Sherry Chandler

But most by numbers judge a poet’s song:
And smooth or rough, with them, is right or wrong;
In the bright Muse tho’ thousand Charms conspire,
Her Voice is all these tuneful Fools admire,
Who haunt Parnassus but to please their Ear,
Not mend thier Minds, as some to church repair
Not for the Doctrine, but the music there…

And ten low words oft creep in one dull line
While they ring around the same unvary’d Chimes,
With sure Returns of still expected Rhymes.
Where’er you find the cooling Western breeze,
In the next Line, it whispers thro’ the trees;
If Chrystal Streams with pleasing murmurs creep,
The Reader’s threaten’d (not in vain) with Sleep.
A needless Alexandrine ends the Song,
That like a wounded Snake, drags its slow length along.
Leave such to tune thier own dull Rhimes…

True ease in writing comes from Art, not Chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to Dance.
‘Tis not enough no Harshness gives Offense,
The Sound must seem an Eccho to the Sense.
Soft is the Strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth Stream in smoother Numbers flows;
But when loud Surges lash the sounding Shore,
The hoarse, rough Verse shou’d like the torrent roar.
When Ajax strives, some Rocks’ vast Weight to throw,
The Line too labours, and the Words move slow…

— Alexander Pope, “Essay on Criticism”

Is Johnny Depp Kentucky’s post-Andy-Kaufman Warren Oates?

And what, you may ask – right after you ask Who Cares? – compels me to ask such an arcane question?

Why, the new Oxford American is in, of course.

Spring 2006. It’s a best-of-the-south issue, and includes a longish “Ode to Warren Oates” by Jack Pendarvis.

And what does Andy Kaufman have to do with it? I kept asking myself that question as Mr. Pendarvis spent the first page of a three-page article on explaining how Kaufman had made Americans too hip to enjoy being an audience:

…Andy Kaufman won. He conquered comedy. He vanquished performance. He murdered entertainment. That great, strange feeling you had the first time you saw him can never be recaptured, because eventually he educated you and made you smart. You bit the apple. The scales fell from your eyes.

“If,” Mr. Pendarvis says earlier, “Andy Kaufman were around and trying to break into showbiz today, Conan O’Brien’s audience would know he was yanking their chain from the moment he opened his mouth.”

Still wondering what’s the point, I flip the page and find the perfectly executed turn:

Who can bring us back to Paradise? Who can purge us of our sins? Who can put us right? Who can remind us what humans were like, back when there were humans? Who can turn us into an audience, rather than a bunch of actors playing the part of an audience?

Only Warren Oates.

Warren Oates will give you the willies, and there is no theory that can explain him away, or tell you what you’re feeling, or how you’re supposed to feel when you’re watching him work. Warren Oates transforms the most ironic, knowing docent into an utter square.

There follows an ode to Mr. Oates’s performances in everything from Tom Sawyer to Stripes, with odd things like 92 in the Shade and 1941 in between.

In discussing both the latter, Pendarvis points out that Spielberg movies are “…no environment for free-range character actors, doomed for extinction from the moment Spielberg’s dad bought him a camera.” And in discussing Stripes, he likens Bill Murray’s later performances to “…the defeated intelligence and wounded romanticism of Oates at his best.” Maybe that is why I admire his performance in Lost in Translation so much.

I never really got Andy Kaufman, though I did enjoy his Latka character on Taxi. Maybe I was too old or too earnest and humorless. Or maybe it’s just because we were living in a grad-student apartment in the Hyde Park section of Chicago at the time and didn’t always have a working television, so I really didn’t see much of Andy Kaufman.

Nevertheless, I still need Warren Oates, whose performances always lit up any scene. Oates was born in Depoy, Kentucky (in the famous Paradise of Muhlenberg County) in 1928. He died in 1982. Pendarvis talks of the way he used his eyes, his mouth, and his voice – which is what led me to my question about that other Kentuckian who can work through irony to make us all an audience again.

And my Netflix queue swells again.

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Other highlights of this issue include Bobbie Ann Mason’s “An Ode to a Strange Procession,” and William Caverlee’s consideration of “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” as the best Southern short story ever. After reading that article, I may have a better understanding of what’s going on in that story, which has always disturbed and puzzled me. Also Hal Crowther’s eulogy of Anne Braden, the Subversive Southerner from Louisville who died in March. Oh, and in all the riches, I nearly missed Kirby Gann’s “An Ode to a Slick Politico,” viz., our own governor Ernie Fletcher, he of the “lustrous hair swept back in one great wing over a toned forehead and extraordinarily bright teeth.” Selected articles are available free online.

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BTW, Wikipedia is looking for some one to write them an article about Depoy, Kentucky.

Louise Erdrich has this article on the op-ed page of the NYTimes – An Army of One:

Minneapolis

I FIRST noticed that he was unusually polite when I brushed by him to get into my middle seat on the plane out of Los Angeles. Then I saw the rose at his feet. It was a long-stemmed red rose. I’d nearly stepped on it. I showed him how to roll it in a magazine and we put it safely in the seat pocket. He looked at my newspaper and said he was interested in Iraq.

“Why?” I asked, though I could tell by now.

“I just came from there.”

His eyes were a clear, pale, unusual green. His cheeks thin and sunburned. He could not keep still. His fingers fluttered, his eyes darted to each person who entered the aisle. He told me that he’d graduated two years ago from his high school outside Seattle on a Friday and that he had enlisted on the following Monday. “Because I’m sort of patriotic.”

Read the rest.

I See Invisible People, via Digg, points to this item at PhysOrg:

A British study suggests the Roman Catholic Church-approved “rhythm method” may kill more embryos than other methods of contraception.

The “rhythm method” relies on abstinence during the most fertile period of a woman’s menstrual cycle. For women who have regular 28-day cycles, that occurs around days 10 to 17 of the cycle.

It’s believed the method works by preventing conception from occurring. But Professor Luc Bovens of the London School of Economics says it may owe much of its success to the fact that embryos conceived on the fringes of the fertile period are less viable than those conceived toward the middle.

Bovens says it can be calculated that two to three embryos will have died every time the rhythm method results in a pregnancy.

So if this is true, what of all those baby-killing arguments?

The article appeared in the Journal of Medical Ethics, and online access is limited to subscribers. You can read the abstract here. I’m not sure that it’s a study exactly, not a clinical study with controls and all. Perhaps more a reasoned argument. I’ll see whether I can dig out the original.

Meantime, the Journal gives access to this article, Women’s reproductive autonomy: medicalisation and beyond, for free.

Nothing would advance women’s welfare more than respecting their reproductive autonomy. This statement presupposes autonomy’s prerequisites, such as decent health care, education, and alternative ways of supporting themselves. By reproductive autonomy, I mean the power to decide when, if at all, to have children; …

In 2005, the factors that influence women’s reproductive autonomy most strongly are poverty, and belief systems that devalue such autonomy. Ensuring that every woman had the prerequisites for practising basic reproductive autonomy would take only a fraction of the world’s resources: but that autonomy is a low priority for most societies, or is anathema to their belief systems altogether. So poverty and anti-autonomy belief systems work together to deny women control over their lives. Although lack of access to the prerequisites for exercising autonomy is often a result of anti-autonomy belief systems, it can also be a consequence of racism or limitless greed.

The issue of net neutrality has finally made the NYTimes op-ed page. In a article entitled, “Why the Democratic Ethic of the World Wide Web May Be About to End,” Adam Cohen points out that:

The World Wide Web is the most democratic mass medium there has ever been. Freedom of the press, as the saying goes, belongs only to those who own one. Radio and television are controlled by those rich enough to buy a broadcast license. But anyone with an Internet-connected computer can reach out to a potential audience of billions.

This democratic Web did not just happen. Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the British computer scientist who invented the Web in 1989, envisioned a platform on which everyone in the world could communicate on an equal basis. But his vision is being threatened by telecommunications and cable companies, and other Internet service providers, that want to impose a new system of fees that could create a hierarchy of Web sites. Major corporate sites would be able to pay the new fees, while little-guy sites could be shut out.

…But Sir Tim and other supporters of net neutrality are inspiring growing support from Internet users across the political spectrum who are demanding that Congress preserve the Web in its current form.

Read the rest.

This issue turns out to be truly bipartisan. The way I see it, for-pay web access would wind up making the web as vapid and profit-driven as television, the big music industry, and the big publishing industry. In all of those, it’s the little independents who are doing the real creative work and the big guys who are raking in the profits.

If you want to learn more or take action, go to Save the Internet and/or to MoveOn.org.

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Update: Also in the NYTimes this morning, an article on the Internet Movie Database. I’m not sure whether to admire this as a sort of rags-to-riches story or decry it as commercialization of what was once a free source of information for us all:

Mr. Needham, a boyish, closely-shorn 39-year-old walked to the kitchen, put on the kettle and made tea. Part of what makes him a curiosity — beyond his enviable work setup — is that Internet Movie Database, or Imdb for short, has become a classic example of a hobby that turns out to be a powerful media asset. For years, it has quietly gone about its business almost entirely separately from its parent, and only subtly does it encourage users to go to the Amazon site to buy videos.

“We didn’t sit down and think, ‘What’s the best way to make money on the Internet?’ ” Mr. Needham said. “This is very much a labor of love. When we started the company, there was no commercial use of the Internet.”

Even so, Imdb’s convergence moment may soon be at hand, say studio executives who have worked with Amazon on developing a download service that could let people burn DVD’s on their desktops. Though Amazon and Mr. Needham decline to talk about plans, Imdb could play a more prominent role in the retailer’s media strategy. Paramount Pictures, Universal Studios and Warner Brothers are all involved in the project, executives close to the project have said.

The universe of poetry, however, is a literary universe, and not a separate existential universe. Apocalypse means revelation, and when art becomes apocalyptic, it reveals. But it reveals only on its own terms, and in its own forms… The poetic imagination … is apt to get claustrophobia when it is allowed to talk only about human nature and subhuman nature; and poets are happier as servants of religion than of politics, because the transcendental and apocalyptic perspective of religion comes as a tremendous emancipation of the imaginative mind. If men were compelled to make the melancholy choice between atheism and superstition, the scientist…would be compelled to choose atheism, but the poet would be compelled to choose superstition, for even superstition, by its very confusion of values, gives his imagination more scope than a dogmatic denial of imaginative infinity does. But the loftiest religion, no less than the grossest superstition, comes to the poet, qua poet, only as the spirits came to Yeats, to give him metaphors for poetry.

— Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1957)

My latest Netflix adventure was in ordering what I thought was the 1983 film version of the Pirates of Penzance, the one with Kevin Kline and Linda Rondstat. What I got was the 1980s made-for-tv video of the stage performance, done for the New York Shakespeare Festival. For reasons I can’t fathom, Netflix doesn’t seem to carry the movie.

I pretty quickly got over the initial twinge of disappointment. The quality of the video for this filmed stage play is terrible. They seem to have worked with several fixed cameras, and the lighting is stage lighting, which for at least one of the cameras really leached out the colors. But the performances are stellar. “Far better than the movie version!” says the IMDb user’s comment, and I agree.

I’m a Kevin Kline nut. The man is intelligent, handsome, lithely athletic, and he looks as good as Errol Flynn in a shirt open practically to the navel. (In fact, he looks a good deal like Flynn, whom I think he may have been channelling in this performance.) Once, shortly after A Fish Called Wanda I think, I read a reviewer’s comment that Hollywood doesn’t know what to do with an actor like Kline. Certainly since the days of Wanda, The Big Chill, and Silverado (that would be the 1980s), he doesn’t seem to have made a really compelling movie. (Of course, as far as I’m concerned, the same might be said of Kevin Costner, who was brilliant in Silverado but then decided to take himself seriously.) I enjoyed his performance in DeLovely and as Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but these were not exactly blockbuster movies. I even liked Life as a House.

After watching this Pirates, I’ve decided that Kline is really in his element as a stage actor. He was leaping, doing Russian saber dances, and singing for two hours and never any sign of strain. (Of course, he was only 33 years old at the time.) He won a Tony for this performance, and deservedly so.

My son, who has played tuba through 6-minute marching band competitions, was marvelling at the whole casts’ breath contol. True, Kline doesn’t have much of a bass range, but the pirate king, as villain, is written as a bass-baritone, which I think is actually more difficult. Anyway, the hero (Rex Smith) wasn’t much of a tenor either. Though he was suitably blond and buff, he tended deliver his songs with a bit of a soul inflection. Neither is up to D’Oyly Carte standards as a vocalist, but then I doubt that D’Oyly Carte puts on quite such a vigorous production.

The orchestra was not quite D’Oyly Carte, either, seeming to consist mostly of vibes, synthesizers, and electric bass, with some brass and woodwinds. The pit was surrounded by the split-level stage and was used for stage business. The conductor was practically one of the players.

Anybody who was alive in the 70s and aware of pop music at all knew that Linda Ronstadt was doing Gilbert & Sullivan. It was all the buzz. Ronstadt does serious music. And she does it very well. Hers is probably the best voice in the ensemble. But her part is dull. Although they let her ham it up a little bit, she gets none of the fast patter songs that always bring down the house, like “I am the very model of a modern major general” or “a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.” (In fact, they write in a patter song, “My Eyes are Fully Open,” from Ruddigore for Kline, Smith, and the contralto.) Ronstadt’s role is (obviously) the soprano, the heroine, all earnest love and sweet trilling ballads.

In Anatomy of Criticism, Northrop Frye points out that “The technical hero and heroine [in comedy] are not often very interesting people… ” (p. 167). And so it is in Gilbert & Sullivan.

The real plum of a female role in The Pirates of Penzance is the contralto, Ruth. Gilbert & Sullivan seem to like to make the contralto a lovelorn aging woman and they don’t break that pattern here. In the movie, the role was done by Angela Lansbury, whose work I admire a great deal. But I was delighted in the play to see Patricia Routledge in the role. Up to this point, I’d only seen her in the Britcom Keeping Up Appearances, which I can barely stand to watch. As Ruth, though, she is completely winning and a very good foil for Kline. She has the presence to stand up to his star quality and scene stealing. She seems to be having a rollicking good time.

And then there’s Tony Azito, who died in 1995, as the Sargeant of Police and George Rose , who died in 1988, as Major General Stanley.

I mean, you just really need to see this. IMDb gives it an 8.5 rating; the movie only 7. See Wikipedia for a plot synopsis (such as it is) of The Pirates of Penzance or The Slave of Duty. Also, there’s a nice Gilbert & Sullivan Archive with histories, lyrics, and midi files at Boise State.

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Added note from Frye:

At the end of the play, [a twist] in the plot that brings hero and heroine together causes a new society to crystallize around the hero, and the moment when this crystalliation occurs is the point of resolution in the action, the comic discovery…

Mathematics, like literature, proceeds hypothetically and by internal consistency, not descriptively and by outward fidelity to nature. When it is applied to external facts, it is not its truth but its applicability that is being verified. As I seem to have fastened on the cat for my semantic emblem in this essay, I note that this point comes out more sharply in the discussion between Yeats and Sturge Moore over the problem of Ruskin’s cat, the animal that was picked up and flung out of a window by Ruskin although it was not there. Anyone measuring his mind against an external reality has to fall back on an axiom of faith. The distinction between an empirical fact and an illusion is not a rational distinction, and cannot be logically proved. It is “proved” only by the practical and emotional necessity of assuming the distinction. For the poet, qua poet, this necessity does not exist, and there is no poetic reason why he should either assert or deny the existence of any cat, real or Ruskinian.

— Northrop Frye, from Anatomy of Criticism

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You will find a longer explanation of Ruskin’s cat and the correspondence between W. B. Yeats and Sturge Moore here at God of the Machine. I do not endorse the opinions of relative poetic worth, having never read Sturge Moore or the correspondence.

Jeff Hess at Have Coffee Will Write has reminded us that May 25 is Towel Day. As the mother of sons who practically cut their teeth on The Hitchhiker’s Guide, I don’t know how I could have missed this. I should have felt it in the wind.

My guys read the books, listened to the radio broadcast, and watched the wonderfully cheesey old television series. They did not take too much to the recent Hollywood version. At our house, Simon Jones will always be Dent Arthur Dent.

Wanna know the answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything??

When I was a lad I served a term
As office boy to an Attorney’s firm.
I cleaned the windows and I swept the floor,
And I polished up the handle of the big front door.
I polished up that handle so carefullee
That now I am the Ruler of the Queen’s Navee!

— from “When I Was a Lad,” Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore

Political Wire has a link to an “amusing” article from the Harvard Crimson:

A 26-year-old college dropout who carries President Bush’s breath mints and makes him peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches will follow in his boss’s footsteps this fall when he enrolls at Harvard Business School (HBS).

Though it is rare for HBS—or any other professional or graduate school—to admit a student who does not have an undergraduate degree, admissions officers made an exception for Blake Gottesman, who for four years has served as special assistant and personal aide to Bush.