Graceland

Living near Belmont Harbor and the lake I am accustomed to the drone of jet planes for the better part of a week each June when the Air and Water Show is in town. This experience made me feel at home this evening as I attended a performance of the world premiere production of Graceland by Ellen Fairey at Profiles Theatre. In addition to the drone of jets Graceland provided a real sense of being in Chicago and the characters who inhabited the world of this play were each very real in their own way. Even though they had moments of messing around with mythology the play itself had a classical balance as the relationships of the two fathers (one dead) and sons mirrored each other. The result was an exciting, even electric evening of theater with great performances by the whole ensemble.

I thought Jackson Challinor was especially convincing as Miles the teenage cemetery worker who is on the cusp of manhood. His tentative moments with Sarah (Cheryl Graeff) were exquisite. Yet the edgy scenes between Sarah and her brother Sam (EricBurgher) were also convincing as they each tried to deal with the loss of their father. The best moments occurred as the relationships slowly developed and came together over the short ninety minutes of the drama. Comic moments relieved the tension, and the wonder of the sky at the end left me with a good feeling about their world. This is a play worth seeing again.

Nicholas Nickleby II

Now that we have completed reading two thirds of Nicholas Nickleby some of Dickens' main themes are emerging. Dickens was passionate about the theater and that passion is quite evident in this novel. Once Nicholas has left the "boys' school" run by the Squeers he soon takes up with a theater troupe. He is successful translating plays from French into English and doing some acting.
This leads me to the theme of illusion and reality which we discussed in our last class. Once you start looking for examples of this you can find it in almost every chapter. In the first scenes of the novel we see Nicholas' family lose their modest wealth when his father's investments are more illusory than real. Nicholas' mother turns to her brother-in-law for help upon the death of her husband only to find any notion of family bonds is also an illusion. Of course the "school" where Nicholas is posted by his uncle Ralph is an utter illusion, much to the detriment of the boys confined therein. As we read further in the novel we find that characters are more likely to not be what they first seem to be; finally, it is somewhat ironic that Nicholas would find himself in a theater troupe learning the profession of creating illusions for a paying audience.

The number of characters seems to be growing geometrically as is typical in most of Dicken's novels, but most of the characters introduced so far are interesting enough to keep the reader's attention. Nicholas' growth and education (this novel is a bildungsroman of sorts) is the most interesting aspect of the novel for this reader. But I wonder what it would be like to have the story told from the point of view of his sister Kate?
Two last comments on the novel so far: 1) The city of London is very much a character in the novel with Dickens sharing his love for this city more than once probably drawing on the experiences he had on the long walks that he often took (cf. pp. 390 & 446, and 2) the narrator includes brief comments on the state of novel-writing itself (p. 345). The chapters comprising the final third of this novel will share with us of the fate of Nicholas and Kate.


Nicholas Nickleby by Charles Dickens. Penguin Classics, New York. 2003 (1839).

Ready or Not

Last night I attended a performance of the play Ready or Not written by John Enright and produced by Barely Concealed Productions at the Dream Theatre. It is an entertaining romantic comedy with suspense, humor and love interests. It is filled with sufficient twists and turns to keep surprising you until the very end. The story begins with the return of Eddie Brennan, after a year in a Mexican jail, to his home and wife, Susan. Tom McGrath and Danielle Gennaoui were both excellent in the roles of Eddie and Susan.
It is when Eddie finds out that Susan is planning to leave him for his co-worker Kyle McCormak the plot begins to unfold and the suspense builds right up to the end keeping the audience in suspense as to the outcome. The arrival of Norma Vasquez, a Mexican friend and colleague of Eddie, adds to the interpersonal complexities as they develop on the stage.

I found the performances of both Tamika Morales as Norma and Jeremy Menekseoglu as Kyle were particularly effective and convincing. Under Jeremy's direction the play moved at a perfect pace that kept me enthralled throughout the evening. I enjoyed the word play and the attention to detail that was evident in the production. This is an intelligent play that treats serious issues with a light touch (I must give credit to my friend Joe Plauche for that last thought). As a regular theater attendee I both appreciate and enjoy a play when it makes me think. This play did and it made for a great evening of theater for me and one I would recommend to all.

"In a game of seduction never fall in love."

-Colette

Last night I viewed the Stephen Frears' film Cheri. It was a beautiful adaptation of the novels Cheri and Le fin de Cheri by Colette. Capturing the beauty of the "Belle Epoque" Frears had the help of Michelle Pfeiffer who looked younger than her real age as the aging Courtesan Lea de Lonval. Pfeiffer and Kathy Bates as Madame Peloux, the mother of Cheri, are excellent in their roles.
Cheri is played well by a photogenic Rupert Friend who I have previously seen as Joan Plowright's young friend in Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont (a film I would also highly recommend). I must also recommend the musical score for Cheri by Alexandre Desplat who has won awards for several of his previous film scores including The Queen and The Beat that my Heart Skipped (another of my favorite films). Overall this film version of Colette's novels is a delightful film that I enjoyed so much I will probably see it again.

Proud to Run


This morning at 8.04am I participated in the annual "Proud to Run" 5K. It is part of the Gay Pride week festivities that lead up to the parade on Sunday.
It was a perfect morning for a run, temperature in the seventies with a nice breeze off the lake at Montrose Harbor. My friends Kyle and Kathy Tschaen joined me before the race as they were participating in the 10K section. As they say, a good run was had by all, and even though Kyle did have an aching Achilles tendon he made it through with 'legs' to spare. After the race we watched "The Righteously Outrageous Twirling Corps" strut their stuff to appropriately gay music. They were delightfully outrageous in a very disciplined and entertaining way. Most of the rest of my day will be relaxing the aching muscles of my lower extremities and remembering the fun that made the aches worthwhile.

Franz von Suppe

The composer and conductor Franz von Suppé (born in Spalato, Dalmatia on April 18, 1819, died in Vienna on May 21, 1895) is famous today mainly for his opera overtures which are generally considered "light classics".

A distant relative of Gaetano Donizetti, he was named Francesco Ezechiele Ermenegildo Cavaliere Suppé-Demelli at birth, he simplified and Germanised his name when he moved to Vienna.
Suppé's first extant composition is a Roman Catholic Mass, premiered at a Franciscan church in Zara. He moved to Padua to study law at the University there. His father chose this direction for him, but he continued to study music furtively. Upon the death of his father, he moved to Vienna where he studied with Ignaz Seyfried and Simon Sechter. He conducted at the Josephstadt theatre, without pay at first, but with the opportunity to present his operas there. Eventually, Suppé wrote music for over a hundred productions at Josephstadt as well as at Leopoldstadt, at the Theater an der Wien (perhaps the most prestigious), and a theatre at Baden. He also put on some landmark opera productions, such as the 1846 production of Meyerbeer's Les Huguenots with Jenny Lind. Suppé was also a singer, making his debut in the role of Dulcamara in Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore at the Ödenburg theater in 1842.

Two of Suppé's comic operas have been performed at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, Boccaccio and Donna Juanita, but they failed to become repertoire works. Though the bulk of Suppé's operas have nearly sunken to oblivion, the overtures, particularly Light Cavalry and Poet & Peasant, have survived and some of them have been used in all sorts of soundtracks for movies, cartoons, advertisements, etc., in addition to being played at "pops" concerts. The operas are occasionally performed in Europe, and Peter Branscombe, writing in the Grove dictionary, characterises Suppé's song Des ist mein Österreich as "Austria's second national song". My own favorites are The Beautiful Galatea which highlights a beautiful waltz melody and Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna which has a pastiche of melodies that suggest the Viennese artistic milieu.

After retiring from conducting, Suppé continued to write operas, but shifted his focus to sacred music. He also wrote a Requiem for theater director Franz Pokorny, three Masses, songs, symphonies and concert overtures.

The World of Yesterday

A poet, novelist, dramatist and biographer, Stephan Zweig (1881-1942) was a brilliant writer, documenting both historical lives and his own. During the First World War he took a pacifist stand together with French writer Romain Rolland, summoning intellectuals from all over the world to join them in active pacifism, which led to Romain Rolland being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Zweig remained pacifist all his life - but also advocated the unification of Europe before the Nazis came. Like Rolland, he wrote many biographies including lives of Balzac, Nietzsche and Rolland. He described his Erasmus of Rotterdam as a concealed autobiography.

Zweig fled Austria in 1934, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany. He then lived in England (in Bath and London) before moving to the United States. Of his non-fiction The World of Yesterday is his personal memoir of growing up in fin de siecle Austria and the early years of the twentieth century. Written the year before he died, the book is a testament to his life, a life of the mind and a life of letters. It is a paean to the European culture he considered lost. As such it is a great source if you desire and understanding of that period of European cultural history.

In 1941 he went to Brazil, where in 1942 he and his second wife Lotte (née Charlotte Elisabeth Altmann) committed suicide together in Petrópolis, despairing at the future of Europe and its culture. "I think it better to conclude in good time and in erect bearing a life in which intellectual labour meant the purest joy and personal freedom the highest good on Earth," he wrote.


The World of Yesterday by Stefan Zweig. University of Nebraska Press. 1964 (1943)

The Sorrows of Young Werther

When Johann Wolfgang Goethe was only 24 years old he wrote this epistolary novel. It quickly became the best-seller of 1774 and swept across Europe inspiring fashion fads and more. I'm not sure what they saw in this novel for it has lost some of its appeal over the years.
It is well-written with some beautiful passages of prose, but it is basically the story of one character, Werther, who writes letters to his friend William, but they seem to be aimed at the reader of the novel.
His interests are often somewhat uninteresting and his passion for Lotte is difficult to appreciate. However, given that he has a passion, he is doomed as she already has a lover and is married to him fairly soon into the story (it only covers about a year and a half of Werther's life). Goethe would go on to write some of the greatest poetry, drama (Faust), and travel literature ever written in German. His complete oeuvre is impressive. So for a twenty-four year old writer, this novel is impressive also.

The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe. Trans. by Burton Pike. Modern Library. (1774).

Noble House

James Clavell wrote many classic books including King Rat, Shogun and Noble House among others. He died in 1994 and his book Gai-Jin was his last book. Other books include Whirlwind and Tai-pan, and he also was noted for the screenplays he wrote both for films based on his books and other films (notably To Sir With Love, The Fly and The Great Escape).

Noble house has become one of my favorite novels. This historical novel that is part of Clavell's "Asian Saga" contains large quantities of the Seven Deadly Sins, with avarice and lust leading the way. The story is set in mysterious Hong Kong in 1963, with its beautiful women, wealthy men, cultural clashes, and fascinating intrigue. A longtime feud between two of the largest financial houses revolves about Struan's - the Noble House - and its battle for economic survival. The plot is further complicated by the arrival of an interloping American power broker and his voluptuous assistant who plan to use the bad blood for their own financial gain. In the background the disenfranchised Chinese watch with great interest and hope to reap huge profits as the Europeans try to outwit each other.

The story is about its dealings with its many competitors. It combines a good amount of fiction, legend and big business and produces a great novel. The struggle between the two great houses sets up the conflict that any great piece of fiction requires. The reader is placed into a world that no longer exists - doubly so since Hong Kong has been returned to Chinese control. It is a world where Tai-Pans - heads of large companies battle each other for money, power and survival. This is international gamesmanship at its highest level with no holds barred. Add gunrunning, opium smuggling, political intrigue, natural disasters, and riots, and the story keeps rolling along. Of note is the importance of the context of history with many of the plotlines drawing on international tensions that existed or were on the horizon in 1963. Hong Kong itself sets the backdrop for the novel and in the end its Hong Kong the affects the outcome of the struggle. The book is as fast-paced as any I have ever read and reminds me of the sort of Romantic swash-buckling adventures of Dumas and Sabatini.

If you haven't read a James Clavell novel start with this one or Shogun.

Rereading

Some Thoughts on the Pleasures of Being a Re-Reader
By VERLYN KLINKENBORG
Published: May 29, 2009



I’ve always admired my friends who are wide readers. A few even pride themselves on never reading a book a second time. I’ve been a wide reader at times. When I was much younger, I spent nearly a year in the old Reading Room of the British Museum, discovering in the book I was currently reading the title of the next I would read.

But at heart, I’m a re-reader. The point of reading outward, widely, has always been to find the books I want to re-read and then to re-read them. In part, that’s an admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that no matter how long and how widely I read, I will only ever make my way through a tiny portion of the world’s literature. (The British Museum was a great place to learn that lesson.) And in part, it’s a concession to the limits of my memory. I forget a lot, which makes the pleasure of re-reading all the greater.

The love of repetition seems to be ingrained in children. And it is certainly ingrained in the way children learn to read — witness the joyous and maddening love of hearing that same bedtime book read aloud all over again, word for word, inflection for inflection. Childhood is an oasis of repetitive acts, so much so that there is something shocking about the first time a young reader reads a book only once and moves on to the next. There’s a hunger in that act but also a kind of forsaking, a glimpse of adulthood to come.

The work I chose in adulthood — to study literature — required the childish pleasure of re-reading. When I was in graduate school, once through Pope’s “Dunciad” or Berryman’s “The Dream Songs” was not going to cut it. A grasp of the poem was presumed to lie on the far side of many re-readings, none of which were really repetitions. The same is true of being a writer, which requires obsessive re-reading. But the real re-reading I mean is the savory re-reading, the books I have to be careful not to re-read too often so I can read them again with pleasure.

It’s a miscellaneous library, always shifting. It has included a book of the north woods: John J. Rowlands’s “Cache Lake Country,” which I have re-read annually for many years. It may still include Raymond Chandler, though I won’t know for sure till the next time I re-read him. It includes Michael Herr’s “Dispatches” and lots of A.J. Liebling and a surprising amount of George Eliot. It once included nearly all of Dickens, but that has been boiled down to “The Pickwick Papers” and “Great Expectations.” There are many more titles, of course. This is not a canon. This is a refuge.

Part of the fun of re-reading is that you are no longer bothered by the business of finding out what happens. Re-reading “Middlemarch,” for instance, or even “The Great Gatsby,” I’m able to pay attention to what’s really happening in the language itself — a pleasure surely as great as discovering who marries whom, and who dies and who does not.

The real secret of re-reading is simply this: It is impossible. The characters remain the same, and the words never change, but the reader always does. Pip is always there to be revisited, but you, the reader, are a little like the convict who surprises him in the graveyard — always a stranger.

I look at the books on my library shelves. They certainly seem dormant. But what if the characters are quietly rearranging themselves? What if Emma Woodhouse doesn’t learn from her mistakes? What if Tom Jones descends into a sodden life of poaching and outlawry? What if Eve resists Satan, remembering God’s injunction and Adam’s loving advice? I imagine all the characters bustling to get back into their places as they feel me taking the book down from the shelf. “Hurry,” they say, “he’ll expect to find us exactly where he left us, never mind how much his life has changed in the meantime.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/30/opinion/30sat4.html