The Year of Webcor, Reed, and Fischer-Dieskau

It was 1956, just before or just after I completed my B.A. and I was living in the chocolate-brown apartment at 2308 Haste Street in Berkeley.  Claude was at sea with the Merchant Marine, I don't think that M. had yet moved in, and I still knew people whom I'd come to know in the apartment at the back of the second floor of 2411 Durant Avenue.  One of these was a graduate student in History named Reed Abel, whom I don't think I've written about before in this blog.  It's all right, I think, to mention him by name, because I can't find anyone at all academic or by now nearing age 80 anywhere on the Web.  I owe a lot to him, primarily as a friend (as lovers we didn't really get anywhere).  He told me things to read in history, he taught me to read German lyric poetry, which became a lifetime pleasure (though I never got around to taking the course, by all accounts delectable, for a single credit hour, devoted to reading not only Goethe but the likes of Ruckert, too).
At that time, too, set on the window seat alongside my single rollaway bed, I had a Webcor Fonograf, three speed, with a flip cartridge for the two diameters of stylus.  I had found, too, the first complete Monteverdi Orfeo on a dozen 12" Voce del Padrone 78rpm shellac records and the two-disk album of the Vivaldi-Bach Concerto for violins or (Bach) for four pianos—the very recording that was used in the film of Les Enfants Terribles.  And I picked up used 78rpm in every secondhand bookstore that I visited.  But it was also the decade not only of Remington records, LPs, very cheap, many of them pirated, seemingly from Austrian state radio and given fictive names of conductors and orchestras.  Not pirated, though issued in the USA under license from Ducretet-Thompsom (if I have that right), and costing only a dollar more, was the Westminster catalogue, where we first listened to Hermann Scherchen and much else of enduring value, and (full price) Concert Hall LPs which I shall always associate with Walter Goehr.  I am not a thorough discographer, so I won't trace all the re-issues later on.  Here it is a particular Westminster LP that is my point of departure.
It is one that I no longer have, but purely on a whim, because I wanted to hear what they were like, I had bought an LP of Beethoven Lieder sung by Alfred Poell, a nice Austrian baritone (I assume you all know how to Google him).  Poell was no longer young, but only middle-aged, and a native speaker of German, but he was no great Lieder singer.  Still, I loved the songs, and I loved the record, too, until my friend Reed visited with the second volume on Electrola, sent from Germany, recorded in 1955, of the thirty-year-old Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (beginning with the Gellert Lieder).  His accompanist was Hertha Klust.  She was not the greatest, and later Fischer-Dieskau did record with the greatest who were capable of accompanying Lieder, but she was very good indeed, much better than Poell's pianist (I've forgotten, too, who he was).
The sequel is predictable.  Yes, of course, I like operas.  But I live for Lieder and mélodies and even art songs by composers that otherwise I can live quite without.  I have 32 complete Winterreise, nearly as many Schöne Müllerin, the whole Hyperion Schubert, and much, much else, even down to mid-20th century composers like Hindemith, whose chamber music I value much more highly.
Not to bore readers who can do without Lieder, just imagine what all this has done for my basic German and for Sprachgefühl.  Imagine how much pleasure it has brought to reading even much more difficult German.
I owe it mostly to my friend Reed Abel.
And now I wonder whether he is still alive.  After all, I'm no spring chicken, either.  And Lucian Freud died the other day, then two days later Michael Cacoyannis (of Zorba fame, though I like the film called, in English, The Girl in Black).  And others, all a little older than me but younger than Queen Elizabeth II and Shirley Temple.  So far as I know the pianists Jörg Demus and Paul Badura-Skoda (two more known thanks to Westminster LPs) are still among us.
But almost every day I wonder, How is Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau?  He is, of course, retired; he must be 86.  Perhaps he is so old that he supposes that no one remembers him.  Of course, I know no one who could tell him that there are those of us who owe half of their sensibility and understanding and pleasure in music to his art, and I don't expect an angel to whisper it in his ear, but there it is.  There were other singers and conductors and dancers I had youthful crushes on, but Fischer-Dieskau was not so much an idol as a great mentor.  Yes, there have been others, but I came to know the others' art much later; it was F-D, indeed, who brought me to listen to them.
And all credit to that laughable-looking little Webcor Fonograf; they sounded good, and my 1950s LPs  still are in playable, enjoyable condition (of course, I kept them clean, and I also have CDs of many of them).  Somewhere I found a YouTube of a couple of young guys who bought one for $4.50 at Goodwill, and found that it runs fine, correct speed, sounds "great" (well, anything is better than a bud in the ear from an iPod).

All Religions Alike

Having given a year to the Brain, Charlie Rose (PBS) has initiated a series on Islam, which bids fair to be outstanding.  On Friday, 1 July 2011, he had numerous academic, thoughtful, authoritative guests to help him frame the questions.  Some of us will think that we already are aware of all the varieties of religious experience, but it is always interesting to hear others sort them out.
One thing caught my attention.  Considering Duke University's Islamic Studies Center, he asked his round table what they would most hope for Islam in America.  Professor Miriam Cooke wanted it to be "just a religion".  That is sympathetic; all my Moslem friends would enjoy the same status as I do, coming from many generations of WASPs in America.  As one who has pled for serious separation of religion and state, I must agree.  It is just what I'd urge to children, but consider its inadequacy, since it requires that all the others be just religions, too.
Buddhists will have no problem.
Jon Meacham will have no problem.
Baylor Baptists will have none, either.
Eminent Turkish and Egyptian intellectuals will rejoice in keeping their personal beliefs to themselves, and I'm sure that Michael Bloomberg will, too.  In short, the whole happy society of the urban educated, for the most part, will rejoice in refraining from saying its prayers in the marketplace, as Jesus of Nazareth enjoined.
What can be more private and more personal than an adult person's spiritual life?  What is harder to enunciate than answers to the ultimate questions?  Blurting them can make them tawdry.
Many persons, if not most, though, do not differentiate emotional life from spiritual life; they never have.
Professor Fukuyama is probably right about the residuum of tribal identity as the monkey wrench (spanner to the English) in 21st-century civilization.  One sees one's fellow citizens making their religious affiliations fill the needs met by extended families.  So, too, adherence to football teams and clubs.  When religious and national affiliations coincide, social problems, political problems (political action committees and parties, etc.), can mount deleteriously.  They not only can—in fact, they do, all the time and the world over.
It's forever the "Merry Minuet".
Quite simply, one's most inward, highest life is one thing and is compromised by the stuff we join with so as not to be so responsible for ourselves.  That is what Freud was trying to get at in Civilization and its Discontents.  I hope he wouldn't mind my saying so.

Monetary Predicaments

Athena Street, AD 2000

Sovereign Wealth and Debt

We take such a drubbing from our legistlators’ speeches.  They seem to be composed, like the lamest, latest interpolations into the Homeric epics, of threadbare fragments all of the same platitudes.  By now one is convinced that the quotations of strings of huge numbers really mean nothing in these persons’ mouths.

One Representative says, “a lot o’ things we’re doin’ we can’t afford to do” and never specifies what we’re doing and can’t afford.  No matter.  We’ve been hammered with this stuff so relentlessly that we know that it merely encompasses whatever the opposing political party thinks worthy.  No need to spell out anything.  It’s like the members of the insane asylum in the old story, who knew all one another’s jokes so well that they just said the number of each and laughed or groaned accordingly.

But I care deeply about economics, and I’ve been working to master the vocabulary, at least, for the last four years.  More.  Ever since Enron was victimizing California more than a decade ago, and I began to learn a bit about ‘creative’ accounting; one had to digest the fact, that such disrespect for the ideals of real wealth could go uncorrected for so long.  Yes, one knew that ever since the end of antiquity money has been ‘debt’ money (even where some governments managed to maintain gold and silver reserves to back it up), but in school they taught us that the arithmetic of the Gross National Product had to be correct.  When one of our own, USA, newsmen today remarked that Christine Lagarde would be able to speak truth to nations who hadn’t faced it, another observed that he hadn’t meant Greece but ourselves.  That’s just what I’ve been thinking, how Greek we all are, how philotimoi, not to say vainglorious, with our Great Nation stuff.  We have lived way beyond our means.  We have believed our stock-market averages, and so forth.

We have let those most capable of paying taxes pay least.  For let no one think that wage-earning Greeks do not pay taxes, but they can’t pay enough to cover the expenses, the legitimate expenses, I mean, of their nation.  Just our own problem: school teachers and bus drivers and builders, and all, no matter how late they wait to retire, have paid for and must have something to live on when they can no longer work.  And that is the least of what a nation must pay for.

Why do we bad-mouth Greece so?  We don’t bully Iceland so badly.  We forget that UBS (to name the most eminent) had some of the Madoff stuff.  He made it, but they ought to have known better, surely, just as our banks ought, than to be tempted by it. 

I take for granted that our own economists as well as Greece’s Papandreou know better than I do, just as surely as Swiss or Scotch bankers do.  But that means that our presidents and premiers and prime ministers may be practically helpless relative to the banks and brokers.  I take some hope, even so, from knowing that Papandreou is a very sound economist.

But I headed this post “Sovereign Wealth”.  That was the first term that I had to look up in 2008.  I gather it is analogous to Capital relative to Income, which persons who are not wage-earning workers refer to in old novels: nice people live on their incomes.  As I recall, however, when I looked it up, only one European nation, Switzerland, had sovereign wealth and only one American State, Alaska.  It seems that sovereign wealth is a good thing to have.  I guess that the USA, even more than one of the large South American nations when in money trouble, has a store of natural resources such as Greece lacks.  Of course, as one who professes Greek art and archaeology, one who loves Greece second only to my own country (without supposing that either of them is faultless or superior, intrinsically, to any other place), I have been agonizing over Greece for months, and I am angry when transalpine nations speak of Greece condescendingly.  It is painful even to a mere philhellene; think how Greeks must feel.  I read their newspapers on line every day, and I am proud of them.  If only I knew the real resolution of all these problems, which (of course) are ours as well as theirs, both in their causes and in their possible effects.  I hope that Christine Lagarde can help.

Taking Positions

WHY NOT USE MY BLOG TO TAKE POSITIONS?

Is this why the radical 1960s called me wishy-washy liberal?  It almost always seems to me that questions, or “issues”, as stated in the media, can only be debated in terms that preclude obvious reasonable solutions.  Is it only because these seem to be politically impossible that they are carefully avoided?

Let me take one question prominent in the News over the last weekend, that of gay marriage.  The word, marriage, itself does not imply a religious rite or consecration, but in common parlance it is felt to entail a divine blessing and a holy vow.  Fine.  A word’s meaning is not necessarily identical to its etymology.  Be that as it may, the question seems to me simply a question of the separation of church (vel sim.) and state:

(a) the state cannot demand of a religious institution that it consecrate a civic right or privilege.  Thus, a church, such as the Roman Catholic (but not her alone), cannot be required to give its sacraments to those outside of it and/or at odds with it, whether it be a sacrament such as communion or marriage or last rites or burial in cemeteries of its own, consecrated to the use of its members.  Also,

(b) in a pluralistic constitutional democracy (in our instance) none of the faiths that are free to worship as they believe has the right to impose its own institutions on the citizens, whether many or few, who believe otherwise.  It is the state that determines what is necessary to keep us civilized.  Nor can the state privilege any one religious institution’s social traditions.  All of the rights of citizenship as such must be available to all.

Thus, if everyone must register their marriage irrespective of their religious beliefs, if any, and obtain divorces, when needed, in the legal way, those who wish the wedding consecrated by the religious faith that they adhere to will arrange for the religious rite of their own kind; and if divorce or non-belief or their sex should preclude the consecration of marriage or the administration of last rites, or whatever, religiously, so be it.  The religions in a pluralistic democracy decide what is essential to each of them.

But I can just hear the claims during a political campaign: that would be requiring a “Soviet union” of everyone.  Is that why the obvious solution is politically impossible?

Can it be (I don’t know) that our president is afraid of alienating the Baptist churches?

Therefore, I do not rehearse in my blog postings what seems obvious to me.  After all, I am too old for the question of marriage to be urgent for me, and I come from a part of this nation where partnerships are just as respectable as marriages.  I am sure that questions such as inheritance could be worked out legally, in any case.  I confess, in fact, to being a little leery of marriage, since my parents made a rather poor job of it, but that is no reason to deny its excellence to others.

The most amiable author

The Kritian Boy

For two weeks now Book TV (C-Span 2 when the House of Representatives is not in session, and every weekend) has invited listeners to send in their current choices for Summer Reading.  The most astonishing variety of readers choose a book that I, too, have read with great pleasure, by everyone's favorite conservative, David Brooks, The Social Animal.  It is not original, ground-breaking neuro-science and social science.  It is just awfully well done and perfectly candid without being ickily confessional.  It is just like himself, whether writing columns or talking with Jim Lehrer and Mark Shields every Friday on PBS.  I enjoyed it so much that I read it in two sittings.

What is it, though, that I like so much about David Brooks?

I realized that it is his recalling a face that I've known for more than sixty years, indeed in the same photograph that is older than I am.

It is the face of that most candid and kaloskagathos from the Athenian Acropolis, the Kritian Boy, which may actually be Kritian, if you agree that it resembles the head of Harmodios, the young Tyrant-Slayer.

How can one possibly not like and trust a man who, in middle age (he is the same age as our President Obama), has all the candor of that most open-faced of all adolescent Athenians?

Besides, may I take this occasion to recommend his book, The Social Animal, to you all?  It is unpretentious and utterly free of malice.

With Reference to Yorkshire

Winifred Holtby, South Riding, Ilkley Moor, James Herriott, Virginia Woolf, The Princess Casamassima, the Kindle device

Discipline, I tell myself, is called for.  With a memory that works by free association, I find myself prompted by another blogger’s essay on Cromer, and its geology, to recall Girl Scout camp and singing “On Ilkley Moor bah t’at” to look up pictures of the real place and thus to recognize a reference to local dialect in the occasional use by Winifred Holtby of the “t’” in the speech of rural men, and so to wonder whether “All Creatures Great and Small” had been filmed, outdoors, in Yorkshire (it was).   And Henry James had gotten into the mix because recalling a bit of Hamlin Garland from school, I had gone back and finally read A Son of the Middle Border and gotten Henry James’ letters to William Dean Howells, who had encouraged Garland, which made me remember how I had loved The Princess Casamassima half a century ago.  Besides, Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, had promptly supplied a copy of Holtby’s biography of Virginia Woolf.  I think VW must have been scared silly by the idea of this younger and more literal writer doing a biography of her (it would account for her mixture of sarcasm and fair-mindedness  towards Holtby, who, at that, did fare better than Katherine Mansfield in VW’s letters and diaries, and, in my opinion, deservedly).  VW would really be scared, and angry, I think, if she had to see some of the posthumous studies and biographies.  Holtby alone published in V. Woolf’s lifetime, and, what’s more, she’s good—and not only because she can’t talk about, couldn’t guess about, Woolf’s death.  What she did know was The Waves, which Woolf sent to her pre-publication, and she grasped it all by herself; if she didn’t like the italicized sea scenes, unless as prose poems apart, well, neither do I. 

It is all because of the Kindle device and my love of literature even older than I am.  We old things are cheap or even free of charge.  The blogs allow me to write with no thought of selling, and the Kindle gives me a very choice library that only looks oddly assorted, because it is all my own, though I’m constantly reading several things at once.  Retirement gives me the leisure to look up the etymology of anything that takes my fancy and answer the question, why real Yorkshire has only three Ridings.  The OED obliges: the word, in the Domesday Book, is treding, and it means a third.  Not to mention making the acquaintance of the Cow and the Calf on the real Ilkley Moor.

A friend just wrote asking me whether she should really read The Princess Casamassima, and, since she is an excellent reader and this is the most readable Henry James you’ll ever find,  I do recommend it, to her and to all true readers.  This is no Daisy Miller or Wings of the Dove, which, of course, are great, but even if you think that you don’t like Henry James you will very probably love The Princess Casamassima.  And even if you didn’t like the recent BBC version of Holtby’s South Riding, which was too telescoped into three episodes, which was photographed with relentless use of darkness and side-lighting (I think that must be cheaper?), which lost all the literary character and much of the nuance of the book and was so chopped up that you needed to read the book along with it just to follow it and remember who was who in the story (not that you could tell in the dark, either), you should read Holtby’s novel, too.  She is a wonderful writer, and she is describing her own world, with neither sentimentality nor condescension.

P.S. It is true: I still haven’t read Wuthering Heights.  But first I’ll finish some of what I have begun.

The accidental triad, put to use

On May 5 I posted a snapshot of three short logs that some neighbors had put out with the trash.
Reminded that, despite my age, I could move them if I simply rolled them, I did so:

Rolled onto my parking pad

And a younger friend, Amber, moved them for me; perhaps Buster the Cat could, like the Three Bears in the Goldilocks story, eat from them.  The next afternoon, just one week ago, I saw him curled up asleep on the largest one, but he moved when he saw the camera: it flashes.

Triad of logs positioned beside the deck

I thought that if I put out cat food there he would discover it.  Since he patrols his territory very thoroughly, I'm sure he did, but he wasn't the only one.  Does everyone know that birds love cat kibble?

Cat food put on the logs never lasts more than a couple of hours.

And it isn't only blue jays and crows; smaller birds come, too.  On my front porch I saw the pair of cardinals calmly consuming Purina Cat Chow–and they have little grosbeaks for cracking nuts.

I never am quick enough with my camera.  The closest I came was in trying to photograph one of the grey squirrels, but just as I raised the viewer to my eye he was up on the shelf afforded him by my neighbor's privacy fence.

Four feet above the logs, the squirrel (I made the inset to help you see him)

Click on the pictures to zoom them.
This post is for my friend Nina, who immediately also saw the logs as an aniconic triad and liked them.  She has been ill, and I hope she'll be better soon.