"I’m Here to Say We Need to Act"

Bill McKibben — who has as good a grasp of the future of the planet as anybody on the planet — suggests in a new article that President Obama’s speech on climate change at Georgetown in June was the high point of the Obama presidency when it comes to climate issues.

The president spoke in a sun-soaked Dahlgren Quadrangle at the center of campus. “The question is whether we will have the courage to act before it’s too late,” he said, addressing a student audience. “And how we will answer will have a profound impact on the world that we leave behind not just to you, but to your children and to your grandchildren.

"As a president, as a father and as an American, I’m here to say we need to act.”

The problem, McKibben spells out, is that President Obama’s speech was itself the high point, rather than a statement of purpose for a broad, serious, sustained effort to address climate change.

He gives the lay of the land – chances taken, chances missed, chances turned away – in an article in the journalism-packed new Rolling Stone. He has high hopes for a campaign urging institutions – such as universities, Georgetown among them – to divest from fossil-fuel companies.

Every story published around Nelson Mandela’s death — not just this one from FaithStreet — was a reminder that divestment works.

• 26 Dec 2013

A Christmas Oratorio

Somebody at the New Yorker (say, the poetry editor, Paul Muldoon) had the wit to place a poem by the late Seamus Heaney (one of his last?) in the middle of the magazine’s profile of Pope Francis. It’s called “In Time.”

Set there, it reads, to me, on Christmas Day, as something like a song of Simeon (say, Eliot’s): the serene declaration of an old man, near death, that he has seen his salvation, and in time – is seeing it in the life of a child:

Energy, balance, outbreak:

Listening to Bach

I saw you years from now

(More years than I’ll be allowed)

Your toddler wobbles gone

A sure and grown woman.

He notes the sureness of her step on the floor — a stone floor, as I imagine it — which recalls the cement floor of his own childhood. She is just taking to the earth. He is just leaving it.

An oratorio

Would be just the thing for you:

Energy, balance, outbreak

At play for their own sake

But for now we foot it lightly

In time, and silently.

The poem puts in mind all the dance pieces set to Bach, such as Paul Taylor’s Esplanade. A bit of the Christmas Oratorio – led by John Eliot Gardiner – is here.

Merry Christmas.

• 25 Dec 2013

Francis: Old Age in Action

Jorge Luis Borges was “an agnostic who said the Our Father every night because he had made a promise to his mother.” So says Jorge Maria Bergoglio, who was a family friend of the great Argentine fabulist – and who is now better known by the name he took when he was elected pope.

That’s the most interesting thing I learned in James Carroll’s ample, artful, aptly timed profile of Francis in the current New Yorker.

I put off reading the profile for more than a week after it came out, partly out of envy (I wished I’d sought the assignment myself, so as to deepen my own reportage from the Vatican) and partly out of unease (I can’t forget the extreme, even if warranted, unpleasantness of Carroll’s piece about John Paul II and Christian-Jewish issues for the magazine in 1996).

Turns out there was nothing to be agitated about. Turns out that the Francis Effect (as it is called) is so powerful that it can ease the religious heartburn of even the most agitated representative of the Vatican II generation of American Catholics: James Carroll, I mean.

Among all the other blessings Francis is bringing us, there is this one: the extraordinary Catholics of my parents’ generation, who kept the faith while out in the cold for three decades, can feel, late in life, a homecoming in this pontificate.

And it turns out that all the attention paid to Francis left Carroll with few stones to turn. If you’ve been following Francis’ first months closely, the profile reads like a roundup of the stories that have attached themselves to the new pope: from his vexed history during the Dirty War in Argentina to his relatively passive (let’s say lax) approach to the matter of clerical sexual abuse – which is getting greater attention now, Carroll reports.

The attention is such that I’d forgotten (and Carroll hasn’t) that the Times appraised the new pope as “a conventional choice, a theological conservative of Italian ancestry who vigorously backs Vatican positions on abortion, gay marriage, the ordination of women and other major issues.”

Next time, let’s all keep in mind how little we know about the cardinals, shall we?

"The Papacy presents the most remarkable spectacle in history of old age in action. Most of the pontiffs were elected at an age when a king would have been considered fit only for abdication, yet the invigorating effect of St Peter’s Chair is well known. "

That remark by the old-time travel writer and Vatican-watcher H.V. Morton (who wandered into an Atlantic piece of mine about the election of popes) says more about Francis than Carroll’s or anybody else’s musings.

Let the invigoration go on.

• 24 Dec 2013

Tune In for Superabundance

“On me your voice falls as they say love should: / Like an enormous yes.” That’s the poet Philip Larkin, describing what he felt when he heard the jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet’s records in grim wartime England — the glimpse they gave him of a world of pleasure and frolic, of unanticipated transcendence.

That is akin to what I felt when I heard the music of Johann Sebastian Bach as a college student – heard it for hours at a time, days at a time, through WKCR-FM’s annual Bachfest, which began last Saturday this year and airs (and streams) through New Year’s Eve.

I’ll be a festival guest tonight from 6 to 9 Eastern time, playing recordings and telling stories about them drawn from Reinventing Bach, now out in paperback.

Like so many people, I first fell for Bach through a Glenn Gould recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations: I was driving up a mountain, and the music corresponded exactly to the blind curves and switchbacks of the road and the clean, chilly air at the top. Aha: so this was why some people were mad for classical music!

Back in New York, I went in search of Bach — and found the Bachfest. Since the seventies, I think, the Columbia University radio station has carried on the practice of playing the music of Bach at Christmastime. I tuned in for jazz and there was Bach, morning, noon, and night. I listened and listened and felt my life changing: music had never sounded so good as the music of Bach coming out of a boombox tuned to 89.9.

Another year and I was versed in the rite of the Bachfest: the abrupt midmorning change-over from Charlie Parker on alto saxophone to Bach on harpsichord; afternoons devoted to different versions of the Well-Tempered Clavier, or the solo violin works, or Bach’s music played on microtonal instruments; the commentaries by Columbia professors or jazz superstars like Keith Jarrett; the evening “cantata request” hours; the red-eye broadcasts of the works for organ, the dry metallic sound pulsing off the antenna atop the Empire State Building and out and out in concentric circles to the multitude of radios, my boombox among them, that were kept on faithfully through the night.

Described that way, Bachfest sounds like a marathon, but it feels like the opposite: a prayer flag or giant quilt of music gifted to the city, a catered spread of Bach’s plenty.

The festival seems to me to deliver a superabundance distinctive to its namesake. The power of Bach’s music derives, in large part, from the quality of superabundance: it is enough, and more than enough. The music itself is superabundant, made so as Bach’s genius is doubled through counterpoint and multiplied through the pattern of invention. There is more of the music than even Bach himself could know well, and in our time that the superabundance has been compounded by recordings.

If you listen to Bachfest, suddenly Bach is everywhere, omnipresent: you are surrounded by Bach, in the midst of Bach. It feels like a holiday in the old, holy sense of the word — feels the way the passage from Christmas to Epiphany must have felt to believers when belief was most believable, as a fruitful immersion, a plunge into the depths, a time of rest that is charged with purpose.

Bachfest streams at wkcr.org. At 6 tonight host Nick Diamand and I will go though a couple of dozen Bach records that encapsulate the history of recording told in Reinventing Bach – from Albert Schweitzer and Pablo Casals to the Beatles and Paul Simon to John Eliot Gardiner and Chris Thile (a mandolinist; that’s him up top).

• 23 Dec 2013

Seeing in the Dark

If you were hoping to see the light in the Peacock Room this winter, you’re out of luck.

That room of the Freer Gallery at the Smithsonian is an instance of the American refreshing of Europe that I wrote about in my previous post: the room was decorated by James McNeill Whistler for a house in London; purchased by Charles Freer, taken apart, shipped, and installed in his home in Detroit; and then taken apart and shipped and installed in Washington after Freer gave his collection of Asian and American art to the Smithsonian in 1906.

Amazing, the ambition of our cultural founding fathers.

Usually the shutters on the windows of the Peacock Room are opened on the third Thursday of the month. But they won’t be opened in January or February because two extraordinary light-sensitive works are on display there: a codex of the Book of Deuteronomy, and the seventh-century Byzantine illustrated parchment manuscript of the four gospels known as the Washington Codex.

The codex was probably made in a monastery near Cairo and was acquired for Freer in Giza a little more than a century ago. The Latino Times reports that “the Bibles came into Freer’s hands with sand amid their pages, discovered when they were unpacked from a shoebox at Freer’s mansion in Detroit.”

Amazing, the ambition of our cultural founding fathers.

That’s Matthew on the left, John obscured, Mark in the middle, and Luke to the right, as far as I can tell.

• 23 Dec 2013

Twilight of the Snobs

The American Century? That — more precisely — was the century when the people of the United States, many of us descendants of immigrants from Europe, reckoned with the glories of European culture and society and made them our own. So it was in abstract art, in Roman Catholicism, in design – and in food and what is called (I can’t use the term without using distancing punctuation) “cookery.”

Luke Barr – an editor with Travel + Leisure, and a great-nephew of the eminent food writer M.F.K. Fisher – tells the cookery part of the story in Provence, 1970: an account, drawn from his grandmother’s journals and much else, of the years in the sixties and early seventies when Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard, Simone Beck, and others spent time together and proximately in France, reckoned with the legacy of French cooking they purveyed in America, and began “to move away in decisive fashion from their France fixation.”

They were all contending with what amounted to a philosoophical problem: a question of taste and style and authenticity, and specifically about how those qualities were expressed in food and cooking – things they all cared deeply about. What was it, exactly, that they were doing? Teaching Americans to cook French food? No, that wasn’t it, that had never been it. Child had always known that what she did was teach people to be fearless, unintimidated, to try and if necessary to try again, to cook, to taste, to enjoy, to have fun – although she herself had been having ever less fun with Beck. That was going to change. And M.F., too, had not simply been celebrating French food and hedonism all these years; she’d been writing about something more essential, about how to live, to find pleasure in the moment. But was she living too much in the past? She was determined to find out.

The turn of the decade from the sixties to the seventies, a time of lost illusions in so many areas, was for them “the moment of American disillusionment with the sentimental glories of France” they had known as expatriates and apprentices at midcentury.

It was a beautiful world, preserved in the amber of fiction and memory. A world of faded aristocrats and remembered vintages, of boat trains and small family-run hotels that never changed, of excursions to Switzerland and meals in French restaurants where the sole meunière was always impeccably fresh and perfectly cooked. The ethos and aesthetic of the period had survived all the way through the 1960s, a worldview held together with wit and irony, tone and inflection, unimpeachable taste, and finally, at bottom, enforced by the logic of money and privilege.

But the mood had changed. The easy authority of the cultured and discerning was not so easy anymore.

“This” – Barr puts it so memorably that you suspect he originally used the expression as his book’s title – “was the twilight of the snobs.”

• 22 Dec 2013

Knock on Wood

In the morning in London, a man went into a small room, took out a wooden instrument, and played some music before a microphone.

In the afternoon in San Antonio, a man went into a small room, took out a wooden instrument, and played some music before a microphone.

The man in London was the cellist Pablo Casals. The man in San Antonio was the blues guitarist and singer Robert Johnson. The day was a Monday in the fall of 1936 (November 25, to be precise), and it’s no stretch to say that the recordings the two musicians made that day — two of Bach’s cello suites, and a dozen or more of Johnson’s blues — are the two most significant solo musical recordings of the twentieth century.

Audio wizard Joe Richman produced a Radio Diaries episode about that day, which is dramatized in detail in my book Reinventing Bach. It aired on NPR on the 75th anniversary of the day, and it’s now Radio Diaries’ current podcast.

That’s Abbey Road Studios, where Casals undertook his Bach recordings. Some other great musicians made records there, and I don’t mean Pink Floyd.

• 21 Dec 2013
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T.S. Eliot on “The First Coming of the Second Coming”

T.S. Eliot’s Selected Poems comes off the shelf every Christmas for his “Ariel” poems: six poems, the series given the name of the sprite in Shakespeare, that touch on Christmas in one way or another.

I’ve read the poems year after year without knowing how they came about. Now an essay on the Paris Review Daily spells out that the poems were part of a series organized by Eliot’s publisher (and employer), Faber & Gwyer of London, and that “G. K. Chesterton, Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Siegfried Sassoon, Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, and W. B. Yeats all contributed.”

The Ariel series followed a strict formula: identical cardboard bindings; title, illustrator, author, and occasionally an illustration on the cover; and two interior sheets folded to make four pages. The first page repeated the title information; the following three featured the poem and an original illustration.

The essay – by Casey N. Cep, a Harvard graduate and Rhodes scholar now living on Maryland’s Eastern Shore – is about the last and least known of the Ariel poems, one called “The Cultivation of Christmas Trees,” and it is what is called an essay in disguise. The Eliot estate manages copyright tightly – as Peter Ackroyd found out; he wrote a full biography of the poet without quoting the poetry more than a line at a time – so the essayist paraphrases, reflects, recalls, responds, associates, ponders, and suggests her way around the poem.

She lingers over a strong image:

The speaker of the poem yearns to be like “the child / For whom the candle is a star,” the young soul for whom “the gilded angel / Spreading its wings at the summit of the tree / Is not only a decoration, but an angel.” He wants to return not to childishness, but childhood, when “the spirit of wonder” filled whole days, not only fleeting moments. He desires “the glittering rapture, the amazement / Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree.”

She moves between the experience in the poem and our own experience:

“The Cultivation of Christmas Trees” is not about raising evergreens, but curating our own lives. Eliot writes with the hope that “the reverence and the gaiety” of childhood might linger, and “not be forgotten in later experience, / In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium / The awareness of death, [or] the consciousness of failure.”

She points a moral:

The symbolism of evergreen trees predates Christianity, and the Christmas trees of Eliot’s poem have meaning beyond their religiosity. The cultivation in the poem’s title is not really of trees, but of persons. Joy is born naturally, but it requires tending if it is to last.

“We had the experience but missed the meaning,” Eliot wrote in a celebrated passage in Four Quartets, and this Paris Review essayist misses none of the meaning of Eliot’s little-known Christmas poem.

• 21 Dec 2013
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