisfying for the audience.
As I argued in the case of Jabberwocky, successful nonsense poetry needs to
insert its nonsense into a strict frame.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(2) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A naive child protagonist</i>. In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno, </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>there is a major child character
(Sylvie), although she isn’t very naive; and she only intermittently appears. Much
of the story is told from the point of view of the narrator, a real-life adult,
who not only dreams part of the story but also travels around in several of the
worlds. Without a naive protagonist, the possibility is eliminated of having
things happen “over her head” that an outside audience can see in more
sophisticated perspective. Instead, there is much more explicit discussing and
explaining, which ruins the light touch and eliminates much of the humor.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(3) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quasi-meaningful humorous nonsense</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carroll continues to provide material
of this sort; for instance one of the professors has invented a time-travel
machine, leading to paradoxes about time reversal. [Carroll wrote this only a
few years before H.G. Wells’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Time
Machine </i>(1895) used the same device more successfully by constructing the
entire plot around it.]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Unlike the
Alice books, here the nonsense episodes are not linked to non-human characters,
talking animals, birds, insects, flowers, and nursery rhyme characters, but are
conveyed by conversations among adult humans. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Some of
the clever nonsense is successful: a series of maps of increasing scale, so
that a map becomes as big as the land it depicts; a government in which
thousands of monarchs rule over a single subject instead of vice versa. The
adults’ stories satirize academic reforms then going on in Oxbridge: giving
scholarships to outstanding students leads to college competing for them and
eventually chasing students in the street to give them money. Another story
satirizes a professor whose lectures no one can understand; so his students
memorize his lectures and repeat them to their own students when they become
professors, ending up with a profession teaching something that no one
understands. This sounds like a reaction to German Idealist philosophy, which
in the 1870s and 80s dominated Oxford philosophy, notably under T.H. Green and
F. H. Bradley.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Parts of
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>thus resemble the more sophisticated
parts of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gulliver’s Travels,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but they cease being cross-over fantasy
for children and adults.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(4) <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>picaresque<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>plot line</i>.
Some of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is picaresque wanderings, but the
book’s failure brings out a hidden point: picaresque strings unrelated episodes
together because a single character’s travels holds them on a<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>thread. This is the pattern for
Odysseus, Don Quixote, Gulliver, and Alice. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>follows too many lead characters,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>removing the psychological unity of the picaresque. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(5) The
failure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>brings to light another principle of
classic cross-over fantasy: avoiding direct or prolonged treatment of serious
themes. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno </i>intrudes
these into both plot and conversations. The real-world characters have marriage
engagements, but they break up over serious issues like disagreement over
religious beliefs. Fantasy, when it does have love interest, makes the
obstacles simple and magical, as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sleeping<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beauty</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cinderella </i>. Fantasy may allow a magic sickness, which ends with a
magic cure; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>has a real-life epidemic and a heroic
doctor who sacrifices his life to treat its victims. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It also
features morality tales:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a boy
caught stealing apples;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a drunken
workman, reformed by Sylvie who gets him to give up drinking and take home his
wages to his wife. She is not a very fun fairy. (Not at all like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Peter Pan,</i> a successful sequel in this
genre in 1904, about a boy who refuses to grow up.) And there are lengthy
discussions, both in the real world and the fantasy worlds, of topics like
whether animals have souls, what people will do in the afterlife, how the
Sabbath should be celebrated, what circumstances make sins more serious, the
morality of charity bazaars, and the flaws of socialism. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How
could Carroll, so careful an author in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice,</i>
write a book so ill-organized and un-pruned? He explains in the preface that he
had been collecting materials for many years-- clever ideas, satires,
dialogues, strange inventions. He was involved in doctrinal controversies in
the Church and political controversies at the University. And he wanted to put
it all together into a novel. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dodgson/Carroll’s
own creativeness got him into trouble. He was a continuously inventive person,
thinking up new machines and games, writing poems and stories, collecting
drawers full of fragments. Many authors collect such material in their
notebooks; F. Scott Fitzgerald’s notes became famous when they were published
after his death. Dodgson/Carroll was an intellectual hoarder or pack-rat, and
his treasury of scraps grew over the years to the point where two substantial
volumes could contain them only clumsily. *</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* The
two volumes of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>are four times as long as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice in Wonderland.</i></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Downstream from Alice: the Oz
books</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In 1900,
L. Frank Baum published <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz</i>, to big national sales and critical admiration. Four years
later, he repeated the success with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Land of Oz. </i>The original Oz book was a one-shot deal and Baum did not plan
for it to be a series. He saw the book as a springboard to his lifetime
ambition for a theatrical career, by making <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz</i> into a musical.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It took two years before he got a production, which played
first in Chicago and intermittently on Broadway during 1903-04.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The play was oriented to adults,
dropping the witches and magic, shifting the plot to political struggles around
the Wizard, and adding contemporary political parodies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But an outpouring of letters from
children convinced Baum to keep the children’s book concept going, no doubt
prodded by the relative failure of his other enterprises. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This
would be the pattern throughout the remaining 20 years of his life; every time
he wanted to quit and concentrate on something else, market pressures kept
returning him to his one big source of audience appeal. Baum produced a total
of 13 Oz books, and after he died in 1919, his publisher had other writers
continue the series,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>bringing out
a new Oz book every year through 1952. It was the archetypal sequel franchise.
The question is, not just why the original <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wizard
of Oz</i> was successful, but why it was perhaps the greatest sequel machine of
all time. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Land of Oz</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>as the subtitle says-- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Further Adventures of the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman</i> -- featured the
most popular characters in the original;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the actors who played them in the stage production became famous.
Neither the protagonist Dorothy, nor the Wizard, are what drive the sequels.
The Wizard is gone at the end of the first volume, exposed as a mountebank who
returns to Nebraska in his balloon; the protagonist in the new adventure is a
boy named Tip. The generic features remain, of course: an alternative world
which transforms features of the ordinary world; a naive child protagonist who
has picaresque adventures; plot tension provided by evil adults (in this case
Mombi, an old witch who is like a wicked stepmother to Tip at the beginning of
the story); adventures always turning out happily because of the timely
discovery of magic powers and the aid of new creatures brought to life (of
which the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman are the archetypes). </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In this
first sequel, Tip constructs a pumpkin-head man and brings him to life by
stealing Mombi’s magic powder; then brings a wooden saw-horse to life to carry
them; then a flying machine cobbled together out of a pair of high-backed
sofas, an elk’s head, and some decorative palm fronds for wings. This was very
timely in 1904, the year after the Wright Brothers’ first flight in December
1903, although flying machines had been an inventor’s craze for the past
decade. The common denominator of the method is to take found objects of
everyday life (scarecrow, pumpkin/jack o’lantern, sawhorse, the household
furnishings that make up the flying Gump) and bring them to life. Baum combines
this with an adventure plot line, essentially a series of crises or
cliff-hangers (in this book, literally, when the Gump crashes in a cliffside
birds’ nest), from which the growing crew of adventurers escapes by another
turn of magic creativity. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Baum
(and his successor) would use this formula throughout the later books. For
instance, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ozma of Oz </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(1907), the child protagonist visits the
land of the Wheelers, who are half-human/half bicycle. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Oz
stories have much less of the paradoxical, two-level dialogue by which Lewis
Carroll constructs his successive episodes. Carroll’s humanized animals and
nursery story creatures do not accompany Alice on her travels, but are largely
one-episode appearances in which she has a nonsensical conversation. Baum’s
dialogue is mostly about the problems the traveling crew are facing at each
juncture, but there are occasional flashes of Alice-like devices. In one
predicament, they find a secret compartment with three magic wishing pills, but
its formula is to count to 17 by two’s.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The characters discuss how this is impossible, since 17 is an odd
number; until one of them suggests starting at 1, and going 3-5-7-etc.-until
17. Tip takes one of the pills, but it gives him such bad stomach pains that he
wishes he hadn’t taken the pill; so now the three pills are back in the box.
This leads to a discussion about whether Tip really could have had a pain,
since he didn’t really take one of the three pills. This is essentially a riff
on the time-reversal paradoxes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Through
the Looking Glass.</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A new
character, Mr. H.M. (Highly Magnified) Woggle-Bug, T. E. (Thoroughly Educated)
is the precursor to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow Submarine’</i>s
Jeremy Hilary Boob, Ph.D. (which Ringo pronounces, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">phud</i>). Both begin by presenting their card.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>They are well-educated intellectuals,
full of esoteric and pretentious language. The Woggle-Bug is also a version of
the original Wizard of Oz, and continues the satire on education at the end of
the first book, where the Wizard solves the Scarecrow’s request for a brain by
giving him a university diploma. What makes the Woggle-Bug most memorable (in
addition to the way he is drawn-- a bug walking upright on its hind legs,
dressed in cutaway tailcoat, striped vest, and top hat-- an echo of the White
Rabbit) is how he is created: a tiny bug whom a school teacher has magnified
and projected onto a screen; when the teacher’s attention is distracted, the
bug walks off the screen, in the size of a human child. There is more of this
playing with scientific experiments in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow
Submarine</i>.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJzDKy1QwkLmMkJSknBtZ93Jm8vyDchBL63cn9wGsV2uyuUv6iZpo_0HZcwY4narKWDgl0fCQsjCiWXIKabJBN3LIIJnJr3-PrCRoGEBFUM2enAnUzC4Iz9sbx8RzTf3X-sW_SyrCd4tA/s1600/14-WoggleBug%252CBoob.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="174" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJzDKy1QwkLmMkJSknBtZ93Jm8vyDchBL63cn9wGsV2uyuUv6iZpo_0HZcwY4narKWDgl0fCQsjCiWXIKabJBN3LIIJnJr3-PrCRoGEBFUM2enAnUzC4Iz9sbx8RzTf3X-sW_SyrCd4tA/s320/14-WoggleBug%252CBoob.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
larger plot-tension of the story is driven by a revolution, carried out by an
army of girls, led by General Jinjur. They are a feminist army, declaring that
men have ruled things too long while women do all the work at home; and they
succeed in overthrowing the King of Oz (who is now the Scarecrow, supported by
an Army consisting of one old man with long whiskers and an unloaded gun). The
girls are armed with knitting needles, plus their well-founded expectation that
no one would hurt a girl. They proceed to carry out a revolution, which
consists of prying out the jewels of the Emerald City so they can wear them,
while the men now do all the housework. Baum is making literary capital out of
current events; he was closely associated with his wife’s mother, a leader of
the Women’s Suffrage movement. Although his parody of the movement is none too
favorable, his books throughout often show girls doing men’s jobs. General
Jinjur’s revolution is overthrown by another army of girls, led by Queen Glinda
the Good Witch, this time carrying real weapons. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The book
ends up with a discussion of who should have the throne of Oz. The Wizard had
gone back to Omaha in his balloon; the previous ruler disappeared. They
discover there was a descendent, a girl named Ozma, but the witch Mombi had
transformed her into some other shape so she couldn’t be discovered.
Eventually, after a trial of rival magic between Glinda and Mombi, the latter
confesses that Ozma has been transformed into a boy: in fact it is Tip. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tip at
first is horrified to hear this, since he does not want to be transformed into
a girl. His friends assert they will continue to like him just as much, and he
undergoes the transformation into a beautiful princess with sparkling jewels
(depicted on the last page of the book). This is a rather astounding ending,
given that it was 100 years before the transgender movement became popular. It
had no political significance; it was just a clever device for ending the book,
and with a boffo effect, outdoing all the other magical transformations that
moved the plot along. The book is innocently non-sexual; apparently the
audience loved it, for the demand for Oz books accelerated. Ozma of Oz would
soon have her own book, in 1907.*</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* The
formula is spelled out pretty clearly in the subtitle: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ozma of Oz Tells More About Dorothy and the Scarecrow and the Tin
Woodman, also about the New Characters-- the Hungry Tiger, the Nome King,
Tiktok and the Yellow Hen.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">L. Frank Baum’s failures: what
made the difference?</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Baum had
been writing plays and musicals and acting in them ever since he was a child--
the same era of home entertainment as Lear and Dodgson with household poetry
recitations. Baum was born in 1856, and grew up consuming the children’s
literature of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>these predecessors.
His father was a successful entrepreneur in many businesses, and Frank also had
the entrepreneurial style from an early age; in his teens he ran a stamp
collectors’ magazine; a stamp dealership; sold fireworks; in his 20s he
published a trade journal for breeders of prize poultry. His father underwrote
his theatre, and Frank wrote advertising for his aunt who was both an actress
and founder of an Oratory School. None of his enterprises took off; and his
father’s oil business went under. At age 32, Baum moved to a frontier town in
the Dakota Territory (not yet a state), where he ran an unsuccessful store and
edited a newspaper. Moving to Chicago, he became a newspaper reporter, and
edited a magazine of ideas for advertising agencies, specializing on store
window displays, and published a book about clothing dummies in 1900, the same
year as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wizard of Oz</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Baum’s
first venture into children’s books came in 1897, with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mother Goose in Prose</i>. Retelling meant elaborating the original
rhymes into narrative and dialogue; in effect, this was what Lewis Carroll did
when he constructed the culminating action of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice in Wonderland</i> from a few stanzas about the Knave of Hearts
who stole the tarts from the Queen. Baum was 41 years old at the time of his
first success, after a lifetime of eclectic projects. Following the groove, in
1899 Baum brought out <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Father Goose,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>consisting of nonsense poems in the
Edward Lear/ Lewis<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carroll
tradition. It topped the sales charts for children’s books, so in 1900 Baum and
his illustrator launched his own version of a trip to Wonderland, starting in
Kansas and resembling the western United States. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Alice
becomes Dorothy; the Red Queen becomes the Wicked Witch of the West with an
army of flying monkeys instead of playing cards. The most innovative character,
the Wizard of Oz, is Baum satirizing his own professional life of huckstering.
Dorothy arrives in Oz via a tornado, receives magic shoes to protect her,
recruits three clownish companions, and proceeds on a series of picaresque
adventures. High points are the Emerald City itself, green and glittering with
jewels; and the geography of Oz, divided into four kingdoms each with its own
omnipresent color and reigning good or evil Witch. The geography would become a
principle dimension for further sequels; although Baum never provides a map (as
Tolkien did for his enchanted lands), the Oz alternative universe acquired a
familiar shape for its readers, as each book added new places to its borders.
For the first Oz book, Baum borrows a device from classic hero tales: an ordeal
that Dorothy and her companions must undertake-- to steal the magic power of
the Wicked Witch of the West-- before the Wizard will tell Dorothy the secret
of how to return home to Kansas. After many adventures, she does; with a
presumably final note that there’s no place like home. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The book
again topped the best-seller list for children, but Baum did not sense what
market niche he was in. He persisted in trying to produce plays. Tired of Oz,
or not recognizing its appeal, he wrote a number of other children’s fantasy
books: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dot and Tot of Merryland</i>
(already in 1901 on the heels of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wizard
of Oz</i> success), <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Queen Zixi of Ix,
Adventures of Santa Claus </i>(another effort at a spin-off<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on the formula of his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Father Goose</i>), and others, none of which
sold well. Sheer market demand for more about Oz-- above all its geography and
tradition-- pulled him into sequels. The musicals he financed-- both follow-ups
to his one big <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wizard of Oz</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>hit, and other ventures as a Broadway
producer-- lost money. (One of the flops was meant to be a musical starring the
Woggle-Bug.) In 1908, his travelling show simulating a trip to Oz combining
short film clips, live actors, and his own Chattauqua-style lecture, almost
bankrupted him. True enough, the period around 1908-1914 was when the film
industry was shaping up, and it was unclear how short soundless films were
going to develop; Baum was combining existing modes of entertainment he had
grown up with, but which would be supplanted by movie theatre chains he had not
foreseen. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In 1914
(when Baum was 58), he started his own film studio; but even its name-- <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Oz Film Manufacturing Company</i>-- did
not make it successful and it folded after a few years. The early film industry
appealed mainly to adults, with its dialogue boards and relatively slow-moving
action. It would take the advent of talkies, background music, and animated
cartoons in the late 1920s to create a sustainable children’s film market. By
1939, of course, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wizard of Oz</i>
became an epoch-making film, using switches between black-and-white and color
to highlight the transition between the ordinary world and the marvelous
alternative universe; and being one of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>the first full-length features in garish Technicolor was a perfect match
for the color-laden land of Oz.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Already in 1906 Baum attempted to set up an Oz amusement park; this
precursor to Disneyland (which opened 50 years later, in 1955) never got off
the ground, hampered by his many failing business ventures. Baum was a promoter
and entrepreneur in many areas; but having the concept was not enough to pull
it off. Only in the Oz books, where his ideas could be quickly and
inexpensively realized in print, and where collaboration involved only a
favorite illustrator, could Baum make his skills pay off. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Altogether
L. Frank Baum wrote 55 novels, hundreds of poems, and numerous film scripts. He
had no shortage of inventive ideas. It takes more than inventiveness to create
a beloved classic. The Oz books enterprise, if not Baum himself, recognized
this; his publishers (who had acquired the royalty rights during one of Baum’s
periodic financial crises) made sure that the winning formula kept being
applied, for 30 years after his death.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Film Era <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Cross-over Sequels</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
switch from books to films was no drastic change. From <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice</i> <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>onwards,
successful cross-over novels had illustrations so that fantasy creatures did
not have to be left to the imagination. The 1951 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>eliminated the
talkier episodes, verbal conundrums, and poem parodies and played up the most
colourful scenes. All the classic fantasy films were the brightest and most
vivid of their time. Film-making and sound-production technologies got better
over time, one element in creating new effects within the genre. But new
technologies succeed only in combination with the basic devices for
constructing cross-over fantasy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Song lyrics into film script: The
Yellow Submarine</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Immediately
upstream from the 1968 film were the Beatles. Neither film script nor
production was their doing; even their voices were those of professional
actors. The Beatles’ input consisted of four new songs, plus some voiceless
sound tracks by their studio music producer, George Martin, who was responsible
for the innovative electronic effects of the Beatles’ sound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Otherwise the film writers chose
existing Beatles hits, and scripted the film around the “We all live in a Yellow
Submarine” song of 1966 and the nostalgic "Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts
Club Band" (1967).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The film
is a sequel, an adaptation of what could be constructed from the Beatles’ music
and image, and above all, from their lyrics. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In their
generation, the Beatles were the most literary of pop song writers, and had the
broadest range of musical knowledge. This was the era of transition from<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>45 rpm singles to LP albums with 6 or
more songs per side.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Beatles’
breadth of musical styles came out gradually, as their immense popularity and
two albums per year gave them opportunity to mix in new styles. *</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* They
were also one of the first groups to write their own songs and lyrics.
Professional Tin Pan Alley song-writers since the record business developed in
the early 1900s were rarely the performers, and the separation held up through
most 1950s rock n’ roll. The Beatles began by adapting existing rock n’ roll songs
to their electric instrument-playing quartet, but their popularity took off
when they wrote their own material. This rapidly became the pattern for rock
musicians.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Early
Beatles hits had minimalist lyrics, the songs mainly carried by the all-electric-guitar
sound, replacing the saxophones and horns of 1950s American rock n’ roll.
American lyrics were mostly hyperbole or sheer hopped-up jitterbugging;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Little Richard: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gonna have some fun tonight, Everything’ll be alright, Gonna have some
fun, Have some fun toni-i-i-i-ght</i> [held through 5 beats]; Jerry Lee Lewis: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Come on over baby, Whole lot a shakin’ going
on</i> [repeat, repeat...].<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"></span>I Want
to Hold Your Hand (1962), the Beatles’ first hit, is an upbeat screamer of
teeny-bopper love; but Please Please Me (the same year) and Love Me Do (also
1962) have the flippant conciseness of Lennon and McCarthy’s lyrics. Their
titles give a hint of verbal cleverness that straight-forward American songs
lacked: A Hard Day’s Night (1964), Eight Days a Week (1964), The Night Before
(1965), Got to Get You Into My Life (1966), Hello Goodbye (1967).*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* This
is on display in Lennon’s two books of cynical nonsense stories, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In His Own Write</i> (1964) and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Spaniard in the Works</i> (1965)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>-- British equivalent of the American
expression, to throw a monkey wrench [spanner] in the machine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lennon
and McCartney were finding a stream of material by casting an ironic eye on the
daily lives of teens. I’m Looking Through You (1965), Ticket to Ride
(1965),<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She Said She Said (1965),
and You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away (1966) are songs about teenage complaints
and break-ups, hardly original topics but treated with a irony and the bouncy
music that makes them trademark Beatles songs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">They
were also adding a serious vein: Poignant short stories are compressed into
lyrics like She’s Leaving Home (1967):</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Wednesday morning at five
o’clock, as the day begins,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Silently closing her bedroom
door,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Leaving the note that she hoped
would say more.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">She goes downstairs to the
kitchen, clutching her handkerchief.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Quietly turning the back door
key,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stepping outside she is free.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Father snores as his wife gets
into her dressing gown.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Picks up the letter that’s lying
there.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Standing alone at the top of the
stairs.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">She cries and breaks down to her
husband,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Daddy, our baby’s gone!”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Why would she treat us so
thoughtlessly?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How could she do this to me?”</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- all
this over the strumming chord changes and the band repeating softly in the
background</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">We gave her most of our lives...
Bye, bye.</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Already
in 1964 there was that great departure for rock music, Eleanor Rigby, where the
jaunty bluesy music is played by a string quartet:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Eleanor Rigby,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Picks up the rice in the church
where a wedding has been,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lives in a dream---</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Waits at the window,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Wearing a face that she keeps in
a jar by the door,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Who is it for?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">All the lonely people, where do
they all come from?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">All the lonely people, where do
they all belong?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Eleanor Rigby</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Died in the church and was buried
along with her name.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nobody came.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Father McKenzie,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Wiping the dirt from his hands as
he walks from the grave,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">No one was saved</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">All the lonely people...</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This
existentialist bleakness, echoing Samuel Beckett plays but relieved by the
tenderness of the tone, is chosen for background music when the Yellow Submarine
first arrives in Liverpool, a blip of colour across gray photographic stills of
the industrial city. A basic ingredient of putting together the movie, surely.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Childhood
fantasy now teeters on the portal to the alternative universe, half held back
in the ordinary world. Downstream from Lewis Carroll, a riff on Mother Goose is
in Cry Baby Cry (1968):</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The King of Marigold was in the
kitchen</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cooking breakfast for the Queen.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Queen was in the parlour</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Playing piano for the children of
the King.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cry, baby, cry, make your mother
sigh,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">She’s old enough to know better,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So cry baby cry.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Duchess of Kirkaldy, always
smiling</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And arriving late for tea.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Duke was having problems,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">With a message at the local Bird
and Bee.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Although
it is not in the film, this song expresses the Beatles’ mentality at the time.
Another echo of the nursery, from the mother’s point of view,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is Lady Madonna (1968), sung above a
piano boogie-woogie, with a Thirties dance band for the breaks:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lady Madonna, children at your
feet,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Wonder how you manage to make
ends meet.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Who finds the money when you pay
the rent?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Did you think that money was
heaven sent?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Friday night arrives without a
suitcase,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sunday morning, creeping like a
nun.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Monday’s child has learned to tie
his bootlace.</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">See how they run----</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lady Madonna, lying on the bed,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Listen to the music playing in
your head.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tuesday afternoon is
never-ending,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Wednesday morning papers didn’t
come.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Thursday night your stockings
needed mending,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">See how they run--- </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(echoing
the nursery rhyme, Three Blind Mice)</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Such
were the ingredients; now the movie:</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Yellow Submarine </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>is a trip to an alternative universe of sounds as well as
visuals. It begins with classical music, played as orchestral background during
the Blue Meanies’ attack on Pepperland,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>featuring a string quarter that gets bonked into grey cardboard silence.
The Yellow Submarine makes its escape while we hear the title song played by a
traditional brass band (sketching music history here, early jazz having come
from syncopated marching bands).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Reaching Liverpool, we are still in the classical string quartet of
Eleanor Rigby. Not until we get inside the Beatles’ fabulous mansion--
outwardly a bleak-looking warehouse-- does full colour take over. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
opening sequence expands on the opening of the 1939 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wizard of Oz,</i> where the scenes in Kansas are in black-and-white,
and Dorothy lands in Oz in a blaze of Technicolor. Inside, contemporary pop
music comes on only in snatches, as the Beatles marshal themselves to the
rescue. It is more than 20 minutes into the film before, the Yellow Submarine
under way, the Beatles’ up-beat sound takes over. And of course, when they
reach Pepperland, what little plot is left consists of recovering their
instruments and destroying the Blue Meanies’ spell simply by playing their
irresistible music (“Nothing is Beatle-proof,” John says).</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Blue
Meanies hate music, just as the older generation of musical taste attacked<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the new rock n’ roll music of the
mid-1950s. (It emerged in the U.S. on independent radio stations, as the
networks abandoned radio for TV; a favorite item of consumption in the rise of
a modern youth culture during the push to keep working-class teenagers in high
school instead of going to work; and the concomitant appearance of youth gangs
(for whom the term “juvenile delinquents” was coined), who flaunted jive music
and sometimes had their own singers.) The battle for rock n’ roll was finally
won by the Beatles, who won over the older generation (not incidentally because
they were white, clean-cut, clever and literate, and quoted older music-- in
contrast to the black and hillbilly/ rural white singers of American rock n’
roll). The struggle of taste-generations is softened in the film: the Blue
Meanies hate all music, even classical, although it is rock music that
vanquishes them.</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Beatles stretch the formula for cross-over children’s fantasy, since they are
not little girls, nor naive. John Lennon even remarks on similarities to their
experience in Einstein’s relativity and Joyce’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses. </i>The lack is remedied by adding the Nowhere Man, a
satirical portrait of an Oxford intellectual, who knows everything but is inept
in real life. The Boob becomes the most lovable character in the film, along
with Ringo, who is always pulling levers and pushing the wrong buttons,
creating the mini-crises that enliven the plot. Not having a naive protagonist
eliminates the two-level humor and irony of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>novels, but an
equivalent is in the new cartoon effects. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Yellow Submarine</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> was a big shift from prior
animated films, both visually and musically. The most ambitious full-length
cartoon <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fantasia </i>(1940) featured
Mickey Mouse characters accompanying a classical orchestra repertoire. Disney’s
children’s films up through the 1950s-- including <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice-- </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>have a sweet, syrupy orchestral
background and feature songs that sound like Broadway musicals. These were
explicitly children’s films, done at a time when youth music did not yet exist.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Yellow Submarine</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> was produced 15 years before
desk-top computers, but a huge crew of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>200 animation artists pioneered what would later become
computer-animation effects. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sleeping
Beauty</i> (1959), the most lavishly and colorfully drawn of its predecessors,
took 6 years to produce with a then unprecedented staff of artists; <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow Submarine </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>took 11 months. The sea the submarine
travels through is made up of background stills, assembled out of collages of
multi-colored strips, with fish-collages moving across the foreground. </span></div>
<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgneNaSd9gdr8B7L_G4hj287DnHhFml5orOn732ikMZUVR6m-eQyFqETaIiELfT-0qkpDKEVvgbuOX907gpLrEQC8bPCvsTueuFrBxtjz3eedbRRKyVspVse5009OlX5aEgJ0Nbd7oUSkw/s1600/21-yello-sub-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgneNaSd9gdr8B7L_G4hj287DnHhFml5orOn732ikMZUVR6m-eQyFqETaIiELfT-0qkpDKEVvgbuOX907gpLrEQC8bPCvsTueuFrBxtjz3eedbRRKyVspVse5009OlX5aEgJ0Nbd7oUSkw/s320/21-yello-sub-.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
limited animation of the characters is made into a virtue. When the Beatles
arrive in Nowhere Land and meet Jeremy Boob, they walk forward leaving a
shadow-collage of flowers and fanciful psychedelic shapes behind them; and at
the windup of the sequence, the film is played backwards so that the Beatles
absorb their own shadow-trail. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiJOgxKezEgoyYB2r4ogVIUy5nBARU4Wi3uKgf94Oq0yBgAFimynsCdjIuMyLF8wOB33D-t_NtKlOY5uHvE7ShWJ04RpGjbaVsuFs8pi_YI_aqaGkjJlknBjo8i8psY9yWasfXzR_Mdas/s1600/21a-Beatles-flowershadowtrail-.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="183" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiJOgxKezEgoyYB2r4ogVIUy5nBARU4Wi3uKgf94Oq0yBgAFimynsCdjIuMyLF8wOB33D-t_NtKlOY5uHvE7ShWJ04RpGjbaVsuFs8pi_YI_aqaGkjJlknBjo8i8psY9yWasfXzR_Mdas/s320/21a-Beatles-flowershadowtrail-.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Psychedelic
art (initially in posters for San Francisco rock concerts) was a revival of
Paris advertising posters like Mucha at the turn of the 20th century. Another
ingredient in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow Submarine</i> is
surrealist art of the 1920s and 30s. When Captain Fred first arrives at the
Beatles’ mansion, he finds himself inside a vast hall of doors-- a reprise of
Alice at the bottom of the rabbit hole. When a character enters a door, we see
what happens in the vacant hall left behind:* strange objects scoot from one
room to another, a circus strongman with barbells, an arm, an umbrella, a giant
snail, Toulouse-Lautrec spinning a top with an elephant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* This
mini-sequence plays with a long-standing philosophical question: what does the
world look like when no one is looking at it? John Lennon’s “It’s all in the
mind” comment is George Berkeley’s idealist philosophy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Another philosophical sight-joke is
Ringo’s car, which keeps changing the colors of its body and wheels when George
asks him to identify it; the contemporary philosopher Strawson raised similar
questions about the identity of objects: if a car has most or all of its parts
replaced, is it still the same car?</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">These
are essentially surrealist images, especially Max Ernst’s collages made in the 1930s from
19th century magazine advertisements. We will see them again in the Sea of
Monsters and in Pepperland, where the emblematic clasped hands of LOVE are
right out of Max Ernst, and the guided missile-like glove is a sinister version
of an old-fashioned advertising hand-pointer.**</span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia_I2tPrK_92qZ9cRgUQxznV5nlDyN2XdR70IIR1thB9A4a_hVjQ3GLzpxf8OP-MjkKbZ1uW5Z9Ck2ZEHUWQIzSQVmOWr4pU_1XxbFPlW6ARGj8STL8rtHwPqEQxSh9OhBB8Iq-ROIVSE/s1600/21b-MaxErnst-claspedHands.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEia_I2tPrK_92qZ9cRgUQxznV5nlDyN2XdR70IIR1thB9A4a_hVjQ3GLzpxf8OP-MjkKbZ1uW5Z9Ck2ZEHUWQIzSQVmOWr4pU_1XxbFPlW6ARGj8STL8rtHwPqEQxSh9OhBB8Iq-ROIVSE/s320/21b-MaxErnst-claspedHands.jpg" width="251" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQsUOkZ4vYJUOX_8AfqLW5fJhxp9h-P5UbA9hIZ5ghqOhNP9qiW_UUB2rLfQk_lM_FwXA6eVRljgm4Tlh557NcaZZd48gMXxY4mL4sH0xRKs8lBP6ANvneTCXOzSE-5QdVUI0Q5ybGUeU/s1600/21c-glove--.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjQsUOkZ4vYJUOX_8AfqLW5fJhxp9h-P5UbA9hIZ5ghqOhNP9qiW_UUB2rLfQk_lM_FwXA6eVRljgm4Tlh557NcaZZd48gMXxY4mL4sH0xRKs8lBP6ANvneTCXOzSE-5QdVUI0Q5ybGUeU/s320/21c-glove--.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmQEIy1R0JUqmPqCM2HUHPT3rDlGvAnbTy84c0oEiQWQTFGYR__h-v3QQpEUuzL4is30DweP_MViRicfaNEXHqpBsHfrcYFDyGciduh9X4RSGH6ximqBZYPSN9EkSjYlhnCFaHVxqhR_Y/s1600/21d-hand-pointer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjmQEIy1R0JUqmPqCM2HUHPT3rDlGvAnbTy84c0oEiQWQTFGYR__h-v3QQpEUuzL4is30DweP_MViRicfaNEXHqpBsHfrcYFDyGciduh9X4RSGH6ximqBZYPSN9EkSjYlhnCFaHVxqhR_Y/s1600/21d-hand-pointer.jpg" /></a></div>
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">**
Surrealists assembled art from existing images or found objects, taking the
collage technique of the cubists a step further. Surrealists rediscovered L. Frank Baum’s technique of creating an alternative universe by bringing
everyday objects to life, except surrealists were aiming at a hyper-sophisticated audience of Paris intellectuals.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Surrealist
art provides the model for the animated creatures of the under-sea voyage, such
as brightly colored fish swimming with human arms.</span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
Sea of Monsters, the submarine gets into a stomping contest with a pair of
Kinky Boot Beasts-- another Max Ernst conception: </span>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj10mLvdeteFVuwmvg0FWHwuPhzDYLttIoYfPvCzgb-8wjRzJ-vfIZtlAmUvucC98GF0QXaCi928QqW8nRYBkmTTatCP4uviGBGexpl14rcytVHK-E-yWX-D6cCdPPO33qY1BL6AYtucFE/s1600/22b-MaxErnst-bootCreature.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj10mLvdeteFVuwmvg0FWHwuPhzDYLttIoYfPvCzgb-8wjRzJ-vfIZtlAmUvucC98GF0QXaCi928QqW8nRYBkmTTatCP4uviGBGexpl14rcytVHK-E-yWX-D6cCdPPO33qY1BL6AYtucFE/s320/22b-MaxErnst-bootCreature.jpg" width="253" /></a></div>
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<br />
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Like
Alice, the plunge into the alternative universe comes with repeated
transformations of self. Clocks start going backwards and the Beatles shrink as
they grow younger. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“What a curious feeling!” said
Alice. “I must be shutting up like a telescope.” ... she waited a few minutes
to see if she was going to shrink any further: she felt a little nervous about
this; “for it might end, you know,” said Alice to herself, “in my going out
altogether, like a candle. I wonder what I should be like then?” And she tried
to fancy what the flame of a candle looks like after the candle is blown out,
for she could not remember ever having seen such a thing.”</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Captain
Fred comments, "If we keep going backwards at this rate, we’ll disappear
up our own existence." Managing to reverse the arms of the clock so that time speeds up, the
Beatles find themselves with cascading beards visibly aging<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>into “senile delinquents”. As usual,
the Beatles apply their music-magic, singing about aging, a virtually
unprecedented topic for anyone but themselves:</span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When I’m
Sixty Four (1967), treats a topic that earlier love songs had rarely approached
more closely than </span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Gershwin's </span></span><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(1938)</span> </span> Our Love is Here to Stay “Not for a year, But forever and a day...”</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When I get older, losing my hair,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Many years from now,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Will you still be sending me a valentine,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Birthday greetings, bottle of
wine?</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If I’d been out till quarter to
three,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Would you lock the door?</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Will you still need me, will you
still feed me,</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When I’m sixty-four?</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This is
used in the film as the Beatles pass through the Sea of Time, ending up with a
sequence of images played at exactly one per second, introduced by the title
board: “SIXTY-FOUR YEARS is 33,661,440 minutes, and ONE MINUTE is a long
time”-- and the numbers count themselves on the screen in bright cartoony
caricatures of 1, 2, 3 through 64 which shows two old people kissing. This is
the phenomenology of experienced time vis-à-vis clock time in as visceral a
demonstration as Bergson could wish.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The hip audience could connect it with Timothy Leary and Baba Ram Dass
on tripping out into the here-and-now. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Now we
are in spacey-land, the humorous semi-meaningful nonsense of Alice and Oz
mutated into visual-philosophical trips.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The next scene is nothing but images of the Beatles’ heads against a black
space, while we hear “Only a Northern Song” (newly written for the film by
George Harrison):</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If you’re listening to this song</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">You may think the chords are
going wrong.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But they’re not,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He just wrote it like that.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When you’re listening late at
night,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">You may think the band are not
quite right.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But they are,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">They just play it like that. </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It doesn’t really matter what
chords I play,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What words I say, </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Or time of day it is,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">‘Cause it’s only a Northern Song.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If you think the harmony</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Is a little dark and out of key.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">You’re correct,</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There’s nobody there.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Northern
Songs was the company that copyrighted Beatles songs.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was in-group knowledge, but that is hardly the point.
The music is electronically distorted, not just the chord changes but wavering
organ strains and deliberately inserted static; meanwhile the screen shows
images of the sound waves from an oscilloscope, bright flashes spanning the
black space between the ears of the four Beatles’ heads; then the oscilloscope
waves rotate sideways, in an early version of computer-assisted design, to create
forms never seen on the screen before. (A similar technique-- slit-screen
photography-- was seen the same year in the spacey climax of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">2001: A Space Odyssey,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a film that hip audiences liked to
watch while on LSD.) George’s lyrics may sound weird but they tell us
straightforwardly what the Beatles are doing at this phase in their musical
career: trying new musical variants and verbal combinations to see what they
sound like. This is Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poetry,
transferred into a new medium with vivid sensory dimensions, a literal
cross-over of sight and sound. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Sea
of Monsters includes sight gags and melodrama, but is most notable for a
further philosophical twist. Among the various monsters the most deadly is the
Vacuum Monster (a combination of man, cat, and vacuum cleaner), who sucks up
other creatures through his long tube-snout. After a chase, the Yellow
Submarine itself is sucked in. End of film? No-- the Vacuum Monster, having
sucked in all the other monsters, breaks frame by grabbing a corner of the
picture and sucking the entire visual screen into itself. Alone in empty space,
he sees his own tail wagging, turns and sucks it in-- thereby placing his whole
body inside himself. Whereupon, pop!-- the Yellow Submarine is released back
into reality. Mathematical logician Lewis Carroll would have appreciated the
visual play on the theory of sets containing sets (here, the equivalent of putting a
computer file into itself).</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqH2p4Vlu49CjYothRxRzxKjjUg5eA10clP3etV65E4x9N6TQto00vNDHMyOFZP1hrwhgB5LU36CyP6AMc7nKesCyFhzUpnnIyhPq882qULiGRyrP0jnznDISEnGeUDQOu0fY5oFIL9v8/s1600/24-vacuum%252B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhqH2p4Vlu49CjYothRxRzxKjjUg5eA10clP3etV65E4x9N6TQto00vNDHMyOFZP1hrwhgB5LU36CyP6AMc7nKesCyFhzUpnnIyhPq882qULiGRyrP0jnznDISEnGeUDQOu0fY5oFIL9v8/s320/24-vacuum%252B.jpg" width="304" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">More spaciness.
The Beatles reach the Head Lands, consisting of human heads with the brain
cavity exposed, showing their thoughts in bright-colored images. John, who
thinks about sex, then sings Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, a head trip of
LSD-like images melting into each other. Then the Sea of Holes, a surrealist
design in black-and-white, with computer-design-like effects of shifting and
self-mirroring planes of perspective, the whole thing vibrating along with the
crescendoing sound, until, pop! again-- they have precipitated out of this
metaphysical warp and find themselves on their feet in Pepperland. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjizMnbkd00r9JZtLNE8rBtglT9xQMVwN_9cJ9wm7oeC5jwlpbNTv12ZRsxC0_YenM485y-aW6gzxFXqzn25XcuTKzdB-t6msRaeIQ08fCYpNIIA5o4VJsLMWqeCI5pYLzxBgFxpyKi3A/s1600/24c-sea%252Bof%252Bholes.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgjizMnbkd00r9JZtLNE8rBtglT9xQMVwN_9cJ9wm7oeC5jwlpbNTv12ZRsxC0_YenM485y-aW6gzxFXqzn25XcuTKzdB-t6msRaeIQ08fCYpNIIA5o4VJsLMWqeCI5pYLzxBgFxpyKi3A/s400/24c-sea%252Bof%252Bholes.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
battle with the Blue Meanies brings the level down a notch. Since nothing can
resist the Beatles, they can’t lose the battle. A little suspense is provided
by sneaking into the bandshell to find musical instruments. In a scene
reminiscent of the 1939 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wizard of Oz</i>,
the Beatles join a marching file of enemy soldiers (in this case, Apple
Bonkers) by disguising themselves as one of them. The battle is mostly notable
for its political resonance. The anti-war movement against the Vietnam War was
at its height; the Blue Meanies have Nazi overtones, but their weapons are
clown-shaped nuclear bombs. The homing-missile glove is virtually an American
flag, red-white-and-blue modified into a sleeve of red-and-yellow stripes.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">An
anti-war movement winning a violent battle is self-contradictory (although that
is a real-life conundrum in the demonstrations and riots of 1967-68), but the
film has the perfect answer. “All You Need is Love” is the slogan, sung during
this part of the film, plus the power of music: Blue Meanies’ machine guns
start shooting flowers, and the chief Blue Meanie ends up with a rose on his
nose. Flower power, all right, unmistakably a version of demonstrations at the
Pentagon and elsewhere in 1967 when hippie girls put flowers in the barrels of
soldiers’ guns. But too much seriousness is poison for a cross-over fantasy,
and it is kept low key as the film ends in a psychedelic poster-tableau of former
enemies entwined in reconciliation.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Recombining Classics,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Japanese-style </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Hayao
Miyazaki rode the Japanese wave of world-popular manga comic books and anime
film in the 1980s. His apprenticeship, starting in the 1960s, was in
cheap-labor Japanese animation for American children’s TV cartoons, moving on
to publish manga such as a comic book <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Puss
in Boots. </i>(His early path is like L. Frank Baum re-doing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mother Goose</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Santa Claus</i> in a new medium.) After 20 years of absorbing Western
popular culture and the rapidly improving Japanese film techniques, Miyazaki
began turning his manga into full-length feature animae. After another 20 years
of weaving between sentimental children’s films, retro-European historical
adventures and science-fiction settings, always visually dazzling, Miyazaki at
age 60 produced a fairly explicit sequel to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice
in Wonderland</i> in Japanese guise.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
alternative world in Miyazaki’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spirited<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Away</i> is a pre-modern bathhouse,
where the gods of ancient Japan come to relax. It is luxurious on a scale
reminiscent of the Yoshiwara pleasure district of Edo, with a certain amount of
historical anachronisms such as a boiler room, train tracks, and telephone.
Most of all it is a trip to the past-- for the audience; for its protagonist, a
ten-year-old girl of the 1990s, it is sudden immersion in old-fashioned
manners. She starts out as a spoiled, bored, mopey, impolite child in
sloppy-casual Western clothes, indulged by her parents; to survive, she must
perform old-fashioned etiquette and obedience to superiors. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Driving
the plot tension, Chihiro’s parents have been transformed into pigs
(Circe-like) while over-eating in an abandoned theme park inhabited by ghosts.
She can only rescue them by getting a job at the bathhouse, where all the
creatures are hostile to humans. At first everything is frightening. The guests
look like monsters, strange cloak-shaped blobs with ancient Japanese masks for
faces; some look like animals-- giant chicks, an enormous walking walrus that
shares an elevator with Chihiro; the kitchen staff and male attendants are
frogs and fishes standing upright (a combination of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>and surrealist
images). The waitresses are women in geisha robes, presumably ghosts, since
they object to Chihiro’s human smell. Chihiro’s place is assigned among the
cleaning-maids, a rough-talking bunch. She is given the hardest tasks, like
scrubbing floors with a wet rag, and finds she can’t keep up with other maids
scurrying in tandem across the floor. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
magic-helper tradition, she acquires friends. At the outset, a handsome teenage
boy, Haku, tells her what she must do to rescue her parents, and gives her a
pill that stops her from becoming transparent like a ghost. She seeks a job
from the boiler-room engineer, an old man with spider-like multiple arms that
stretch like rubber to reach anything in the room; he is gruff at first but
eventually takes her side after she has shown she can work. She is assigned to
one of the cleaning-maids, who treats her with slangy working-class
brusqueness, but shows her the ropes on the most onerous tasks, cleaning out a
huge, filthy bathtub full of slime. The ordeals on her picaresque path are less
the conversational conundrums of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or the life-threatening witches and
monsters of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oz</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Submarine</i>, but the grubbiest aspects of ordinary working life. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
villain of the story is Yubaba, the old crone who owns the bathhouse, a witch
who transforms herself into a crow to fly off during the day when the bathhouse
is asleep (vampire theme). Yubaba makes Chihiro sign a contract of utter servitude,
under the threat of being transformed into a pig and served up in the kitchen.
Yubaba’s chief magic power is the ability to take away people’s names. In one
of the spaciest scenes of the film, she sweeps her hand over Chihiro’s
signature-- written as a column of Japanese characters-- leaving only a single
syllable, so that she is now called Sen. Later Haku explains that if you forget
your real name, you are totally in the witch’s power. Haku himself does not
know his real name, and is under contract to Yubaba as an assistant with some
magic powers. At the conclusion of the story, Chihiro/Sen finds Haku’s real
name and releases him from the spell.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Yubaba
is the Wicked Witch of Oz and the fairy tales, and visiting her is frightening
at first. But whenever she is about to do something horrible to Sen, she is
distracted by her crying baby. This baby is a giant, who looks like a sumo
wrestler, inhabits a luxurious nursery, and is even more spoiled that Chihiro
was by her parents. The baby is completely self-centered and demanding, and not
only wails but is capable of destroying his surroundings. (These scenes look
like a outgrowth of the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>episode with the Duchess and crying
baby who turns into a pig.) Yubaba shows another side, the ultra-indulgent grandmother.
This is a psychologically more realistic way of solving a major problem of
fantasy adventure-- the evil character must be powerful, but must have some
weakness so that the hero can escape its dangers. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This is
Miyazaki’s new twist: making the fantasy world psychologically real, and
thereby producing less violent solutions than most action-adventure (or
pre-modern fairy tales). The action of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spirited<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Away<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>is thus much less violent than his other films like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Princess <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mononoke </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Porco <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Rosso</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sen gets
through each episode by making friends out of unpropitious starts. In the
boiler room, the furnace is fed by a crew of insect-like creatures who carry
coal lumps bigger than themselves; when one of them falls down, squashed by its
load, she manages to haul it to the furnace herself. This makes the rest of the
coal-carriers all fall down and pretend to be squashed, leaving the work to
Sen. They are driven back to work by the engineer, who threatens to magically
turn them back into soot; but in future episodes they become her helpers. </span></div>
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In her
work as cleaning-maid, Sen is thrown into the middle of two successive crises
that threaten the bathhouse. A huge shapeless guest, dripping brown slime,
wallows its way into the bathhouse and fouls its halls. It is a stink-spirit,
and all the attendants hold their noses and fruitlessly try to keep it out. Sen
is given the job of bathing it in a huge tub.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Under the bathwater she manages to find a thorn stuck in the
monster’s side; then the entire team of bathhouse workers, directed by Yubaba
as cheer-leader, pull on a rope and finally extricate the contents of the
bloated monster: a huge accumulation of trash and debris found at the bottom of
a river. The stink-spirit transforms into a beautiful silver dragon, writhes
dazzlingly making dragon-shapes in the air, and zooms out of the bathhouse,
having left Sen a magic pill as a reward. This would be more familiar in
East-Asian mythology, where dragons are supposed to be water-spirits, who
manifest themselves as rivers and clouds. The ecological pollution theme is one
of Miyazaki’s favorites, used in his previous films (above all <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nausicaä, </i>1984), here combined with
traditional dragon lore. Since Sen has already seen that Haku, when he flies
off on mysterious errands, also takes a dragon form, there is a hint of what we
are going to find out about Haku.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
second crisis revolves around a character called No-Face. This is a tall
cloaked humanoid, all black except for a black-and-white mask face frozen in a
sorrowful expression. When we first see No-Face, he is alone of the bridge
outside the bathhouse, in a pose reminiscent of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Munch’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Scream</i>.
</span></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjejjeAtigP4NOphHiivx663o6hKVHzEJ0w-2Eog_c2hMAm9tR2oEqYoTVp0h5ofGHs6c_qZ8buxpSn1vQXpp-FHaj8DQBUak4j3LlfoEr3XTTZw5eYn2TtEyRRa3NORuHwKNv1dnF5S6c/s1600/27-No-Face%252B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="170" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjejjeAtigP4NOphHiivx663o6hKVHzEJ0w-2Eog_c2hMAm9tR2oEqYoTVp0h5ofGHs6c_qZ8buxpSn1vQXpp-FHaj8DQBUak4j3LlfoEr3XTTZw5eYn2TtEyRRa3NORuHwKNv1dnF5S6c/s320/27-No-Face%252B.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG_S_ZcHzS9NgAMPhMkqNsOjatxUnIzZVsiblf5DGKf4hKitgZcxgdLo889JOeA7gUxKGaIxTlI5KZEcr5zNxvfYyl7FGsbSToEeUA2dTona8IEKrrsPdd-LgvyCXmxtrc7U_u-UHEFyk/s1600/27b-Munch%252CScream-75k.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjG_S_ZcHzS9NgAMPhMkqNsOjatxUnIzZVsiblf5DGKf4hKitgZcxgdLo889JOeA7gUxKGaIxTlI5KZEcr5zNxvfYyl7FGsbSToEeUA2dTona8IEKrrsPdd-LgvyCXmxtrc7U_u-UHEFyk/s320/27b-Munch%252CScream-75k.jpg" width="250" /></a></div>
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<br />
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<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As a
spirit of sadness, he is banned from admittance. Sen takes pity on him and lets
him in through a sliding screen. No-Face is the ultimate geek; he holds out his
hand pathetically and can make no conversation other than feeble grunts. But he
has magic powers; when the frog-official refuses to let Sen have the token
needed to order scented water from the boiler-room, No-Face turns invisible and
steals a handful of them for her. This provides a bit a magic-induced help that
gets her started on cleaning the filthy tub, and solving the stink-spirit
crisis.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Once
inside the bathhouse, No-Face uses his magic to make himself popular: he
creates gold nuggets for the attendants, who rush eagerly to feed him
delicacies. This turns into a reprise of the opening scene where Chihiro’s
parents cram themselves with goodies and turn into pigs. Now No-Face develops a
huge mouth-- not in his face mask but in his belly (like the Snapping Turks in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Submarine</i>); he grows bloated with food, and eats any of the
attendants whose service is not abject enough. He has also acquired a voice, a
bullying and demanding one-- except when he talks to Sen, reverting to his
halting pathetic grunts. No-Face has now become gigantic and is making more or
less the same mess in the bathhouse as the stink-spirit; Yubaba and the others
urgently call for Sen to help again. He offers Sen piles of gold, but she
refuses. As a last resort, she gives No-Face part of the magic pill she had
gotten from the stink-spirit-- she was saving it to rescue her parents, but
this seems more urgent. Can’t Buy Me Love is the theme here; No-Face shrinks
back down to his original form and leaves the bathhouse in peace, even
regurgitating the frog/people he has swallowed.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The plot
starts to tie up. Haku has returned in his dragon-shape, injured and bleeding,
from some mysterious struggle; and she rushes to rescue him. Sen, seeking for
Haku in Yubaba’s penthouse apartment, is caught by the baby who threatens to
break her apart if she won’t play with him; Yubaba appears, but turns out to be
another witch, Yubaba’s identical sister and rival Zeniba, who transforms the
baby into a tiny mouse (who henceforward accompanies Sen), while leaving a fake
baby in the nursery. Sen goes on a ghostly train-ride to Zeniba’s house, where
she expects to make amends for Haku’s magic thefts; No-Face pathetically
follows her, and she uses up her magical tickets to get him on the train. It is
plain everyday life in early 20th century Japan, with a late 20th century girl
sitting beside her sad tag-along friend.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>At Zeniba’s hut (a Grimm fairy-tale cottage), her apology is accepted,
and she learns that the spell on Haku has already been lifted-- Sen’s love
triumphs over magic (All You Need is Love). As she flies back on the
Haku-dragon, she recognizes him as a river she fell into as a child, and tells
him his river name. He transforms back into a boy, and they fall marvelously
through a beautiful blue sky, hand in hand, to the bathhouse. No-Face even gets
a home with Zeniba.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The film
is about what it is like to be Japanese: all-out, high-effort but meticulous
work; repetitive politeness-- bowing, chanting out welcomes, ritually
apologizing for failures. (We also see the backstage, beneath the hierarchy,
where workers among themselves are abrupt rather than polite.) Above all,
dedication to the work-team, all efforts together for the common task.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>By the end of the film, Sen is popular
with everyone. The bathhouse staff cheers her as Yubaba puts her through a last
ordeal to save her parents from being slaughtered as pigs. In the end, the only
bad guy is Yubaba, but Sen calls her Granny. It is a film of redemption, like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow Submarine,</i> except there it only
applies to the Blue Meanies-- under the power of the Beatles’ music, and not
too convincingly. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Spirited<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Away,</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> like <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Submarine</i>, is a nostalgia trip: to
the pre-war period, with deeper roots in Japan’s mythological past.
(Pepperland, before the Meanie conquest, is Edwardian England, depicted
idyllically in graceful, stylishly dressed cut-outs.) By the 1990s, Japan was
not only the technological marvel of the global world, but losing its social forms
to American-style casualness. No wonder Sen’s self-transformation and
rediscovery of Japan made it the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Spirited<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Away</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> builds on all its predecessors. Sen falls down a long
rickety flight of stairs to the boiler room, a more frightening version of down
the rabbit hole; she walks through interludes with the cartoon-beautiful Haku
in brilliant flower fields reminiscent of the 1951 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice </i>. On a deeper level, both No-Face (who might well be called
No-Name), and the central metaphysical magic of bondage by being deprived of
one’s true name, are sophisticated spin-offs of Lewis Carroll’s playing with
the logical meaning of names, and the murkiness of passing through the No Name
Woods. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The pair
of good and bad witches and the contests between magic powers reprise <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oz</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The bathhouse of monsters is a descendent of the
brightly-colored Sea of Monsters, by a later generation of film animation.
Cartooning has gotten better, showing more facial expressions and body gestures.
Chihiro/Sen is more psychologically realistic-- visually, too-- than Alice,
Dorothy, or the cartoon Beatles. Chihiro is a very ordinary little girl, not a
beautiful fairy-tale princess; her transformation is far more powerful than
1950s classics <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sleeping<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Beauty</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Cinderella </i>. Among Miyazaki’s heroines, Chihiro stands out as the
most complex and realistic. While the others are static personalities, she
changes. She is even drawn as more distinctively individual, in contrast to the
images of Princess-warriors and eager girls that Miyazaki recycles from one
film to another.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But
then, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spirited<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Away</i> is on a different level than Miyazaki’s other
films. It joins a different tradition of fantasy classics-- not adventure
escape but the transformation of everyday life into a spirit world,.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Secret of Failure Following
Success</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lewis
Carroll attempts a second sequel to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alice
in Wonderland,</i> but <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno</i>
flops. L. Frank Baum would rather have <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Wonderful Wizard of Oz </i>as a theatre piece than a novel; he invents other
children’s fantasy-lands that don’t appeal, and only abandons his
lecture-plus-film road show and returns to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oz</i> series when he runs out of money. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow Submarine </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>has
no sequel, and the Beatles break up two years later, never to be as successful
separately as they were together. It is by far the most memorable of the four
Beatles films, the others being can’t-get-enough-of-them fan films (although
their first film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hard Day’s Night,</i>
is not only full of early Beatles’ performances but a satire on the recording
industry run by adults exploiting youth culture without understanding it). </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Miyazaki
does not quite fit the failed sequel pattern, since he never tried a sequel to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spirited<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Away. </i>It was the 9th of his 13 films (plus another 5 rather
average children’s films that he produced or co-wrote). The only other one that
attempts something serious is his final film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wind Rises </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(2013),
which tells the story of a Japanese pioneer of aviation engineering before
World War II. This is Miyazaki’s own family biography, aggrandized into
fantasy, since his father ran an aircraft manufacturing plant.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(Hayao was born in 1942, and had early
memories of American fire-bombing.) As usual, the visuals are beautiful, but it
lacks the psychological depth of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spirited<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Away. </i>Miyazaki was in the
children’s cartoon business his entire life, and only two of his films are
genuine cross-over fantasy for adults; of these, his semi-biographical finale
is something he did to clear the memory decks. So here our question shifts
into: why, during a long creative career, is the classic-making peak so hard to
hit and to sustain?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Having
done it once shows that you have the techniques. Why then can’t you just repeat
them, with structural modifications and new materials? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Too much inventiveness, too many
materials.</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All these creative artists were
supremely versatile, good at observations from life, well-versed in the
classics of their field, clever at sifting and inventing techniques. They had,
on the whole, much more material than they could use. Paradoxically, this
became a weakness and an impediment to further finished products at the highest
level. Their inventiveness generated huge stock-piles, hoards of material they
felt they had to empty out. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Carroll
poured the contents of an office-full of materials into <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvie and Bruno</i>, creating a jumble. Good ideas got in each other’s
way; bad ideas-- or at least ones that were inappropriate for the mix-- spoiled
the effect.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A writer
can lose one’s judgment on too great a pile of materials. Baum immediately
turned <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Wonderful Wizard of Oz</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>into a play where Dorothy is cast as an
adult, eliminating the magic, and turning the rest into political
parodies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some of the changes no
doubt came from his producers, but Baum had been a newspaper editor and writer
of political satires, so it is safe to say he was shifting to another of his
long-standing interests. It was the book market and the insistence of his
publisher in continuing the Oz series that produced the long string of successful
sequels, not Baum’s own judgment.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Boredom with the success formula.</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baum repeatedly turned away from writing Oz books to do
something else.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course one can
get bored with doing the same thing, even if it was successful. Boredom was
part of the breakup of the Beatles. In cases like Baum’s, boredom is a
byproduct of having too many interests, being too clever and inventive, so that
new topics in the forefront of one’s mind obscure the successful formulas in
one’s corpus.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Losing the tone. </span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Carroll’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sylvia and
Bruno</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>fails, among other
reasons, because too much of it is preachy and moralizing. His political
satires are sometimes clever but the tone is too seriously meant. It is true
that an early fantasy classic like<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gulliver’s Travels</i> is full of
political satire; but it was not a children’s cross-over fantasy at the time it
was first read, and as it became a classic over the generations the political
allusions dropped out of recognition. Baum’s original <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Wonderful Wizard of Oz</i> had contemporary political overtones; and
that was the way it was played in the stage version. It may well be true that
the Tin Woodman represents industrial labor, and the Scarecrow, agriculture;
while the Cowardly Lion and the Wizard caricature William Jennings Bryan and
other politicians of the day. But knowing this does not make the Oz story more
enjoyable, but rather less so. The successful sequels dropped these
contemporary characters, and where they played with political themes (the
feminist army in the second book), they did it with a light touch. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yellow Submarine,</i> too, can be regarded
as a political movie, an anti-war statement at the height of the Vietnam War.
But the Blue Meanies are easily vanquished, and what makes the film memorable
is above all the central portion while the submarine is navigating various
metaphysical seas. It is here that it is cross-over fantasy at its best.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Creativity is not enough.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Perhaps surprisingly, creative inventiveness is the
relatively easy part, once you get the hang of it. Creativity means making
something new. Can there be a technique for this? Certainly; we’ve seen how
it’s done. Humorous inventions (and non-humorous ones as well) are made by
reversals of words or ideas. New situations, characters and plot ideas are made
by recombining existing ones, with a few reversals, giving a new mix. The
results are ironies, satires, and jokes. In the adult/child cross-over fantasy
genre, some of the best effects come from clever combination of philosophical
and naive levels. Lewis Carroll constructed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Through
the Looking Glass </i>with just these techniques.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">But
generating a lot of such material is not enough for a successful book or film. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Pace and rhythm has to control
creative materials.</span></i><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Having a creative
idea-- a reversal or recombination-- is enough to make a writer feel inspired.
But it needs to be worked out, in the proper length and detail; if not, it lies
among one’s papers as notes to be developed. This is the source of the backlog
problem that weighs on a creative person and can lead to the obstacles listed
above. Assuming one gets the time and the material resources to work out some
of these creative elements, there is still the issue of how they combine into
an overall package. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A
successful work needs a pace and a rhythm, and this is something over and above
the clever pieces that go into it. Ironically, too much creativity can get in
the way of a successful product. The total product is not something static but
the flow of experience in audience-time: the difference between a new classic
and a book you stop reading or a film you can’t quite get into. Pace and rhythm
is something a great writer learns too, but it appears to be the aspect that
most easily gets overwhelmed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">For
explaining creativity, a key comparison is the successes and failures of the
same author, at different points in their career. Obviously, since it is the
same person, clichés like genius or talent are no use. Finding one’s voice is
certainly something that happens; in micro-detail, it means that the author/artist
has found the techniques and the niche in which to construct something that
attracts lasting admiration. What about losing one’s voice, after you have
found it? That part of the creative process is what this essay is about.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">References</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Klaus
Peter Dencker. 2006.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Deutsche Unsinnpoesie.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Max
Ernst. 1934/1976.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Une semaine de bonté. A surrealistic novel
in collage.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Maurice
Nadeau. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A History of Surrealism.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mel
Gooding and Alastair Brotchie. 1993. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Surrealist
Games.</i> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: black; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Wikipedia
articles</span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-24228657807366881952017-02-17T09:37:00.000-08:002017-02-17T09:51:20.273-08:00THE ASSASSINATION OF THE TERRACOTTA EMPEROR (a fiction after the style of Jorge Luis Borges)<style>
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<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Most
famous of all the Emperors of China was Ying Zheng, King of the state of Qin,
who united the Warring States and took the title Qin Shihuang-di, the First
Emperor.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The thousands of
life-sized terracotta warriors buried with him are described by tour guides as
the Eighth Wonder of the World. Their sight proclaims China on tourist posters
all over the world, and heads of state visit to have themselves photographed
with China’s new rulers alongside the terracotta army. Qin Shihuang-di ended
the anarchy of the feudal lords, bringing order out of chaos by imposing
uniform laws, standardizing the writing scripts, unifying the currency, even
regulating the length of cart axels so that the ruts of roads everywhere might
be equally passable. He established the rule of centralized bureaucracy which
became the stamp of Chinese civilization, and began the cycle of dynasties that
fall only to rise again.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He built
the Great Wall to keep out the Northern Barbarians, sending 700,000 workers
whose bones were buried under the Wall to make it strong. His tomb took 38
years to build, the length of his entire reign, consuming another 700,000
workers. They surrounded it with underground caverns filled with terracotta
warriors and battle chariots lifelike in every detail, and also with real
horses and household servants who were buried with him, along with incalculable
treasures in jade and gold. To deter grave-robbers, crossbows were cunningly
set to kill any intruder in the underground passageways, and the craftsmen who
knew the secrets of the tomb were buried inside it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">Qin Shihuang-di</span>
was a tyrant, but a great one.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Even
his enemy Jia Yi, writing in the Han Dynasty which overthrew the Qin after the
death of Qin-Shihuang-di, extolled him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>According to the ancient text: “After this the First Emperor arose to
carry on the glorious achievements of six generations. Cracking his long whip,
he drove the universe before him, swallowing up the eastern and western Zhou
and overthrowing the feudal lords. He ascended to the highest position and
ruled the six directions, scourging the world with his rod, and his might shook
the four seas. In the south he seized the land of Yüeh and made of it the
Cassia Forest and Elephant commandaries, and the hundred lords of Yüeh bowed
their heads, hung halters from their necks, and pleaded for their lives with
the lowest officials of Qin. Then he caused General Meng Tian to build the
Great Wall and defend the borders, driving back the Huns over seven hundred li<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>so that the barbarians no longer dared
to come south to pasture their horses and their men dared not take up their
bows to avenge their hatred.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Thereupon
he discarded the ways of the former kings and burned the writings of the
hundred schools in order to make the people ignorant. He destroyed the
fortifications of the states, assassinated their powerful leaders, collected
all the arms of the empire, and had them brought to his capital where the
spears and arrowheads were melted down to make twelve human statues, in order
to weaken the people of the empire. He garrisoned the strategic points with
skilled generals and expert bowmen and stationed trusted ministers and
well-trained soldiers to guard the land with arms and question all who passed
back and forth. When he had thus pacified the empire, the First Emperor
believed in his heart that with the strength of his capital within the Pass and
his walls of metal extending a thousand miles, he had established a rule that
would be enjoyed by his descendants for ten thousand generations.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Nevertheless,
the old chronicles tell us, the great Emperor came close to being assassinated
before all this could be done.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>None of this might have come about: China unified, cart axels, pottery
soldiers and all. The Grand Historian, Sima Qian tells the story, which he
verified from those who had talked to eyewitnesses at the scene. Qin had not
yet destroyed the six remaining great feudal states, but pressure was growing.
His generals inflicted defeated on the state of Zhao to the east, and buried
alive the 400,000 soldiers who surrendered. The state of Yan, in the north, was
the weakest of the states; its prince, Dan, knew that if the other states fell,
Yan could not survive. At this time Fan Yuqi, a Qin general, knowing that his
master Ying Zheng, King of Qin, was unforgiving of failure but jealous of
success, fled to the protection of Yan. Knowing that receiving Fan Yuqi would
provoke Qin even more, nevertheless Prince Dan took him in. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>His
worries redoubled, Prince Dan sent for a famous assassin, Jing Ke, and asked
him to eliminate the tyrant. But the King of Qin sat always in fear for his
life; how would Jing Ke come armed into his presence? Only one way: the Prince
must send a secret envoy, offering alliance; to assure good faith, he must
carry the head of the traitor Fan Yuqi. He would also offer a map of the Yan
fortresses, wrapped up in which would be the dagger Jing Ke would use to kill
Ying Zheng.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jing
Ke agreed to the plan and called on Fan Yuqi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The ex-general received the assassin courteously. He had
been thinking, he said, of how he could contribute to revenge on the King of
Qin. Now he understood; and with that, he cut his own</div>
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<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>throat,
offering his head to Jing Ke.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Jing
Ke now journeyed to Qin, offering bribes and gifts to the appropriate officials
to arrange an audience with King Ying Zheng. Ushered into the royal chamber, he
took the head of Fan Yuqi from the box in which it was packed with salt, and
brandished it before King Ying Zheng. The king beckoned Jing Ke forward to
unroll the map of the Yan fortifications. Seizing the dagger that appeared at
the end of the roll, Jing Ke sprang forward. Now the king, terrified of
assassination, allowed no one armed to enter his inner hall; so the courtiers
and attendants were unable to defend against Jing Ke.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
king alone had a sword, but it was a ceremonial sword, longer than anyone
else’s because he was the king; its scabbard was so long that he could not draw
the blade as Jing Ke rushed at him. They darted around the pillars of the court
chamber, Jing Ke giving chase with the dagger, King Ying Zheng fleeing and
trying to draw his sword, while his courtiers watched in horror. Or perhaps
indifference. No one gave orders to call armed soldiers from the outer halls,
and since they had not been called, no one risked punishment by entering the
upper hall.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Only the court
physician, Xia Wuqie, battered at Jing Ke’s dagger with his medicine kit. At
last the king unsheathed his sword and managed to cut down Jing Ke’s legs.
Falling, Jing Ke hurled the dagger at the king, but missed him and struck a
pillar. Thus King Ying Zheng of Qin escaped assassination. The assassin Jing Ke
was hacked to pieces and his head displayed on the city walls. The king of Yan,
hoping to appease the wrath of Qin, ordered the head of Prince Dan cut off and
sent to Qin, but a massive Qin army destroyed Yan, and soon after unified the
Middle Kingdom.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Such
is the story as reported by Sima Qian, Grand Historian of the Han dynasty, who
lived 100 years ater Ying Zheng, the First Emperor. In truth, the story went
differently. As the courtiers stood paralyzed, or indifferent, while Jing Ke
brandished his dagger, only the court physician Xia Wuqie<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>attempted to protect the king. But as
he moved forward to place his medical kit between the king and the assassin’s
dagger, he was held back by a pull of the long sleeve of his gown by the Prime
Minister, Li Si . The tyrant king Ying Zheng was unable to draw his sword from
its scabbard, and as he dodged behind the pillars, Jing Ke’s dagger found its
target. The tyrant was dead. Only then did the Prime Minister Li Si call the
guards from the lower chamber, who rushed in and killed Jing Ke. At a sign from
Li Si, they killed too all the courtiers who were close enough to see what had
happened -- whether as punishment for not protecting </div>
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their soverign, or to eliminate witnesses of the deed, no
one would ever know. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Now
Prime Minister Li Si and court physician Xia Wuqie held conference over the
king’s corpse, out of sight behind a pillar. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“The
situation is thus,” observed Li Si. “King Ying Zheng was suspicious of
everyone. That is why our most successful general, Fan Yuqi, fled to Yan. Ying
Zheng has been king since he was twelve years old. As he has grown up, it has
begun to dawn on him that we ministers, who flatter him as the great and
tyrannical king, have always controlled the state of Qin. Soon he would have
turned his suspicions on us. It is better we are rid of him.”</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“In
that case,” remarked the physician Xia Wuqie, “are we not now superfluous? Or
do you intend to make yourself king?”</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Not
at all,” said Prime Minister Li Si. “Who I am is known to everyone. It is
preferable to remain Prime Minister, and replace the king.”</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“To
replace a king is not easy,” replied Xia Wuqie.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“On
the contrary,” said Li Si, “this very king, Ying Zheng, was just such a
replacement. You may recall my predecessor, the Prime Minister Lü Buwei. He was
once a common man, merely a wealthy merchant. But he befriended one of the
grandsons of a previous king of Qin; standing nearly lowest out of more than 20
sons of the royal concubines, Prince Zichu had little chance of receiving the
succession on his own. By distributing bribes and gifts at court, Lü Buwei had
the king’s favorite concubine, who was childless, adopt this prince as her own
son, and by her wiles prevail upon the old king to put aside his first son and
name Prince Zichu as his heir. Then Lü Buwei, promoted to Prime Minister, gave
one of his own beautiful concubines to Prince Zichu; in fact she was already pregnant
by Lü Buwei, but Prince Zichu believed he himself quickly impregnated her with
a son. It was this son, Ying Zheng, who succeeded his father as king of Qin.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Being
only twelve years old when he ascended the throne, Ying Zheng was naturally
under the advice of Prime Minister Lü Buwei. As we know, for six generations
the state of Qin has followed a policy of expansion. Ministers have come from
every state, offering their clever plans, and the shrewdest have been given
office here in Qin. Our generals have built the most massive armies, scouring
territories of the outlying marchlands west of the Pass and south into Sichuan
to build up our population. Our ministers have established laws regulating the
people, concentrating power in the tentacles of the court, while the other
feudal states have allowed a free hand to their unruly barons. Our policy has
worked well, as long as no ruler was allowed to interfere with it. Therefore,
in order to occupy the attention of young King Ying Zheng, Prime Minister Lü Buwei
encouraged him to take an interest in magic, and flattered him to believe
himself a cruel tyrant. As soon as Ying Zheng took the throne, the Prime
Minister set before him plans to build his tomb, greater than any predecessor.
Three hundred years before, King Jingsong of Qin buried hundreds of horses and
attendants in his tomb; King Ying Zheng of Qin would have thousands more. Lü
Buwei sent to him alchemists and sorcerers, filling his ears with tales of
magic potions bringing immortality. Thus the King of Qin thought more of his
tomb than of anything else; he would have an army underground to accompany him
in the afterlife -- and protect him too, since already in his young life his
cruelty surrounded him with enemies, and the world of immortality in the grave
is in this respect no different than our mortal life. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Thus
young King Ying Zheng enjoyed his cruelties and took pleasure in building his
huge underground toy. But Lü Buwei let himself become too grand. He began
secretly to take back his beautiful concubine, aged though she was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Finding her insatiable, he arranged
other lovers for her, choosing a man with a giant penis who they secretly
passed into the women’s quarters as a eunuch. On reaching the age of
twenty-two, King Ying Zheng grew suspicious; he had his mother imprisoned, and
her suspected lovers killed, along with their relatives through the third
degree of kinship. Lü Buwei, realizing he had overreached himself, offered to
retire. But even on his vast country estate, King Ying Zheng suspected Lü Buwei
of being too grand; taking a hint, Lü Buwei killed himself. It is thus that I,
Li Si, became Prime Minister.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
have guarded King Ying Zheng since he was twenty-two. I have changed nothing
suddenly, only extended previous precedents. King Ying Zheng I have kept
occupied with filling his vast tomb with precious objects and building his army
of terracotta warriors, while I have continued plans of previous Prime
Ministers to build the state of Qin and unify the Middle Kingdom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Our armies grow steadily stronger than
any of the feudal states. They are stronger, too, even off the battlefield,
since they are drawn from a population where everyone is harnessed to the will
of the state. Elsewhere the feudal nobles do what they wish, following their honor
codes of loyalty to friends and sworn vengeance to enemies. Here in Qin no one
stands above the law. Only one, the king appears to stand above. But he too
does not escape the law; he is merely the name in which all others are leveled.
</div>
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"The king of Qin is at the center of this circle
we are constructing, because we need one point on which all eyes are focused.
But the king does this for Qin only as long as I control him, I the Prime
Minister, just as another Prime Minister did before, and another Prime Minister
will after me. At times I have considered: if this child ever realizes what we
are doing, he will ruin everything. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Of
late, it has come close to that. Ying Zheng’s suspicions were growing. His
cruelties were striking everywhere, ever closer at hand. It was time to replace
him. Heaven has sent this assassin at the right time. Truly, Heaven looks down
on the state of Qin, and on its destiny to unify the Middle Kingdom.”</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Court
physician Xia Wuqie bowed his head to Prime Minister Li Si in the kowtow.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“You are truly wise, Prime
Minister.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But what shall we do
with the corpse of Ying Zheng?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
who shall we put in its place?”</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“There
is a servant in my household,” said Li Si.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“Low-born, lacking confidence in himself, he will do what I
suggest. His face and body match the late King Ying Zheng well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He is superstitious too, a halfwit. He
is also a coward, fearful of enemies, so we can easily make him Ying Zheng,
fearful of assassins. I have detected in him signs of cruelty, and that too we
can encourage, giving him petty victims to begin with. Let him start by
executing his fellow servants of my household, who might recognize him, and the
former servants of Ying Zheng. They can be executed for treason, for failing to
fend off the assassin. After that, let him move on to bigger cruelties. We can
use him to cut off any rivals who might appear at court, who have designs on
our own offices.”</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>So
it was done. The young halfwit was dressed in the robes of the king, and taught
to brag how he killed the assassin with his own sword while his cowardly
courtiers watched. To get him in the right spirit, Li Si and the physician Xia
Wuqie had him hack at the body of the dead king Ying Zheng, after it had been
stripped of its clothes, until it was mutilated beyond recognition. This they
represented as a henchman of the assassin; and its head too was displayed on
the city wall.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
so the halfwit was set on the throne. Qin’s armies resumed their task of
reducing the state of Zhao in the northwest and Yan in the north, Han and Wei
in the center, Chu in the south, and finally the mighty king of Chi in the
east.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In 221 B.C. the halfwit was
named emperor of all the Middle Kingdom.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>On the advice of his ministers (Li Si standing in the front row not too
far forward, showing due humility as no more than foremost among the ranks
below the emperor), he took the title of Qin Shihuang-di. Being told repeatedly
by everyone of his great achievements, he came to believe in them himself.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For
Li Si, there remained one chief problem. Only the court physician, Xia Wuqie,
knew the secret.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The thought began
to trouble Li Si’s mind: had he told anyone? The scholars too seemed to have an
air of knowing something, both Li Si’s old schoolmates in the School of Rigidly
Enforced Laws, as well as the advocates of the other systems, the followers of
Confucius and Modi and Laozi, the theorists of the Yin-Yang and of the Five
Processes, the debaters and the School of Names. The solution was simple. Li Si
insinuated to the emperor that the scholars were plotting against him, using
their books (which he could not read) as evil portents against his rule. The
emperor obligingly ordered all books collected and burned. When the scholars
protested, 460 of them were buried alive. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
emperor became steadily more cruel, and more concerned with magic. The Prime
Minister, extending old policy, suggested connecting all the walls of the older
states of the north into one Great Wall to keep the Huns beyond the borders.
The Emperor accepted the suggestion, but believed the magicians who told him
that the wall would be strong only if thousands of living persons were buried
alive beneath the wall. His tomb became a maze of caverns beneath an enormous
mound. The emperor began to meld in his halfwit mind the idea of immortality in
the grave and immortality above the ground, through magic potions that would
enable him to mount to the sky as equal of the gods. He sent expeditions into
the Eastern Sea, toward the Land of the Rising Sun, where alchemists told him the
potion of immortality would be found, if only the ships were manned by 4000
beautiful boys and girls. These were taken from their wailing parents and sent
off, but the ships always wrecked and never came back successfully.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
two old conspirators, Li Si and the court physician Xia Wuqie, grew
increasingly suspicious of each other.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Xia Wuqie acted first; in his straightforward way, he decided to explain
to the emperor the true circumstances of how Li Si had put him on the throne.
Affronted by a dim recollection that no longer fit his sense of himself as the
great Qin Shihuang-di, the emperor had Xia Wuqie struck down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But the thought lingered in his mind;
perhaps Li Si was plotting against him. Others, quick to see how the wind was
blowing, began to spread rumours about Li Si. The burning of the books and
execution of the scholars had increased the numbers of his enemies. It ws not
difficult, with a distribution of gifts and bribes, to have stories circulate
that would reach the emperor behind the back of Li Si.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>One day Li Si found himself on the
execution ground, the emperor watching from one tower, the new Prime Minister
(a hitherto unnoticed court official) from the other, while the relatives of Li
Si through three degrees of kinship were lined up to be executed, and Li Si was
sentenced to be cut in half.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>*</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Does
the story end here? Like a cycle that is the history of China (and the pattern
of the world, according to some sects of the scholars), events turn on a wheel.
Sometimes faster:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>after ten years
of the reign that was to last ten thousand generations, the First Emperor died,
poisoned by mercury which was the principal ingredient of the immortality
potions he was taking. After his death, revolt broke out.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Peasants exhausted by work on the Great
Wall and on the enormous tomb with its terracotta warriors, flocked to join
rebel armies. The court at the emperor’s magnificent city of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Xianyang broke into factions; no one
gathered in his fist all the reins of power like the Prime Ministers Li Si, Lü
Buwei, or their predecessors; each turned on each, betraying them to the
rebels. The city of Xianyang and its palace were destroyed. The underground
caverns of terracotta warriors were broken into, their weapons stolen to arm
the rebels, the statues smashed into shards, not to be reassembled until
archeologists twenty-two centuries later began to reconstruct their own myth. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
empire of the great tyrant was shattered. On its ashes, the leaders of the
peasant revolt built a new empire and a new city, Changan (which later
generations would call Xi’an), a few kilometers east of the city of Xianyang.
The glorious Han dynasty arose, taking over the laws of the Qin -- its
mutilations and punishments, its conscript armies, its people condemned as
criminals and sent as slave labor to build new walls, or march in ranks like
live terracotta warriors to extend the frontiers of the Middle Kingdom in every
direction. Sima Qian, who preserved the stories of the the evil Qin emperor and
his would-be assassin, himself lived under a newer and greater Emperor,
Wudi.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Angering the emperor for
some offense -- could it have been protesting against repeating the policy of
the tyrannical First Emperor, when the Han emperor Wudi conscripted new
millions to build walls and extend even further the Middle Kingdom?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However that may be, Sima Qian offended
the emperor enough to be sentenced to castration -- not to death by being cut
in two, nor to having his head displayed on the city walls, since the Han
dynasty was a more progressive time, and laws were adjusted to circumstances.
Thus Sima Qian survived, to give us the records of the Grand Historian, and to
hide from us (although, we believe, with guarded omissions and hints), the
truth of the assassination of the First Emperor, Qin Shihuang-di.</div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Sometimes
the wheel turns slower: more than twenty centuries later, another period of
Warring States returned, followed by yet another unification.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some date it to the time of the Opium
Wars with the Western Barbarians, some to the rebellion of the Taiping
tian-guo, the Kingdom of Great Heavenly Peace, some to the warlords of the
1920s and the invasion of the Japanese from the Land of the Rising Sun. After
this came another turn of the wheel, the unification of the Middle Kingdom.
Righteous and militant, its leaders proposed a rule of rigorously enforced
laws, with all people in equality beneath the state. Here again ministers
struggled at court over who should be the point on which all eyes are focused,
the picture on the front of the Imperial Palace in the capital city. In the
struggle, one minister in emulation of Li Si launched another burning of the
books. This too, like all burnings of books, flared up unstoppably and then
burned itself out. During a period of twelve years (the length of the Qin
dynasty itself, from 221 B.C. to the death of the First Emperor in 209 B.C.),
the book burners buried in peasant villages those who wrote books and those who
read them. And since books are written not only on strips of bamboo and on
paper, but also on stone steles and inscribed on walls and in very shape of the
statues and the tile roofs of temples and all the monuments of culture, there
was a formidable task of destruction to be done, too much for the book burners
to carry it all out before they themselves burned out. </div>
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<span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Fortunately
-- or not, since in the great turnings of the wheel nothing happens by chance
-- in 1974 A.D., exactly twenty-two hundred years after the assassin threw his
dagger at the First Emperor, peasants digging a well in the countryside near
the old imperial cities of Xianyang and Changan, came across the underground
caverns and Qin Shihuang-di’s armies of terracotta warriors. The book burners
were flickering, their leader aging and about to die. The new regime, eager to
divert attention from the emblem of the leader whose picture looked down from
every wall, seized on the new discovery of the old emblem.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>An army of archeologists reconstructed
and reassembled the terracotta army, and in 1979 -- the year China opened a new
policy and pierced its own walls to the world -- the Eighth Wonder of the World
was announced. Foreign heads of state, and tourists bringing money for
development and admiration to rebuild the prestige of China’s ancient<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>culture, were invited to Xi’an and
photographed in front of the terracotta warriors of Qin Shihuang-di. The First
Emperor, great builder and great tyrant, who was himself but another terracotta
warrior, now took the place of the great leader, great picture on the wall of the
Imperial Palace in the capital city.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The wheel turned.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-75818277188795714802017-01-03T11:59:00.001-08:002017-01-06T10:58:42.776-08:00THE RASHOMON EFFECT DE-MYSTIFIED<style>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Akira
Kurosawa’s film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rashomon,</i> is famous
as an unsolvable puzzle: multiple clashing viewpoints, with no truth to be
found. If we view the film through the eyes of the sociology of fighting,
however, one of the four witness accounts is true to life. The others are
largely false. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Four realities</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
film tells the story of a murder and rape set in Japan during a lawless period
of the 12th century. There are four witnesses. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">bandit</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>says he was aroused by the sight of a beautiful woman on
horseback being led through the woods by a samurai. The bandit offers to show
the samurai where a cache of weapons is hidden in the forest; when they arrive
there, the bandit seizes the samurai from behind and ties him up, then lures
the woman to the forest glade and rapes her. Afterwards, she tells the bandit
that she can’t live with the shame of being seen by two men, and that one of
them must die. The bandit unties the samurai and gives him his sword back. They
fight heroically in classic samurai style. The bandit brags about it after he
is captured: no one ever clashed swords with me for twenty strokes; we fought
like tigers until I killed him with the twenty-third stroke. But the woman had
run away.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">woman </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>says that after the rape, she rushed to her husband and cut
him free with her dagger. But in his eyes she saw only a cold look of loathing.
The bandit was gone. She tells her husband that she can no longer live with
him, and asks him to kill her. When he refuses, she loses consciousness, then
awakens to find she has stabbed him. She tries to kill herself but she hadn’t
the strength. So she ran away.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dead man’s </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>story is told by a spirit-medium, to testify before the
police investigator. After the rape, the samurai remained tied up, listening to
his wife’s conversation. The bandit tells her that her virtue is stained, so
that her husband won’t take her back; why not marry him instead? She suddenly
cries out, Kill him! I can’t marry you as long as he lives. The bandit angrily
knocks her down, and asks the samurai what he should do with her, kill her or
let her live? While the samurai struggles to answer, the woman escapes into the
forest, and the bandit cuts his bonds and disappears. After a long silence, the
samurai hears someone crying: it is himself. He finds his wife’s dagger and
stabs himself. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">These
three witnesses comprise the story as written in 1922 by Ryunosuke Akutagawa,
which Kurosawa used as the basis for his 1950 film. But Kurosawa now adds a
fourth witness. In the original, there is a woodcutter who finds the body. In
the film, Kurosawa has the <i>woodcutter</i> tell his story, not to the police
inspector, but to a small group of listeners at Rashomon gate, where they are
waiting out a rainstorm. The woodcutter, hiding among the trees, saw the rape
and its aftermath. The two men fight, but not at all in the heroic samurai
style. Both are tense and fearful; they hang back, make sudden charges and
retreat again. They swing wildly and can’t keep their feet, falling into the
bushes in their uncontrolled rushes. Finally the samurai drops his sword and
gets tangled in branches-- an easy target, finally, for the bandit to stab him
through the heart.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Real fights in sociological
observation</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
fourth version is true to life. Fighting in films and in literature has almost
always been depicted inaccurately, portraying fighters as more heroic than they
really are. In the last 20 years, as real fights have been captured on video
and CCTV, sociologists find a very different pattern. Fighters are tense and
mostly incompetent. They swing wildly, shoot inaccurately and hit the wrong
targets. Because of the tension, angry disputes often end in standoffs before
they get going; most fights abort without a clear winner. This is the pattern
in fist-fights as well as gun violence. One-on-one confrontations are the
hardest to carry off; most such fights abort. The exception is where there is
an audience who cheers on the fighters, making it more like a boxing match or a
duel, where the social pressure of the group keeps them fighting. Fights
between evenly matched antagonists have the highest tension; violence is
successful mainly when it consists in the strong attacking the weak, catching
them off guard in an ambush, or by a group ganging up on a single individual--
the most common pattern of violence seen in riots. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rashomon,</i> the fighters are evenly
matched-- the bandit versus the samurai. At the very beginning, the bandit
attacks the samurai from behind and ties him up; attacking from behind is a
favorite tactic of robbers, giving a psychological advantage, avoiding the
tension that results when the contenders stare in each other’s face. Later-- in
the woodcutter’s account of the sword fight-- they are evenly matched, and
hesitant to fight. The woman goads them into fighting, screaming that neither
is acting like a real man; but once the fighting begins she is terrified, can
scarcely bear to watch the fight, and runs away. This fight fits the pattern of
the most difficult kind of confrontation-- one-on-one, without a supporting
audience. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And
here the fighters are very incompetent. Their sword-swings and lunges are
clumsy; they screw up their courage, then run away; they have trouble staying
on their feet. This clumsiness is common in cell-phone videos of fighters,
whose wild swings often throw themselves off balance; in street confrontations
with guns (as among rival gangs), there is a lot of wild firing that misses its
target. The threat of a violent confrontation generates a surge of adrenaline,
the flight-or-fight hormone, tensing up the body to go either way. The
mythology of fighting pretends that the adrenaline surge (called “heart” or
“courage”) always presses forward in a determined attack; in reality, most
fighters either retreat or at best keep themselves on the spot by an effort at
self-control, their body pulling two ways at once. This is the mechanism that
produces heavy breathing and trembling limbs, with the result that fighters
often can’t control their fists or their weapons. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Confrontational tension in
sword-fighting</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This
is what we see in the woodcutter’s account of the fight: they are tense,
breathing heavily, gasping for breath, wearing themselves down as the fight
proceeds. The bandit only wins because his opponent loses his sword and becomes
tangled in the bushes. Suddenly it turns into an unfair fight, the strong
attacking the weak, and this is when the bandit gets enough control over his
bodily tension to kill him. After the fight, he is so debilitated that he can
barely walk away. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Almost
all our evidence of realistic violence in video and first-hand observation
comes from modern times, in fights with fists or guns. Does it also fit sword
fights? Certainly there are a lot of Hollywood movies and TV series of medieval
heroes and sword-and-sorcery dramas, showing sword-fighters in the mythical
heroic mode: never afraid, always attacking and counter-attacking; far from
being clumsy, they make acrobatic moves, especially when the hero has to swirl
around fighting his way through a crowd of opponents on all sides. This is also
the style of kung-fu films and Chinese flying-dragon films, where the
acrobatics are enhanced by computer-generated images. And Japanese samurai
films-- including those made by Kurosawa in his long career after he made <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rashomon</i>-- also show Zen-inspired
warriors, flashing their lightning sword-thrusts and making the graceful moves
of a martial arts school routine. All this means is that sword-fighting films,
both the Western and the East Asian versions, are designed to be an
entertaining spectacle. It’s all done in the studio, and the film editing.
Movie sword-fights are no more accurate than movie fist fights or gun
fights.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Here
are two pieces of direct evidence. A samurai in 1864 just before the Meiji
revolution in Japan describes a night-time encounter<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>on the streets of Edo (Tokyo): </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“The
time had already turned an hour past midnight-- a cold and clear winter night
with the moon shining brightly overhead. Its silent, white beams made me feel
unusually chilly for no good reason. I walked along the broad, vacant street--
no one in sight, absolutely still. Yet I remembered that strolling ruffians had
been appearing every night, cutting down unfortunate victims at dark corners.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
saw a man coming toward me. He looked gigantic in the moonlight, though now I
would not swear to his stature at all. On came the giant. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“
‘I cannot run back,’ I thought, ‘for the rascal would only take advantage of my
weakness and chase me more surely. I had better go ahead. And if I go ahead, I
must pretend not to be afraid. I must even threaten him.’ </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
moved diagonally to the middle of the street from the left side where I had
been walking. Then the other fellow moved out too. This gave me a shock, but
now there was no retreating an inch. If he were to draw, I must draw too. As I
had practiced the art of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">iai,</i> I knew
how to handle my sword.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>‘How shall I kill him? Well, I shall
give a thrust from below.’</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“I
was perfectly determined that I was going to fight and felt ready if he showed
the slightest challenge. He drew nearer...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Now
there seemed no alternative. If the stranger were to show any offense, I must
kill him. At that time there was no such thing as police or criminal court. If
I were to kill an unknown man, I would simply run home, and that would be the
end of it. We were about to meet.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Every
step brought us nearer, and finally we were at a striking distance. He did not
draw. Of course I did not draw either. And we passed each other. With this as a
cue, I ran. I don’t remember how fast I ran. After going a little distance, I
turned to look back as I flew. The other man was running, too, in his
direction. I drew a breath of relief and saw the funny side of the whole
incident. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Neither
had the least idea of killing the other, but had put up a show of boldness in
fear of the other. And both ran at the same moment... He must have been
frightened; I certainly was.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Autobiography of Fukuzawa Yukichi, </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>236-37]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">During
the Tokugawa period of the 1600s, when the civil wars had ended, the Shogun
required all the great lords and their samurai to spend every other year in
Edo. The samurai spent much of their time in sword-fighting academies, where
the graceful movements of stylized exercises and mock duels were practiced. It
kept the samurai ethos alive, but in fact it was almost all for show. There was
very little real fighting, while carrying swords and displaying the elegant
etiquette of the sword schools became a key part of the samurai code. Japanese sword-fighting
turned into the equivalent of boxing gyms, which in England and the United
States became popular for men at just the time when modern law-and-order was
eliminating duels and most real fighting. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The bandit’s idealized
sword-fight</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
bandit’s account portrays the usual mythology of fighting. It is all very
honorable; the bandit cuts the samurai free so that they can have a fair fight,
just man-on-man, to decide who will get the woman. Both look like they were
trained in a sword-fighting school, making all the proper feints and maneuvers.
The bandit is bragging, showing off afterwards to the police and declaring that
he expects to die sooner or later and he repents of nothing. His claim that
they crossed swords 23 times is implausible-- not that it couldn’t have
happened, but a real fighter in the midst of adrenaline rush would find most of
it a blur.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(This is typical of
cops describing their experiences in a gun-fight, where time is distorted and they
often are unaware of how many shots they fired.) In the bandit’s version of the
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rashomon</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>fight,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>both men
perform their moves like a ballet or a sword-school exercise. This is the
opposite of the woodcutter’s version, which shows the fighters sweating profusely.
Their breathing is so heavy that it fills the sound track.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The other two versions</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">We can
rule out the bandit’s version, and accept the truth of the woodcutter’s
version, as far as the sword-fight goes. What about the other two stories--
could they be true? There is no fighting in either of these. In the woman’s
version, she cuts her husband loose, but he refuses to fight for her. In the
dead man’s version, he also refuses to fight, refuses to let the bandit kill
his wife (even though in his view she has betrayed him), and kills himself. Both
accounts are self-serving. The woman says she killed her husband while she was
blacked out. This is plausible; losing conscious awareness can happen during
extreme states of adrenaline rush. After she runs away, she tries to kill
herself by drowning, but fails. This too is plausible, since the majority of
suicide attempts fail, and women’s attempts fail more frequently than men’s. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If we
leave aside the sword-fights, comparing the four stories one after another
turns up something unexpected: the woman is the central character driving the
overall plot. And she becomes increasingly dominant from one version to the
next. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
first version, she resists the rapist ineffectively: she lunges with her
dagger, he dodges, he overpowers her. Then she turns on sexually: the camera
shows her hands clutching the bandit’s back as the rape proceeds. (This is the
bandit’s story, and it sounds like rape mythology, that a woman enjoys it.)
Afterwards, she demands that the two men fight over her, and they comply.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
second version, she takes the initiative to free her husband; but when he
refuses to fight for a dishonored woman, she goes into a fury, demanding that
he kill her to relieve her shame. When he refuses that too, she flips out of
ordinary consciousness, and stabs him. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In the
third version, she switches tactics strategically (as her husband sees it).
After the rape, she implores the bandit to take her with him; he agrees. Then
she implores him to kill her husband; this makes the bandit angry. He offers to
let the husband decide whether he should kill her or not. Her husband is now
reduced to complete passivity, and the woman successfully escapes the bandit. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">From
scene to scene, she becomes more central; in the fourth version, she dominates
most of the action.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After the
rape, the bandit is won over by her, and begs her to marry him, even promising
to give up crime for her. She’s not letting anyone tell her what to do; she
breaks away with her dagger and frees her husband. But her husband takes the
same line as the second and third versions, refusing to fight for a worthless
woman: “You’ve been with two men. Why don’t you kill yourself?” In version two,
she asked him to kill her, but now she switches tactics: she rushes to the
bandit, calling on him to wait, crying she is only a helpless woman. “Stop<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>crying. It’s not going to work any
more,” her husband says. This gets the bandit to take her side: “Stop bullying
her.” She laughs angrily, “If you’re my husband, why don’t you kill this man?”
Annoyed at his cowardice, she turns to the bandit: “I was sick of this tiresome
daily farce. I thought you could save me. But now I see you’re as petty as my
husband.” She laughs hysterically at both men, and they hesitatingly begin to
fight.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As an
actor would say, she takes over the scene. A micro-sociologist would say she
achieves emotional domination, forcing the men to do even what they don’t want
to do. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dramatic sequence or
alternative realities?</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Does
this help us decide which scenarios are more truthful than others?
Unfortunately not, except in the all-important point, that the fight scene in
the first version is untrue, and the last version is typical of real fights. Focusing instead
on the woman, we see that she becomes increasingly dominant over the men, by
her emotional tactics, from one version to the next. This implies that it is
really the screen-writer and director-- i.e. Kurosawa-- who has developed the
sequence in this way. He does it for dramatic considerations, in order to make
the film build up towards a climax.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In effect,
Kurosawa is running through a series of permutations on what can happen in a
sexual triangle following a rape: who blames who, and who gets killed. Strictly
speaking, there is no sequence; it could have been run in any order.* This
would be maximally relativistic-- maximal Rashomon effect-- but it would not be
as dramatic. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*In
fact one could produce as many as 36 different versions of the film, differing
only in the order of the 4 witnesses’ accounts. This relativistic device was
used, 35 years later in Milorad Pavic’s novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dictionary of the Khazars,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>published in two versions (male and female) identical except for one key
passage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More recently, the device
was used to structure Orhan Pamuk’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">My
Name is Red.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
fourth version, as noted, is not in the original story Kurosawa used for his
script. The original three episodes were not long enough for a full-length
movie, so Kurosawa wrote a fourth episode, the woodcutter’s story. This
introduces the realistic version of the sword fight, and it also gives the most
complex psychology of the woman’s role. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
first three episodes were enough to establish the Rashomon effect-- multiple
realities that are all equally plausible; and that is what the original writer
(Ryunosuke Akutagawa) appears to have intended. But by adding a fourth episode,
and making it into a banal, unheroic fight, Kurosawa shifted the emphasis: the
fourth version ends up feeling more real than the others.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In the concluding scene of the film,
however, one of the<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>listeners to
the narrations at the Rashomon gate, declares that the woodcutter is lying too:
he omitted to say that he was the one who took the pearl-inlaid dagger from the
murder scene. Yes, this makes the woodcutter a liar, but only about that
particular detail; what he saw and reported of the rape and its aftermath,
including the incompetently-performed duel, is true. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Kurosawa
clings to the Rashomon effect, although adding the realistic fourth version
undermines his philosophical statement. His autobiography says that he intended
a multiple-reality effect all the way through conceiving and making the film.
It was a one-shot trial. None of his other major films use multiple realities.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Would a micro-sociological
conclusion still be a great film?</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Would
the film be any better if it explicitly said the ignominious fourth version is
the true one? Obviously not; the whole metaphysical Rashomon-effect would
disappear, and it would turn into nothing but another mystery story solved at
the end. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This
raises a further question about the usefulness of micro-sociology in literary
creativity. A thought experiment should convince us: omitting the woodcutter’s
version would leave us feeling unsatisfied, even with the Rashomon-effect
intact. Dramatically the film needs the fourth retelling in order to rise to
the level of one of the great films. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This
is the same conclusion reached in my analysis of the realistic violence in<i> </i><a href="http://creativity-via-sociology.blogspot.com/2016_11_01_archive.html">Camus' </a><i><a href="http://creativity-via-sociology.blogspot.com/2016_11_01_archive.html">The Stranger</a>;</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>a micro-sociological insight is at the
core of the plot, but the author can’t dwell on it, and has to stay on a
philosophical level in order to keep up its serious message. The spoiler isn’t
micro-sociology in general (most good fiction writers are good
micro-sociological observers); it is the micro-sociology of violence in
particular, the dirty secret of how ugly and disgusting people look in
committing real violence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
aesthetic fact is, real violence is just too unpalatable to get much space in a
narrative that people will want to view. The writer’s dilemma is this: nothing
makes a plot more dramatic than violence; but the more realistically violence
is depicted, the more it has to be covered over by aesthetic distractions.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Rashomon</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> does a lot to soften the
violence. The bandit, Toshiro Mifune, is a rapist and professional murderer;
but he is made into something of an anti-hero. In part, by his good looks and
handsome physique-- he comes across as low-class only because he is scruffy and
badly groomed; and he shocks the Japanese stereotype by lolling around in
undignified postures, grimacing and slapping at mosquitoes. This was Toshiro
Mifune’s first major film, and he and Kurosawa rose to stardom on the same
vehicle. Yes, he is the villain of the plot, but he is irresistible to watch on
screen; ebullient and spontaneous, laughing boastfully and childishly, but also
overcome by fits of puzzlement. He grows more human through the sequence of
retellings, alternatively in love with the woman he has raped and sympathetic
with the samurai he has humiliated. By the fourth episode, we feel he is not a
bad guy through and through... and our search for the bad guy widens to
everybody. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
woman is beautiful and delicate in classic Japanese style, but the film makes
her more than a mere victim. As the film goes on, she becomes the
scene-stealer, the psychological center of attention. Against these two, the
samurai is the straight man in every sense of the term, with his limited range
of facial expressions, few speaking lines, his prim look: his slicked-back hair
contrasting with Mifune’s wild hairiness. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Without
the fourth viewpoint, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rashomon</i> would
have been a near-great try at a great film. It still would have the
beautiful cinematography, perhaps the very best of the black-and-white era,
with its rhythmic camera movement synchronized with the thrusting tom-tom of
the music, and its psychologically revealing close-ups. It would have missed
greatness, though, because the visual rhythms, the music, the shifting emotions
of the actors, and the mounting philosophical doubt surrounding the whole thing
are so tightly interwoven. A three-act version could have been just as
beautiful, but it would have missed its climax. The three scenarios are too
idealized, each artificial in its own way; the fourth, realistic scenario was
needed to shift the mood and tie everything to the real world. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
four-part <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rashomon</i> is a greater film
than the straight Rashomon-effect of a three-part version. The fourth
alternative, anchored in the micro-sociology of violence, undermines the easy
relativism of the Rashomon-effect. That dose of aesthetic tension makes it one
of the greatest movies ever made. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tragedy,
the most serious form of literature, and action-adventure, one of the most
popular forms, both depend on episodes of violence; but they cannot show
violence as it really is. What does this mean for the rules of creative
success? Future posts will take this further.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">References</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Akira
Kurosawa. 1982.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Something Like an Autobiography.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Eiko
Ikegami. 1995. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Taming of the Samurai</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Randall
Collins. 2008. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Violence: A Micro-sociological
Theory.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-58641242973793942032016-12-16T21:33:00.000-08:002017-01-03T13:33:28.768-08:00INTOXICATION AS WRITER’S CAPITAL: THE BEAT GENERATION AND NORMAN MAILER<style>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Jack
Kerouac in 1960 was fleeing from being famous. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Road,</i> published 3 years before, has reporters knocking on
his door and pursuing him for interviews wherever he goes. Everyone in the
literary bookshops in San Francisco recognizes him, and his secret visit to the
bars and skid row hangouts is no secret at all, and ladies come in wanting a
real beatnik for her party, so there is no way to deal with it except be rude and
drink more and more, and finally he gets a cheap bus ticket to Big Sur where a
hip friend has a cabin he can use. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(I
will pause for breath even though Kerouac rarely does, just a nonstop stream of
words in the present tense.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Jack
digs the ocean and having no people around and he is going to get down to
writing another novel but first he will have a drink. Then he is walking in the
canyon where the wind roars and the ocean has a voice and then the bottle is
empty and he goes to bed. He wakes up in the morning without any food, but
first he would rather have a drink but the bottle is empty. So he hitch-hikes
up the mountain to the nearest tavern, where he has several drinks including a
Manhattan with a cherry in it for nutrition, and he starts feeling like writing
again, but this time makes sure he brings a couple of bottles back to the
cabin. After three weeks of this, he can’t stand it any more, so he goes back
to San Francisco, where everything is just like it was last time. So he rides
50 miles down to the farm country to see his old buddy Cody who drove back and
forth across the country with him stoned in his last book and they do some
drinking and driving around. Then it’s back to San Francisco and then Cody and
a bunch from Los Gatos all pile in a car and go to the cabin at Big Sur where
they get in each other’s way. Jack gets into a really long binge which goes
like this: every day he drinks until he feels sick. Then he gets up in the
morning and starts drinking to ease the hangover. He doesn’t feel like eating
so when he’s hungry he drinks to get some energy in his body. This does
something to his metabolism so after a while he can’t sleep. So he is
hallucinating and wandering around and quarreling with people until something
happens that pulls the plug on him and he sobers up for a while-- </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">There’s
more. We haven’t touched on the Zen/ beat theme and the literary movement and
their drop-out trip and why the beats are different than the hippies that came
after them. The point here is only that a writer has to have something to write
about and a style in which to write it, and Kerouac got both of them by seeking
intoxication. He’s not the only one, which is why Kerouac is a good entry-point
for a whole movement. For another pointer-reading, take Norman Mailer.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mailer
and Kerouac are about the same age, in fact Mailer was born a year later (in
1923), but he became a best-selling author in 1948 for his war novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Naked and the Dead</i>, while Kerouac
was still trying to get his book published about bumming his way across
America. The theme of intoxication is not important in Mailer’s earliest
novels, but it looms more centrally into the 1960s when Mailer is a celebrity,
a self-appointed political guru, an obnoxious drunk, and one of the most
extreme self-promoters of that counter-culture decade. Mailer also happened to
be a writer with flashes of excellence-- clear and easy to follow, a sharp eye
for how things look and an ear for the way people talk, energetic writing that
moves you forward on the page. For the sociology of creativity, it is very
worth explaining how one acquires these skills, and the fact that Mailer is
good at some aspects of writing and fails at others makes him useful for
dissecting what makes a writer tick. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Here
is Mailer in one of his most successful books, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Armies of the Night</i>, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1968. The
topic is a big anti-war demonstration in Washington D.C. to shut down the
Pentagon, or at least dramatize opposition to the Vietnam War by the tactic of
non-violent resistance and getting arrested. Mailer puts himself in the center
of the narrative, which is legitimate enough since he was one of the celebrity
intellectuals invited by the organizers to make speeches and draw attention to
their cause by their willingness to emulate Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
Mailer is both participant and observer, and he uses his tell-it-like-it-is
style to include backstage preparation for speeches in leftist political
meetings and what it is like to be thrown into a police van. Mailer thus
acquired literary acclaim for breaking down the boundaries between
novel-writing and news reporting, becoming known as an exemplar of “the new
journalism” along with Tom Wolfe and (on the heavily drugged-out side) Hunter
Thompson. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Armies of the Night</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> is Mailer’s breakthrough
performance. He is very self-conscious about his rank in the American literary
pantheon; thus he is pleased to write about himself marching next to “America’s
best poet?” (Robert Lowell) as “America’s best novelist??” But not to follow
traditional decorum.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He gets
roaring drunk the night before the demonstration, when the big names are
supposed to make inspiring speeches at a rally. Just before going on stage,
Mailer urgently has to take a piss, but he can’t find the light switch in the
bathroom so he pisses on the floor. This gives him the idea of confessing he’s
the one who did it so the hostile press can’t accuse the demonstrators of being
slobs. He loves the idea because it will bring existential reality into the
artificiality of public speech-making, and when he finally gets on stage he
makes it the main point of his obscenity-laden speech. This tells you something
about Mailer’s judgment, and how his worst ideas come from his belief that
intoxication is writer’s satori. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
other side of Mailer’s method gets his book back on track. Once the march
starts moving, he delivers perceptive details of the soldiers guarding the
Pentagon (mostly small-town boys, like those he knew in the Army) and the
demonstrators (mostly urban and educated) who clash with them.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mailer continues his own
preoccupations. He had planned to attend an exclusive party in New York that
evening, and he grows impatient that the march is taking so long. So he makes
himself one of the first to cross the open grass, accosting a military guard to
arrest him; then he mingles details about being held in the same paddy wagon as
right-wing counter-demonstrators, with his urgent need to get booked, bailed
out, back on the plane and on the way to his Manhattan <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">soirée</i>. Honesty, egotism, political relevance, mix with not a
little drunken recklessness to power the book to its conclusion. (Which is that
he has indeed succeeded in writing The Novel as History, plus a sermon on how
America lost its mojo.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Intoxication as topic or as
method</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Intoxication
is writer’s capital in two senses: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>a topic for a writer to write
about;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>or intoxication as a method
of writing, writing while drunk or stoned. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Intoxication
as topic was explored by naturalistic writers like James Joyce describing the
taverns of Dublin (later he did a riff on drunkenness as stream of
consciousness). Hemingway had his impotent narrator watch his companion exiles
from Prohibition America drinking and coupling in 1920s Paris. The genre goes
back at least to De Quincey’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Confessions
of an English Opium Eater</i> (1821), and medieval student-monks wrote Latin
poem/songs about drinking. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Intoxication
as writing method has been extolled since antiquity, but it clashes with the
general pattern that most writers are disciplined and at least partly
methodical, using notebooks, outlining, drafts, revising, putting in long
months or years to see projects to completion. Historically some writers were
heavy drinkers (and more recently, drug-users) but many were not;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>some carousing authors alternated
respites of intoxication with long hours of literary concentration. If and
where intoxication was actually a creative method needs ferreting out in the
details of how authors spent their time while writing. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Cult of Intoxication</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What
makes intoxication important for a particular ecology of writers is that both
kinds of capital overlap in a cult of intoxication. The writer is inspired: by
the sheer act of creativity, of words in flight through one’s head and one’s
pen, by the lyrical desire to sing what is in your heart, by<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>echoes of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>pagan incantation in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner</i>. Zen monks in medieval Japan had to produce as
evidence of Enlightenment a poem that conveyed their experience. Baudelaire
epitomizes the modern cult of the writer, simultaneously the free spirit
unchained from social convention, the aristocrat of taste and perception, and
the energized professional who can meet journal deadlines with a music review,
an art exhibit criticism, or a serialized novel. Those were the social
conditions for the writer’s cult of the 1850s; Baudelaire’s expression of it
was the artist as magician in a world of bored readers. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Balzac
contributed to the emerging cult by fueling himself through all-nighters with
50 cups of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">café noir,</i> as he penned
endless revisions directly on printer’s proofs. (He produced 85 novels in a
spurt of 20 years, before dying, not too surprisingly, at age 50.) Downstream
from<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud
deliberately engaged in “a reasoned derangement of the senses” by means of
absinthe, hashish, whatever was available; and succeeded in writing memorably
gnomic poems:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A
noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Je
dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A,
noir corset velu des mouches éclatantes</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Qui
bombinent autour des puanteurs cruelles,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Golfes
d’ombres; E, candeurs des vapeurs et des tentes,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lances
des glaciers fiers, rois blancs, frissons d’umbelles;</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A black, E white, I red, U
green, O blue: vowels,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I will tell some day your
latent births:</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A, black corset hairy with
brilliant flies</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">That bulge around cruel
stenches,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Gulfs
of shadow; E, artlessness of vapours and booths,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Launched by proud ices, white
kings, thrills of umbrella-shapes; </span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I,
poupres, sang craché, rire des lèvres belles</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dans
la colère ou les ivresses pénitentes;</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>U,
cycles, vibrements divins des mers virides,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Paix
des pâtis semés d’animaux, paix des rides</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Que
l’alchimie imprime aux grands fronts studieux;</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I, crimson, spit-up blood,
laugh of beautiful lips</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In anger or drunken penitence;</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>U,
cycles, divine vibrations of heaving seas,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Peace of meadows scattered with
animals, peace of wrinkles</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">That alchemy prints on great
studious foreheads;</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>O,
suprême Clairon plein des strideurs étranges,</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Silences
traversés des Mondes et des Anges:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">--O
l’Oméga, rayon violet de Ses Yeux!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">O, supreme bugle full of
strange shrillness,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Silences traversed by Worlds
and Angels</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- O the Omega, violet ray of
His Eyes!</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Rimbaud
still writes formally conventional verse, rhythm and rhyme; the stylistic break
is in the shock of word associations. Does it have a meaning? It was not
written to express a preconceived idea; the method itself creates striking
phrases that readers must parse for themselves. Much in the same way rock bands
of the 1960s gave themselves names like Strawberry Alarm Clock. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Where
can you go after this, if you are a writer at the beginning of the 20th
century?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Several places. Balzac
was a caffeine freak but his method was naturalistic word-pictures of all
corners of French society, propelled by melodramatic plots. These genres
prospered for another century in novels of society and popular adventure, the
invention of the detective story, and several other niches where an abundance
of writers could find work.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
everybody took the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fleurs du mal</i> / <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bateau ivre</i> route.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why then does the cult of intoxication
come back so strongly in the 20th century, from the 1920s through the 60s? </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Partying Scene of the 1920s</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
obvious thing would be Prohibition. The underground drinking scene of
speak-easies and bootleggers gave American writers something new to write
about, and they could be ironic or moralizing about what the change in American
manners meant. But it wasn’t just an American phenomenon. American writers
flocked to Paris where they wrote about the easy drinking and easy sex among
the expatriots. But the expats were also British and other nationalities, who
had no Prohibition but were mixing in the same scene, which they variously
interpreted as loss of values, disillusionment from WWI, but also attraction to
the center of action in literature, painting, and modernism generally. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In
fact there was a new social phenomenon in the Roaring Twenties. Superficially
it was the wild and crazy parties of the younger generation, thumbing their
nose at the stiff formality of the older generation-- which, they could add,
had disgraced themselves with their stupidity in promoting a devastating and
pointless war. Fitzgerald became famous for writing about the partying scene in
the U.S., but<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>the same kind of
scene provides the materials for Evelyn Waugh’s and Aldous Huxley’s early
novels of youthful high society in England. Germany has it too, reflected in
Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin novels and Herman Hesse’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Steppenwolf</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(the name of
a Berlin bar that is the entrance to an alternative reality, more drug-flavored
than alcoholic). Underneath the ideological blaming was a structural change:
the breakdown of the traditional marriage market controlled by adults, and its
replacement by a courtship scene where young people picked their own partners
in affairs that began in fun parties. Love used to be sentimental but led to
socially sound matches; now love is fun and excitement, leading to marrying the
really fun guy or gal. If you were rich enough on your parents’ money, or had a
good job in the booming Twenties, you could keep up the partying scene after
you were married, full of fun couples like Scott and Zelda and the hilarious
stunts they were always cooking up. (Evelyn Waugh gives a more sardonic picture
of this than Fitzgerald, who is always sentimentalizing his alter-ego heroes,
then bringing them down with a romantic/tragic crash like his bootlegger hero
Gatsby who can’t get the rich girl after all, even though he does give better parties.)
The sexual revolution isn’t yet full scale, compared to what happens later in
the century, but the partying scene of the 20s is not only flirtation for the
young but adulterous affairs later on and the growing acceptance of divorce
(reaching even the King of England in 1936); in short, on the way to modern
serial monogamy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">All
this was great material for novelists, who at their best are sociologists of
the moving social frontier. It also fed the modern cult of intoxication. Fun
parties and zany antics were best engineered with a heavy dose of alcohol, but
mixed with the excitements of flirtation, and a mild amount of sex (the real sexual
outburst, as Kinsey, Laumann and others have shown, came decades later). Above
all, making the scene, being present at the really cool party is more important
than anything else. (Not for nothing does Norman Mailer waver between stopping
the Vietnam War and attending a high-status party in New York.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As
further proof that Prohibition (repealed in 1933) was not the cause, the
partying cult continued into the WWII years and after. Drinking was a big part
of seeing it through, especially in London during the blitz, along with singing
and rolling home in the arms of your buddies. This was mass-participation
drinking, with nothing specific to intellectuals. Why does there emerge a
full-scale intellectual cult of intoxication in the postwar era? This time the
U.S. is the center, already in the late 1940s, when Jack Kerouac is trying to
hitch-hike his way out of New York City (although the term Beats does not catch
on until the late 50s). The timing is a puzzle, since this is the period of
postwar economic boom, and America has vaulted to Top Nation in world
geopolitics. But the intellectuals are bailing out, not just ideologically
(they aren’t as far Left as they were in the 30s), but in lifestyle; just when
everyone seems to be becoming middle-class, the beats are going in for lumberjack
shirts and fisherman’s dungarees, trying to find their soul downward and
outward as far as possible from the upscale world of F. Scott Fitzgerald. The crucial
development is a new form of intoxication, a scene, a philosophy and a status
that trumps everything anyone else can do. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Heroin-fueled jazz and the
hipster</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Syncopated
popular music, AKA jazz, had existed since the ragtime of the early 1900s. In
the late 1940s it morphed into an esoteric version, modern/cool/jazz/bebop. The
social scene was different. Instead of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>loud audiences and dancing, it was more cerebral, dim-lit clubs where
you concentrated on the music, and clapping or snapping your fingers showed you
were not with it. Just being able to follow the way-out sounds was a secret
code, and drugs unlocked the code. Booze made you sloppy, but the musician on
heroin felt they could concentrate on the intellectual patterns of the music,
creating new riffs for hours on end. A woman described a jab of the heroin
needle in her leg as “an incredible exhilaration, as if an electric current
flashed through her body, leaving her detached yet connected to the music and
everyone in the room.” (Schneider, 31).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>The cult of musicians and jazz fans were a secret society, with their
own clothing, gestures, their own rhythm of walking and their own talk. (“I
ain’t hep, to that step, but I dig it.”-- song lyrics from the 40s) They were
cool and hip; everyone else was square. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Heroin
wasn’t the only drug, and it had its problems. Hipsters also used morphine,
cocaine, anything you could get your hands on if you were addicted enough.
Marijuana was popular in the same circles, although advanced musicians looked
down on it as “for kids,” too light to get the really far-out insights (that
would come a dozen years later with LSD). But heroin addicts became unreliable
band members, easily forgetting to show up for a gig. Teenage gangs, which
appeared in New York around the same time, had the same problem; heroin was
popular (as was bebop) but the really heavy users were useless in fights
and<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>tended to wander away from the
gang looking for a fix, so that after a few years the tough gangs became
antagonistic to junkies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>William
S. Burroughs’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Naked Lunch</i> (1959)
gives a brilliantly surrealistic picture of the junkie’s life and fantasies.
(Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg helped get it in shape and find it a publisher.)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Music
and popular culture continued to evolve in the 50s and 60s. More up-beat music
became easier to understand, dancing and partying came back in, youth gangs
expanded and created a fringe of wannabees and look-alikes, youth movements
both black and white became more political. Through it all one basic marker
continued: the distinction between the hip/cool and the square. This was the
essence of literary movements like the Beats (who tried to make their poetry
readings sound like jazz), non-literary movements like the hippies, and celebrity
writers like Jack Kerouac and Norman Mailer. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Intoxicated by writing vs.
writing while intoxicated</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
cult of intoxication is one way of capturing the high point of a writer’s life.
As the image of the writer as a higher being spread in the 19th century, even
very straight-laced writers like Emily Dickinson could express it:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I taste a liquor never brewed,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">From tankards scooped in pearl;</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Not all the vats upon the Rhine</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Yield such an alcohol!</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Inebriate of air am I,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And debauchee of dew,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Reeling, through endless summer
days,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">From inns of molten blue.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Till seraphs swing their snowy
hats</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And saints to windows run,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">To see the little tippler</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Leaning against the sun!</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If you
get into Emily Dickinson there is no pitying her solitude; she is genuinely turned-on,
tripping out on her own word-play and the shadows angling across the lawn.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Intoxicated
writers, full of the lyric impulse, are not necessarily users of intoxicants.
Walt Whitman, drunk on words as anyone could be, was more of a teetotaler.
Ezra Pound, at his best in summoning up the spirit of tripped-out writers from
the galleries of world history, conveys the downside of addiction to writing:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">O God, O Venus, O Mercury,
patron of thieves,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Give me in due time, I beseech
you, a little tobacco-shop,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">With the little bright boxes</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>piled
up neatly upon the shelves</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And the loose fragrant
cavendish</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>and
the shag,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And the bright Virginia</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>loose
under the bright glass cases,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And a pair of scales not too
greasy,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And the whores dropping in for
a word or two in passing,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">For a flip word, and to tidy
their hair a bit.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">O God, O Venus, O Mercury,
patron of thieves,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lend me a little tobacco-shop,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>or
install me in any profession</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Save this damn’d profession of
writing,</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>where
one needs one’s brains all the time.</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Getting
intoxicated from writing can be an antidote to heavy drinking or doping, since
one is competitor to the other.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nevertheless,
there have been great writers who were intoxicated most of the time. Some of
them, like Scott Fitzgerald, made drunkenness their writer’s capital throughout
their career. All his novels, from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Beautiful and Damned</i> to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tender is the
Night,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>follow somebody like
himself and Zelda, giving it a high-tragedy seriousness by making the pursuit
of intoxication into a noble flaw, the hubris of the modern age. In his
personal life, Fitzgerald’s drinking in pursuit of gay-zany episodes mostly
alienated his friends, and kept him from getting his work done until he was no
longer in fashion. Kerouac<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>was
pretty much a one-note writer but he kept himself going by reporting each
segment of his life in a new novel. Unlike Allen Ginsberg, he made no
transition to the upbeat 60s, and died in 1969 at age 47. Other writers who
drank themselves to death at an early age were Dylan Thomas -- an intoxicated
poet in every sense-- and Flann O’Brien, who was an inventively good-humored
drunk and a tremendous mimic of the voices of Dublin saloons and newspaper
writers. For some of these, their topic and their style was so close to the
world of drinking that they couldn’t avoid it; they lived in the groove that
killed them.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In vino veritas?</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
phrase goes back to folk proverbs, meaning no more than a drunk cannot keep a
secret. If taken to mean anything deeper,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>why would anyone believe it? Drunks mostly are sloppy, clichéd talkers,
repetitive and boring. A good analogy is the way Dr. John Dee, an
Elizabethan-era occultist, summed up his life of magic calling up spirits:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I have heard their voices for forty
years, he said, but never learned anything from them but gibberish. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In
vino there is little veritas, although a group of like-minded drunks may
convince themselves that the only worthwhile truth is their happy solidarity.
Intoxication works best when it is social, producing collective effervescence
in the group, and thereby the feeling of deep, uninhibited bonding. One of the
literary expressions of this is in James Jones’ <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">From Here to Eternity</i> (another cult-of-intoxication book from the
1940s, published in 1951). The book’s two protagonists, tough Sgt. Warden and
soulful bugle-player Pvt. Pruitt, get falling-down drunk outside the Enlisted
Men’s Club, and play out their comradeship in a parody of saluting each other.
Alcohol encourages expressing deeper masculine bonds than anything else; and these
are two soldiers in love with the Army, with Pearl Harbor about to happen. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Shared
intoxication is good for temporary solidarity, but bad for action, planning, or
self-control. Shakespeare depicts drunks as low-comedy buffoons. Marlowe’s Dr.
Faustus seeks the devil’s path of intoxication but he ends up selling his soul
for little more than drunken hi-jinks, and the plot peters out without any
great breakthrough on the wisdom front. Other drugs, like Charlie Parker and
Dizzy Gillespie’s bebop heroin, are more cerebral but their creativity is
short-lived and self-liquidating. The only one who kept up a long career along
this route was Burroughs, who would break his heroin habit from time to time by
taking a cure, but then let himself get back on heroin for his next book; he
knew he was on a life-long cycle. It helped that he was the heir of a big
business fortune, always had an income, and could flee to foreign countries
when things got bad, such as when he accidentally killed his wife while playing
William Tell with a pistol in Mexico City in 1951. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">And
this brings us back to--</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mailer’s method of literary
intoxication</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mailer’s
pissing incident at the Pentagon rally is ludicrous, except from his own point
of view. Mailer is no humorist, and he explains very seriously the key to his
own creativity, as he sees it:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“He
was fond of speaking in public because it was close to writing... a good half
of writing consists of being sufficiently sensitive to the moment to reach for
the next promise which is usually hidden in some word or phrase just a shift to
the side of one’s conscious intent. (Consciousness, that blunt tool, bucks in
the general direction of the truth; instinct plucks the feather.) ...
speaking-in-public (as Mailer liked to describe any speech that was more or
less improvised, impromptu, or dangerously written) was an activity like
writing; one had to trick or seize or submit to the grace of each moment, which
were usually occasions of some mystery. The pleasure of speaking in public was
the sensitivity it offered: with every phrase one was better or worse, close or
less close to the existential promise of truth, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">it feels true,</i> which hovers on good occasions like a presence
between speaker and audience. Sometimes one was better, and worse, at the same
moment; so strategic choices on the continuation of the attack would soon have
to be decided, a moment to know the blood of the gambler in oneself.” [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Armies of the Night, </i>28-29]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mailer
then describes what went through his mind while he decides that he will make
the pissing incident the high point of his speech; later he describes how he
tried to play the audience, getting a combination of laughs, hostile jeers, and
embarrassed silence. Nothing fazed, Mailer both acutely reports his own stream
of consciousness, and concludes that it was a great speech. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He has
behaved far worse. Back in 1960, he stabbed his wife with a knife and almost
killed her. Mailer had decided to run for mayor of New York, on a third-party
ticket of hipsterism and existentialism. The idea seems to have come from
petition campaigns that Mailer was involved in to change local cabaret
licensing laws that prohibited drug-convicted musicians from performing. It was
also a time when liberals and lefties were coming together to support the Civil
Rights movement growing in the South. After John F. Kennedy got the Democratic
nomination for president, Mailer wrote an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Esquire</i>
magazine article called “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” extolling Kennedy
as a hipster, like Mailer himself. The article was successful in the literary
world, and Mailer got a thank-you letter from Jacqueline Kennedy, whereupon he
replied that when they next met he would explain his ideas about rehabilitating
the Marquis de Sade. Mrs. Kennedy did not write back nor invite him again, but
after the election Mailer started claiming partial credit for Kennedy’s
victory. He began to drum up support among his lefty and celebrity friends for
his campaign for mayor. His wife, sister, and friends mostly think the idea is
bonkers, but Mailer is running around to meetings, doing literary readings, and
writing letters to famous people. A big party is planned for his apartment two
weeks after Kennedy won, where Mailer plans to announce his candidacy. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">On the
big evening, Mailer is hyper. He has a couple of hundred guests, but enthusiasm
for his candidacy is mixed, and as the evening goes on Mailer becomes more and
more pugnacious. He follows departing guests into the street and gets into
scuffles and fist-fights. Mailer has been drinking steadily. Around 4 a.m., the
party is down to a handful. Mailer comes back in with a black eye, and his wife
taunts him; he stabs her in the back and chest with a knife, narrowly missing
her heart. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mailer
beats the rap. His friends arrange for a psychiatrist to admit him to Bellevue
mental hospital. His wife survives and withdraws charges against him; a
sympathetic judge gives him a suspended sentence and probation. During his two
weeks in the mental ward, Mailer uses his time to gather material from the patients
that will go into his next book; particularly interesting to him is one of the
criminally insane who stabbed his brother. Mailer is developing his philosophy
of violence. A year later, Mailer tells an interviewer that the death camp
commander Adolf Eichmann had bureaucratically murdered thousands of people, but
that if he had killed them with his bare hands, “he would have worn the scar of
his own moral wound” and gained “our unconscious respect.” [Lennon 2013: 303]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Such is the existential viewpoint of
the hipster philosophy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Enough.
Mailer had terrible judgment in the kinds of things he would say-- and
apparently believe-- in his own hipster intuition. It is sometimes said that
genius is personality; thank God it isn’t. You don’t have to like someone’s
personality to get the best out of their writing. How could he be so good at
some things and so ridiculously bad at others? Here is an example of what
Mailer is good at, from his 1955 novel about Hollywood:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Seated
on two couches which faced each other were half a dozen women. They were all
dressed expensively, and their make-up to make up for such faults as thin
mouths, small eyes, and mouse-colored hair, had curved their lips, slimmed
their cheeks, and given golden or chestnut tints to their coiffures. Like
warriors behind their painted shields, they sat stiffly, three and three,
staring at one another, talking with apathy. These were the wives of important
men and men who wanted to be important, the husbands in chase of one another
through the Laguna Room while the women were left behind.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“When
a man went by, they tried to take no notice. They either walked by without a
look, or stopped for a brief but wild gallantry which went something like:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Carolyn!”
the man would say, as if he could not believe he saw the woman here and was
simply overcome. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Mickey!”
one of the six women would say.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“My
favorite girl,” the man would say, holding her hand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“The
only real man I know,” the deserted wife would say.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Mickey
would smile. He would shake his head, he would hold her hand. “If I didn’t know
you were kidding, I could give you a tumble.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Don’t
be too sure I’m kidding,” the wife would say.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Mickey
would straighten up, he would release her hand. There would be a silence until
Mickey murmured, “What a woman.” Then, in the businesslike tone which ends a
conversation, he would say, “How are the kids, Carolyn?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“They’re
fine.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“That’s
great, that’s great.” He would start to move away, and give a smile to all the
women. “We have to have a long talk, you and me,” Mickey would say.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“You
know where to find me.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Great
kidder, Carolyn,” Mickey would announce to nobody in particular, and disappear
into the party.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“All
through the Laguna Room, wherever there was a couch, three wives were sitting
in much that way. Since a lot of the men had come without women, the result was
that men got together with men, standing near the pool, off the dance floor, at
the café tables or in a crowd near the bar. I picked up a drink and wandered
through the party looking for a girl to talk to. But all the attractive girls
were surrounded, though by far<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>fewer men than squeezed up to listen to a film director or a studio
executive. Most of the girls seemed to like the conversation of fat middle-aged
men and bony middle-aged men. Actually I wasn’t that eager [to join a
conversation]. Being stone sober, the fact was that it was easier to drift from
one circle of men to another.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Deer Park, </i>69-70.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This
is Mailer being a micro-sociologist, walking around stone sober making mental
notes on the ways people behave. He was in Hollywood for the filming of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Naked and the Dead,</i> and accumulated
enough material for a no-holds-barred portrait of the Biz. It also gave him the
idea he was as fit as anybody to be a film producer, director, writer and
actor, all of which he tried back in New York with his friends. Nothing much
came of it; Mailer’s roll-with-your-intuitions approach did not work in an
enterprise that requires a lot of coordination and planning. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Totting
up his strengths and weaknesses, on the plus side we can put his vivid,
realistic observations, his capacity to make the reader feel like you are
there, and his quality of always being interesting. On the negative side, his
characters tend to be off-putting, especially those based on himself. The
narrator of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Deer Park</i> is an ace
fighter pilot, a near-professional boxer, great poker player, big-handsome-sexy
irresistible to women who resemble Marilyn Monroe, and of course a great
writer-in-the-making.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This
adolescent fantasy check-list does nothing to advance the plot, but Mailer uses
it for the main characters in most of his works of fiction. For his new
journalism, he himself is the observation post, but this is his strong point
and these are his best works.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He
intrudes too much of his opinions, which he thinks are brilliant existential
psychology but mostly come down to asserting that what the world needs is more
of his spontaneously macho risk-taking and violence. He admires Hemingway and
has some of his descriptive skill but none of his restraint. He regards himself
as a high-intellectual leader but his ideas are too wacky to influence anybody;
and as we have seen, his practical judgment is terrible.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">His
strength is social ethnography, vivid portrayals of cutting-edge scenes in
America. Where does he get his skills? He trained himself to be a writer,
already as a high-school student in New York and an undergraduate at Harvard.
He went into the army near the end of the Pacific war, hoping to get near
enough to the front to write a great war novel. (He had one combat patrol, but
everything he observed went into a convincing picture of the military machine,
especially the previously little-discussed class conflict between officers and
enlisted men.) He has an excellent memory for detail and the sounds of people’s
voices. Some of this is the memory component of high intelligence. One
remembers best what one deliberately sets out to observe, and Mailer trained
his mind to see what messages people are giving off while claiming to be
something else. This is a Freudian-inspired mode of observation, that Mailer
shared with his exact contemporary, Erving Goffman, when the Freudian vogue of
the 1940s and 50s shifted away from deep childhood traumas to the fronts people
are acting out all around us. In action Mailer was usually a jerk, but as an
observer he was focused and on target. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What
makes his writing so energetic? His sentences have flow; often they are long
and strung-together, but without complex grammar or subordinate clauses, the
whole thing rushing forward without a hitch. Whatever he is saying, you get it;
you don’t have to figure it out. Like him or not, he keeps you awake; and
except when he is sounding off on his own trips, his descriptions have the feel
of reality. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">With
Mailer and Kerouac alike, the cliché is right, trust the writer’s
reports, not the writer’s ego. Ironically, these are writers who believe the
cult of intoxication gives them their true voice, but it gets in the way of the
idea part of writing, which requires a lot of reflection. For all his claims to
be writing philosophical novels, Mailer’s philosophy is the least impressive
thing about it. Writers who truly have something to say (as distinguished from
something to report), like Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, or Proust, have a calmer tone;
and their writing practice is the opposite of a frenzied rush. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What,
then, does the cult of intoxication really deliver? As a method, it has its <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kubla Khan</i> peaks of poetry, but novels
are made for the long perspective, passion recollected in tranquility. There
are not a lot of successfully intoxicated novels. Its successes are all on the
other fork, the cult of intoxication as a topic. It has been increasingly a
central part of modern history, and one whose allure we have yet to fully
understand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">References</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Jack
Kerouac. 1962. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Big Sur.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">J.
Michael Lennon. 2013. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Norman Mailer: A
Double Life.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Norman
Mailer. 1955. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Deer Park.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Norman
Mailer. 1968. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Armies of the Night.
History as a Novel, the Novel as History.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bill Morgan.
2011.<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> The Typewriter is Holy: The
Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Eric
C. Schneider. 2008. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Smack: Heroin and the
American City. </i></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-81604755936261854132016-11-27T11:40:00.003-08:002016-11-30T09:27:01.988-08:00ALBERT CAMUS’ MICRO-SOCIOLOGY OF VIOLENCE PLUS PHILOSOPHICAL NOVEL<style>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
plot of Albert Camus’s novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Stranger, </i>builds on realistic micro-observations of violence and the
emotions leading up to it. This is inserted into a pre-conceived plan to write
a philosophical novel, dramatizing Camus’s central argument.</span></div>
<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Violence
is shrouded in myths, and Camus creates a shock by describing it accurately.
What he sees, however, is subordinated to the clash of philosophies in the
later part of the book. Camus is not really interested in developing a
sociological theory of violence; that would come 50 years later once we started
getting videos and close reports on violent experiences. Most good writers are
intuitively good sociologists; but it is adding something else that makes it
literature.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Low life in French Algeria</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Meursault,
Camus’s anti-hero, is a low-paid clerk who lives on the fringes of the Algerian
underworld. A neighbour in his cheap apartment house wants to make him his
“pal.” Raymond is known as a pimp, talks like a lower-class tough guy, looks
like a boxer, and wears snappy cool clothes. Raymond takes him drinking, and
fills his ears with stories about beating up his girl friend because he thinks
she’s cheating on him. This sounds like the kind of drinking talk that
Americans would call bullshitting, and Meursault doesn’t take it seriously, but
Raymond gets him to write a letter luring the woman to his apartment so he can
talk some sense into her. Meursault is surprised that the woman is an Arab, but
he lets that pass too. Next evening there is screaming in Raymond’s apartment.
Everyone spills out into the hall, and the police come. The woman accuses him
of being a pimp, and he says he will report her to the police as a whore. Next
day Raymond phones Meursault to tell him that some Arabs are shadowing him
because one of them is the girl’s brother. He wants Meursault to be on the
lookout, and to come to the police station to testify that the girl was false
to him. Meursault does so, and the case is dropped. Raymond then invites
Meursault to a weekend party with one of his pals at the beach.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Camus’s
text describes four incidents between the antagonists.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Incident #1</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Just
as we were starting for the bus stop, Raymond plucked my sleeve and told me to
look across the street. I saw some Arabs lounging against the tabacconist’s window.
They were staring at us silently, in the special way these people have-- as if
we were blocks of stone or dead trees. Raymond whispered that the second Arab
from the left was “his man,” and I thought he looked rather worried. However,
he assured me that all that was ancient history. Marie, who hadn’t followed his
remarks, asked, “What is it?” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
explained that those Arabs across the way had a grudge against Raymond. She
insisted on our going at once. Then Raymond laughed, and squared his shoulders.
The young lady was quite right, he said. There was no point in hanging about
here. Halfway to the bus stop he glanced back over his shoulder and said the
Arabs weren’t following. I, too, looked back. They were exactly as before,
gazing in the same vague way at the spot where we had been.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
first confrontation comes to nothing except hostile staring and growing
tension. Initially there are 3 French colonials and about 4 Arabs. They are
fairly evenly matched and not ready to fight. Confrontational tension is an
unconscious barrier that is breached only when one side feels a palpable
advantage over the other.</i>]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[At
the beach they meet Raymond’s older friend Masson (“tall, broad-shouldered, and
thick-set”), who has a bungalow on the beach, with his plump wife. After
swimming and eating lunch, drinking several glasses of wine, the women clean up
and the three men go for a walk in the noon-day sun.] </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Incident #2</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Just
then Raymond said something to Masson that I didn’t quite catch. But at the
same moment I noticed two Arabs in dungarees a long way down the beach, coming
in our direction. I gave Raymond a look and he nodded, saying, “That’s him.” We
walked steadily on. Masson wondered how they’d managed to track us here. My
impression was that they had seen us taking the bus and noticed Marie’s
oilcloth bathing bag; but I didn’t say anything.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Though
the Arabs were walking quite slowly, they were much nearer already. We didn’t
change our pace, but Raymond said: </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Listen!
If there’s a roughhouse, you, Masson, take on the second one. I’ll tackle the
fellow who’s after me. And you, Meursault, stand by to help if another one
comes up, and lay him out.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
said, “Right,” and Masson put his hands in his pocket.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
sand was hot as fire, and I could have sworn it was glowing red. The distance
between us and the Arabs was steadily decreasing. When we were only a few steps
away the Arabs halted, Masson and I slowed down, and Raymond went straight up
to his man. I couldn’t hear what he said, but I saw the native lowering his
head, as if butt him in the chest. Raymond lashed out promptly and shouted for
Masson to come. Masson went up to the man he had been marking and struck him
twice with all his might. The fellow fell flat into the water and stayed there
some seconds with bubbles coming up to the surface round his head. Meanwhile,
Raymond had been slogging the other man, whose face was streaming with blood.
He glanced at me over his shoulder and shouted:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Just
you watch! I ain’t finished with him yet!”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Look
out!” I cried. “He’s got a knife.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
spoke too late. The man had gashed Raymond’s arm and his mouth as well.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Masson
sprang forward. The other Arab got up from the water and placed himself behind
the fellow with the knife. We didn’t dare to move. The two natives backed away
slowly, keeping us at bay with the knife and never taking their eyes off us.
When they were a safe distance they swung round and took to their heels. We
stood stock-still, with the sunlight beaming down on us. Blood was dripping
from Raymond’s wounded arm, which he was squeezing hard above the elbow.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The details of the fight are realistic. It
is 3 against 2, starting as a pair of fist-fights. The big Frenchman knocks out
his Arab in two punches. Raymond takes the initiative and pummels his Arab, but
when he glances back over his shoulder the Arab slashes him with a knife. At
this point, the weaker Arab hides behind the knife-wielder--- an alignment
often seen in photos of small-scale fights. Like most fights where we have
micro-interactional detail, they reach a standoff, literally stock still, then
one side backs away slowly, then runs.</i>] </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Masson
says there is a doctor at the beach on weekends, and they take Raymond to get
his wounds patched up, which turn out to be are not very deep. Back at the the
bungalow, the women are upset.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Incident #3</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Presently
Raymond said he was going for a stroll on the beach. I asked him where he
proposed to go, and he mumbled something about “wanting to take the air.” We--
Masson and I-- then said we’d go with him, but he flew into a rage and told us
to mind our own business.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>However,
when he went out, I followed him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>At
the end of the beach we came to a small stream that had cut a channel in the
sand, after coming out from behind a biggish rock. There we found our two Arabs
again, lying on the sand in their blue dungarees. They looked harmless enough,
as if they didn’t bear any malice, and neither made any move as we approached.
The man who had slashed Raymond stared at him without speaking. The other man
was blowing down a little reed and extracting from it three notes of the scale,
which he played over and over again, while he watched us from the corner of an
eye. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>For
a while nobody moved; it was all sunlight and silence except for the tinkle of
the stream and those three little lonely sounds. Then Raymond put his hand to
his revolver pocket, but the Arabs still didn’t move. I noticed the man playing
on the reed had his big toes splayed out almost at right angles to his feet.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The monotonous flute-playing is a version of
fuck-you jiving, contemptuous of the other side as generally happens in
confrontations among groups of tough guys.</i>] </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Still
keeping his eyes on his man, Raymond said to me: “Shall I plug him one?”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
thought quickly. If I told him not to, considering the mood he was in, he might
very well fly into a temper and use his gun. So I said the first thing that
came into my head.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“He
hasn’t spoken to you yet. It would be a low-down trick to shoot him like that,
in cold blood.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Again,
for some moments one heard nothing but the tinkle of the stream and the flute
notes weaving through the hot, still air.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Well,”
Raymond said at last, “if that’s how you feel, I’d better say something
insulting, and if he answers back I’ll loose off.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Right,”
I said. “Only, if he doesn’t get out his knife you’ve no business to fire.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Raymond
was beginning to fidget. The Arab with the reed went on playing, and both of
them watched all our movements.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“Listen,”
I said to Raymond. “You take on the fellow on the right, and give me your
revolver. If the other one starts making trouble or gets out his knife, I’ll
shoot.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>The
sun glinted on Raymond’s revolver as he handed it to me. But nobody made a move
yet; it was just as if everything had closed in on us so that we couldn’t stir.
We could only watch each other, never lowering our eyes; the whole world seemed
to have come to a standstill on this little strip of sand between the sunlight
and the sea, the twofold silence of the reed and the stream. And just then it
crossed my mind that one might fire, or not fire-- and it would come to
absolutely the same thing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Then,
all of a sudden, the Arabs vanished; they’d slipped like lizards under cover of
the rock. So Raymond and I turned and walked back. He seemed happier, and began
talking about the bus to catch for our return.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">It begins as a 2-on-2 standoff. They are
full of confrontational tension, and locked in on their mutual threats. “... </i>everything
had closed in on us so that we couldn’t stir. We could only watch each other,
never lowering our eyes; the whole world seemed to have come to a
standstill.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Interviews with police who have been in deadly shootouts also shows the
tendency to tunnel-vision, seeing nothing but the enemy; time-distortions are
typical. There is already time-distortion in Incident #2: “</i>Though the Arabs
were walking quite slowly, they were much nearer already.” </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Underlying these perceptual distortions are heightened
adrenaline, manifested in a very rapid heart beat: </span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“thudding in my head...”<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Showing the gun changes the balance, and the weaker side retreats.</i>]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>When
we reached the bungalow Raymond promptly went up the wooden steps, but I halted
on the bottom one. The light seemed thudding in my head and I couldn’t face the
effort needed to go up the steps and make myself amiable to the women. But the
heat was so great that it was just as bad staying where I was, under that flood
of blinding light falling from the sky. To stay, or to make a move-- it came to
much the same. After a moment I returned to the beach, and started walking.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Two paragraphs omitted describing feeling
befuddled by the heat, and thinking about reaching the stream</i>.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Incident #4</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
wasn’t going to be beaten, and I walked steadily on... Anything to be rid of
the glare, the sight of women in tears, the strain and effort-- and to retrieve
the pool of shadow by the rock and its cool silence!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>But
when I came nearer I saw that Raymond’s Arab had returned. He was by himself
this time, lying on his back, his hands behind his head, his face shaded by the
rock while the sun beat on the rest of his body. One could see his dungarees
steaming in the heat. I was rather taken aback; my impression had been that the
incident was closed, and I hadn’t given a thought to it on my way here.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>On
seeing me, the Arab raised himself a little, and his hand went to his pocket.
Naturally, I gripped Raymond’s revolver in the pocket of my coat. Then the Arab
let himself sink back again, but without taking his hand from his pocket. I was
some distance off, at least ten yards, and most of the time I saw him as a
blurred dark form wobbling in the heat haze. Sometimes, however, I had glimpses
of his eyes glowing between half-closed lids. The sound of the waves was even
lazier, feebler, than at noon. But the light hadn’t changed; it was pounding as
fiercely as even on the long stretch of sand that ended at the rock. For two
hours the sun seemed to have made no progress, becalmed in a sea of molten
steel. Far out on the horizon a steamer was passing; I could just make out from
the corner of an eye the small black moving patch, while I kept my gaze fixed
on the Arab.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>It
struck me that all I had to do was turn, walk away, and think no more about it.
But the whole beach, pulsing with heat, was pressing on my back. I took some
steps toward the stream. The Arab didn’t move. After all, there was still some
distance between us. Perhaps because of the shadow on his face, he seemed to be
grinning at me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
waited. The heat was beginning to scorch my cheeks; beads of sweat were
gathering in my eyebrows. It was just the same sort of heat as at my mother’s
funeral, and I had the same disagreeable sensations-- especially in my
forehead, where all the veins seemed to be bursting through the skin. I
couldn’t stand it any longer, and took another step forward. I knew it was a
fool thing to do; I wouldn’t get out of the sun by moving on a yard or so. But
I took that step, just one step, forward. And then the Arab drew his knife and
held it up toward me, athwart the sunlight.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>A
shaft of light shot upward from the steel, and I felt as if a long, thin blade
transfixed my forehead. At the same moment all the sweat that had accumulated
in my eyebrows splashed down on my eyelids, covering them with a warm film of
moisture. Beneath a veil of brine and tears my eyes were blinded; I was
conscious only of the cymbals of the sun clashing on my skull, and, less
distinct, of the keen blade of light flashing up from the knife, scattering my
eyelashes, and gouging into my eyeballs. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Then
everything began to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while
the sky cracked in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down
through the rift. Every nerve in my body was a steel spring, and my grip closed
on the revolver. The trigger gave, and the smooth underbelly of the butt jogged
my palm. And so, with that crisp, whipcrack sound, it all began. I shook off my
sweat and the clinging veil of light. I knew I’d shattered the balance of the
day, the spacious calm of this beach on which I had been happy. But I fired
four shots more into the inert body, on which they left no visible trace. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Now it’s down to 1-on-1, both sides armed,
again locked into confrontational tension. Time distortions get worse -- “</i>For
two hours the sun seemed to have made no progress.” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Meursault’s heart beat is pulsing in his forehead, although he
attributes it to the sun-- </i>“the whole beach pulsing with heat” -- “cymbals
of the sun clashing on my skull.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The tension intensifies as one side moves
forward a step, the other draws his knife. The flashing blade fills the
narrator’s consciousness-- the acute tunnel vision on the enemy’s weapon that
police often experience before they<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>fire.</i>]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The last paragraph turns metaphorical, away
from the narrator’s usual matter-of-fact delivery. “</i>Then everything began
to reel before my eyes, a fiery gust came from the sea, while the sky cracked
in two, from end to end, and a great sheet of flame poured down through the
rift.”<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> But it does convey the acute
perceptual distortions shooters can experience at the moment of firing.</i>]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I have clipped off this final sentence of
the first part of the book, since it shifts to dramatic comment
uncharacteristic of Meursault.</i>]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Where did Camus get his
materials?</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He had
spent several years as a newspaper reporter, covering the crime news and court
trials in an Algerian city. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Incidents #2
and #3</i> are partly real: a tough guy Camus knew told him about a couple
renting a villa on the beach. The wife was accosted by an Arab, the husband
intervened and got knifed in the mouth. Husband went back to get the tough guy,
who brought his revolver and the two men went looking for the Arab. They found
him, but no shot was fired-- the confrontation wound down, as most such
incidents do. [Lottman p. 221]<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Camus
said that three people in the book are real: himself (Meursault), his tough
friend (Masson), and Mersault/Camus’s sexy girl friend. Mersault is depicted as
a nobody, but he has friends, and women are attracted to him. He resembles
Camus, who was very good looking, tall and slender, an actor who always played
the lead roles and hooked up with a series of hot women. Camus was also
athletic, liked to swim, and was a star on a local soccer team. Meursault has
some of these qualities (in solitary confinement, he passes the time imagining
the details of all the sex he’s had sex with<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>women); but his personality is very different. Camus was the
engagé intellectual, a political activist; member of the Communist Party until
expelled over his rejection of Communist political expediency. Mersault is
completely apolitical. He is the opposite of intellectual; he is not curious
about anything; untalkative, feeling that he has nothing to say. (Camus’s original
title was <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’Indifférent.</i>) Mersault
goes along with everything that happens around him. He advises his tough pals
on the side of caution and moderation, but always concludes that it doesn’t
matter, go ahead and whatever. Mersault just wants to live in the physical
world, enjoying swimming, the beach, sexy women, the Mediterranean evenings. If
this sounds like southern California 30 years later, that is no accident: there
was an ethos of French colonial Algerians who rejected cold rainy France for life’s
a beach. In the late 1930s when the story is set, Algeria like L.A. was la-la
land.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In
writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’Etranger</i>, Camus had two
good reasons to make the hero unlike himself. One was that by the time the
novel was finished in 1941, France had been occupied by the German blitzkrieg
for a year; and to get anything published it had to be completely apolitical.
The other reason was more central: Camus wanted to write a novel about a person
who believes in nothing-- it is a thought experiment, a philosophical exercise.
Mersault is not a Byronic anti-hero who rebels magnificently against
conventions; that old Romantic stereotype was outdated, and the avant-garde had
moved on to characters like Kafka’s anonymous victims or Sartre’s bummed-out
alter ego in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nausea</i> (published a few
years earlier in 1938).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mersault
is not alienated or even unhappy. He is deliberately pared down to a man who
believes in nothing but his senses.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The colonial situation</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">One
aspect that seems strange from our 21st century point of view is Raymond’s Arab
girl friend. She lives in a Frenchman’s apartment; she wears western clothes
and makeup. But this is a time before the nationalist uprisings of the 1950s
and 60s; before the neo-Islamist radicalism of the late 20th century. In fact
she is a rather typical figure of colonial regimes, the native woman who plays
the sex market with colonial men. The same pattern is in Graham Greene’s 1955
novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Quiet American</i>, set in
French-occupied Vietnam; the hero has a live-in Vietnamese girl friend who works
at a pick-up bar, and her shifting loyalties among men drives much of the plot.
Camus and Greene see the situation from the western side. But Camus’ plot is
implicitly driven by the sexual tension of Arab men resentful of the colonials
treatment of their women. The outburst of resentment can be seen on screen in
the realistic 1967 Italian film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Battle of Algiers. </i>Its central figure, Ali La Pointe, is an Arab street
hustler denounced to the police by respectable French women who don’t want him
in their neighbourhood; in prison he becomes a terrorist bomber. Ali La Pointe
is Camus’s knife-wielding Arab 20 years later.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The next step in the
intellectual chain</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Camus
by the late 1930s had linked up with the network of avant-garde French
intellectuals in Paris, notably the journal <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nouvelle
Revue Française</i> and the Gallimard publishing house, who published Sartre
and translated Kafka into French. They were inclined to see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’Etranger</i> as a combination of Sartre’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nausea</i> and Kafka’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Trial</i>, which does describe the niche in intellectual space
Camus was moving into. But Camus had a further agenda, and he added another
stylistic element. He didn’t need Kafka’s surrealistic vision of a man summoned
to trial without knowing the charge against himself. Camus knew plenty about
murder trials, and he wanted to make the story completely realistic. That is
why it starts out as a kind of “hard-boiled” crime novel (soon to become <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">film noir</i>); and Camus adopted the newly
famous American style of Hemingway and his followers. This required the author
to be completely self-effacing, avoiding all explanatory comments, and letting
the story speak for itself. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Moreover,
Camus had decided to write a trio of works that would establish his <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">oeuvre</i> in the lineage of great writers.
Simultaneously, he worked on <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">L’Etranger,
The Myth of Sisyphus</i>, and his play <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Caligula.</i>
*<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sisyphus</i> develops the philosophy that Camus called “absurdist”--
life is without any meaning given by religion or anything else. Any truths had
to be developed anew, like Descartes doubting the existence of everything until
he could deduce new principles from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cogito
ergo sum</i>. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sisyphus</i> was to be
no abstract treatise. Rejecting all previous philosophical themes, Camus
begins: “There is only one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is
suicide.” Instead of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">cogito</i>, it is
death that serves as the starting point for everything else. (Yes, this also
had been said in 1927 by Heidegger, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dasein</i>
is being-towards-death; but Camus was writing no heavy German tome.)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Because human life-vs.-death is
philosophically the one necessary value, Camus is anti-death-penalty. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
Caligula was historically a flighty, spoiled brat Roman emperor, but Camus
transforms his fooleries and murders into philosophical gestures against the
Absurd. Camus had already acted and adapted scripts for avant-garde theatre.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">So
Camus’s novel, to drive home the theme of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sisyphus</i>,
has to center on a character who is condemned to death. But he can’t be an
innocent victim, a maudlin cliché. The plot needs to contain a murder that
occurs naturally. To get a sympathetic reading, the murderer can’t be a really
bad guy, but he is not going to repent like the philosophically-driven killer
in Dostoyevsky’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Crime and Punishment</i>
(where a wise cop and a prostitute-with-a-heart-of-gold are the rescuers).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So Meursault is made into an ordinary
guy who accidentally falls in with criminals and their guns. To complete the
set of substitutions, Camus makes the dramatic bad guy the State Prosecutor-- a
devout Christian who is outraged that Meursault feels indifferent about his
crime; and who builds his death penalty case on evidence that Meursault did not
grieve at his mother’s funeral. The plot is a combination of Dostoyevsky and
Kafka, but with the philosophical implications upended. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
other villain in the plot is a priest who intrudes into Meursault’s cell to try
for a last-minute conversion. (There was a long tradition of Catholic priests
boasting of converting atheists on their deathbeds.) But Mersault ends up as
the Voltairean hero, bursting out of his silence in the last few pages to
denounce the priest and affirm that he will not give up his truthfulness in the
face of death, since death constitutes humanity because everyone eventually
faces it. The novel, largely naturalistic and non-preachy all the way through,
turns into a philosophical fable at the end. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Camus as micro-sociologist</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Camus
is an excellent observer of the small details of how people interact in
particular situations, especially what consciousness feels or looks like at
each moment in one’s body. </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Notice:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After drinking with Raymond and
agreeing to be his pal and help punish his girlfriend, Mersault stands alone in
the hallway, unthinking but hearing “nothing but the blood throbbing in my
ears, and for a while I stood still, listening to it.” </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">When
the police come to Raymond’s apartment after he is heard beating his girl
friend, the policeman knocks the cigarette out of his mouth. “You ought to be
ashamed of yourself,” the policeman added,<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“getting so tight you can’t stand steady. Why, you’re
shaking all over!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>“I’m not
tight,” Raymond explained. “Only when I see you standing there are looking at
me, I can’t help trembling. That’s only natural.”</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Raymond
is right; his adrenaline, the fight-or-fight hormone, has shot upwards, his
heart is racing; but he has to stand still and do nothing because the cop has
the upper hand. These are exactly the circumstances when someone goes into
trembling.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Mersault’s
actions, which seem inexplicable when examined as acts of deliberate reasoning,
make sense when seen as how he reacts to the Goffmanian micro-rituals of
everyday life. At his mother’s funeral, he is not only tired out by a long bus
ride and the vigil of sitting up all night with the dead body; he dislikes the
social pressure from these conservative Catholics to follow their rituals,
including the ostentatious mourning they expect everyone to perform. And just
before <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Incident #4,</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>it is Mersault’s rejection of the
burden of social politeness that sends him back down the beach: “I couldn’t
face the effort needed to go up the steps and make myself amiable to the
women.” </span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Back
again to the most famous line in the novel:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>“And
each successive shot was another loud, fateful rap on the door of my undoing.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Camus
has Mersault speak out of character, to create a dramatic tag line. But it is
also the chief mystery of the novel: why, after shooting his antagonist once,
does he deliberately pump four more shots into the body? The prosecutor makes a
big deal out of this, and Mersault never explains it. It is just a fact, and he
tells the truth about facts. OK, that makes him an existentialist hero. But
micro-sociology adds something further. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">With
the advent of videos, police cameras, and today’s news scrutiny, we have seen
many cases where the police end a confrontation with suspect, not just by
shooting once, but unleashing a whole barrage of shots-- emptying their gun’s
magazine. This looks like what Mersault is doing. He shows all the acute
symptoms of perceptual distortion -- time slowing down, tunnel vision, flashes
in his eyes. His heart beat is racing; he feels it pounding in his temples. It
is the phenomenology of losing control in a violent confrontation, what I have
elsewhere described as a “forward panic.” </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Camus
is a better micro-sociological observer than analyst of his observations. The
four superfluous shots are real. We understand now what causes such things.
Camus implies it is the pressure of the sun-- although here he verges into the
metaphorical-- and more basically, just one of those God-damned accidents that
rule human life, and that makes a reasonable thinker reject God. Camus has
taken a little-noticed reality of violence, and adds a philosophical twist to
it. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">I am
not suggesting it would be a better novel if an omniscient author intruded, at
some point, and explained it as I did. Great literature is great, in part,
because it builds on acute observations of real life. But it has a drama and a
symbolic resonance that goes beyond sociology. Literary success is a
combination of such ingredients.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">References</span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Albert
Camus. 1942.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Stranger.</i> Paris: Gallimard.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Herbert
Lottman. 1997. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Albert Camus. A Biography.</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Dave
Klinger. 2004.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Into the Kill Zone: A Copy’s Eye View of
Deadly Force</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Randall
Collins. 2008. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Violence: A
Micro-Sociological Theory. </i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Randall
Collins. 2016. “Cool-headed Cops Needed: Heart-rate Monitors can Help"</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2016/10/cool-headed-cops-needed-heart-rate.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2016/10/cool-headed-cops-needed-heart-rate.html</span></i></a><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-26339729544677168082016-11-06T04:40:00.000-08:002016-11-15T04:24:29.741-08:00LOVE TRIANGLE VARIATIONS: FROM GATSBY TO THE GRADUATE... TO THE FUTURE<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Most
great stories have a strong plot line. That comes from how the characters are
related to each other. The classic way of doing this is a triangle. The
skeleton of the plot can be diagrammed as a social network.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A network diagram may look static, but a good structure is bursting with energy. It is the
tensions in the network--<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with its
positive and negative links-- that drive the plot. Great literature is a
version of network sociology.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Great Gatsby</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> is considered a major classic
above all for its tight plot structure. It is also the great self-portrait of
the Jazz Age, and has been filmed many times for its over-the-top party scenes,
not to mention the reckless driving around in flashy convertibles.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What
makes it work, though, is the way it is structured: two interlocking love
triangles closely packed into a short book.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
love triangle is a very old plot device that doesn’t show any sign of wearing
out. A love triangle is a tense network because there are two very strong
ties-- the two rivals with their love object-- plus a strong negative tie
between the rivals. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How do
authors and film-makers get so much mileage out of it? Aside from inserting a
love triangle into different social classes and historical settings, there are
three main possibilities:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[1]
Vary the focus on different members of the triangle. Take one of the rivals as
protagonist; or zoom in on the emotional struggles of the person in the middle;
or give everybody equal time; etc.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Make the conflict quick or long drawn-out; highlight being faithful or
flighty; end happily or tragically.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[2]
Link two or more triangles together. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Sun Also Rises; The Graduate)</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[3]
Locate the point of view in an outsider to the triangle. If the outside
narrator has to discover what is going on, it adds mystery to the inner tension
of the triangle. The driving force becomes finding out what is happening,
combined with the unresolved plot tension of what is yet to happen. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Great Gatsby</i>)</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A simple triangle: Casablanca</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
structure doesn’t have to be complicated to make it work. One of the most
famous films of all time, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Casablanca,</i>
consists of one simple triangle.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
story is told almost entirely from the POV of Rick, the American bar-owner.
There is his on-and-off romance with the beautiful Ilsa, explained in
flashbacks after she walks into his saloon in Morocco with another man. The man
turns out to be Ilsa’s husband, Victor Lazlo, heroic leader of the anti-Nazi
underground throughout Europe. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Unlike
many love triangles, there is no conflict between the two rivals; they respect
and even like each other. So the plot tension is driven mainly by the love-hate
relationship between Bogart’s character and Ingrid Bergman’s character. Since
Bogart has the documents that will enable a couple to get out of Casablanca and
escape the Germans, Ilsa tries to get them from him by various appeals. Finally
she pulls a gun on him; when that doesn’t work, Ilsa simply breaks down and
tells him he’ll have to make the decisions for both of them from now on. End of
triangle; end of plot tension.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Well,
not yet. The effect of the minor figures surrounding the triangle now takes
over driving the plot. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
antagonistic part of Lazlo’s network are the Nazis. Bogart starts out neutral,
the cynical tough guy only out for himself. But almost everyone who works for
him in the saloon is in the anti-Nazi side, and Bogart gets pulled into
protecting them. A third part of the penumbra are the Vichy French, like the
bar women who consort with the German soldiers. There is also Rick’s
quasi-friend, the chief of police Captain Renault (Claude Rains’ character),
who is likewise cynical and sophisticated, but with a light and charming
manner. Through a series of symbolic confrontations with the Nazis, all
provoked by Lazlo, the fence-sitters start standing up for the Resistance.
Bogart is pulled along by the minor part of his network--- all secondary
characters and bit parts, but Rick as famous saloon-keeper is the patron of a
network, which cumulatively adds up to a strong tie. In the end, Bogart goes
over to the Resistance and brings his counterpart Captain Renault along with
him. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Rounding
it off at the end is the love story. The triangle rivalry isn’t quite over,
although it takes a new twist.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Bogart and Lazlo take turns showing how noble they are.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Lazlo offers to give up Ilsa so that
she can escape; Bogart finally sends her off with Lazlo so that she can support
him in the great work he is doing for the cause. In the high-angle perspective
of network structure, the woman at the hinge of the triangle is essentially
passive, all the decisions being made for her by the men in her life. This is
certainly a pre-feminist film. On the other hand, the ending does resonate with
the join-the-fight message of this 1942 film: Bogart becomes the typical
American soldier leaving his lover behind as he goes off to war, doing what a
man has to do. Lazlo, who gets Ilsa, is not quite in the same category as a
hero. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Sun Also Rises: Multiple
triangles around a hub</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In
Hemingway’s signature novel of Paris in the 1920s, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sun Also Rises</i>, a series of triangles centered on one woman
make up both the atmosphere of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>“the lost generation” and the prime mover of the plot.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
central figure in the network structure is Lady Brett Ashley, a beautiful and
wealthy widow, who lost her husband and her ideals in the war. In the novel,
she is surrounded by past and present lovers, including: [1] Jake Barnes, a
cynical American newsman; [2] Pedro Romero, the rising star of the Spanish
bullfighting world; [3] Robert Cohen, a gauche young Jewish American; [4] Mike
Campbell, another British aristocrat and Brett’s current fiancée, who drinks
continually and views everything with cynical amusement. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">We
never do see things from Lady Brett’s POV, and only the network diagram brings
out how central she is. * Take her out of the network and the whole story
collapses. Instead, the narrator is Jake Barnes, who is both disgusted with
Brett but can’t help carrying a torch for her, as the saying was. They were old
lovers, supposedly idealistic ones, but he was wounded in the war and has
become impotent, while everyone else centers their lives on their sex drives.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
There appears to be a punning allusion in her name: the British equivalent of
the American <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Social Register</i> that
lists members of the hereditary wealthy upper class was called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">DeBrett’s Peerage.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>Hemingway is implying that she represents the topmost
elite of the aristocracy, who have thrown themselves into the new 1920s scene
of partying, drinking and sexual affairs, like Fitzgerald’s rich young people
in America. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Structurally,
Jake’s impotence enables Hemingway to let one of the participants in the
triangles conduct us through the story-- not that anything is mysterious for
Jake, but he is dragged along nevertheless in the feeling of networked doom
that Hemingway manages to evoke. Jake knows all the other characters, and in
fact the novel starts by Jake talking about how Robert Cohen was a boxing
champion at Princeton; and how Cohen is always hanging around his newspaper
office. This sounds like starting off on a tangent, but by the end it becomes
clear that it is structurally important. Looking at the network where men
radiate out from Lady Brett like spokes of a wheel, the plot question is: where
is a jealous triangle going to form? </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
answer is: Cohen sees Lady Brett in the Paris cafe whirl, and she toys with
him, while he becomes obsessed with her. Moving on with the whole group of
holiday-makers into Spain, Brett picks up with a beautiful, slender young
bull-fighter. Jake is even more sorry to have made this connection for her,
because he knows how much bullfighters need to avoid distractions and
concentrate on their craft; but there is no stopping Lady Brett. Cohen finds
out about this affair, and beats up the bull-fighter in a rage-- a boxing
champion being the more dangerous to human beings, especially when he doesn’t
understand the code that Hemingway insiders live by.</span></div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiShn1XQ38L6l3SOZZwzQ5qd4AV64B3MSJoI2l1qY1RryuzLEZI-e5ERy8KbjYJwHPNC6NyrQphQFKpOmHsWP6PFHhUM-fekJgwnyCop0qFvs4F-jTr6VjgZJCKljFZuhkbekxTvisQio/s1600/net-sun-2--.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="211" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjiShn1XQ38L6l3SOZZwzQ5qd4AV64B3MSJoI2l1qY1RryuzLEZI-e5ERy8KbjYJwHPNC6NyrQphQFKpOmHsWP6PFHhUM-fekJgwnyCop0qFvs4F-jTr6VjgZJCKljFZuhkbekxTvisQio/s320/net-sun-2--.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
story ends with Lady Brett calling on old reliable Jake to get her out of
Spain-- a place where an older moral code still prevails and the lost
generation’s affairs are barely tolerated. Jake Barnes is more like a real-life
version of Bogart’s character in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Casablanca</i>,
but this time life has no romantic endings, just real regret over what might
have been.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Sun Also Rises </span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">is the most serious, and most
sociologically acute, of all Hemingway’s novels; and the only one structured
around a love triangle.**</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">**
Until Hemingway’s posthumous novel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Garden of Eden</i>, came out in 1986, 25 years after his death, and receiving
little attention among his major novels. It is psychologically the most complex
of all his novels, plotted around a bisexual love triangle: an attractive and
creative young man; his wealthy young wife who wants to immerse herself in him
so much that she tries to be the man; and a beautiful Frenchwoman who lets both
of them make love to her. The ideal coupling breaks up as the wife directs the
triangle more and more aggressively; the young man ends up with the Frenchwoman
but without his ideals. Tersely written in the best Hemingway style, it reads
like the enigmatic “Hills Like White Elephants” overgrown into a rainforest of
love-cum-sex. </span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Interlocking triangles plus
outside narrator solving mystery </span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
construction of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Great Gatsby</i> is
especially powerful. The network structure consists of two interlocking
triangles:</span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_YAqGClwagbWWJkCREy5_jwafxsP6nvk_78imT7fDXb7hm-W5rsT5kdk4IjPqKAZvcCd8JdAbXytCH4ew5qY_XzaztJntxaD8pYv3J8M-t6Iuws5P1FTyjRQtWssODCZv1P2DIgD5nJU/s1600/net-gatsby-1--.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="193" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_YAqGClwagbWWJkCREy5_jwafxsP6nvk_78imT7fDXb7hm-W5rsT5kdk4IjPqKAZvcCd8JdAbXytCH4ew5qY_XzaztJntxaD8pYv3J8M-t6Iuws5P1FTyjRQtWssODCZv1P2DIgD5nJU/s320/net-gatsby-1--.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Triangle
number one: </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Daisy,
the golden girl, belle-of-the-ball, debutante of the year as of five years ago;
now married to:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tom
Buchanon, rich inheritor of an old family fortune, athletic and domineering;</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Gatsby,
upwardly mobile from nowhere into splashy riches; the antithesis of Buchanan in
being unrespectable and linked to the criminal underworld; but very good
looking and personally dominant. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Left
to itself, we can easily imagine how this triangle would work out. Although
Daisy and Gatsby had a romantic affair when he was disguised by his army
officer’s uniform, in the adult world respectability and money were bound to
beat disrespectability and money. Sociological theory of marriage markets shows
this from empirical data: marriages tend to be homogamous on as many dimensions
as possible.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Fitzgerald’s
inspiration was to link this rather standard old-rich vs. nouveau-riche
conflict with a second triangle:</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Tom
Buchanon, the rich man:</span></div>
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a floozy from the working class, the lower class version of the flapper / party
girl (of which Daisy is the upper class version);</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">George
Wilson, Myrtle’s husband, a working class looser struggling to run a gas
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Looking
at the network, we discover that the center linking everything together is Tom
Buchanon. He is not presented as a sympathetic character, but nevertheless if
he is taken out of the diagram, the plot collapses. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Structurally,
the central character is a plot-tension network does not have to be
sympathetic; nor does much attention have to be directed at him or her. The
pivot of the story is inescapable, and may well be last one standing at the
end-- not only like Tom Buchanon, but Lady Brett Ashley.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Pivoting
on Tom, the two triangles work themselves out at the same time: </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If we
take Daisy-Tom-Myrtle as one rivalry triangle, it ends in classic fashion, with
Daisy killing Myrtle, her structural rival. Never mind that Daisy kills her by
accident with a speeding car through a mix-up of whose car it is; and for that
matter, that Daisy knows only that someone like Myrtle exists in her husband’s
life although she doesn’t know who she is. Fitzgerald’s plot works with the
inevitability of ancient Greek tragedy; the protagonists don’t need to know
what they are doing, to bring the structure to its fated resolution.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
other triangle in Tom’s life ends with Wilson killing Gatsby, and then shooting
himself. In other words, Tom gets his two male rivals to eliminate each other.
This is arranged, half-inadvertently, but sensing an opportunity, by Tom, who
tells Wilson (truthfully) who the speeding car belongs to. The rest of the
triangles being eliminated, Daisy is back with her respectable rich husband,
and they leave this sordid mess for somewhere else in the world, retreating
into their vast fortune.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
two-triangle story, murders included, could have been told straightforwardly by
an omniscient author or from the point of view of one of the main characters.
Fitzgerald however adds a third layer:</span>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">This
is his narrator, Nick Carraway. He happens to know the other main characters--
Daisy because she is his cousin; Tom because they were classmates at Yale;
Gatsby because Nick rents the old caretaker’s house next to his mansion.
Everybody drags Nick along with them, and reveals the backstage of their
affairs. Tom takes him to the garage and to a drunken party with Myrtle and
other flappers. Gatsby invites him to his grand parties, shows him around his
mansion, takes him to lunch in New York with his underworld connections. And of
course, Gatsby is cultivating Nick so he can establish the network link that
will bring him and Daisy together, and launch the culminating action of the
plot.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
outside narrator gets the early part of the story going, where the main
interest is the parties Gatsby gives at his mansion, and all the speculation
about who he is and where his money comes from. Nick Carraway is like a naive
detective who has the mystery revealed for him. Nick grows in stature towards
the end because he is the only person throughout the plot who learns the truth.
He alone knows that Gatsby pretended he was driving the fatal car, to save
Daisy from a murder rap. This raises Gatsby’s moral standing, but it also is
the nail in the coffin of his affair with Daisy, since she can’t go off with a
known murderer. (Even though she is a murderer herself; and her husband is
indirectly.) So the naive narrator can present a moral judgment on what is
going on. “You’re worth the whole damn bunch of them,” Nick says to Gatsby
before he goes to the pool and is murdered. No need for Fitzgerald to preach;
the structural arrangement of the POV does it for him.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Graduate</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Three consecutive triangles viewed<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>from inside</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Finally,
look at the network structure of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The Graduate</i>, another famous film.
This consists of three triangles, played in sequence:</span><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span><br />
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">First,
Benjamin, a young Ivy League graduate moping around home, responds to the wife
of his father’s business partner, Mrs. Robinson, and starts a clandestine
affair. This is played awkwardly for comedy, until the other parents in the
network pressure Benjamin into dating the Robinsons’ daughter Elaine.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Benjamin finds her a respite from the
pressures of his clandestine life, and falls in love, thereby setting up the
first triangle.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Most of the plot
tension in this part is between Mrs. Robinson and Benjamin; structurally mother
and daughter are rivals, but the mother can’t tell her that, and so her anger
has to come out on the other link of the triangle.</span>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
unusual twist is the mother-daughter rivalry over the same young man (a
structural substitution for the father-son rivalry over the same young woman
that is at the center of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Brothers
Karamazov</i>). In this sense <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The
Graduate </i>resonates with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. It also shows
there are plenty more permutations possible in the old love-triangle formula,
by shifting sexual taboos and gender preferences.</span><br />
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
second triangle develops when Benjamin finds Elaine has another boyfriend. This
is Carl Smith, a medical student depicted only vaguely as good-looking,
successful and conventional. Carl largely ignores Benjamin and the latter
doesn’t even try to play the aggrieved rival;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>this leads to another comedy sequence in which Benjamin uses
his naive gaucheness as a way of mocking Carl and importuning Elaine to marry
him instead.</span><br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSfxtIugyrRaXeVHq6gPW4AOAlSI2Zzb-gxMaQNL-aVUhRcoIUm2Ikw5ikD8DS6rsaBAC-QzSM53jxwj5G3w5-Ip__UKajMxZofjAzhnCmMxgs-TBMTBoZlr-ROm6BX9GSm1Clo1RZkUc/s1600/net-grad-2-clean.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="194" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhSfxtIugyrRaXeVHq6gPW4AOAlSI2Zzb-gxMaQNL-aVUhRcoIUm2Ikw5ikD8DS6rsaBAC-QzSM53jxwj5G3w5-Ip__UKajMxZofjAzhnCmMxgs-TBMTBoZlr-ROm6BX9GSm1Clo1RZkUc/s320/net-grad-2-clean.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
third triangle is latently present from the beginning. Having an affair with
Mrs. Robinson makes Mr. Robinson the aggrieved husband, and therefore
Benjamin’s rival. This doesn’t come out until late in the plot-- as a device to
retard the action of triangle number two, when Mr. Robinson shows up at
Benjamin’s rooming house and threatens him with a lawsuit. Keeping this triangle
latent also makes the point that Mr. Robinson is sort of a nothing; his wife
has stopped sleeping with him so he is no real rival. Benjamin never gives him
a thought, and literally tells him so, in a comedic apology that makes things
worse. Structurally, Mr. Robinson is just one of the cliché-spouters that
Benjamin perceives as populating the entire older generation; all the more
reason why this triangle is not very important in driving the action.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
final action sequence is when Benjamin breaks into the wedding to Carl Smith,
calls out Elaine, and successfully fights off the families and wedding guests
to escape on a bus.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This rounds
off triangle two with a happy ending. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Structurally,
triangle one has already played itself out when Benjamin leaves southern
California, the site of his affair with Mrs. Robinson, and follows Elaine to
Berkeley. In that sense, the plot sequence of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i> is rather simple; one triangle is succeeded by
another, and it is all told from Benjamin’s POV. There is a brief period of
linkage between the triangles, when Mrs. Robinson tries to alienate Elaine from
him by telling her that he raped her mother. Surprisingly, Elaine gets over her
outrage rather quickly. Is this a flaw in the plot? Perhaps so;<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but notice that Elaine’s actions in the
sequence of triangles are much the same as Ilsa’s in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Casablanca</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
heroine emotes and vacillates in her triangles, but she lets other people
decide things for her: taking her mother’s standpoint in the first triangle,
then prevailed upon by first one man, then the other, in the second triangle.
Despite the coincidence that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i>
appeared as a film in 1967, when the 1960s counter-culture was becoming famous,
it is not feminist viewpoint. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It
isn’t even a counter-culture viewpoint. The irony is that some of the scenes
were shot on the Berkeley campus (during production a year or two previously),
but the rebellious long-haired counter-culture style is nowhere in evidence,
and certainly not in the preppy Benjamin with his upper-class kid’s Italian
sports car. In real life, Benjamin and Elaine of the late 1960s would not have
gotten married; they would have smoked dope, joined a commune or at last
cohabited, taken part in demonstrations and played around with revolutionary
politics. The reason they don’t do any of these things is that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate</i> was initially a novel by
Charles Webb, published in 1963 when the 60s still looked like the 50s; the
author graduated from tweedy ivy league Williams College a few years earlier,
and that is the atmosphere still shown in the movie. It is more <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Catcher in the Rye</i>, a 1951 depiction
of existentialist alienation in an elite Eastern prep school. Benjamin is
Holden Caulfield a few years older, and having discovered sex.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Triangles and sexual revolutions</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Anachronisms
in the setting don’t make that much difference for successful drama.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The network structure of interlocking
triangles is perfect for dramatizing sexual revolutions, with new sexual
behaviors filling in the content. The first modern sexual revolution was the
1920s, when the old-fashioned marriage market overseen by parents was superceded
by the flirtatious partying scene depicted by Fitzgerald and Hemingway. Both
novelists were social observers, and their material came from both sides of the
Atlantic, at virtually the same moment (1925-26). * The second sexual revolution
of the 1960s and 70s became far more radical, challenging marriage by
cohabitation, the gay movement, and feminism.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This second sexual revolution received its iconic statement
in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Graduate, </i>not because it is an
accurate portrayal of what was happening, but because the dramatic structure of
a succession of triangles is so memorable.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">* The
best description of the revolution is Fitzgerald’s 1936 essay, “The Crack-up.”
Fitzgerald named it “the Jazz Age,” but in the early 1920s, “jazz” did not mean
music—it was a slang word for sex.</span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Further possibilities</span></i><span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Great
literature resembles network sociology. The basic forms are simple, but a lot
of variations can be built from them. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">One of
the oldest dramas, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Oedipus Rex</i>,
creates a shocker by making the network between a father, mother, and son.
Shakespeare did something close to this in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hamlet</i>.
Dostoyevsky did a more complicated version in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Brothers Karamazov.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
variations are not exhausted. One new vein, just now being explored, is to a
network of heterosexual and homosexual ties. (Imagine re-doing Jane Austen with
gay characters coming out of the closet. You can expect to see this on the
screen before long.)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000aa; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">How do
writers create plots? One way is by rearranging the structure of successful old
plots, and transforming them in the ways listed above.</span></div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3189724790879985669.post-7408169379053711512016-10-24T15:43:00.000-07:002016-11-14T13:01:29.838-08:00JAMES JOYCE’S NIGHTTOWN ETHNOGRAPHY<style>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">James
Joyce's creative technique is on display in the Nighttown chapter of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses. </i>The chapter is famously
surrealistic.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But it is easy to
understand once we see how it is put together out of three main ingredients. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(1) A
detailed and completely realistic description of sex workers and their
customers; plus (2) the blended experience of drunkenness and dreaming, the
flow of fantasy and free-association presented with Freud-like
faithfulness.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In both ingredients,
Joyce is a naturalistic writer telling the truths of everyday urban life.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But putting the two together, and
giving the reader no guidance as to when he is doing one or the other, creates
a third effect: (3) reading <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i>
is like cracking a code or solving a puzzle. Joyce is very much a 20th century
modernist writer, by keeping the author out of the way and never speaking to
the reader in his own voice. Gertrude Stein played the same game-- never
explain anything.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So did
Hemingway, whose simplicity is ostensibly the opposite of Joyce's style. They
are all writers of hidden meanings.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Put
this another way. Ingredient (1) is Joyce being an ethnographer. Novelists were
sociologists before professional field researchers existed. In the Nighttown
chapter, Joyce carries forward what previous novelists like Balzac,
Dostoyevsky, and Zola had touched on-- prostitution-- but in far more detail,
and without either romanticizing it or moralizing about it. Throughout <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses, </i>Joyce is a superior
ethnographer of the details of everyday life. In Nighttown, and in Molly
Bloom's concluding thought-stream about sex, Joyce went further than anyone has
done yet-- even today-- on the micro-sociology of sex. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Ingredient
(2) is psychological ethnography. The drunken/sleeping fantasies that intrude
on the scene are psychologically realistic, what Stephen Dedalus and Leopold
Bloom in the red light zone of Dublin on a night in June 1904 would be
thinking, or at least have flickering across their minds in dream recollection.
Joyce was not the only writer to attempt stream of consciousness. Virginia
Woolf did it too, the difference being that her characters are limited to
respectable upper-middle class members of her family and her social class; she
had no way of exploring the lower-middle-on-down sector Joyce was immersed in.
(Woolf found Joyce distasteful, which was partly literary rivalry-- Gertrude
Stein didn't like him either-- and partly class bias.) Joyce's creativity here
needed only one step. After seeing that the realm of everyday people's thoughts
and fantasies are dramatic material, he just had to go ahead and describe as
much of it as possible. Like most creativity, it required no continuous flashes
of inspiration; only finding a new technique, then the long work of applying
it.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Joyce's
problem in writing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i> was to
take a day of ordinary life and make it interesting rather than boring. He made
it harder for himself by dispensing with plot, the most artificial aspect of
fiction. He took the opposite path from detective stories-- that other modern
literary invention-- which are set in ordinary life but with strange things
happening at a fast-moving pace. Joyce solved this by cloaking each chapter in
a different style, making the book into a puzzle to figure out. The Nighttown chapter
is especially successful both in the ethnography-- dealing with the most
exciting topic, sex and violence, the police coming and politicians smoothing
it over-- and in the Freudian fantasies. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It is
possible to take the ingredients apart, to extract from the surrealism a
straightforward description of the red light zone, the prostitutes and their
customers. Joyce’s 180 page chapter boils down to one-tenth that length. I will
present the stripped-down text, Joyce's red light ethnography, at the end of
the post. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Preceding
Joyce's text, I will summarize what Joyce the sociologist shows about sex work
and the world of underground excitement. Joyce turns out to be quite a good
sociologist, one reason why he is a great writer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Carousing Zone</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nighttown
in Dublin in 1904 was literally on the other side of the tracks, behind the
railway yards, and down-river near the harbor. It is mostly unpaved, with
scanty street lights, a place of sheds and barns (it is still the era of
horse-drawn vehicles), mostly low flimsy houses. The up-scale brothels are in a
street with more prosperous multi-story buildings. It is a place for the lowest
of the poor, beggars, sick and half-crazed people. Dirty and ill-fed children
play on the street even at night. It is also a carousing zone, a place where
the laws are relaxed, illegal and semi-legal entertainments are available. The
night-time population also includes drunken soldiers, sailors, and laborers
visiting cheap unlicensed drinking establishments run by “shebeen-keepers.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joyce’s narrative also shows the
presence of medical students and middle-class middle-aged men. Touts, bawds,
and street-prostitutes recognize such outsiders immediately as potential
customers. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Carousing
zones, in one degree or another, have existed in most big cities since the
Middle Ages. Their atmosphere is a vacation-break from normal work and
respectability; a “holiday from morality” is their chief image and
attraction.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Various kinds of
unlawfulness and immorality are accepted here without question; but as we see,
the carousing zone has its own kind of order and rules its members try to
enforce. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stratification of sex-work
markets</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Joyce’s
novel is permeated with sex. Both Bloom, the protagonist, and Mollie, his wife,
are pursuing extra-marital affairs; the latter with Blazes Boylan, her
concert-promoter, who is portrayed as a dandy and man-about-town in Dublin’s
saloons. Stephen’s medical student friends continually joke and brag about sex.
All this is amateur sex-- although as Viviana Zelizer (2005. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Purchase of Intimacy</i>) shows, there
is no sharp division from paid sex, since receiving gifts and favors is
generally part of sexual relationships. Professional sex differs by being much
more explicitly bargained, and for short time-periods rather than longer
relationships with their bundle of commitments. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">What
generates the demand for explicitly commercial sex? Customers are those seeking
more attractive, or more easily accessible partners than are available to them
in the amateur sex market of courtship, dating, and affairs. Famously, this
includes soldiers, sailors and travelers away from normal social networks; but
also persons whose social class is too low, personality and culture unappealing
to potential partners, or who are too unattractive to match up with sexier
women. Another advantage of commercial sex is that it is an exchange market
where there are very few rejections, unlike (as David Grazian shows) the world
of dating, pick-ups, hook-ups, as well as courtship.*</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
David Grazian, 2008.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Make: The Hustle of Urban Nightlife.</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Elizabeth
Bernstein, 2007. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Temporarily Yours.
Intimacy, Authenticity, and the Commerce of Sex, </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>describes how work-obsessed Silicon Valley geeks buy upscale
prostitutes selling GFE (Girl Friend Experience) since it doesn't waste their
time.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It
follows that sex markets are stratified. Customers vary in how much money they
can offer. Older men of the higher social classes can afford the best-looking
women, compensating for their own declining physical attractiveness. Joyce
depicts two commercial travelers who have been drinking champagne with
Kelleher, a city official, who in turn brings them to the best brothel in
Dublin; also a middle-aged customer (bald head, goatee beard, suspenders
dragging from his trousers) whom Bloom passes in embarrassed silence on the
stairs. Prostitutes reminisce about a priest who tried to disguise his clerical
collar under his coat. Further down the customer chain are middle class
students, short on cash, like Stephen’s companion Lynch, who toys with the
prostitutes but can’t afford to take one until Stephen drunkenly offers part of
his teaching pay received that morning. Still further down are the drunken
soldiers, who pick up a street girl.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">On the
seller’s side, prostitutes offer different prices, depending on their
attractiveness and the corresponding market of what their customers can
afford.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Following is a list of
Joyce’s sex workers, in ascending order:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">An
elderly bawd (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"famished
snaggletooths"</i>) trying to upsell middle-class customers by offering a
virgin (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“ten shillings a maidenhead”</i>).<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Joyce describes her unappetizingly <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“in the gap of her dark den furtive,
rainbedraggled”</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">“Cheap whores, singly, coupled,
shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.”</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cissy
Cafferty, on the street with two soldiers (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“I’m
only a shilling whore.”</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>[a
shilling is 12 pence, 1/20th of a pound.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>One pound was worth about $120 in today’s money; her price was about
$6.]</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Several
other slangy street whores are called Biddie the Clap and Cuntie Kate, implying
disease and gross appearance.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Among
the low-class prostitutes is one Bloom fleetingly remembers as his first sex,
behind a stable. Another prostitute drifts through a previous chapter<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
frowsy whore with black straw sailor hat askew came glazily into the day along
the quay.”</i>) Bloom tries to avoid her; she had offered to do washing for his
wife, and they had <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“an appointment”</i>
which Bloom now regards as too risky, as well as seeing that she <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“looks like a fright in the day.”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She reappears in the post-Nighttown
chapter when she peers into a late-night shelter looking for customers: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“The face of a streetwalker, glazed and
haggard under a black straw hat...”</i>) Bloom dismisses her as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“partially idiotic female.”</i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Higher-class
prostitutes are at Mrs. Cohen’s brothel. The sitting room is furnished in
middle-class style, with piano, gilt mantlepiece mirror, tapestried wallpaper,
and peacock-feather fireplace screen. The women’s prices are ten shillings each
[half a pound sterling, equivalent to<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>$60], for a short time, while staying the night is more. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe,
the most attractive (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a young whore in a
sapphire slip, a slim velvet fillet round her throat</i>), is also the boldest
and most skilled talker, mixing slang and repartée. Kitty (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a bony pallid whore in navy costume, sailor hat, doeskin gloves, coral
wristlet, corset, jacket, skirt, white petticoat, boa around her neck</i>) is
dressed much more properly than Zoe’s deshabillé. Kitty has polite middle-class
manners, apologizing about her coughing and hiccuping-- implying ill health.
Florry (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">a blonde feeble goosefat whore in
a tatterdermalion gown of mildewed strawberry, lolls spread-eagle on the sofa
corner</i>) is regarded by Kitty as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“a
bit imbecilic.”</i> </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
madam or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">whoremistress, </i>Mrs. Cohen,
is middle-aged, heavy, unattractive, but wears a low-cut evening gown, rings
and semi-precious jewels, and flirts behind a showy operatic fan. She is
reputed to be on good terms with officials and race-track tipsters, and to have
a son at Oxford. She is alert and aggressive at business, and compliments Bloom
for not letting himself be short-changed; although later she tries to cheat
Stephen out of more money.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Still
higher on the scale are the barmaids at the Ormond Hotel, in the earlier
“bronze by gold” chapter. Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy go by polite form of
address, and are paid enough to dress well and take sea-side vacations. They
lord it over the waiters and kitchen servants. Their role is not so much to
serve drinks as to attract men to the saloon, where they flirt delicately. Two
of the gentlemen-about-town customers play a game with Miss Douce that they
call (in cultured French) “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Sonnez la
cloche” </i>(ring the bell). This consists of her raising her long skirt above
the knee and snapping her garter against her thigh. Although she tells Blazes
Boylan <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“You’re the essence of vulgarity,”</i>
she smiles superciliously and glides gracefully away. This is reminiscent of
Zoe, at Mrs. Cohen’s, depositing her ten shilling note in the top of her
stocking. In a more high-class way, Misses Douce and Kennedy have a sex-worker
attitude to men, expressed as they look through the saloon window at a
top-hatted gentleman riding past in a carriage: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“He’s killed looking back,” Miss Douce laughed. “Aren’t men frightful
idiots?” “It’s them that has the fine times,” Miss Kennedy answered.</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Relationships among the players</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">If the
business is love for sale, there are ambiguous relationships among everyone
involved: </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Sellers and buyers of sex: </span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Prostitutes and their touts push a mixture of sexual arousal,
friendliness, and making the sale at the highest price. Taking advantage of
politeness, guilt-tripping, and fair play also enter the mix. Which tactics
prevail depends on where in the social ranking the exchange takes place.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
cheap whores call out blatant sexual come-ons: (“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How’s your middle leg? Come here till I stiffen it for you.”</i>) When
they are turned down, they make insults: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bawd
spits in their trail her jet of venom. “Trinity medicals. All prick and no
pence.”</i>)</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe
starts more indirectly with conversation, moves on to innuendo along with
cuddling, feeling Bloom’s pockets and genitals, lets him caress her breasts,
and bites his ear gently. This last technique is found<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in much earlier societies-- biting the
lover’s body is prominently mentioned in the Kama Sutra (ca. 200 A.D.), but
largely disappeared in the 20th century. Zoe switches tones when Bloom tries to
leave her. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“I hate a rotter that’s
insincere. Give a bleeding whore a chance.”</i>) This mixture of aggression and
guilt-tripping works on Bloom, who apologizes for his bad manners and resumes
conversation. She then offers a deal: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Have
you cash for a short time? Ten shillings?” </i>They go inside and he bows
politely to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“two sister whores”</i> at
the doorstep. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Inside,
Lynch (who has no money) is lifting the skirts of the prostitutes, getting what
sex thrills he can for free. When Mrs. Cohen enters, she makes them stop
playing around: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“This isn’t a musical
peepshow. Who’s paying here?”</i>), herself<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>playing the teamwork game of good cop, bad cop. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Competition among sellers.</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sex business is rarely booming, and the prostitutes compete
for customers. They do this by invidious comparisons, some more strident than
others: (The Bawd: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">You won’t get a
virgin in the flash houses. Sixty-seven </i>[a street number]<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> is a bitch.”</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Zoe’s competitive advertising is subtler: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bloom: “Is this Mrs Mack’s?” Zoe: “No,
eightyone, Mrs. Cohen’s You might go farther and fare worse.”</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Mrs. Cohen is aware of her standing.
When Stephen creates a drunken disturbance, she declares: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Here, none of your tall talk. This isn’t a brothel. A ten-shilling
house.”</i> Bloom tells her: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">But he’s a
Trinity student. Patrons of your establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. “</i>She
replies angrily: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Trinity! Coming down
here, ragging after the boat races and paying nothing.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>Class conflict comes to the
surface, although it quiets down when a cab drives up with more gentlemen
customers. </span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Inside
the brothel, there is a tone of put-downs between some of the prostitutes. But
on the whole, they stay on friendly terms. This is typical of sex workers,
since they generally spend much time in each other’s company, and there are
long boring spells waiting for customers. Overall the strongest solidarity in
the red light district is among prostitutes who work together. Their implicit
rivalry is expressed mainly against sex workers of a different rank, especially
those they regard as underselling them or displaying too much sex in the bargaining
phase. The structure generates its own morality.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Relationships among customers</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">: Male customers ignore each
other. Bloom avoids meeting eyes with the punter in the stairwell by turning
his head to examine the hall table. The two gentlemen (“<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">two silent lechers”</i>) arriving by cab try to enter unobtrusively,
while Bloom again averts his gaze. Why is there no atmosphere of camaraderie
among all those “out for a good time”?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Research on red light zones and sex clubs shows the same pattern; a
group of men may be jolly together passing by looking at prostitutes, but they
rarely break off from the group to engage a woman in bargaining. Prostitutes
regard such groups as lookers; actual customers are those who leave the group,
such as when they are drinking in a bar, to return alone. The solidarity of the
male group itself is a strong rival to the mutual absorption, the temporary
folie-à-deux of the erotic pair. Sexual adventuring, like violence, has a
strong element of pretence, more talk than action. [Grazian, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">On the Make.</i>]</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Quarrels and fights</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen
has been brought to the brothel after a drinking party by his friend Lynch. But
their concerns are deeply split: Lynch wants to flirt with the prostitutes,
hoping to cadge enough money to hire one of them. Stephen is aimless, upset
about the death of his religious mother and his own failed vocation as a
priest. They don’t provide any solidarity for each other, and Stephen is
badgered by Mrs. Cohen into paying for three prostitutes. Next, he starts
swinging his walking stick wildly—subjectively at his drunken fantasies, but in
fact doing a little symbolic property damage to Mrs. Cohen’s sitting room,
which is one way to reassert his will.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Bloom, who has a good financial head, settles the dispute with a token
payment. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Outside
on the street, Stephen has gotten into another quarrel, this time with two
British soldiers. Considering this is the red light district, nevertheless it
is interpreted as a matter of honour, even sexual jealousy. Cissy, a street
prostitute, is alarmed when Stephen (probably inadvertently) runs up behind
her, while her two soldiers are off taking a piss. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">But I’m faithful to the man that’s treating me though I’m only a
shilling whore.</i>” *</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*The
term “treating” existed in the US at the turn of the century, meaning a kind of
dating relationship, where the man paid for entertainment and gifts, and a
certain amount of sexual intimacy was expected.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Truman Capote comments that the main character in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Breakfast at Tiffany’s </i>--set in New York
City in the 1940s-- is a “treats girl” who make her living by meeting wealthy
men in bars, then asking them for $20 (a lot of money in pre-inflation times)
to tip the maid in the ladies’ room. Elizabeth Taylor’s character in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Butterfield Eight, </i>based on John
O’Hara’s realistic novel of the 1930s, is also a treats girl. </span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">In
Joyce’s Dublin, here is the morality of a sex worker: while she is with a
customer, he gets all her attention. The soldiers regard it the same way, and
accuse Stephen of insulting her. When the fight is about to happen, she seizes
the soldier’s sleeve, and cries: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Amn’t
I<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>with you? Amn’t I your girl?
Cissy’s your girl.” </i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
fight takes a number of moves to escalate. Of the two soldiers, Private Carr
does all the direct aggression, addressing Stephen and uttering a string of
curses. His chum, Private Compton urges him on: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Biff him Harry.” </i>And later, as Bloom tries to intervene to prevent
the fight: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Go it, Harry. Do him one in
the eye.”</i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen
is mostly aloof, makes supercilious answers to Private Carr’s threats, looks up
at the sky; at one point he nervously puts his arm on Private Carr’s sleeve,
and semi-apologizes: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I understand your
point of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>view...” </i>although
continuing with his rambling thoughts. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>Private Carr now picks up a new line
of imputed insult, no longer about his girl, but about his king. Through a
series of six utterances, as Stephen tries to retreat, Private Carr escalates
verbally, from: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">What are you saying
about my king? / I’ll wring the neck of any bugger says a word against my
fucking king. / I’ll wring the neck of any fucking bastard says a word against
my bleeding fucking king. / I’ll do him in, so help me fucking Christ! I’ll
wring the bastard fucker’s bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!” </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Piling on the obscenities operates as a
ritual incantation; each utterance repeats part of the previous and adds to it,
although the effect of this is to show no great respect for the king or anyone
else invoked in aid. *</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*Joyce
accurately describes the process of cursing. As Jack Katz (“Pissed Off in
L.A.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>in 1999, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">How Emotions Work </i>), has shown with the
curses drivers make at each other in road rage incidents, cursing pumps you up;
it is what I have called self-entrainment, getting entrained in the rhythm of
one’s emotion. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Ultimately
Private Carr breaks away from his girl who is holding him back, rushes at
Stephen and knocks him down.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It is
a one-punch fight, total domination; this is typical of most casual fights
among the unacquainted, consisting of one “sucker punch.” As an informant told
me about bar fights: the first to decide there is going to be a fight usually
wins. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr is looking for a fight; he has worked himself up; he is strong and a
competent fighter and has found a weak, diffident victim, all of which are
ingredients for the most typical kind of fighting, attacking the weak. In real
life, most fights are ugly, unfair, and not at all honorable except in the
partisan mind of the attacker.**</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">** The
audience plays an important role. Observational and video research [Collins,
2008.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Violence: A Micro-sociological Theory</i>] shows that fights are longer
and more intense when the audience cheers on the fighters; short and abortive
when the crowd is divided or indifferent; and quickly end when bystanders
intervene. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">An
excited crowd has gathered, but they dispute among themselves in a cacophony of
voices who is to blame or even what is going on. Private Compton offers crucial
social support. Not only egging on his chum; he attempts to control the crowd,
waving them back, and calling out “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fair
play, here.” </i>He is invoking the rules of a classic duel or fair fight,
one-on-one, while the audience watches. This is a second major form of
fighting, where the audience by assuming the role of spectators puts the
contenders under pressure to perform. Cissy immediately recognizes the
honorific form, and cries out: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">They’re
going to fight! For me!”</i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cooling out the cops</span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
aftermath of the fight is equally realistic. The police arrive. Private Compton
tries to drag his chum away: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Here bugger
off, Harry. There’s the cops!” </i>Too late, the police start asking for
identities. The privates go back to their line about being insulted with their
lady. Bloom asserts his civic standing: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I’m
a witness. Constable, take his regimental number.</i>” Giving orders to a
police officer rarely works [Donald Black, 1980. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Manners and Customs of the Police.</i>], and the cop responds: “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I don’t want your instructions in the
discharge of my duty.” </i>Private Compton takes advantage of the turn of
attention to drag off his comrade, who has found a new target to swear at. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
cop now is about to take Stephen’s name and address, when Bloom spies an
acquaintance in the crowd, Cornelius Kelleher, the city official who had
brought two gentlemen to the brothel. Bloom whispers about network connections:
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Simon Dedalus’ son. A bit sprung.” </i>Kelleher
adopts a different approach with the police. “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">That’s all right, I know him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Won a bit at the races./<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Leave it to me, sergeant. That’ll be all right. We were often as bad, ay
or worse. What? Eh, what? </i>The police are reluctant to change an
investigation they have already started, but they disperse the crowd (which
gives them more privacy), and gradually fall into Kelleher’s mood-- calming
things down, drawling, laughing, invoking an informal tone, above all pulling
them into his rhythm. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Come and wipe your
name off the slate.” (He lilts, wagging his head, then imitates a drunken
song.) “What, eh, do you follow me?” </i>The second officer finally says: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Ah, sure we were too.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></i>Bloom joins in, shakes hands all
around, offering polite thanks and confidential explanations. The artificial
and embarrassed quality of the parting is displayed as they all repeatedly wish
each other goodnight. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Respectability and
embarrassment</span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Now
Kelleher and Bloom have to cool each other out, as middle-class citizens
meeting in the midst of the brothel district. Kelleher continues to laugh and
to make light of the whole series of events, while explaining his purely
incidental part in bringing the visiting commercials to Mrs. Cohen’s. Not that
he is a prude: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">“Sure they wanted me to join
in... No, by God, says I. Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. (He
laughs again and leers with lackluster eye.) Thanks be to God we have it in the
house what, eh, do you follow me? Hah! hah! hah!”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Bloom tries to laugh:</i> “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He, he, he.” </i>They ignore each other’s excuses and turn their
attention to Stephen, still knocked out on the ground. Kelleher has been asked
to help carry Stephen away in the cab, but he lets it drop. The ride would have
prolonged the embarrassing situation of being together. As the horse-cab turns
around and leaves, they act out a pantomime: Kelleher, Bloom, and the cabbie
all pretending to be mirthful about witnessing lapses from propriety.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Joyce
captures better than anyone the maneuvers people go through on the borders between
underground adventure and respectability. Historically, neither side has gone
away.* This is another reason why sex is good material for literature. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">*
Randall Collins, “Why does Repression Exist?”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2015_02_01_archive.html"><span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">http://sociological-eye.blogspot.com/2015_02_01_archive.html</span></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Following
is the stripped-down version of Joyce’s text, omitting the fantasies.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Extracts are in sequence without
breaks, elisions left unmarked. [In brackets are my brief summaries of omitted
action.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">JOYCE’S
NIGHTTOWN CHAPTER-- ETHNOGRAPHIC VERSION</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The Mabbot Street entrance to
nighttown. Rows of flimsy houses with gaping doors. Rare lamps with faint
rainbow fans.</span></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Calls:
Wait, my love, and I’ll be with you.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Bawd. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The famished snaggletooths of an
elderly bawd protrude from a doorway. Her voice whispering huskily.</i>) Sst!
Come here till I tell you. Maidenhead inside. Sst.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Stephen
passes with his companion Lynch, making irrelevant remarks.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Bawd: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">spits in their trail her jet of
venom.</i>) Trinity medicals. Fallopian tube. All prick and no pence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Bloom
appears.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Bawd: Ten shillings a maidenhead. Fresh thing was never touched. Fifteen.
There’s no-one in it only her old father that’s dead drunk.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She
points. In the gap of her dark den furtive, rainbedraggled Bridie Kelly stands.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Weak squeaks of laughter are heard, weaker.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Bawd:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s getting his pleasure.
You won’t get a virgin in the flash houses. Ten shillings. Don’t be all night
before the polis in plain clothes see us. Sixtyseven is a bitch.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bloom passes. Cheap whores, singly, coupled,
shawled, dishevelled, call from lanes, doors, corners.</i>) </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Whores: Are you going far, queer fellow? How’s your middle leg? Got a match on
you? Eh, come here till I stiffen it for you. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He plodges through their sump towards the
lighted street beyond. From a bulge of window curtains a gramophone rears a
battered brazen trunk. In the shadow a shebeen-keeper haggles with a navvy and
two redcoats.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Navvy: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">belching</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Where’s the bloody house?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Shebeen-keeper: Purdon street. Shilling a bottle. Respectable woman. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Navvy: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gripping the two redcoats,
staggers forward with them.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Come on, you British army!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: He ain’t half balmy.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Compton: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Laughs.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What ho!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zoe Higgins, a young whore in a sapphire
slip, closed with three bronze buckles, a slim black velvet filet round her
throat, nods, trips down the steps and accosts Bloom.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
Are you looking for someone? He’s inside with his friend.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
Is this Mrs Mack’s?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
No, eightyone. Mrs Cohen’s. You might go farther and fare worse. Mother
Slipperslapper. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Familiarly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s on the job herself tonight with
the vet, her tipster, that gives her all the winners, and pays for her son in
Oxford. Working overtime but her luck’s turned today. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Suspiciously.</i>) You’re not his father, are you?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
Not I!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
You both in black. Has little mousey any tickles tonight?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">His skin, alert, feels her fingertips
approach. A hand slides over his left thigh.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
How’s the nuts?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Her hand slides into his left trouser pocket
and takes out an object.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
For Zoe? For keeps? For being so nice, eh?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She puts it greedily into a pocket, then
links his arm, cuddling him with supple warmth. He smiles uneasily. He gazes in
the tawny crystal of her eyes, ringed with kohol. His smile softens.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
You’ll know me next time.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gazelles are leaping, feeding on the
mountains. Near are lakes. Round their shores file shadows black of
cedargroves. Aroma rises, a strong hairgrowth of resin. It burns, the orient, a
sky of sapphire, cleft by the bronze flight of eagles. Under it lies the
womancity, nude, white, still, cool, in luxury. A fountain murmurs among damask
roses. Mammoth roses murmur of scarlet winegrapes. A wine of shame, lust, blood
exudes, strangely murmuring.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zoe murmuring singsong with the music.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Fascinated.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought you were of good stock by
your accent.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
And you know what thought did?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She bites his ear gently with little
goldstopped teeth sending on him a cloying breath of stale garlic.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Draws back mechanically caressing her
right bub with a flat awkward hand.</i>) Are you a Dublin girl?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catches a hair deftly and twists it to her
coil.</i>) No bloody fear. I’m English. Have you a swaggerroot?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
Rarely smoke, dear. Cigar now and then. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lewdly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The mouth can be better engaged than
with a cylinder of rank weed.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Bloom
talks at length, says farewell.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stiffly, her finger in her neckfillet.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Honest? Till the next time. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She sneers.</i>) Suppose you got up the
wrong side of the bed or came too quick with your best girl. O, I can read your
thoughts.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bitterly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Man and woman, love, what is it? A cork and bottle.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In sudden sulks.</i>) I hate a rotter that’s
insincere. Give a bleeding whore a chance.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Repentantly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I am very disagreeable. You are a
necessary evil. Where are you from? London?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Glibly.</i>) Hog’s Norton where the pigs
play the organs. I’m Yorkshire born. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She
holds his hand which is feeling for her nipple.</i>) I say, Tommy Tittlemouse.
Stop that and begin worse. Have you cash for a short time? Ten shillings?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Smiles, nods slowly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>More, houri, more.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
And more’s mother. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She pats him
offhandedly with velvet paws.</i>) Are you coming into the music room to see
our new pianola? Come and I’ll peel off.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Feeling his occiput dubiously with the
embarrassment of a pedlar gauging the symmetry of her peeled pears.</i>)
Somebody would be dreadfully jealous if she know. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flattered.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What the eye can’t see the heart can’t grieve for. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She pats him.</i>) Come.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
Silent means consent. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">With little parted
talons she captures his hands, her forefinger giving to his palm the pass touch
of secret monitor, luring him to doom.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hot hands cold gizzard.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He hesitates amid scents, music,
temptations. She leads him towards the steps, drawing him by the odour of her
armpits, the vice of her painted eyes, the rustle of her slip in whose sinous
folds lurks the lion reek of all the male brutes that have possessed her.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Zoe and Bloom reach the doorway where two
sister whores are seated. They examine him curiously from under their pencilled
brows and smile to his hasty bow. He trips awkwardly.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She crosses the threshold. He hesitates. She
turns and, holding out her hands, draws him over. On the antlered rack of the
hall hang a man’s hat and waterproof. A door on the return landing is thrown
open. A man in purple shirt and grey trousers, brownsocked, passes with an
ape’s gait, his bald head and goatee beard upheld, hugging a full waterjugjar,
his twotailed black braces dangling at heels. Averting his face quickly Bloom
bends to examine the halltable; then follows Zoe into the musicroom. A shade of
mauve tissuepaper dims the light of the chandelier. The floor is covered with
an oilcloth mosaic, footmarks stamped over it, a morris of shuffling feet
without body phantoms, all in a scrimmage higgledypiggledy. The walls are
tapestried with a paper of yewfronds and clear glades. In the grate is spread a
screen of peacock feathers.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lynch squats crosslegged on the hearthrug,
his cap back to front. With a wand he beats time slowly. Kitty Ricketts, a bony
pallid whore in navy costume, doeskin gloves rolled back from a coral wristlet,
a chain purse in her hand, sits perched on the edge of the table swinging her
leg and glancing at herself in the gilt mirror over the mantelpiece. A tag of
her corset lace hangs slightly below her jacket. Lynch indicates mockingly the
couple at the piano.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Kitty:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Coughs behind her hand.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s a bit imbecilic. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lynch lifts up her skirt and white petticoat
with a wand. She settles them down quickly.</i>) Respect yourself. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She hiccups, then bends quickly her sailor
hat under which her hair glows, red with henna.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>O, excuse!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The wand in Lynch’s hand flashes: a brass
poker. Stephen stands at the pianola on which sprawl his hat and ashplant. With
two fingers he repeats once more the series of empty fifths. Florry Talbot, a
blonde feeble goosefat whore in a tatterdermalion gown of mildewed strawberry,
lolls spread-eagle in the sofa corner, her limp forearm pendent over the
bolster, listening.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Kitty:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hiccups again with a kick of her horsed
foot.</i>) O, excuse!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Promptly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Your boy’s thinking of you. Tie a knot on your shift.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kitty Ricketts bends her head. Her boa
uncoils, slides, glides over the shoulder, back, arm, chair to the ground.
Lynch lifts the curled caterpillar on his wand. She snakes her neck, nestling.
Stephen glances behind at the squatted figure with its cap back to the front.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
Who has a fag as I’m here?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lynch:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tossing a cigarette onto the table.</i>)
Here.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Her head perched aside in mock pride.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is that the way to hand the pot to a
lady? (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She stretches up to light the
cigarette over the flame, twirling it slowly, showing the brown tufts of her
armpits. Lynch with his poker lifts boldly a side of her slip. Bare from her
garters up her flesh appears under the sapphire a nixie’s green. She puffs
calmly at her cigarette.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can
you see the beauty spot on my behind?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lynch:
I’m not looking.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Makes sheep’s eyes.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No? You wouldn’t do a less thing. Would
you suck a lemon?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Squinting in mock shame she glances with
sidelong meaning at Bloom, then twists round towards him pulling her slip free
of the poker. Blue fluid again flows over her flesh. Bloom stands, smiling
desirously, twirling his thumbs.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
There was a priest down here two nights ago to do his bit of business with his
coat buttoned up. You needn’t try to hide, I says to him. I know you’ve a Roman
collar.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lynch:
I hope you gave the good father a penance. Nine glorias for shooting a bishop.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Spouts walrus smoke through her nostrils.</i>)
He couldn’t get a connection. Only, you know, sensation.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A dry rush.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The door opens. Bella Cohen, a massive
whoremistress enters. She is dressed in a threequarter ivory gown, fringed
round the hem with tasselled selvedge, and cools herself, flirting a black horn
fan like Minnie Hauck in </i>Carmen<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">. On
her left hand are wedding and keeper rings. Her eyes are deeply carboned. She
has a sprouting mustache. Her olive face is heavy, slightly sweated and
fullnosed, with orange-tainted nostrils. She has large pendant beryl eardrops. </i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>My word! I’m all in a mucksweat.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She glances around her at the couples, Then
her eyes rest on Bloom with hard insistence. Her large fan winnows wind towards
her heated face, neck and embonpoint. Her falcon eyes glitter.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Fan: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Flirting quickly, then slowly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Married, I see.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Approaches Zoe.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Give me back that potato, will you?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe:
Here. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She hauls up a reef of her slip,
revealing her bare thigh and unrolls the potato from the top of her stocking.</i>)
Those that hides knows where to find.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Frowns.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This isn’t a musical peepshow. And don’t you smash that
piano. Who’s paying here?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She goes to the pianola. Stephen fumbles in
his pocket and, taking out a banknote by its corner, hands it to her.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Looks at the money, then at Zoe, Florry
and Kitty.</i>) Do you want three girls? It’s ten shillings here. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Delightedly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A hundred thousand apologies. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He fumbles again and takes out and hands her
two crowns.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bella goes to the table to count the money
while Stephen talks to himself in monosyllables. Zoe bounds over to the table.
Kitty leans over Zoe’s neck. Lynch gets up, rights his cap, and clasping
Kitty’s waist, adds his head to the group.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Florry:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Strives heavily to rise.</i>) Ow! My
foot’s asleep. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She limps over to the
table. Bloom approaches.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella,
Zoe, Kitty, Lynch, Bloom: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Chattering and
squabbling.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The gentleman...
ten shillings... paying for the three... allow me a moment... this gentleman
pays separate... who’s touching it? ... ow... mind who you’re pinching... are
you staying the night or a short time?... who did? ... you’re a liar, excuse me
... the gentleman paid down like a gentleman... drink... it’s long after
eleven. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lifting up her pettigown and folding a half
sovereign into the top of her stocking.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hard earned on the flat of my back.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lynch:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lifting Kitty from the table.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Come!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Kitty:
Wait. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She clutches her two crowns.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Florry:
And me?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lynch:
Hoopla!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He lifts her, carries her and bumps her down on the sofa.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quietly lays a half sovereign on the
table between Bella and Florry.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>So. Allow me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He takes up the pound note.</i>) Three times
ten. We’re square.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Admiringly.</i>) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You’re such a slyboots, old cocky. I
could kiss you.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Points.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hum? Deep as a drawwell. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lynch bends Kitty back over the sofa and kisses her. Bloom goes with
the poundnote to Stephen.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
This is yours.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Piano-playing,
dancing, singing; more fantasy apparitions. Stephen lifts his walking stick at
a phantom and smashes the chandelier.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lynch:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">rushes forward and seizes Stephen’s
hand.</i>) Here! Hold on! Don’t run amok!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
Police!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stephen flees from the room past the whores
at the door.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Screams.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After him!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The two whores rush to the halldoors. Lynch
and Kitty and Zoe stampede from the room. They talk excitedly. Bloom follows,
returns.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Whores: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Jammed in the doorway, pointing.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Down there. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pointing.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There. There’s something up.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
Who pays for the lamp? (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She seizes
Bloom’s coattail.</i>) There. You were with him. The lamp’s broken.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rushes to the hall, rushes back.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What lamp, woman?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Her eyes hard with anger and cupidity,
points.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who’s to pay for
that? Ten shillings. You’re a witness.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
Me? Ten shillings? Haven’t you lifted enough off him? Didn’t he...!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Loudly</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here, none of your tall talk. This isn’t a brothel. A ten
shilling house.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">His hand under the lamp, pulls the chain.
The gasjet lights up a crushed mauve purple shade.</i>) Only the chimney’s
broken. There’s not a sixpenceworth of damage done. Ten shillings!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Do you want me to call the police?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
O, I know. Bulldog on the premises. But he’s a Trinity student. Patrons of your
establishment. Gentlemen that pay the rent. Know what I mean? You don’t want a
scandal.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angrily</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Trinity! Coming down here ragging after the boat races and
paying nothing. Are you my commander here? Where is he? I’ll charge him.
Disgrace him, I will. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She shouts.</i>)
Zoe! Zoe!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">urgently</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And if it were your own son in Oxford! (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Warningly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I know.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bella:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Almost speechless.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who are you incog?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Zoe: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">In the doorway.</i>) There’s a row on.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
What? Where? (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He throws a shilling on the
table and shouts.</i>) That’s for the chimney. Where?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He hurries out through the hall. On the
doorstep all the whores clustered talk volubly, pointing to the right where the
fog has cleared off. From the left arrives a jingling hackney car. It slows in
front of the house. Bloom in the halldoor perceives Corny Kelleher who is about
to dismount from the car with two silent lechers. He averts his face. Bella
from within the hall urges on her whores. They blow ickylickysticky yumyum
kisses. Corny Kelleher replies with a ghostly lewd smile. The silent lechers
turn to pay the jarvey.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[In
the street, Stephen is being berated by two soldiers and a street whore,
surrounded by a knot of noisy onlookers.]</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To Cissy Cafferty.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was he insulting you?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Voices:
No, he didn’t. The girl’s telling lies. He was in Mrs Cohen’s. What’s up?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Soldiers and civilians.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cissy
Cafferty: I was in company with the soldiers and they left me to do-- you know
and the young man ran up behind me. But I’m faithful to the man that’s treating
me though I’m only a shilling whore.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To Cissy.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Was he insulting you while me and him
was having a piss?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Compton: Biff him, Harry. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">His cap awry, advancing to
Stephen.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Say, how would it
be, governor, if I was to bash in your jaw?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen.
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Looks up at sky.</i>) How? Very
unpleasant. Noble art of self-pretence. Personally, I detest action. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Elbowing through the crowd, plucks
Stephen’s sleeve vigorously.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Come now, professor, that carman is waiting.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Turns, disengages himself.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Why should I not speak to him or any
human being who walks upright? (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He points
his finger.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’m not afraid of
what I can talk to if I see his eye. Retaining the perpendicular.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He
staggers a pace back.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Propping him.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Retain your own.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Biddy
the Clap: Did you hear what the professor said? He’s a professor out of the
college.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cunty
Kate:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I did. I heard that.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pulls himself free and comes
forward.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What’s that you’re
saying about my king?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nervous, friendly, pulls himself up.</i>)
I understand your point of view, though I have no king myself for the moment. A
discussion is difficult down here. But this is the point. You die for your
country, I suppose. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He places his arm on
Private Carr’s sleeve.</i>) Not that I wish it for you. But I say: let my
country die for me. Damn death. Long live life!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Compton:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Eh, Harry, give him a
kick in the knackers. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To the privates, softly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He doesn’t know what he’s saying.
Taking a little more than is good for him.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s a gentleman, a poet. It’s all right.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: I don’t give a bugger who he is.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Compton: We don’t give a bugger who he is.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To Stephen.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Come home. You’ll get into trouble.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Swaying.</i>) I don’t avoid it. He
provokes my intelligence.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: Here. What are you saying about my king?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Throws up his hands.</i>) O, this is too
monotonous. He wants my money and my life, though want must be his master, for
some brutish empire of his. Money I haven’t. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He searches his pockets vaguely.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Gave it to someone.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: Who wants your bleeding money?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tries to move off.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will someone tell me where I am
least likely to meet these necessary evils? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ça
se voit aussi à Paris</i>.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Not
that I ...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cissy
Cafferty (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shrill.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Stop them from fighting!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tugging at his belt.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll wring the neck of any bugger says
a word against my fucking king.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Terrified.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He said nothing. Not a word. A pure
misunderstanding.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Compton: Go it, Harry. Do him one in the eye.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: I’ll do him in.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Compton: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Waves the crowd back.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fair play, here. Make a bleeding
butcher’s shop of the bugger.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cissy
Cafferty: They’re going to fight! For me!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cunty
Kate: The brave and fair.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Loosening his belt, shouts.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll wring the neck of any fucking
bastard says a word against my bleeding fucking king.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shakes Cissy Cafferty’s shoulders.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Speak, you! Are you struck dumb?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cissy
Cafferty: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Alarmed, seizes Private Carr’s
sleeve.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Amn’t I with you?
Amn’t I your girl? Cissy’s your girl. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">She
cries.</i>) Police!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Voices:
Police!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">With ferocious articulation.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll do him in, so help me fucking
Christ!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll wring the bastard fucker’s
bleeding blasted fucking windpipe!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Runs to Lynch.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Can’t you get him away?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Lynch:
Kitty! (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To Bloom.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Get him away, you. He won’t listen to
me. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He drags Kitty away.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Points.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Exit Judas.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Runs to Stephen.</i>) Come along with me
now before worse happens. Here’s your stick.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Stephen:
Stick, no. Reason. This is the feast of pure reason.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cissy
Cafferty: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pulling Private Carr.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Come on, you’re boosed. He insulted me,
but I forgive him. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shouting in his ear.</i>)
I forgive him for insulting me.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Over Stephen’s shoulder.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes, go. You see he’s incapable.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Breaks loose.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll insult him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He rushes towards Stephen, fists
outstretched, and strikes him in the face. Stephen totters, collapses, falls
stunned.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Crowd:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Let him up! Don’t strike
him when he’s down! Air! Who? The soldier hit him. He’s a professor. Is he
hurted? Don’t manhandle him. He’s fainted!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A Hag:
What call had the redcoat to strike the gentleman and he under the influence?
Let them go and fight the Boers!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Bawd:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Listen to who’s talking!
Hasn’t the soldier a right to go with his girl? He gave him the coward’s blow.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">They grab each other’s hair, claw at each
other and spit.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shoves them back, loudly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Get back, stand back!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Compton:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tugging his comrade.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here bugger off, Harry. There’s the cops!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Two raincaped watch, tall, stand in the
group.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">First
Watch: What’s wrong here?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Compton: We were with this lady and he insulted us and assaulted my chum. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The retriever barks.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Who owns the bleeding tyke?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Cissy
Cafferty: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">With expectation.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Is he bleeding?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">A Man:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rising from his knees.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No. Gone off. He’ll come to all right.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Glances sharply at the man.</i>) Leave
him to me. I can easily... </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Second
Watch: Who are you? Do you know him?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lurches towards the watch.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He insulted my lady friend.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Angrily.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>You hit him without provocation. I’m a witness. Constable,
take his regimental number.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Second
Watch: I don’t want your instructions in the discharge of my duty.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Compton:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pulling his comrade.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Here, bugger off, Harry. Or old Bennett’ll have you in the lockup.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Private
Carr: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Staggering as he is pulled away.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>God fuck old Bennett! He’s a whitearsed
bugger. I don’t give a shit for him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">First
Watch: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Taking out his notebook.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What’s his name?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Peering over the crowd.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I just see a car there. If you give me
a hand a second, sergeant...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">First
Watch: Name and address.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Corney Kelleher appears among the bystanders.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Quickly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>O, the very man! (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He
whispers.</i>) Simon Dedalus’ son. A bit sprung. Get those policemen to move
those loafers back.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Second
Watch:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Night, Mr. Kelleher.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">To the watch, with drawling eye.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>That’s all right. I know him. Won a bit on the races. Gold
cup. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He laughs.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Twenty to one. Do you follow me?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">First
Watch: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Turns to the crowd.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Here, what are you all gaping at? Move
on out of that.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The crowd disperses slowly, muttering, down
the lane.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Leave it to me,
sergeant. That’ll be all right. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He
laughs, shaking his head.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We
were often as bad, ay or worse. What? Eh, what?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">First
Watch: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Laughs.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I suppose so.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nudges the second watch.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Come and wipe your name off the slate.
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He lilts, wagging his head.</i>) With my
tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom tooraloom. What, eh, do you follow me?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Second
Watch: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Genially.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ah, sure we were too.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Winking.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Boys will be boys. I’ve a car round
there.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Second
Watch: All right, Mr. Kelleher. Good night.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ll see to that.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shakes hands with both of the watch in
turn.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Thank you very much
gentlemen, thank you. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He mumbles
confidentially.</i>) We don’t want any scandal, you understand. Father is a
well known, highly respected citizen. Just a little wild oats, you understand.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">First
Watch: O, I understand, sir.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Second
Watch: That’s all right, sir.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">First
Watch: It was only in case of corporal injuries I’d have had to report it at
the station.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Nods rapidly.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Naturally. Quite right. Only your
bounden duty.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Second
Watch: It’s our duty.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Good night, men.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">The
Watch: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Saluting together.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Night, gentlemen. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">They move off with slow heavy tread.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Blows.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Providential you came on the scene. You have a car? ...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Laughs, pointing his thumb
over his right shoulder to the car.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Two commercials that were standing fizz in Jammet’s. Like princes,
faith. One of them lost two quid on the race. Drowning his grief and were on
for a go with the jolly girls.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>So
I landed them up on Behan’s car and down to Nighttown.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
I was just going home by Gardiner street when I happened to...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Laughs.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Sure they wanted to me to join in with
the mots. No, by God, says I. Not for old stagers like myself and yourself. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He laughs again and leers with lackluster
eye.</i>) Thanks be to God we have it in the house what, eh, do you follow
me?<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hah! hah! hah!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tries to laugh.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He, he, he!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yes. Matter of fact I was just visiting an old friend of
mine here, you don’t know him (poor fellow he’s laid up for the past week) and
we had a liquor together and I was just making my way home...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher: Sure it was Behan, our jarvey there, that told me after we left the
two commercials in Mrs Cohen’s and I told him to pull up and got off to see. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He laughs.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Will I give him a lift home? Where does he hang out?
Somewhere in Cabra, what?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
No, in Sandycove, I believe, from what he let drop.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stephen, prone, breathes to the stars. Corny
Kelleher, asquint, drawls at the horse. Bloom in gloom, looms down.</i>)</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher: (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Scratches his nape.</i>)
Sandycove!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He bends down and calls to Stephen.</i>) Eh! (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He calls again.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Eh!<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He’s covered with
shavings anyhow. Take care they didn’t lift anything off him.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
No, no, no. I have his money and his hat here and stick.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Ah well, he’ll get over
it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>No bones broken. Well I’ll
shove along. (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">He laughs.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I’ve a rendezvous in the morning. Safe
home!</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
Good night. I’ll just wait and take him along in a few...</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Corny
Kelleher:<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">From the car, standing.</i>)<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Night.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bloom:
Night.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">(<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The horse and car back slowly, awkwardly and
turn. Corny Kelleher on the sideseat sways his head to and fro in sign of mirth
at Bloom’s plight.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The jarvey
joins in the mute pantomimic merriment nodding from the farther seat. Bloom
shakes his head in mute mirthful reply...</i>) [until the car is ought of
sight.]</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">EARLIER VERSION:
JOYCE'S TEEN-AGE OBSERVATIONS OF NIGHTTOWN</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Joyce
gave a description of himself wandering around Nighttown, in<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man</i> (written 1904-11). His fictional
alter ego, Stephen Dedalus has grown up to become the top boy in his last year
of Jesuit secondary school. He uses his new freedom to explore the streets of
Dublin.] [<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">actual descriptions italicized</i>]</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He had wandered into a maze of
narrow and dirty streets. From the foul laneways he heard bursts of hoarse riot
and wrangling and the drawling of drunken singers. </span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He walked onward, undismayed,
wondering whether he had strayed into the quarter of the jews. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Women and girls dressed in long vivid gowns
traversed the street from house to house. They were leisurely and perfumed</i>.
A trembling seized him and his eyes grew dim. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The yellow gasflames arose before his troubled vision against the
vapoury sky,</i> burning as if before an altar. Before the doors and the
lighted halls groups were gathered arrayed as for some rite. He was in another
world: he had awakened from a slumber of centuries.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">He
stood still in the middle of the roadway, his heart clamouring against his
bosom in a tumult. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A young woman dressed
in a long pink gown laid her hand on his arm to detain him and gazed into his
face. She said gaily:</i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- Good night, Willie dear!</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Her room was warm and
lightsome. A huge doll sat with her legs apart in the copious easychair beside
the bed.</span></i><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;"> He
tried to bid his tongue speak that he might seem at ease, watching her as she
undid her gown, noting the proud conscious movements of her perfumed head.</span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">As he
stood silent in the middle of the room she came over to him and embraced him
firmly to her and he, seeing her face lifted to him in serious calm and feeling
the warm calm rise and fall of her breast, all but burst into hysterical
weeping. Tears of joy and relief shone in his delighted eyes and his lips
parted though they would not speak.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">She
passed her tinkling hand through his hair, calling him a little rascal.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">--
Give me a kiss, she said.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">His
lips would not bend to kiss her. He wanted to be held firmly in her arms, to be
caressed slowly, slowly, slowly. In her arms he felt that he had suddenly
become strong and fearless and sure of himself. But his lips would not bend to
kiss her.</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">With a
sudden movement she bowed his head and joined her lips to his and he read the
meaning of her movement sin her frank uplifted eyes. It was too much for him.
He closed his eyes, surrendering himself to her, body and mind, conscious of
nothing in the world but the dark pressure of her softly parting lips. They
pressed upon his brain as upon his lips as though they were the vehicle of a
vague speech; and between them he felt an unknown and timid pressure, darker
than the swoon of sin, softer than sound or odour. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">[Sitting
in the schoolroom, Stephen awaits the night.]</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">It
would be a gloomy secret night. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">After
early nightfall the yellow lamps would light up, here and there, the squalid
quarter of the brothels. He would follow a devious course up and down the
streets, circling always nearer and nearer in a tremor of fear and joy, until
his feet led him suddenly round a dark corner. The whores would be just coming
out of their houses making ready for the night, yawning lazily after their
sleep and settling the hairpins in their clusters of hair.</i> He would pass by
them calmly waiting for a sudden movement of his own will or a sudden call to
his sinloving soul from their soft perfumed flesh. Yet as he prowled in quest
of that call, his senses, stultified only by his desire, would note keenly all
that wounded or shamed them; his eyes, a ring of porter froth on a clothless
table or a photograph of two soldiers standing to attention or a gaudy
playbill; his
ears,<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> the drawling jargon of greeting:</i>
</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- Hello, Bertie, any good in
your mind?</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- Is that you, pigeon?</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- Number ten. Fresh Nelly is
waiting for you.</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="color: #0000bb; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">-- Goodnight, husband! Coming
in to have a short time?</span></i></span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Comment:</span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Nighttown
here is substantially the same place as in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i>,
published in 1922.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>But Joyce had
trouble getting the innocuous stories in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Dubliners</i>
published until 1915 because of a small amount of sexual innuendo; and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, </i><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>published the following year, is much
more guarded although it focuses on Stephen's sexual awakening and resulting
estrangement from his previous religious devoutness. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Portrait</i>'s style is a conventional rendering of the protagonist's
thoughts and feelings, in rather florid and romanticized language, especially
in Stephen's first encounter with a prostitute. The prostitutes' talk is
obviously cleaned-up of obscenities. The kissing scene might be real; in
mid-20th century the rule was "never kiss a whore"-- with the
rationale that she had some other man's cock in her mouth. But oral sex seems
not to be common in the period Joyce is describing. The loose gowns worn by
prostitutes outdoors would have been shocking in 1900, since this was ladies'
casual indoor dress, and they would have worn corsets under tightly fitting
suits outdoors and on proper occasions indoors. </span></div>
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<span style="color: #0000bb; font-size: large; mso-bidi-font-size: 12.0pt;">Bottom
line: Joyce in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ulysses</i> has learned
how to convey objective realities more sharply, and subjective feelings
indirectly without the heavy veil of conventional expressions. It is possible
that Joyce started his keen observations of sights and sounds-- the ring of
beer froth on the clothless table, the voices of the prostitutes calling for
customers-- from his sexual awakening. If his autobiographical novel is
chronologically accurate, Joyce would have been 17 and the year of his
wandering the red light zone would be about 1899. </span></div>
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