The Beiderbecke Affair

Shostakovich Is No Small Thing to Have in Common

Scott pens a wonderful essay on the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (pictured) over at Conversational Reading. My first piece of published writing was about Shostakovich; well, not in any technical sense. I’m no critic of classical music. I don’t know enough. Rather, it was about the ways his music weaved in and out of my life for a brief period in high school and college. The essay appeared in the ambitiously titled anthology Healing: Twenty Prominent Authors Write About Inspirational Moments of Achieving Health and Gaining Insight. Here’s the beginning:

This Is Not a Review of Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony

Instead, it is me trying to remember the beginning, sitting here with the lights turned low and the clicking hum of my ceiling fan, trying to remember. For Dr. Culver it had been like quoting Shakespeare or the Bible. Standing in the carpeted lobby at Symphony Hall in Chicago, we asked him something about the Shostakovich Cello Concerto. “Oh sure!” he exclaimed and vigorously hummed the opening bars in perfect tune. Even under such a shower of saliva we were dumbstruck. After that we tried to stump him, with names like Hindemith and Piston, but it never worked. It was as if a full symphony orchestra had taken up residence in his head, on a moment’s call. I, on the other hand, am forced to settle for the compact disc. The New York Philharmonic, Leonard Bernstein conducting; recorded live at Bunka Kaikan, Tokyo, 1979. I press play and I can hear it now, I can finally remember now. It begins as good symphonies do—quietly—and as all Shostakovich symphonies do—darkly. Moderato. D-minor. It begins with an anapest, or nearly an anapest—one short, then long—referring to Beethoven’s Fifth. And there is a low conversation among the strings: first the cellos, then the violins, in hushed tones. They are huddled in the back shadows, whispering over shoulders, periodically working themselves to a nervous pitch, the violins suddenly screaming—then just as suddenly cut off. The temperatures here are sub-zero, we are shivering, and there are these silences everywhere. Held breaths. Pianissimo. These are the moments most difficult for musicians to master because they are where the fear inhabits. The fear that causes us to play and to listen and to write and to read in the first place. And it is inside of these silences that I am able to sit once again on the cold tile of a second-floor classroom-turned-dressing-room. It is Variety Show my sophomore year in high school. I am dressed in a wretched black polyester tuxedo and next to me is Heather listening to her headphones again. She also plays violin and has bright, curly red hair. She looks a bit like a Raggedy Ann doll. I suspect that she is a smoker, partly because her dad is an artist. They sometimes give me rides home from Youth Symphony on Saturdays, driving across town in congested traffic, listening to the radio. They were surprised when I had not even heard of a group like R.E.M., and I can’t help it if I don’t understand why her father, even if he does paint, knows about music. This makes no sense to me. Now she asks me to put on the headphones because she has recorded this Shostakovich symphony off the radio. “Who is Shostakovich?” I ask, and she tells me that they played Symphony No. 5 in Youth Symphony last year, except that I hadn’t been in Youth Symphony last year. I listen and at first I hate it. I feel like I am listening to a skeleton. The bass tiptoes across the score while the woodwinds very carefully repeat the theme back, note for note. There is no room for error here, comrades. It is so quiet I can hear the audience shifting in their seats. I borrow the tape from Heather, take it home to my room in the basement, and listen to it again and again, playing it loudly, as if it were rock music. I do not understand that this is something Heather and I now share. Perhaps if I do I should fall in love with her as she has fallen in love with me, always referring to me in those melodramatic notes we pass as “dear friend.” After all, Shostakovich is no small thing to have in common.

How Badly Do Koreans Want to Learn English?

Speaking English with a native accent has become such a status symbol that some parents reportedly put their children through the clinically questionable surgery of snipping the thin tissue under the tongue to make it longer and supposedly nimbler, helping the children to pronounce the R sound better.

That’s from the International Herald Tribune. According to Oranckay, the article also mentioned “an Internet and video program that teaches pregnant women to speak to their unborn babies in rudimentary English.” No such line appears in the piece I clicked to, but it wasn’t really necessary. I mean, you get the point.

Amongst Angels, Or John McGahern Dies

John McGahern has died of cancer at the age of 71. From The Associated Press:

“John was one of Ireland’s finest writers ever,” Irish Prime Minister Bertie Ahern said. “His beautiful use of language in telling and retelling the stories of his time and place are the enduring testimony of his life and his talent.”

And Irish President Mary McAleese said McGahern made “an enormous contribution to our self-understanding as a people.”

John Banville, another of Ireland’s most respected authors, praised McGahern’s wit and power of observation—and rued the fact his work had not received much recognition outside the country.

“Amongst Women, which was his masterpiece—if there was any justice at all, it should have won the Booker Prize. It would have given him the international recognition that he didn’t have,” Banville said. “The literary world we live in now is so glittery. His novels were so quiet, perhaps they didn’t travel well. But they will.”

McGahern’s trademarks included a loving attention to the detail of Ireland’s rural life: its plants and animals, its textures and smells—and the witty idiom and darker insular dynamics of its people.

His final novel, That They May Face the Rising Sun, charted the social and seasonal changes in a border farming community without relying on conventional dramatic hooks—or even much plot.

In an interview last year, McGahern said he had attempted “to take plot and everything else out of the novel and see what was left.”

“In fiction, the most powerful weapon the writer has is suggestion. I think that nearly all good writing is suggestion, and all bad writing is statement. Statement kills off the reader’s imagination. With suggestion, the reader takes up from where the writer leaves off,” he told The Guardian newspaper.

While he wrote for a few hours each day, McGahern remained a part-time farmer, and shunned the limelight. When Ireland’s censorship board banned The Dark, he barely commented on the matter and expressed no bitterness.

“For me, all that matters is whether a book is well written or not. Once a book is published, the less a writer has to say about it the better,” he said. “That’s why I never protested the banning. I thought it was a joke, the censorship board, and by protesting I would give them too much honor. Besides, a book has a life of its own. Once it is written, it belongs to its readers.”

Read the beginning of McGahern’s nearly perfect story “Korea” here.

IMAGE: John McGahern, 2001

Theory a Few Words, Grandfather

When Kate & I lived in Korea, our home was a shiny new neighborhood called Gwanjeo-dong (pictured), our favorite hangout an all-night convenience store called Anyway Mart. Below is an aborted attempt at capturing the craziness of that time & place, the way everything we encountered served to dislocate us a little bit more. Even the bootleg DVDs left behind in our apartment by the previous teachers were as strange as anything we’d seen. In this case, a French flick had subtitles in gibberish . . .

SO ANYWAY

Mart—brightly lit, caffeinated, riding the thump-thump of an all-night no-ray bong, its windows reflecting the multi-colored, neon wash of Gwanjeo-dong, with all of its Internet game rooms and hair salons and hogwans and red-crossed church steeples and stationery stores where we buy monster stickers for our students and Happy Virus notebooks for ourselves and kimbap stands and Western bars with names like Jack and TNT Boom and taekwondo and kumdo academies and seafood restaurants with giant blue tanks of fish out front, flat, slow-moving fish who stare malevolently at kids staring gleefully at them, pissed-off fish whose dank smell reminds me of Young’s Lobster Pound in Belfast, Maine, sitting with you one evening on a worn-out picnic table overlooking the shallow Passagassawakeag, greasy fingers, bottles of Blueberry Ale, the lights of the harbor blinking like stars in the winter, a self-conscious postcard of two lovers still gleefully riding the surface of each other, the thump-thump of reality kept safely in the distance—this, you’ve told me time and again, is your favorite kind of place to be, where empty green soju bottles litter the tops of white plastic tables set up outside and where a twentysomething clerk with blond streaks in his hair grins mischievously and says “Long time no see” every time we push open the glass doors. So can I help it if sometimes I feel like the fish? A man is weaving his motor scooter in and out of Paris traffic, at times braking so suddenly that the back of his scooter rears up, jostling the package that reads “Pizza Joe” and then screeching off again, skidding finally into a throng of cheering well-wishers. “I am the record!” he proclaims, clicking his stopwatch, and the crowd lifts him up and delivers a shout in the direction of the delivery driver’s boss: “Theory a few words, grandfather.” And grandfather, a round-, wrinkly-faced Frenchman in a faded shirt, lifts his arms to calm his employees, pauses, and with a satisfied smile instructs them to “See off the electricity bicycle of red Buddhist nun to stroll about greatly.” A few minutes later, after a high-decibel parade of motor scooters passes before our hero and his girl, two cops ominously roll up. “Holds sending, is it right?” the cop accuses, but the girl looks puzzled. “Are they thin pancake men?” she wonders aloud. “Thin pancake differs from man,” her boyfriend replies impudently, and the cop is quick to take offense: “We do not have the thin pancake, and want to see your license plate.” “The license plate is inside the house,” answers the boyfriend, who this time sounds a bit nervous, “and I go to hold.” “The bright hand point,” comes back the cop, and now the boyfriend seems flustered. “Send immediately,” he says, grabbing his girl’s arm and whisking her away, the both of them disappearing before my mind has had a fair chance to struggle through the wildly distorted, underwater English that serves as subtitles to this movie—a bootleg DVD we inherited six months ago with the apartment and the yellow leather couch and the cookware inscribed with ungrammatical epigrams of flowers and pain. It’s so sometimes I swear I can’t even breathe. This, you’ve told me time and again, is your favorite kind of place to be. So here I am at the Anyway Mart, Gwanjeo-dong, on a Saturday night, writing this postcard to you: Dear Kate. It’s so sometimes I swear I can’t even breathe.

You Better Be Street If You Lookin’ at Me

A Sam Goody store in town is going out of business—huge screaming signs: EVERYTHING HALF OFF!—so Kate & I stopped by last week. We walked out with an improbable pair of CDs: Pee Wee Russell’s Take Me to the Land of Jazz and Destiny’s Child: #1’s. I’m not ashamed to say that I’ve been listening to nothing but Destiny’s Child for five or six days now, and in particular the song “Soldier.” I’m sure it’s because I’m so white, so hopelessly ignorant of hip hop, and a writer, but I’m fascinated by all the slang & wordplay. “Openin’ their mouth their grill gleamin’.” Their grill? “We like dem boys up top from the BK / know how to flip that money three ways.” BK? Three ways? Hip-hop culture is a closed system of references: there’s no way to enter without a glossary. (I know that’s the point. The jazz scene was once like that, and so to a lesser extent was rock ’n’ roll.) Meantime, Destiny’s Child has taken the gangster aesthetic—at least in the video for “Soldier”—and mainstreamed it into nothing more dangerous than a fashion shoot. That’s why the entrance of Lil’ Wayne, whose rhymes are deceptively laid back and behind the beat, is so cool. It’s like he’s going to call the whole game for the bullshit it is. Just the look of him says that maybe this stuff is dangerous after all. Here’s the thing, though. He’s just as confused as the rest of us. A friend loaned me the interview with him in the new Vibe, and he’s pictured in his hotel room all tatted up and looking all tough-guy next to a side table stocked with bullets, a gun-cleaning kit, and weed. But when the interviewer asks him if he’s affiliated with the Bloods in his native New Orleans, he totally squirms:

Like I tell everybody, go get the Cash Money video collection and look at all the first videos. We always wore red, the cars, everything. It’s red for Uptown Hot Boy. That’s what it stood for, just fire, hot, red. I got embraced by them, like, “Yo, we fuck with you. You got that flag,” and you can’t tell them no different. I never went through no initiation or nothing like that, but I’m a real nigga, and they rep me, and I respect it. Just like the Grape Street Crips. I don’t beef with no Crips or nothing like that. I’m just a real nigga with a red bandanna in my pocket, but yeah, I got New Orleans Blood in me. There are Bloods in New Orleans, and yeah, I am affiliated.

Either way, it hardly matters. We’re within the context of no context. Or, as a friend of mine in Korea used to say, looking at a bar mysteriously called TNT Boom, a place where sign and referent have finally quit one another, or in the words of Lil’ Wayne, gone all Kobe & Shaq.

PS—Lil’ Wayne was asked how he met his girlfriend Trina: “We been knowin’ each other. We’d always see each other in Miami, but it was always ‘hi’ and ‘bye.’ Then, I grew into a man. So a man ain’t gonna just say ‘hi’ to Trina, so I said what I had to say to her.” But who the hell is Trina? So I googled her, and all I can say is that I feel bad for comics artist Trina Robbins.

Welcome Back to the World

Christian Science Monitor freelance reporter Jill Carroll is released from captivity in Iraq.

Responding to the news of Carroll’s release, Monitor editor Richard Bergenheim said, “this is an exciting day, we couldn’t be happier. We are so pleased she’ll be back with her family. The prayers of people all over the world have been answered.”

Thinking of Teaching English in Korea? You’re a Loser.

That’s the sentiment of one Brendon Carr, an attorney who works in the ROK. In response to an op-ed by an American teacher, an op-ed that complained about the all-too-frequent scenario wherein said teacher gets screwed by boss, Carr writes:

The masturbating Koreans I can forgive, since they’re obviously clueless. But good God am I sick of the English teachers. There is so much information freely available on the Internet about how Korea is a disaster for so many teachers (my personal all-time favorite is “Prisoner of Wonderland”) that one must willfully disregard every warning, including the warnings of one’s own Embassy (in diplomatese, the U.S. government is screaming “Don’t do it! You’ll get cheated!” but few listen) in order to come here and teach English.

Carr’s comments are followed by a lively discussion that involves rapping, name-calling, holier-than-thou grandstanding, and several well-reasoned points. The gist is that Korea is a prison, and fresh-off-the-boat teachers are new meat. More or less.

Canadians Are Scum (You Heard It Here First)

A story in the Korea Herald announces the formation of an organization meant to foster cultural understanding. The problem is, in a newspaper ad the group made a point to say that Canadians aren’t welcome. The Herald is on the case:

When contacted by a Korea Herald reporter by e-mail, the organizer of the group, Bernard Carleton, elaborated further, “The thing is, CANADIANS ARE SCUM! They are self-loving, welfare supporting, over taxing, work ethic hating scum!!! They are not welcome in our group.”

Anyone who would like to join the meetings with Carleton in order to break down prejudices, dissolve stereotypes and have an enhanced understanding of people from other countries can contact him at cbicsmd@yahoo.com.

(h/t)

I Feel Better Already, Thanks

The image above, dated 1970, is from a Japanese advertisement for the drug haloperidol, brand name Seranace. It appeared in Psychiatria et Neurologia Japonica. A great & creepy selection dating back to 1956 can be found at The Japanese Gallery of Psychiatric Art.

Channeling Capote & Tango

John Baker, channeling Capote, suggests that finishing a book is like taking a child out back and shooting it. That helps explain why writing a book is like raising a child: full of ups & downs.

Meanwhile, Baker posts an excerpt from his recently completed novel, a story of “time and tango and revolution, abduction and denial,” called Winged with Death.

It was 1972 and I was eighteen years old. I had jumped ship and watched while she sailed away. I left the docks and stood on the white beach while the Hanseatic Shipping Company’s freighter put to sea and headed for Cape Horn and Santiago, leaving me behind in Uruguay. I knew no one in Montevideo. I had no contacts in South America. I had a Spanish phrase book, about twenty pounds freshly converted into pesos, a slim volume each of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky and nowhere to live. I realize now that this was my way of reinventing myself, something that every young person has to do sooner or later. But I hadn’t thought it through. And looking back I am amazed that I was such an extremist. I could have become a punk and found redemption in tartan and safety pins or joined an ashram in Goole. It wasn’t necessary to travel to the other side of the world.