Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Soffro anche spesso

“Being a part of something special makes you special, right?”

Those words, uttered by Rachel Berry in the first episode of Glee, are remarkable.  I remember watching the trailer for the series on YouTube last spring and instantly falling in love, mostly because of how moving I thought that line was.  The show, with its cast of mildly misfit highschoolers, is all about that kind of desperate enthusiasm that teenagers ooze.  But as we age, we somehow never completely get over that need to feel special.

It’s maybe just that the things that make us special change a bit.  I had that thought in the shower before bed last night, while I was humming Radiohead’s biggest hit, “Creep.”  Now, lest you think I have some affinity with the angsty grunge-rock lyrics (how 90s!), you should know that I think of that song in Italian (which is maybe worse).  But a cover of “Creep” was a huge hit while I was there last fall.  You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it playing on the radio, sung in appropriately grungy style by Vasco Rossi—a sort of Italian cross between John Mellencamp and Leonard Cohen in both vocal stylings and political activism.

Now you know that I hate my “when I was in Italy” stories, but this little episode actually gave me some insight into why people love to travel and why I still tell these damned stories all the time.  The song, in English, is of course about a guy who doesn’t feel he deserves to be with a girl who’s “so f***ing special.”  The Italian is a cleaner version about a guy who doesn’t want to leave a girl; he’s going to stay “ad ogni costo” (at any cost—the title of the song).  The Italian girl in question isn’t quite as perfect as Radiohead’s “angel.”  She has “eyes that are never honest,” but she’s apparently still special enough that you wouldn’t want to leave here.  Rossi makes that very clear in a kind of brilliant reworking of the Radiohead version.  The last line of the verse in English (with the infamous epithet) is

I wish I was special
You're so fuckin' special

The Italian version goes for a rhyme instead

Tanto รจ lo stesso
Soffro anche spesso

[Much is the same / I also often suffer]

The second line rolls around in the mouth (and sounds) almost the same as the English version.  The s-f-n-sp chain of consonant sounds is identical.  It’s hard not to imagine that Rossi started with this line and built the rest of the song around that.

Now this is much to say that a song I heard in Italy was about wanting to be a part of something special.  But that makes me think that one of the reasons that people love to travel so much is to capture some of that feeling that Rachel Berry gets from being in Glee club.  It’s also maybe one of the reasons we (I) reminisce so much about our travels.  We loved that sense of being special.  Of being a stranger in a far land.  Of being a part of something bigger than ourselves.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on people who have the bug for travelling.  My last post was perhaps too critical.  After all, we all want to have those radically transformative experiences.  They are the stuff of dreams, and of course, poetry.

Dante was a guy who met a pretty special girl at the age of nine.  It was that experience that inspired him to write La vita nuova, one of the most important works in literature.  It has a lot of wonderful poetry, but its most iconic passage is perhaps the first sentence, which is in prose. 

In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.

[In that part of the book of my memory before which there is little that can be read, there is a heading which reads: here begins a new life.]

Just down the street from my apartment in Naples was the Piazza Dante, a lively and unsurprisingly run-down eighteenth-century square with a beckoning statue of Dante in the middle (above).  I’d sometimes perch myself at his feet in the afternoon and wonder when I could mark a new heading in the book of my memory.  Naples wasn’t that for me.  But I did feel pretty special to be there. 

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

“I Don’t Care for Roving”

In life you occasionally come across someone who suggests travel is a necessary component of your education.  This person is usually someone who backpacked through Europe on a summer holiday, or more recently braved South America, in order to “find themselves.”  They’ll regale you with stories of a restaurant found on a narrow street, a kiss stolen from an exotic stranger, and the myriad of ways in which life is so different from the way it is here in Canada.

I used to hate coming across these people.  That was until I inadvertently became one.  Last year I had the opportunity to “live abroad” (I’m vomiting as I right that).  I now find myself peppering my conversations with useless facts about life in Italy as though my few months there impressed upon me a certain knowledge of the place, its people, and its character.  But no sooner do the words “when I was in Italy” leave my lips and I feel something in my soul turn sideways.  Am I that douchebag?

Despite my newfound “cultural capital” I feel really no different then when I left.  I may be marginally more engaging at poncy academic events, but I found no insight about the ways of the world or who I was. 

I was perhaps predisposed to feeling this way because I could never understand how seeing more of the world could make one any wiser than one who stayed put.  I would always cite Emily Dickinson as my example.  The woman barely left Amherst, and never left her house for the last twenty years of her life.  And yet her poetry displays the most brilliant insight about life.  Joy, sorrow, the natural world—no better travelled writer has written anything superior about these topics.

So while writers have been arguing for decades about the reason of her seclusion (Did she nurse a broken heart? Was she the victim of family cruelty?) I preferred to think of Dickinson as a brilliant recluse, who had all that one needed to know about life there in her home and in her orchard.

But last month Lyndall Gordon, Professor at Oxford and noted literary biographer, has suggested a new reason for Dickinson’s hermetic life: epilepsy.  Lives Like Loaded Guns details the relationship between Dickinson, her sister-in-law, Susan, and her editor, Mabel Loomis Todd (who was also the mistress of her brother).  Susan attempted to get Dickinson’s poems published.  But the Amherst homebody couldn’t convince New York publishers to do so.  Todd—worldly, and well-travelled—took to editing the poems herself and made Dickinson the household name she is today.  Score one for the peripatetic set?

Maybe not.  Emily may not have got around very much, but it is because of her poetry that she’s famous.  Perhaps the fact that she never travelled and wrote about the life around her made her poems that much more universal.  Todd just gave her some good PR.  It’s just too bad that Dickinson may not have been able to travel, even if she wanted to.

For those of us who have the option, however, travel doesn’t necessarily bring the delights that it promises.  I was thinking a lot about that while I was away and listening to Miranda Lambert’s album Revolution which came out just as I was leaving last September.  A recurring theme on the album is a sense of home.  The first verse of “Makin’ Plans,” for example, makes the case that travelling can change a person.

If I ever left this town
I’d never settle down
I’d just be wandering around
If I ever left this town

If I wasn’t by your side
I’d never be satisfied
Nothin’ would feel just right
If I wasn’t by your side

It’s a bit desperate, maybe.  Should one not travel out of fear?

One of the most emotional tracks on the album, “The House That Built Me,” presents the flip side of the coin.  While the house/life metaphor can be a bit shopworn, this song is so touching it works beautifully.  The singer returns to her childhood home because

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

No wonder that it’s become the surprise hit of the album.  Who can’t relate to wanting to go back home?  Maybe Emily Dickinson.  But if she did venture out her front door, she might be disappointed by what she found.  “I don’t care for roving” she wrote her mentor Thomas Higginson in 1870.  Thank goodness.  Neither do I.   

Monday, January 18, 2010

Poetry, the Law, and Me

act of anne

There’s an urban legend that poetry is no longer relevant—that only scarf wearing, tweed sporting, rheumatic leftist white humanities profs of a certain age bother with the stuff (see, for example, Patton Oswalt’s plea to be named Poet Laureate, here).  While poetry collections may not top the bestsellers lists these days, you can’t go to a movie, read a book, or watch an advertisement without running into some verse. 

Or, for that matter, brush up on your copyright law.  I had to do a bit of just that after my video post (below) was identified by YouTube as containing copyrighted content.  Through the magic of technology, YouTube had managed to sniff out my less-than-thirty-second clip of Sugarland’s “Something More” that appeared at the end of the video.  I naively assumed that this little snippet fell within “fair use” in the United States (where YouTube runs its servers, and therefore where its content is subject to law).

Silly me.  Any use of recorded music on YouTube, even by an amateur user, it turns out, is subject to copyright law.  What would have made an appropriate musical selection?  Apparently anything prior to 1923, the last year in which creative content entered the public domain.  Be warned, next time you might have to watch me “cut a rug” to “Toot Toot Tootsie” or “I Wish I Could Shimmy Like My Sister Kate” (both hits that year).

Copyright is continually being extended by the American Congress.  It was most recently in 1999 with the Sonny Bono Copyright Copyright Term Extension Act.  That law could have been struck down in the 2003 Supreme Court case, Eldred v. Aschcroft.  It was a case that turned on the publication of, you guessed it, poetry.

The plaintiff, Eric Eldred, had wanted to publish Robert Frost’s collection New Hampshire online in his continuing effort to promote literacy by making literary classics available to the masses for no cost (other that your internet connection).  New Hampshire’s copyright was to expire, but the Bono Act ensured that the long-dead Frost would receive royalties for another twenty years (he died in 1963).  Eldred defied the extension and published anyway.  Court cases ensued.  Eldred lost them all.

I’m not sure how much money I owe Frost for publishing some of his poems on this blog.  You’d think he just might like the publicity.  Wouldn’t you want your work to still be published without censure when you’re dead?  How are we supposed to make something new when we’re cut off from the past?

Lawrence Lessig, Harvard professor and Eldred’s lawyer, asks that question in his book from 2008, Remix: Making Art And Commerce Thrive In the Hybrid Economy (available in paperback, via Amazon, here).  Lessig worries about the erosion of the public domain.  He writes that in 1923 the average copyright was held for 28 years.  Today, the average copyright is forever—seriously, all current copyrights are enforced and can theoretically be extended ad infinitum just as the Bono Act extended them in 1999.

Imagine, Lessig asks, if we still had a 28 year copyright?  I wouldn’t have to get by with Al Jolson numbers.  I could rock out to “What Kind of Fool,” or “Morning Train.”  And really, wouldn’t that be amazing?  Or course, Barry Gibb and Sheena Easton would renew their copyrights and those particular songs wouldn’t be in the public domain.  But think of all the great music that would be: the whole Lennon catalogue, for example.

But what’s really important (my rocking out certainly isn’t) is creating copyright law that encourages creativity, not limiting it in the name of profits.  That’s why copyright was created in the first place.  The full title of the first copyright law, the 1709 Statute of Anne (pictured above), is “An Act for the Encouragement of learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.”  Copyright was for a renewable term of 21 years.

My story has a happy ending.  The copyright holder of my song decided not to wipe my audio track (I had that happen when I ran afoul of the Golden Girls theme some months ago), but rather to post an ad encouraging listeners to buy the song.  What a brilliant solution.  It doesn’t penalize amateur users, and encourages the sale of the product and the creative interpretation of that product.

So thank you, Universal Music Group, for your enlightened stance on copyright.  I got to promote poetry, and you got to promote your band.  Now, if only every company decided to “Act for the encouragement of learning” in addition to acting in the name of profits.  This little episode has me heartened that the two are not mutually exclusive.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Poker Face

This Saturday I’m heading to the Met HD broadcast of Carmen.  The new production, directed by Richard Eyre, got a rave review by Anthony Tommasini in the New York Times.  He particularly lauded the direction of the final scene, which he wrote was

executed with such stunning realism, a dangerous mingling of sex, rebellion and violence: the very essence of “Carmen.”

Carmen caused a scandal when it was first performed in 1875.  But in the past century-and-a-quarter it’s netted a number of high-profile admirers.  Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Debussy—many contemporary composers were quick to declare their love.  Hell, even Nietzsche thought Bizet had saved music with the opera. 

Ever since, it’s been fashionable to like Carmen for all sorts of PC reasons: its musical merit, its exploration of class, its feminism, its realism.  But let’s be real.  Tommasini is right.  Carmen is compelling because it is lurid, sexy, and ends with a good stabbing. 

Feminists of course always get upset with that last one.  If Carmen were a man, would he have to pay for his sins with his life? Of course.  That’s the plot of Don Giovanni.  At the very least he would be assaulted in his SUV with a nine iron.

But women are always more compelling than men.  Don Giovanni would be no fun without Elvira.  And Carmen would be a total snooze with just Don Jose.  In fact, it would be a bit like an extended poem by Matthew Arnold.  I’ve never been much a fan of his most famous, “Dover Beach.”

 

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night

 

As if to prove women are more interesting, Anthony Hecht wrote this brilliant parody entitled “The Dover Bitch.”

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,
And he said to her, 'Try to be true to me,
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad
All over, etc., etc.'
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read
Sophocles in a fairly good translation
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,
But all the time he was talking she had in mind
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like
On the back of her neck. She told me later on
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought
All the way down from London, and then be addressed
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.

Carmen must have been the perfect antidote to Arnold’s brooding—and chaste—Victorianism.  A woman who refuses to love only one man?  Arnold would have definitely thrown himself off those white cliffs.

Luckily we don’t live in such a bleak and bland world as Arnold.  We have our very own Carmens, like Lady Gaga.  As silly as the lyrics to “Poker Face” are, it’s hard not to admire Gaga’s take on a well-worn conceit.  Instead of the “rebellious bird” of Bizet’s “Habanera,” Gaga goes for the poker table.  Timely, clever, and catchy.

Can't read my,
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(She's got to love nobody)
Can't read my
Can't read my
No he can't read my poker face
(She's got to love nobody)

P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)
P-p-p-poker face, p-p-poker face
(Mum mum mum mah)

I won't tell you that I love you
Kiss or hug you
Cause I'm bluffin' with my muffin
I'm not lying I'm just stunnin' with my love-glue-gunning

I can’t wait to watch Carmen do some bluffin’ with her muffin—in high def no less—this weekend on the big screen.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010