Classical Music, Poetry and stuff

[Stavros]

I don't know if there are any David Mamet fans here; I have disliked his work since I first encountered it through Glengarry Glen Ross, and the film House of Games, I don't like his use of language, that brittle soul-less repetition that you get in the empty books by Hemingway and Cormac McCarthy -anyway I always assumed he was a macho right-wing Republican like the film-maker David Lynch so I was surprised to see this review by Christopher Hitchens of some kind of confessional book in which Mamet declares his allegiance to the 'no-nonsense' politically incorrect strata of society who consider all forms of government an assault on freedom. As Hitchens points out Mamet can't even get simple facts right (Beaverbrook was Presbyterian not Jewish), and rants with all the spooky perfection of a convert -but from what, to what? Its an acid review, and I don't usually think of Hitchens as anything other than a self-important windbag, but its worth reading anyway. It is from today's New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/bo....html?_r=1&hpw

David Mamet’s Right-Wing Conversion

By CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS

THE SECRET KNOWLEDGE


On the Dismantling of American Culture


By David Mamet
241 pp. Sentinel. $27.95.




This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason. In order to be persuaded by it, you would have to be open to propositions like this:
“Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.”
Or this:
“America is a Christian country. Its Constitution is the distillation of the wisdom and experience of Christian men, in a tradition whose codification is the Bible.”
Some of David Mamet’s unqualified declarations are made even more tersely. On one page affirmative action is described as being “as injust as chattel slavery”; on another as being comparable to the Japanese internment and the Dred Scott decision. We learn that 1973 was the year the United States “won” the Vietnam War, and that Karl Marx — who on the evidence was somewhat more industrious than Sarah Palin — “never worked a day in his life.” Slackness or confusion might explain his reference to the *Scottish-Canadian newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook as a Jewish courtier in the tradition of Disraeli and Kissinger, but it is more than ignorant to say of Bertrand Russell — author of one of the first reports from Moscow to analyze and excoriate Lenin — that he was a fellow-traveling dupe and tourist of the Jane Fonda style.
Propagandistic writing of this kind can be even more boring than it is irritating. For example, Mamet writes in “The Secret Knowledge” that “the Israelis would like to live in peace within their borders; the Arabs would like to kill them all.” Whatever one’s opinion of that conflict may be, this (twice-made) claim of his abolishes any need to analyze or even discuss it. It has a long way to go before it can even be called simplistic. By now, perhaps, you will not be surprised to know that Mamet regards global warming as a false alarm, and demands to be told “by what magical process” bumper stickers can “save whales, and free Tibet.” This again is not uncharacteristic of his pointlessly aggressive style: who on earth maintains that they can? If I were as prone to sloganizing as Mamet, I’d keep clear of bumper-sticker comparisons altogether.
On the epigraph page, and again on the closing one, Mamet purports to explain the title of his book. He cites the anthropologist Anna Simons on rites of initiation, to the effect that the big secret is very often that there is no big secret. In his own voice, he states: “There is no secret knowledge. The federal government is merely the zoning board writ large.” Again, it is hard to know with whom he is contending. Believers in arcane or esoteric or occult power are distributed all across the spectrum and would, I think, include Glenn Beck. Mr. Beck is among those thanked in Mamet’s acknowledgments for helping free him from “the bemused and sad paternalism” of the liberal airwaves. Would that this were the only sign of the deep confusion that is all that alleviates Mamet’s commitment to the one-dimensional or the flat-out partisan.
I am writing this review in the same week as I am conducting a rather exhausting exchange with Noam Chomsky in the pages of a small magazine. I have no difficulty in understanding why it is that former liberals and radicals become exasperated with the pieties of the left. I have taught at Berkeley and the New School, and I know what Mamet is on about when he evokes the dull atmosphere of campus correctness. Once or twice, as when he attacks feminists for their silence on Bill Clinton’s sleazy sex life, or points out how sinister it is that we use the word “czar” as a positive term for a political problem-solver, he is unquestionably right, or at least making a solid case. But then he writes: “The BP gulf oil leak . . . was bad. The leak of thousands of classified military documents by Julian Assange on WikiLeaks was good. Why?” This is merely lame, fails to compare like with like, appears unintentionally to be unsure why the gulf leak was “bad” and attempts an irony where none exists.
Irony is one of the elements of tragedy, a subject with which Mamet is much occupied. He has read — perhaps before Glenn Beck’s promotion of it on the air — Friedrich von Hayek’s classic defense of the market, “The Road to Serfdom.” (I would guess he has not read Hayek’s essay “Why I Am Not a Conservative.”) Briefly, Hayek identified what he called “the Tragic View” of the free market: the necessity of making difficult choices between competing goods. Classical economics had already defined this as “opportunity cost,” which is just as accurate but less tear-jerking. We have long known it under other maxims — “to govern is to choose” — or even under folkloric proverbs about having cakes and consuming them. But to Mamet, Hayek is the brilliant corrective to the evil of Franklin Roosevelt, who “dismantled the free market, and, so, the economy,” and shares this dismal record with Nazis, Stalinists and other “Socialists.” More recent collapses and crimes in the private capital sector, and the Bush-Obama rescue that followed, strike him as large steps in the same direction.
Mamet began the book more promisingly, by undertaking to review political disagreements between conservatives and liberals in the light of his own craft: “This opposition appealed to me as a dramatist. For a good drama aspires to be and a tragedy must be a depiction of a human interaction in which both antagonists are, arguably, in the right.”
That was certainly Hegel’s definition of what constituted a tragedy. From a playwright, however, one might also have expected some discussion of what the Attic tragedians thought: namely, that tragedy arises from the fatal flaw in some noble person or enterprise. This would have allowed Mamet to make excursions into the fields of irony and unintended consequences, which is precisely where many of the best critiques of utopianism have originated. Unfortunately, though, he shows himself tone-deaf to irony and unable to render a fair picture of what his opponents (and, sometimes, his preferred authorities, like Hayek) really believe. Quoting Deepak Chopra, of all people, as saying, “Our thinking and our behavior are always in anticipation of a response. It [sic] is therefore fear-based,” he seizes the chance to ask, “Is it too much to suggest that this quote contains the most basic prescription of liberalism, ‘Stop Thinking’?” On that evidence, yes, it would be a bit much.
Eschewing irony, Mamet prefers his precepts to be literal and traditional. In case by any chance we haven’t read it before, he twice offers Rabbi Hillel’s definition of the golden rule and the essence of Torah: “What is hateful to thee, do not do to thy neighbor.” As with Hayek’s imperative of choice, the apparent obviousness of this does not entirely redeem it from contradiction. To Colonel Qaddafi and Charles Manson and Bernard Madoff, I want things to happen that would be hateful to me. Of what use is a principle that is only as good as the person uttering it? About as much use as the (unnamed) “doyenne” of the American left who, according to Mamet, recommends always finding out what MoveOn.org thinks and does, and then thinking and doing it. That, I suspect, was a straw antagonist — with no chance at all of being, “arguably, in the right” — and this is a straw book, which looks for tragedy in all the wrong places.


Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His memoir, “Hitch-22,” is now available in paperback.

[trish]

I generally enjoy Christopher Hitchens' writing, whether I agree with him or not. I do agree with his (and apparently your) assessment of David Mamet. I find Mamet's theater cold and unbelievable. (My first encounter was Oleanna, which I found to be stilted, preachy, robotic and shallow in spite of the intellectual pryrotechnics.) His plays are intended as sermons and display as much intellectual integrity as one. I haven't been following Mamet's career and was unaware of his new book and his "conversion." Thanks for posting the Hitchens review.

P.S. We (Stavros and I) disagree on Cormac McCarthy. As far as Hemingway goes, I like the short, simple prose. Brief flashes of light. An illuminated face. An undeveloped idea. Then darkness. But like Mamet, Hemingway sometimes constructs his characters to illustrate a moral. Rather than being true to themselves and reality, his characters are reduced to symbols in an allegory.

[Paige]

I 'm really, really glad somebody started this -there's not a law saying TGirls have to be incurably dumb (=interested only in pop stuff), or if there is, i haven't been told. A lot of hot-as-hell GGirls are much more interested in Mozart & F.S. Fitzgerald than in Lady GaGa, etc. etc. No reason TGs can't be too. One note-try to get all the Mozart piano concertos by Mitsuko Uchida-expensive, but it's like buying medicine, only better. Paige. PS-Stavros-that is a super post, i hate politics, but i'll look Mamet up.

[samlord]

I agree with Paige completely. This thread is such a breath of fresh air in the forum. So bravo fortissimo to the intrepid souls who decided to hijack it and create a small oasis of cuture and sociability in the wild and wacky world of Hungangels.

Now . . . anyone care to discuss the lyric qualities of Algernon Charles Swinburne's Hymn to Proserpine? Anyone . . .? Anyone remember Swinburne (hint - he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature every year from 1903 to 1907).

[Stavros]

P.S. We (Stavros and I) disagree on Cormac McCarthy. As far as Hemingway goes, I like the short, simple prose. Brief flashes of light. An illuminated face. An undeveloped idea. Then darkness.
Its obviously a matter of taste, and it doesn't always mean that intricate prose is superior -Conrad, Woolf, Joyce and Proust to me are at the summit of modern writing, Nabokov is a worthless fraud. I think it took me 4 hours to read The Road, and it was a waste of four hours of my life. I then watched the film after a cup of tea, so I guess I wasted half a day of my waking life. Its more like typing than writing. Modernism intrigues me with its paradoxes, subtleties, anxieties -its just more enjoyable to read.

One note-try to get all the Mozart piano concertos by Mitsuko Uchida-expensive
Paige, I adore Uchida, I have her Schubert set but the HMV shop in London had a special offer on Barenboim's complete set of Mozart a few years ago -no contest! and I am not disappointed...

Anyone remember Swinburne..
Swinburne is the forgotten romantic of English poetry, as with AE Housman his poetry went out of fashion in the 20thc under the onslaught of modernism and after, Auden and the 'Life Studies' type movement pioneered by Lowell. Its a bit odd because Yeats is a late romantic -I think it was Edmund Wilson or someone who called Yeats the last 19thc poet, but on the whole a better poety than AS. Swinburne's poetry has musicality, lush phrasing, and though dense can be rewarding if you stick with it. He himself like Rilke was a sickly, neurotic individual needing constant care and attention. Maybe that style will come back into fashion, but I doubt it in present times.

[robertlouis]

[/I]
Its obviously a matter of taste, and it doesn't always mean that intricate prose is superior -Conrad, Woolf, Joyce and Proust to me are at the summit of modern writing, Nabokov is a worthless fraud.

It saddens me that of the four authors you named, Stavros, Conrad is the least read these days. I remember being enthralled as a youngster by his maritime novels and only realised on returning to them in adulthood that it was the quality of the prose and his talent for characterisation that had pulled me in in the first place. Most people know that Heart of Darkness was the template for Coppola's masterful Apocalypse Now, but I wonder how many have read it. The opening chapter, in which he describes the civilisation of London as the thinnest and most fragile of veneers sets the tone for one of the 20th century's finest novels. Add in Nostromo - his masterpiece imho - The Secret Agent, Lord Jim, Typhoon.....

A lost genius.

[robertlouis]

I 'm really, really glad somebody started this -there's not a law saying TGirls have to be incurably dumb (=interested only in pop stuff), or if there is, i haven't been told. A lot of hot-as-hell GGirls are much more interested in Mozart & F.S. Fitzgerald than in Lady GaGa, etc. etc. No reason TGs can't be too. One note-try to get all the Mozart piano concertos by Mitsuko Uchida-expensive, but it's like buying medicine, only better. Paige. PS-Stavros-that is a super post, i hate politics, but i'll look Mamet up.

As the OP, thank you, Paige. Well, it's nice to get away from the metal freaks for a while!

If you're into piano concertos, I picked up the full set of Beethoven concertos in a 2 cd set from Amazon uk for £6 (about $10) last month, with Alfred Brendel in his prime, excellent quality 1983 recording, on Decca. Strongly recommended.

[robertlouis]

Ingram Marshall -not a name I had previously heard of, I am ashamed to say; however I checked it out on YouTube and it indicates the options that composers have been able to explore outside the dreary, lifeless legacy of Schoenberg and Stravinsky- there is so much music out there from which to draw inspiration. It also has some kind of congruence with what Klaus Schulze has been working with, vide Irrlicht:

On Trish's recommendation I did a search for the Marshall and downloaded it from Amazon. Excellent. Challenging, but very lyrical in its own highly idiosyncratic way.

In my other musical strand I've been on a serious Paul Simon kick this month, so the Marshall made for an intriguing counterpoint!

[Stavros]

Add in Nostromo - his masterpiece imho - The Secret Agent

It takes time to read and understand Conrad, as is also the case with other modernists, like Faulkner for example, and if you believe people 'don't have time' these days and expect everything to take place within 3 minutes its never going to happen. On the other hand I notice how many histories and biographies are rarely less than 500-600 pages long, so some people must be spending a lot of time reading.

I was not impressed by Apocalypse Now, and repeated viewings confirm it is a mess of a film; it doesn't have much to do with Heart of Darkness, which is surely one of the most misunderstood pieces of 20thc fiction -either Coppola doesn't understand it or realised he couldn't film a story that is a narrative within a narrative that simultaneously takes place in London and Africa...

Nostromo is without doubt one of the finest creations in English literature, I used to read it every summer when I went on holiday, and decided I only really understood it after the fourth reading -to which someone I know responded if it took that long then what was the point of reading it? Under Western Eyes may be his most under-rated book, it has been criticised for giving voice to Conrad's issues with the Russians, but for a book published in 1911 is remarkably perceptive on the mind-set of 'revolutionaries' and particularly the expats, in this book cuddled together in Geneva. Victory is also a book I have read several times, I also saw Richard Rodney-Bennet's opera years ago although I didn't enjoy it; and most of these books have been filmed, but never successfully, although Hitchcock's version of The Secret Agent (called Sabotage, he made another flm called The Secret Agent but its not Conrad); is not bad. I also read The Shadow-Line in tandem with the BBC2 drama, but Blick who wrote it has only taken the kernel of that story, most of which takes place on board a ship in the Gulf of Siam.

[Prospero]

I fully agree with the judgement of Mamet's ignorance and of his poor quality as a playwright in recent years. However I personally found Glengarry Glen Ross to be a wonderfully powerful piece of theatre and then cinema brining forther a performance of near brilliance from Jack Lemmon. The rot set in fully with Oleanna.


Conrad is a quite astonishing writers made more remarkable by swift mastery of English and then dramatic achievement in it - rivalled and perhaps surpassed by Nabokov. Apocalypse Now was a ragged film with some brilliant moments. But as a cinematic approach to Conrad it was a failure. I suspect Lord jim filmed many years earlier with peter O'Toole was a better piece but i saw it so long ago I've forgotten it (and read the book many years later).