The Beiderbecke Affair

A Hero’s Death

I’m reading Dead Certainties by Simon Schama, a rather odd book that explores the often uneasy boundary between history and fiction. Schama is particularly interested in the death of James Wolfe, the British general whose army stormed Quebec in 1759—although his interest is less in the details than in how those details are lost, or, more to the point, how they are transformed into myth. Consider the 1770 painting by the American Benjamin West, Death of General Wolfe (above).

From its first conception, West rejected literalism and embraced rhetoric. “Wolfe must not die like a common soldier under a Bush,” he wrote. “To move the mind there should be a spectacle presented to raise and warm the mind and all should be proportioned to the highest idea conceivd of the Hero . . . A mere matter of fact will never produce the effect.” Accordingly, throughout the composition, from top to bottom, mere fact is overwhelmed by inspired, symbolically loaded invention. It was this unapologetic hyperbole which set West’s painting off so dramatically from the prosaic versions that preceded it, none more painfully feeble than Edward Penny’s effort of 1763. Where that product of honest toil conscientiously had the General attended only by two officers and set down in a shrubby clearing apart from the battlefield, West produced the grandiloquent lie the public craved: a death at the very centre of the action; the firing of guns still sounding at his back; the St. Lawrence that he had finally conquered to his right; three groups of officers and men arrayed like a Greek chorus to witness the tragedy.

Schama goes on to explore the treatment of Wolfe in a history by the Bostonian Francis Parkman, and then veers into a long, sometimes fictional treatment of the 1849 murder of Parkman’s uncle, followed by the trial and hanging of a Harvard professor. It’s an odd book, but fascinating.

VQR: Iowans Still Have Essential Dignity

I was checking out the new issue of Virginia Quarterly Review online earlier today and ran across a short review of a new collection of black-and-white photographs: Driftless: Photographs from Iowa by Danny Wilcox Frazier. According to VQR, the subjects of Frazier’s work—migrants, slaughterhouse and factory types, people who live in trailers—“haven’t been defeated”; rather, they get their pleasure “in the form of deer hunting and pool halls, cigarettes, beer, and”—wait for it—“love.”

In the end, the magazine assures us, these poor Iowans manage to hold on to their “essential dignity.”

Christ Almighty. How much more condescending and clichéd can a review get?

Still, the photos are gorgeous. And bleak. And make me miss home. Find a whole slideshow here and another exhibit here.

IMAGE: Dirt Road, Near Lone Tree, 2003 by Danny Wilcox Frazier

Move Along, No Green Here

Jesus, I hate St. Patrick’s Day. But this music helps to make up for it. Reels and jigs shall be left for another day (well, okay, besides the last track).

1.  How Can They Tell That I’m Irish? – Edward M. Favor

Nonsense from 1910.

2.  Lorca’s Novena – The Pogues

Shane MacGowan is the one who needs an intercession.

3.  Spring Comes to Spiddal – The Waterboys

Instead of a sweater, how about some Dixieland?

4.  Ballerina – Van Morrison

Van unplugged.

5.  Wind Out of My Sails – Julie Feeney

The Co. Galway native plays all the instruments, too.

6.  Kvi Gjeng Du Så Einsleg Og Stundar – Dolores Keane & Rita Eriksen

Ireland meets Norway.

7.  Bí Ann – Kíla

They met in an Irish language school.

8.  Leanfaidh Mé – Kíla

One of their founding members left to join the Frames.

9.  Altercations – The Tossers

The Tossers are a poor man’s everything from Chicago.

10.  Tomás Bán Mac Aogáin – Darach Ó Cáthain

A sean nós, or “old style” (a cappella), song about love and a hanging.

11.  St. Dominic’s Preview – Van Morrison

An acoustic version with Mary Black on backing vocals. Performed on an Irish-language television show.

12.  Broken Things – Juliet Turner

Heartbreaking Julie Miller song recorded for an Omagh benefit album.

13.  Crazy Love – Brian Kennedy & Anúna

Kennedy backed Van for years; Anúna is a medieval choral group.

14.  You Know What I Want to Know – David Kitt

From a 2000 SXSW compilation.

15.  Factory Girls – Flogging Molly with Lucinda Williams

Less drunk than the Pogues, less crude than the Tossers.

16.  The Island – Paul Brady

Ulster singer who started out as a hotel piano player in Donegal.

17.  The Shankill and the Falls – Bap Kennedy with Nanci Griffith

Brian Kennedy’s older brother. Both are from Belfast, but Bap worships Steve Earle, not Van Morrison. (Stay tuned for the attached hidden track, wherein Kennedy & Earle get filthy.)

18.  Seol Do Bhó (Biddy from Sligo) – Séamus Begley & Stephen Cooney

Begley is a Kerry sheep farmer; Cooney is an Australian and an honorary Aborigine. I saw them perform in Ballyshannon, Co. Donegal, in 1997.

IMAGE: Untitled (mixed media) by Ross Stewart

That Bridge Again

Another great photo of “That Old Ugly Beauty,” the Government Bridge that connects Davenport, Iowa, and Rock Island, Illinois, across the Mississippi River. February 1940; Arthur Rothstein for the Farm Security Administration. (Via Shorpy)

‘She found it almost impossible not to harmonize’

One of the stories in Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons is called “Famous Blue Raincoat” after the classic Leonard Cohen song. In the story, Shane—whom I picture to be a Van Morrison type stuck in a so-so folk-rock group—“turned out to know intimately an entire body of work he still insisted he despised—the songs of Tim Hardin, Tom Paxton, Joni Mitchell, and Leonard Cohen. Sometimes he would take one of Cohen’s more doleful tunes, or one of Joni Mitchell’s sillier songs, and exaggerate their worst qualities to the accompaniment of a mandolin.”

I might have liked Shane.

Anyway, in Cohen’s song—or rather Shane and his pals’ rendition of it—Tóibín finds another opportunity to emphasize the magic that comes from stripping things down.

The song that nearly made them stars was the one that Shane detested above all. It was Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat.” No one at that time had noticed the song much or made cover recordings of it. Phil and Shane, despite Shane’s hatred for manufactured sadness, as he called it, worked at isolating the melody, discovered that by leaving some parts bare and unadorned and filling other parts with voices, echoes, instruments, and harmonies, the song could be made very powerful.

The harmonies come from sisters Julie and Lisa, the latter of whom “found it almost impossible not to harmonize; she had to let Julie guide her, pull her along like a small boat.” Things can be stripped down only so much. In the end, Tóibín’s story is about how Lisa responds when harmonizing is no longer an option.

(If you guessed “with silence,” then you’ve been paying attention!)

• Famous Blue Raincoat – Leonard Cohen [Mp3]

• Famous Blue Raincoat (Suture) – Jared Louche & The Aliens [Mp3]

• Famous Blue Raincoat (Unedited) – Jared Louche & The Aliens [Mp3]

IMAGE: Thirty-two, Blue #1 by Patti Parsons (mixed media on paper, 26x40)

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Obey Obama

Obama (Hope) by Shepard Fairey (2008)

Emancipated woman – build up socialism! by Strakhov-Braslavskij A. I. (1926)

Mao Poster by Dashiell Hermann (date unknown)

Obama (Progress) by Shepard Fairey (2008)

• String Quartet No. 3 in F major, Op. 73: III. Allegro non tropo – Dmitri Shostakovich [Mp3]

Composed in 1946; performed by the Borodin String Quartet, Moscow, 1983

IN ADDITION: “I don’t like it at all!” “SCARY!!!!”

What We Talk About When We Talk About Nothing

I’m just following a line of thought that began with a quote from Colm Tóibín’s collection of short stories Mothers and Sons, “that behind everything lay something else.” This led to some quick thoughts on secrecy and silence in Irish literature. Which led to a passage from another Tóibín book about the magic of ancient stones, which are as unadorned as Tóibín’s own prose. Which led to the idea of adorning—filling up white space—as magic (see Kells, Book of or Brooch, Tara).

You get the idea. And let’s face it, those early Irish monks were amazing. In order to spread the Gospel in word-obsessed Ireland, they literally invented the written form of Old Irish. For poets and priests, it was designed to replace what was called “the blessed white language” of the written Scriptures. Which makes the Irish language itself a kind of magical illumination: it fills up the white of silence.

Or something like that. For what it’s worth, the historian Peter Brown is impressed. He says that during the sixth and seventh centuries, “Irish went into letters with surprising rapidity and speed.” Which is to say fast. “Nothing like it had happened before in Europe.”

Which prompts me to pull another book off my shelf, this one by another Irishman, Seán de Fréine, who writes of another event, more than a thousand years later, that also occurred with “surprising rapidity and speed”: the loss of Irish.

The linguistic upheaval was of such scope and intensity that it is quite without compare among any other people enjoying as strong a sense of historical continuity and national consciousness as the Irish. Within the space of a century the language spoken by the great majority of a people became the badge of a scattered minority ; and within a further fifty years a tongue which had been habitually spoken by literally millions shrank to a bare two or three per cent of its former strength.

“The cataclysm,” de Fréine moans, “was unique in its intensity.”

So while I’m not inclined to trust people who insert spaces before semicolons, I’ll accept his word that this was, in fact, unique. And devastating. One can only imagine the sorts of cultural upheavals & instabilities that lurk below the surface of a society that so quickly—and so recently!—lost its language, which is to say its way of seeing and understanding itself and the world.

Oh, and the title of de Fréine’s book?

The Great Silence.

But wait. What does this have to do with Mothers and Sons again? Silence is everywhere in Tóibín. It’s there, for instance, at the end of the first story, “The Use of Reason,” when an art thief takes his Rembrandt out into the country, “to the great barren emptiness which lay south of Dublin,” where “there was absolute silence, a silence that came to him like power”—and he burns the thing, all the while imagining the “vivid emptiness in the space where it had once hung.”

There is power in silence, just as there is great fear. Whatever you say, say nothing.

IMAGE: Sorcerer by Gerard McGourty

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

‘They caused the honor of God to blaze from the page’

Colm Tóibín’s used the word magic to describe ancient stones, which he suggested were without artifice, without religion, and without history. Ironically, his description reminded me of the Book of Kells, and that, in turn, brings me to this passage in Peter Brown’s definitive history of the early Middle Ages, The Rise of Western Christendom. It seems that magic was very important, even to the monks of Ireland.

In a Christian region where books of any kind were rare objects, the Christian mystique of copying the Scriptures was yet further tinged with the magical awe that had always surrounded the áes dana, the “people of the skill,” the master-craftsmen whose legendary cunning provided secular rulers with the ornaments and jewelry appropriate to their status.

The writer as jeweler . . .

In the same way, the craftsmen of the great monasteries covered the vellum  pages of the Gospel books with exquisite illuminations. These craftsmen were the áes dana of the “High King of Heaven.” They caused the honor of God to blaze from the page. They were not simply copying a text. They were turning parts of the holy text into the equivalent of jewelry.

IMAGE: The Tara Brooch, illustration from The Early Christian Architecture of Ireland by Miss M. Stokes

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

‘For once a history which could do us no harm’

I quoted the other day a passage from Colm Tóibín’s Mothers and Sons in which a character surmises “that behind everything lay something else, a hidden motive perhaps, or something unimaginable and dark.”

This is a persistent theme in Irish literature, as perhaps it is in any literature that is the product of a society so long occupied and divided. A professor of mine in college liked to point out the elaborate embellishments in the Book of Kells—so detailed that some of the Irish monks went blind painting them—and wonder what it was about white space, about silence, that the Irish are so afraid of. “Whatever you say, say nothing,” as Seamus Heaney famously put it.

But Tóibín’s prose, as I mentioned, is perfectly unembellished. And I was thinking of this as I read from his 1987 travelogue Walking Along the Border, when Tóibín happens upon an ancient stone circle in Beltany:

I started to think about that moment, that second when the final stone was put in place and the circle formed, what difference it would have made to the people who placed it there: something new, powerful, complete. That there was no artifice involved, that they had merely carried them there and made them into a circle gave the stones a greater spirit. I moved around touching them, looking at the land down below. Beltany must have come from Bealtaine, the Irish word for the month of May; I said that to James Bradley. ‘No, no’ he answered. ‘It’s even older than that, not Bealtaine, but its root, Baal Tine the fire of Baal.’ Baal was a Celtic god. Tine is the Irish for fire.

Indeed, the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland has always been a place of magic and fire, of smuggling, secret identities, and the promise of violence. Tóibín continues:

We walked down the hill, leaving the stones to their magic, away from the reminder that there was once a time in this place when there were no Catholics or Protestants; the dim past standing there on the crown of the hill, for once a history which could do us no harm, could not teach us, inspire us, remind us, beckon us, embitter us: locked up in stone.

It’s the wish for silence. No more embellishment. Whatever you say, say nothing.

IMAGE: A detail of Folio 129v., from the Book of Kells (ca. 800)

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

That Old Ugly Beauty

When I was a kid, I was briefly in love with bridges in much the same way I was briefly in love with dinosaurs and outer space. My bridge of choice—while in elementary school I proclaimed it “the Mona Lisa of bridges”—was the I-74 bridge, a relatively rare identical-twin suspension bridge crossing the Mississippi River. Over the years, however, I’ve come to appreciate that the defining landmark of my hometown is in fact the ugliest of its three bridges: the Government Bridge.

Above, you can see the GB as it was drawn on a gorgeous but not-to-scale map from 1888. Built thirty years earlier, in 1856, the bridge connects Davenport, Iowa, with the government-owned Rock Island Arsenal. Below you can see how it looks today, looking from Rock Island toward Davenport.

The Government Bridge (or Arsenal Bridge, as Davenporters also call it) was the first to span the Mississippi and, because it served a federal installation, was approved by the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis. As you might imagine, Davis was a loyal southerner, and he became worried that that the bridge’s construction all but guaranteed that a transcontinental railroad would go through the North. So in a fit of never-mind, he briefly stopped work on the project, but to no avail. It opened anyway. Oh, and another would-be Confederate helped to scout the bridge’s original location: Robert E. Lee, an engineer just out of West Point.

Here’s another image that shows how the bridge manages both rail and auto traffic.

The bridge’s spans swing open for river traffic (regularly and frustratingly backing up auto traffic). But in 1856, the whole process still needed some work. On May 6, the steamer Effie Afton slammed into the spanking new structure, destroying the steamer and with it one of the bridge’s spans. Steamboat companies predictably sued to tear down the bridge. And who was the lawyer the Rock Island Line hired to defend its river-crossing? Abraham Lincoln.

Here’s the bridge in 1940.

What I like about this photograph is the sense that you don’t need to see the whole bridge to understand its presence and importance. It has become iconic.

Finally, here’s an image of the old beauty that you have to squint to see. (In fact, I’d suggest clicking on the photo for a larger image.)

The shot is taken from a riverside parking lot in 1920s-era Davenport. The Indian that Abe Lincoln and his Illinois militia once battled has ingloriously given his name to a candy company, and Fort Armstrong, where Lee was first stationed and where Dred Scott first stepped onto free soil, can be seen jutting squarely up from the bridge’s Arsenal terminus.

I’m a little sentimental, I know, but I can’t get enough of this . . .

CORRECTION: The Government Bridge was the first railroad bridge to span the Mississippi.