Mr. McBride Again

I had the joy of hearing Christian McBride and Inside Straight, his quintet with whom he recorded, "Kind of Brown." Since that 2009 recording, there have been several personel changes. This evening, he had Warrent Wolf on vibes, Ulysses Owens on drums, Jaleel Shaw on sax, and Christian Sands on piano. Quite simply, the group was crisp, bright, and hip.

Having vibes in a modern jazz group is rather rare, I don't personally listen to many other groups with vibes. In this group, they are simply wonderful, adding a new tone to their essentially post bop sound. Warren wolf's dexterity and speed on the instrument is truly amazing. His ability to zip up and down the instrument and roll around chromatic figures is unique. I'm really glad that he has found a group that can really showcase his talents.

Indeed, in contrast to the last time I heard Mr. McBride, the performance was all around energetic, tasteful, and inspiring. The entire group was solid. It is somewhat disheartening to hear that his talented pianist is only 21. He can do way more with two fingers than I Used'ta Could with both hands; their rendition of the original tune, "Used'ta Could" was exceptional.

I also though that Mr. Mcbride's prelude on "Theme for Kareem" was rich enough in harmony and textures to stand my hair on end. Simply awesome. "Theme for Kareem," is, however, one of my favorite tunes from the album, as it has such a distinct and lively character, which is very much appreciated when I listen to it while I work.

Overall, it was a pleasure to hear these guys back at Stanford.

Some More Jazz

Three performances: Dave Douglas "Quintet +", but there were 6 people (I guess someone forgot to count?). This group, really a sextet not a quintet was really an amalgamation of musicians who were around for the jazz camp. All of them well known in their own right including Josh Redman (saxophone) and Larry Grenadier (bass). So while they had never performed together before, they still put on one of the best jazz performances I've heard in quite some time. (I wish that were more of an accolade than it actually is.)

One of the amazing parts of listening to this group of musicians was to hear how each of these players could bring something new to the composition. While each of the compositions - all originals of Dave Douglas - were interesting in their own right, the solos that each musician took were quite incredible. Dave Douglas has a way of placing trumpet lines above the rest of the band that sing through with amazing clarity and focus. Every note carefully chosen and played as such. Josh Redman brought a fury of energy with several of his solos. Starting off slow, calm, and clearly stated, he often was able to weave a complex set of lines whipping the rest of the group into quite a boil by the end. Skillfully and well done, he told his stories well.


Nicholas Payton and the Taylor Eigsti Trio: To be honest, I had never heard of these folks before, but I was quite impressed. Taylor Eigsti, the pianist can lay down some pretty hip solos. I certainly enjoyed their rendition of "Things Ain't what they used to be," demonstrating a certain New Orleans flair and vibe that made the piece glow.

Joshua Redman Trio: These three guys really lit it up. I was impressed by the way that the three musicians seemed to genuinely care about what the other musicians are playing during their solos. In other performances this week, one of the lead horn players would help get a song started, play a solo, then walk off the stage. While it might work for them and give the rest of the band some space so to speak, it seems to say something about how they value the work of their fellow musicians. Josh Redman, seems to be way into it. While he steps out of the way when the bass or drums are taking a solo, he just stands off to the side and is clearly into the music. It makes it more of a group performance and production, three musicians up on the stage having a good time, and it shows.

Their playing was lively and energetic no doubt. His solo lines have a wild and almost dizzying aspect to them. At times, he can cram in more notes that they aren't all distinguishable, alternating to different modes and keys to keep things harmonically lively. Its quite impressive.

One last comment about the three performances: I have to say that I was much more aware of the clarity of the bass playing both during solos and the rest of the tunes. Maybe its just that I never truly paid attention, but I though that all of the bassists this week truly had a great voice during their solos. They were able to make their ideas clear and heard, while all too often a bass solo gets too muddy and confused. Well done.

A Pair of Performances

It seems like Wednesday night performances are the new thing to do. Maybe I'll find another one next week.

In any case, last evening I attended a concert in Stanford's Memorial Church. The head organist, if you will, at Stanford has undertaken a project to perform all of the organ works of Bach on the Fisk organ in the church in commemoration of the completion of this organ. For reference, Charles Fisk also built the organ in the Meyerson Symphony Hall.

I'll be honest, I've never been to an organ concert before, and never really gave it much thought. But sitting in the ornate Memorial Church and listening to the rolling counterpoint of Fugues was simply delightful. If ever you see a program of someone performing Bach organworks, go. Likely you won't regret it. The organ in a church like that has a way of completely enveloping you, a sound that has almost visceral qualities. And if it is the 4 (or more) intertwined voices of a fugue, all the better.

Robert Huw Morgan performed both the Prelude and Fugue BWV 550 and BWV 541, both in G minor, the Trio Sonata No. V in C major, and a host of apparently Easter-related settings of hymns. While I don't recognize the melodies, they certainly were a joy to hear.

In contrast, the performance I heard a week before was not as wonderful. Christian McBride set out to do a tribute concert to Herbie Hancock, a concert that has the potential to be quite exciting. Herbie has been through many phases in his career, and I was glad to hear that Mr. McBride wanted to focus on the 1970's era jazz/funk part of his career, because honestly, I find that period much more exciting and hip than some of his later work. I just wish that Mr. McBride hadn't told the audience that 45 minutes after the show was supposed to start.

That's right, all of the musicians arrived at the venue more than 45 minutes after the scheduled start of the performance. If I had not been able to get a student discount ticket, I would have been much more upset. Even after the hokey student-led introduction to the performance, the music itself wasn't all that hip. One of the features of Herbie Hancock's music of that era, like Chameleon, is that it is driving funk, pushing forward with incisive percussion and precision. There was none of that in the performance. I felt as though the tempo always was dragging, the bass should have been a little more ahead of the beat, and the percussion funkier. Sure, the musicians admitted to having not played together before, but the sound they achieved reminded me of some of the "jam" sessions I used to have with my old bands in some poorly lit garage or the back room of the music department. They had trouble reaching new ground in some of the pieces as demonstrated by the fact that they also had trouble ending many of the pieces. That's never a good sign.

All and all, I did not find the concert to be a great tribute to Herbie. Their performance showed a lack of rehearsal, time, and care for the project they were undertaking.

Pen of Iron

I had a chance to read Robert Alter's new book, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible. In terms of bookshelf organization, I might place this book at the end of my collection of Alter books on biblical style (yes, this book also includes a chapter titled 'The World Through Parataxis') and right before David Gelernter's Americanism. The review of it in the Wall Street Journal was a good one - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703862704575100020148950134.html

and my own thoughts and a general sum-up are as follows:

In the first section of the book, Alter mentions that the earliest settlers in America usually had a King James Bible with them and knew it intimately. Alter argues that since style encompasses a worldview, and that the influence probably runs in both directions at times – ““…one must remember that style is not merely a constellation of aesthetic properties but is the vehicle of a particular vision of reality” – then the rhythms and the vocabulary of the King James version went hand in hand with the American colonists’ Protestant dedication to Bible-reading. The colonists relied on the King James in their commitment to biblical literacy and their commitment to religious ideals in building their new nation. The effects of those commitments are obvious in American literature, and that it is something that makes American literature particularly American.

Alter notes the problem of the decline of reading today – that “Americans read less, and read with less comprehension…they[ committed readers ] are an embattled minority in a society where tone-deafness to style is increasingly prevalent.” Perhaps this is why his discussion about the King James style may seem initially startling to contemporary readers who associate it with convoluted stuffiness (I have the feeling that most just can’t get past the thee’s/thou’s). In fact, Alter reminds us, the King James Version has a very studied simplicity of diction, relying mainly on active verbs. The King James style should also be seen in contrast to “a trend in English prose from the Renaissance onward that cultivated lexical profusion, figurative ornamentation, and syntactic complication.” Rather, “the King James Version offered a model of spare diction and of a syntactic simplicity that amounted to a kind of studied reticence which generated its own distinctive eloquence.”

Alter looks at several quintessentially American novelists – Melville, Faulkner, and Bellow – as well as some of the speeches of Lincoln, to demonstrate his points. In each author’s work he points out a different facet of the King James style. With Melville, it is the King James’ revolutionary juxtaposition of two different traditions – that of Latin and of the Anglo-Saxon. If Latin is ostensibly “higher” and more melodious than the “lower” and more blunt-sounding Anglo Saxon, then Alter sees the same sort of mixing in Melville’s juxtapositions of American street witticisms with more eloquent homilies. In Faulkner, Alter does not show an overt stylistic similarity but instead Faulkner’s assumption that all his readers would readily see the thematic connections in Faulkner’s novels and biblical narratives. Alter uses both Faulkner and Lincoln to show that even the use of one particular word or phrase can be enough to show the influence. “The borrowing of the biblical phrase is not really an allusion to a particular scriptural intertext,” he writes, “but rather the use, in the perorational final gesture of the [Gettysburg] Address, of a familiar biblical idiom that gives the speaker’s own language the breadth and moral gravity of the Bible.” Lincoln’s original audience would not have had to research the amount of “a score.” The King James Version uses the phrase “three score and ten” 111 times. Bellow himself wrote an essay about how certain words and phrases from the Bible touch something profound within us:

“A small clue will suffice to remind us that when we hear certain words – ‘all is but toys,’ ‘absent thee from felicity,’ a wilderness of monkeys,’ ‘green pastures,’ ‘still waters,’ or even the single word ‘relume’ – they revive for us moments of emotional completeness and overflowing comprehension, they unearth buried essences.”

Bellow’s simple, declarative, descriptive sentences evoke the simple declaratives of the Bible (and as they are reproduced, Alter argues, in the KJV). Bellow’s style is similar to the Bible is that he presents “the narrative data in ways that allow them to speak for themselves, without a sense of elaborate literary mediation, without an obtrusive feeling of language calling attention to itself. I do not mean to claim that he was consciously imitating the Bible in this project but simply that he had internalized something of its dignified, even stark, simplicity of diction.”

Alter’s book does a double service by inspiring readers not only to start using the KJV but also to read at least some Melville and Bellow. Alter acknowledges that the same stylistic “peculiarities” which draw some people to Faulkner also chase them away. I am chased away, not only by his ridiculously long, convoluted sentences but also by his ridiculously pessimistic storylines. I was also strangely gratified to see that Alter is not a big fan of Hemingway, because I’ve never been able to get into him, either. “After the passage of eight decades, much of the novel [The Sun Also Rises] looks rather flat – its characters sketchy, lacking psychological or moral complexity, and its plot a slender vehicle for development or discovery” – well, no worries, I’ve got plenty to read otherwise in the meantime!

I'm hoping to have some conversations with profs about the KJV and biblical literacy, and how Alter's points (or his book - it's very short) could be used or encouraged in HUC and the rabbinic world at large.

The Dignity of Difference by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

The Dignity of Difference was written in 2002, but I only became aware of Rabbi Sacks about a year ago. Now I’m a regular reader of his weekly drash at his website, and I own a few other of his books. One of my professors highly recommended this book in particular, and the copy I got from the HUC library is personally inscribed “To Gene Boworitz – in admiration of your outstanding work – wishing you a New Year of blessing, healthy and fulfillment.” Dr. Eugene Borowitz is alive and well, thank God, (and still teaching at HUC) in New York, so I’m not sure why he went ahead and gave away this copy to the HUC library. Ah well, glad I got my hands on it, at any rate.

            The book was written mainly as a response to 9/11 and the problem of a “clash of civilizations.” Rabbi Sacks argues that, globally, the gap is growing between the haves and have-nots, that we do not properly accept and understand other cultures. These problems are what lead to fundamentalism and terror. These arguments have been made elsewhere, and seem to end up placing the blame for jihad terror attacks on us – and I don’t agree. Poverty does not cause terrorism, and Western pluralism surely surpasses anything in the Muslim world, anyway. When I read these premises in the first chapter, I actually put the book down because I thought it was going to be a boring rehash of leftist idealism. A rash of snow days combined with a lack of new reading material led me to pick it up again, and I’m very glad I did. Rabbi Sacks definitely does not do the usual lefty-liberal routine, once you get past the introduction.

I found that Rabbi Sacks includes an amazing variety of writers and thinkers. Not every author would use quotes from George Soros and Roger Scruton within just a few paragraphs of each other, and both to support the author’s point about free markets and tzedakah. Sacks does, and very smoothly. Sacks’ familiarity with an incredible number and variety of thinkers and writers - and his ability to incorporate them into his own arguments – is a major part of his appeal for me.

            I also enjoy when Sacks compares Greek/traditional philosophy to Jewish thought. This is something that Leon Kass frequently does in his commentary on Genesis, too. p. 51 “Against Plato and his followers, the Bible argues that universalism is the first, not the last, phase in the growth of the moral imagination….” This is part of Sacks’ discussion on how universalism can only be understood or apprehended through particularism. Another noteworthy quote from this part of the discussion is this: “Judaism has a structural peculiarity so perplexing and profound that though its two daughter monotheisms, Christianity and Islam, took much else from it, they did not adopt this: it is a particularist monotheism. It believes in one God but not in one exclusive path to salvation. The God of the Israelites is the God of all mankind, but the demands made of the Israelites are not asked of all mankind.” (52)  I thought this was a wonderfully succinct statement about a complicated idea.

            Rabbi Sacks discusses the value of particularity and diversity because he seems to think that we (his readers) aren’t quite tolerant enough of cultural differences. Not long after the above mentioned quote on Israelite particularist monotheism, Sacks describes how we might be if we were more tolerant: “What would faith be like? It would be like being secure in one’s home, yet moved by the beauty of foreign places…it would be like being fluent in English, yet thrilled by the rhythms and resonances of an Italian sonnet one only partially understands…” (65) Except that Rabbi Sacks doesn’t get much deeper than those differences, and the unfortunate reality is that one of the main religious differences between my culture and that of fundamentalist Islam is not about food or music preferences but over my right to exist. Tolerance has to work both ways and that doesn’t seem to be the case these days.

            But Rabbi Sacks himself is one of the most bi-partisan, pluralistic writers I’ve seen, and he walks the inclusive talk. He even seems to contradict himself across parts of the book. Here’s an example: In his chapter on “environmental sustainability” (yes, I dreaded getting through this one – but there was nary a mention of global warming in it!) he writes, “Most significant of all is the pressure on he environment by the growth of the human population…” and proceeds to quote Jared Diamond on the subject. So he buys into Jared Diamond on this theory of overpopulation. But earlier in the book, he seems to refute what I thought was a major premise of Jared Diamond’s main book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Sacks writes: ““One of the questions he [David Landes] raises, for example, is why the industrial revolution took place in Europe, not China…Landes answer’ is broadly this: that culture, not natural resources, climate or other material factors, makes the difference. Europe had what China did not: a Judeo-Christian ethic…” If I remember correctly, Diamond was of the opinion that culture didn’t play so much as a part as did the presence of a few certain microbes or the fecundity of the soil here versus there. There isn’t anything wrong in disagreeing with some things that an author writes and agreeing with others – but it is interesting to see it played out in so subtle a manner.

            In describing that “Judeo-Christian ethic” that played such a part in the rise of Western civilization, Rabbi Sacks addresses civics: “First is the biblical respect for property rights…The brief answer is that the Hebrew Bible is an extended critique of what we would today call big government. At one extreme is the biblical portrait of ancient Egypt, a nation which builds extraordinary buildings at the cost of turning human beings into slaves. At the opposite extreme we have the justly famous eighth chapter of I Samuel…Even constitutional monarchy, in other words, will involve a sacrifice of rights of property and person…

…Long before Hobbes, Locke and Jefferson, biblical Judaism is a theory of limited government…God, in the Hebrew Bible, seeks the free worship of free human beings, and two of the most powerful defences of freedom are private property and economic independence.”

            But before you put Rabbi Sacks on the invite list to your next Tea Party, you might wonder at this statement which comes in a different chapter on tzedakah: “Tzedakah is a concept for our time. The retreat, set in motion by Reagonomics and Thatcherism, from a welfare state, together with the deregulation of financial markets throughout the world, has led to increased and increasing inequalities both in developed countries and the developing world.” Rabbi Sacks certainly defies easy categorization.

            This reminds me of another author I wrote about recently – Lionel Trilling. I thought it intriguing how Sacks and Trilling both identified the Victorian Age as one of “confidence.” Sacks mentions the Victorians in a discussion about the rapid changes that our society has witnessed:  “The nineteenth century was also a time of immense change…Writers from Dickens to Disraeli spoke of child labour, poverty, the bleak urban landscape, and new forms of social division (Disraeli’s ‘two nations’_. Urban crime was so widespread that it was unsafe to walk city streets at night. Yet these problems, though they gave rise to social criticism and political activism, did not generate the kind of uncertainty we feel today…It was, in ways that seem remote to us now, an age of confidence.”

And here’s Michael Kimmage, on Trilling’s thesis: ““To the despair of modernist literature, Trilling preferred Jewish humanism, an elevated ideal for assimilating into America, or he preferred the self-confidence and vigor of the Victorians.”

            Rabbi Sack’s insight into actual biblical analysis, and comparisons to Greek philosophy or other Western secular ideas, is always brilliant. I was disappointed that Rabbi Sacks doesn’t get into more profound differences of the “clash of civilizations” than preferences for worship styles or opinions on birth control, but the diversity of various writers and thinkers that he includes is inspiring and makes for a very good read.

 

 

 

Wave Sensing of Complexity

By chance, I picked up a collection of scientific essays today collected as a tribute to Leopold Felsen, a physicist, electrical-engineer, and theorist involved in numerical modeling of electromagnetic waves and fields. The book was published on the occasion of his being bestowed with an honorary degree from the Technical University of Munich. As a Jew growing up in Germany in 1924, he claims that the degree has a special significance for him. (His acceptance speech is included as a preface to the collection.) He emigrated to the US in 1940 and eventually served in the US Navy from 1943-1946. Quite a remarkable story.

What makes the preface truly stand out are the poems included. From "Wave Sensing of Complexity" :

When waves meet with complexity,
The modelers feel perplexity.
The options one can choose abound,
But how can those that work be found?

Statistically irregular,
Or smoothly scatters specular?
A blend of both? If not, why not?
We ponder, and then chuck the lot.

The Conservative Turn

Thoughts on The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers, and the Lessons of Anti-Communism

-for reference - check out http://www.tnr.com/book/review/the-illiberal-imagination

The book reviews that I’ve read on Michael Kimmage’s book, The Conservative Turn, have mostly focused on Kimmage’s premise itself: that Whittaker Chambers and Lionel Trilling, despite their different backgrounds, had similarities in their political journeys, and that both of them were fundamental (though neither one consciously) in the development of neoconservatism. That’s not really what I thought was most interesting about the book, and it wasn’t my initial reason for picking it up in the first place. I just wanted to learn more about Lionel Trilling.  Kimmage wrote about Trilling in very admiring terms, and I enjoyed that.

Trilling was an ex-Communist, and Kimmage describes in detail how both Trilling and Chambers each had their “Kronstadt” moment, when they saw that Stalinism, the Soviet Union, and Communism itself were all inextricably tied together by horrific violence, and suddenly and definitely turned away from the movement. Both Trilling and Chambers then, of course, subsequently wrote a great deal attacking the American left over its affinity or neutrality toward Communism.

            What is always striking to me is how sympathy for Communism is still treated as something benign, amusing, or even “interesting” by my classmates and professors. It is disquieting how prescient and relevant Trilling’s declarations against progressive leftism (whether that’s specifically how he identified it or not) are today. The quotes that Kimmage provides seemed directly relevant to my experience so far with the progressive leftism that is too often identifiable with liberal Jewish leadership – that is, Reform and Conservative clergy who use a very elastic definition of tikkun olam to encompass any current agenda of the Democratic party. In response to more than a few sermons or emails from the RAC that I’ve gotten over the past few years, exhorting us to raise the minimum wage or vote for universal health care coverage or “do the Jewish thing” and promote gay rights, I wish I’d been able to quote Trilling:

 •”…liberals serve no good end at all when they cease to look for truth and, in the name of ‘action…’ substitute wish-thinking and rationalization for the functions of the critical intellect.” (1937) (82)

 •“Trilling concentrated on the psychological roots of the Popular Front, eschewing any simple equation of progressivism with a longing for social justice: ‘the ‘social consciousness’ of the Thirties which flowered in Hemingway and Steinbeck, in Odets and Irwin Shaw, which millions found so right, proper and noble, did indeed have a kind of passion, and perhaps it had the virtue of being better than nothing. But how abstract and without fiber of resistance it was, how much too apt it was for the drawing-room, how essentially it was a pity which wonderfully served the needs of the pitier.’”

  Or in response to the endless classes I’ve had to taken on “learning styles” and educational theory:

• “if the Victorians too much disregarded Rousseau and Wordsworth and thought of children as adults manques, we today are perhaps too often tempted to think of adults as children manques.”

  Trilling seemed to identify with a liberalism that invited open, serious critique, in which the questions were posed without assuming the answers beforehand. He valued tradition, morals, manners (which he linked with morality), and evaluation of art and writing according to aesthetics and morality. Already he was worried that the liberalism of his time was embodying not the open-minded serious critique but rather an orthodox adherence to predetermined assumptions. This was making liberalism, once the dynamic and engaging intellectual front, into something stagnant and prone to blindness of various types.  I feel like I’ve seen this in liberal Jewish leaders who not only confuse their Jewish liberalism with political and cultural leftism, but also simply assume that all the principles of the Democratic Party/contemporary leftism are correct and obvious, without further consideration. This is not a helpful method of thinking – and it could lead to a real decline in many ways: in affiliation, relevancy, moral and intellectual engagement, etc.

 In a sentence reminiscent of the patter song from Patience – ‘If you want a receipt” - Trilling himself described his liberalism: ”you take the best ideas of [Jeremy]Bentham – I mean Bentham as he really is, not Bentham as most people represent him – and John Stuart Mill, and [John] Ruskin, and Matthew Arnold, and William Morris, and involve them with the temperament of the English romantic poets, and connect them with Montaigne…and much of Rousseau, and much of Stendhal, you will get some notion of the intellectual constellation to which I refer.” (186) I certainly haven’t read all of those guys. Nevertheless, Trilling and his work have been inspiring to me as a model of an “old-school liberalism.”

I favor Trilling’s approach instead when discussing contemporary issues of liberal Judaism (though maybe I’d leave out the T.S. Eliot): “Trilling ushered in conservative ideas into his essays and books with the aim of expanding the liberal imagination and widening the parameters of American intellectual culture…he wrote appreciatively about the (reactionary) politics of T.S. Eliot, about the moral vision of the Victorians, about the merit of hierarchy, and of stable ethical values.”

What if, instead of simply assuming that all Reform Jews somehow instinctively know that the moral thing is to be pro-choice and pro-gay (in every respect), we had serious discussions in which the pros and cons of each position were critically evaluated? What if opinions about being pro-life and against gay religious marriage were actually considered or allowed discussion in an open atmosphere?

  Trilling consistently resisted being identified with either the conservative movement as it was being formulated under Buckley et al or the official Republican party. I found it disappointing that Kimmage didn’t go into much detail of why this was so, other than Trilling was just so committed to his ideal of liberalism – though it seems Trilling allowed his definition of liberalism to fit many ideas labeled as “conservative” today. Perhaps it was also that Trilling saw that the solid identification with one party or another, or with one defined set or another, defied his true commitment, which was to liberalism.

I am personally intrigued by Trilling’s desire to remain flexible in his political and social affiliations. Orthodox Jews may have an easier time of identifying with contemporary cultural/political conservatism and being accepted by fellow Orthodox Jews for affiliation with the Republican Party. But I am committed to becoming a rabbi, and to the liberal Judaism that has developed uniquely in America. Furthermore, I don’t believe that Orthodox Judaism has all the easy answers or is problem-free, either. I think that there are plenty of opportunities in that lifestyle to fall into just the kind of unthinking adherence that defies Trilling’s liberalism. I certainly disagree with the mantra of “progressivism” that all change is progress, and good. But I also disagree that simply because something is new and different that it must not be good. I don’t think that the practices of liberal Judaism necessitate its being linked with the political left; at the same time, I think that orthodox Judaism might do well to acknowledge that it has changed much (and for the better, in this American environment) since an older style of Judaism that resisted secular studies, Zionism, or careers for women.

            So, perhaps like Trilling, I can maintain the freedom to maintain my flexibility, resisting blind acceptance of the doctrines spouted by either party or camp. This freedom can be invigorating and, maybe someday, even an ‘intellectual catalyst:’

 • “To the despair of modernist literature, Trilling preferred Jewish humanism, an elevated ideal for assimilating into America, or he preferred the self-confidence and vigor of the Victorians, who had tasted Arnold’s despair without succumbing to it. For both Trilling and Chambers, despair was a powerful intellectual catalyst and not simply a mood to be indulged.” (18)

 

I think Rabbi Levi Olan, a longtime spiritual leader of the synagogue where I grew up in Dallas (although he was a good bit before my time) was an old-school, Trilling-style liberal. Here’s what he wrote in 1969:

 “In biblical times the Prophets were certain liberals. They called for a change in the social order; they denounced the rich and championed the poor. But they were also conservatives who bid the people to ‘remember when they came out of Egypt.’….It is not an either/or situation, either conservative or liberal. Both are essential in any healthy existence, whether personal or social…The clash between the liberal position and that of the conservative resounds noisily and at times without charity. It would appear at the outset that these positions can never be reconciled. In all probability they cannot. What is important is that religion needs the best of both if it is to be alive and vital for man. The conservative becomes the guardian of the great truths which the tradition has preserved – the accumulated experience of the race and a resource for wisdom and hope…The fact is that even the conservative changes, for not even he brings sacrificies as the Bible commands. The liberal gives the old a chance to live by clearing out the accretions which stop up the well of living water. His danger is that he may in the end totally forsake the well of his father and wander aimlessly after new water which he cannot discover…The liberal has not found an answer to the authority for his faith. The conservative is doing no better. He formally acknowledges the revelation of God but he does not really live by the word…Wisdom in this hour would dictate the recognition that there are virtues and weaknesses in both positions. What is needed most is a concerted and united effort against the secularism which threatens our very existence today.”

Rabbi Olan is also connected to Trilling (in my view) in that he consistently quoted from great literature – Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Coleridge – in his sermons. Trilling was obviously committed to the idea that classics of literature help us see and appreciate the complex variety of life. Olan apparently agreed. I haven’t seen a single sermon of his in which he quotes Bob Dylan.

 And this is an interesting postscript that didn’t fit anywhere else:

•“Chambers does not write [in a 1957 National Review essay] about Islam as a political factor, except as it might alienate Arabs from the Soviet Union, which was ruling over millions of Muslims, suppressing their religious freedoms just as it suppressed those of Christians and Jews. Chambers wonders whether ‘those wretched Arabs heard, too, that in Soviet Siberia several million of their co-religionists exist in a misery not much different from their own?” p. 287

 

The End of Everything, by David Bergelson

About a week ago on the new website Jewish Ideas Daily, there was a blurb on a new translation of a book by Yiddish writer David Bergelson:

http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2010/1/21/on-books/1/the-end-of-everything

I read the blurb while sitting in the amazing HUC Klau Library, so I just had to walk a few steps to find a brand new copy of this very translation on the shelf. 

Like the few other Russian novels I've read, this one had plenty of depression and general misery to go around. In an essay Lionel Trilling once wrote, "every situation in Dostoevsky, no matter how spiritual, starts with a point of social pride and a certain number of rubles..." and that is exactly how Bergelson's novel begins, too. Mirel, the daughter of Reb Gedalye, goes through a series of successive engagements to different men. She continually feels pressure to get engaged because 1) what else is there to do and 2) it would really help her father out financially. But each time she gets engaged - and there is never really any real passion or feeling on her part toward any of the men, just a sort of resignation - she almost immediately begins to work on how to break the engagement. 
Here are some of my favorite quotes that I think are pretty representative of the book: 

"For some time now she'd feld the slow, painful demise of her vapid, commonplace, self-absorbed life."

"With cold, vaguely formed resolution she neared her father's house, and with the same icily unemotional determinaton she went inside...she lingered at the door, and it occured to her that she didn't live as other people lived but wandered all alone along the periphery of life, that from childhood on shed been stumbling about there in a long restless dream that had no beginning and no end: Now, it seemed, she'd come to some decision and would take some action, yet perhaps she'd come to no decision and would take no action. All alone she'd merely continue to stumble about as in an eternal dream of chaos and would never arrive at any destionation..."

"While she was lying here alone on the margins of life, other people were living fully. From a distance she saw the way they lived..."

You can probably get the gist of Mirel's character from those. There are other female characters in the book who go to university, and I don't know if Bergelson intended for his readers to want to yell at Mirel to follow their example, or something, at least. The back cover of the book describes it as the "Yiddish Emma Bovary." I didn't go back and check a copy of M. Bovary, but this section from Bergelson's book struck me as similar to what I remember of Flaubert:
"...his remark still echoed in her ears: 'A provincial tragedy.' She couldn't tell where the barb of this insult, and the resentment she felt at it, really lay: whether in the fact that Herz couldn't be bothered to remember her name or in the phrase itself that he'd coined about her: 'A provincial tragedy.'"

That Herz character is interesting. He's a poet who writes Hebrew poetry. In another scene, some of the characters name-drop about "Ahad Ha'am" in order to show their political/cultural affiliations. Either Joseph Sherman, the translator, or the New Yiddish Library publishers, did a nice job with lots of historical and cultural footnotes throughout the book. Bergelson probably has more than a few characters who represent people from his own circle:

"A little farther on, in the middle of the large room, stood the master's youngest brother, Sholem Zaydenovsky, a perpetually discontented young man with the appearance of an overgrown yeshiva student...after the death of his fanatically observant parents not long before, he'd found himself to be nothing more than a partially agnostic, venemous freethinker...toward money he now felt a deep antipathy coupled with a shopkeeper's pathological love for it that was his genetic inheritance, believed that no one was as capable of making it as he was, and for this reason held an uncommonly negative opinion of Jewish youth: - our people are quite incapable of producing any healthy types." 

Lest I sounded like I was being too hard on Mirel earlier, I do understand that she had limiting social conditions. I think Bergelson also makes sure his readers are aware of that point in describing a startling dream that Mirel has:
"She found herself walking alone across an open field somewhere, toward a church where a great many yelling people had congregated, demanding to know: Is a woman a human being or not?"

I suppose Bergelson is also presenting Mirel as a metaphor for all Jews in modernity. If so, then the question from Mirel's dream echoes Shylock's speech from The Merchant of Venice: "Hath not a Jew eyes..." and so on - showing that not much had changed on that front. But then one would also wonder whether, like Mirel, Bergelson really saw all other modern Jews as provincial tragedies. I don't know what Bergelson thought of Zionism, and it doesn't seem to appear in his novel at all. 

So, yes, a slightly depressing read - but artful and interesting. A relevant quote from different book I've started reading:

"Rather than appealing to 'socialism' of some not-yet-existing kind to calm the fever of the despairing intellectual, Dos Passos is simply despairing and for this he earned [Lionel] Trilling's admiration. 'I can think of no more useful political job for the literary man today,' Trilling wrote in praise of Dos Passos, 'than, by representation of despair, to cauterize the exposed soft-tissue of too easy hope.'  

All the Goodes

I think that one of the small joys of going to hear a great performer is to discover what it is they choose to play. While I may think I have listened to a large sampling of classical music, it is always a delight to hear a piece of music I have never heard before, and played exquisitely. I have to admit, Richard Goode did precisely that this evening.

I rushed in a few minutes late and missed the first few minutes of one of Bach's Prelude and Fugues from the second book of the Well Tempered Clavier. And finding that someone had decided to make my seat theirs, I had to wait a while longer before finding a seat I could occupy. Such was a small trifle, simply listening to Mr. Goode play, wherever I was, was good enough. Mr. Goode then played a set of three Haydn Sonatas. I could look up the numbers if you want. Following a brief intermission, he returned with Schumann's Kreisleriana. All were excellently played, with keen attention to detail. Furthermore, the acoustics of the hall, the Herbst Theater, were stunning in my opinion. I haven't been to many solo piano concerts, but often the tone of the piano can get muddied in the middle registers due to no fault of the performer per se, but the poor acoustics of the hall. Not so here at the Herbst theater. The piano was very clear and vibrant. I look forward to hearing Brad Mehldau there tomorrow night.

As Mr. Goode played the Haydn sonatas, I could not help but thinking of how delicately these works were put together. The counterpoint and delicate balance between the voices, the modulation from one key center to another. It takes a deep appreciation of the intricacy of the composition to play these with as much elan as Mr. Goode did; I thought he did a remarkable job of elucidating these details from the composition itself. It reminded me of what I have read about Berrocal sculptures (as in Martin Gardiner's essay From Burrs to Berrocal). The work as a whole is not understood nor fully realized until each piece has put in its proper place in the proper order.

The Schumann was very nice as well. Not as rigorous in form as the Haydn, but harmonically richer, Mr. Goode was able to play it in its full romantic glory. Hearing it reminds me of a whole set of piano compositions of the romantic period, the Fantasies and Songs without Words, that I really have not investigated, probably because I've been somewhat traumatized by solo piano music for a while. I'll have to re investigate that pocket of rich romantic music.

Playing a short second set is not necessarily grounds for playing three encores, but whatever. I couldn't really complain at hearing a Chopin Nocturne and the Sarabande from Bach's Partita no.1. There was something else, but I didn't recognize it.

Blue Skies

Let in a little sunshine
Everything is in balance

Terry Teachout's new biography of Louis Armstrong has received much praise from those who have reviewed it, and I really have little to add to the insightful reviews that have been written. The two clips above are inspired by one of the anecdotes near the end of the book. "Richard Brookhiser tells of how, when doing battle with cancer, he was unable to listen to any music other than the Goldberg Variations and Louis Armstrong: 'Bach said everything is in its place; Armstrong said the sun comes shining through.'" Funny how I listened to primarily the Goldberg Variations and Louis Armstrong the few weeks before my big exam. I'm glad that I didn't have to reach such life threatening circumstances in order to see the profundity of these two bodies of music.

Pops, however, remains a very clear, precisely written, and seemingly unbiased account of Armstrong and his career as one of the most influential jazz musicians. While much has been written about Louis Armstrong's early career in the slums of New Orleans at the beginning of the twentieth century, Pops does an excellent job of filling in the rest of the narrative. Louis Armstrong's first big break with the recordings of the Hot Fives and Hot Sevens was not the only big event for his career. Those recordings arguably changed the face of Jazz in the 1920's, propelling it to high popularity, Louis with them, but Louis also had a remarkable break in the 1950's with the inception of Louis Armstrong and his All Stars, a recording of which is posted.

One of the key aspects that Pops brings out about Louis Armstrong is his unfaltering dedication to the music he played. Until the last years of his life, Louis was almost continuously on the road moving from performance to performance. Near the end of his career, Louis was told by the doctors to take eight weeks off to rest and recover. After three weeks, Louis called the rest of his band in to go back on the road. He simply could not stand to take so long off.

In all ways, he personifies the career path laid out by Caleb in Middlemarch: "'That depends,' said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering his voice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying something deeply religious. 'You must be sure of two things; you must love your work, and not always be looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honourable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying There's this and there's that - if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. no matter what a man is - I wouldn't give two pence for him' - here Caleb's mouth looked better, and he snapped his fingers - ' whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do.'"

We should all strive to be as dedicated to our work as that.

In contrast, I went to a lecture this evening on "The Electric Louis Armstrong" This was supposed to be a lecture about how advances in recording technology played a significant role in Armstrong's career. Unfortunately, Loren Schoenberg only made passing reference to the intended topic of the lecture. Fortunately, he and a few other musicians played a few numbers to ease the bitter pill of the lecture itself. In essence, Loren spend the entire time relating Abe Lincoln to B. Obama, with a passing reference to how Louis is kind of like them too. The lecture was full of cliche phrases about the importance of jazz and how, at a jazz performance, "Something is Created." Oh, he also asked the bass player and drummer accompanying him to improvise while he read the Gettysburg Address, which, by the way, is on the same level of importance as Senator Obama's speech on race relations in the US. Hungadunga and a colon.