Considering a Scene as a Character

Once again I find myself involved with a major listening project. This time it is the Decca collection of the complete works of Benjamin Britten. This is structured according to categories, rather than ordered chronologically. This works for me, because it will allow me to deal with each category as a separate Examiner.com article.

The first category in the set is opera; and I have to take satisfaction in having acquired enough experience that each of the operas is familiar to me through at least one staged production, through video when not through experience in an opera house. Every now and then, however, there are certain dramatic elements that are better recognized through the music without visual distraction. This is the way I feel about A Midsummer Night's Dream, which lends itself to imaginative visual design while having to bear the burden of familiarity with William Shakespeare at the same time.

What fascinates me about Britten's opera is how the composer chose to make it his own narrative without ever compromising Shakespeare in any serious way. This is apparent from the very beginning, since the very first music you hear establishes the scene (to use Kenneth Burke's technical term) of the forest in which all acts (from the same Burke terminology) of significance will take place. Indeed, to prepare the audience for Puck's epilogue, it is clear that Britten has chosen to establish the forest as a "dream world" of sorts, rather than merely an untamed piece of land on the outskirts of Athens. One might almost say that, from a musical point of view, the forest matters more to Britten than all those agents (Burke's term again), both supernatural and "natural" that will be bumping into each other (often in comic ways) as the narrative unfolds.

Clearly, the forest does not itself act; but perhaps Britten is trying to prepare the audience for how the scene will create a variety of dispositions through which the acts themselves will be motivated. This strikes me as significant, particularly since the opera never leaves the forest until the final scene of the final act. (The text for that scene actually begins with the very first words of Shakespeare's play.) In other words one only returns to "reality" for the multiple wedding celebration (in which Oberon and Titania are somewhat like "participating bystanders"). Furthermore (notwithstanding the influence of Felix Mendelssohn), that scene has less to do with the wedding and spends most of its time on the "Pyramus and Thisbe" performance, which, since it is the (highly distorted) enactment of a familiar myth, involves yet another move into yet another "dream world."

Recognizing the Interests of Peace

It now seems to be official, at least according to Declan McCullagh.  In his Privacy Inc. column for CNET News, he reported this morning that WikiLeaks is among the 241 nominees for the 2011 Nobel Prize.  In fairness McCullagh also reported that it does not take much to get a nomination:

Nominations for the Nobel Peace Price may come from any professor of "social sciences, history, philosophy, law and theology," in addition to national governments and former Nobel Peace Prize recipients, under the rules of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

Nevertheless, as I observed last December, the nomination itself throws an ironic light on the attitude of large and powerful governments towards the Nobel Peace Prize:

What makes me most uneasy is that the “official” reaction of our government to Assange and WikiLeaks comes dangerously close to the conduct of the People’s Republic of China in response to the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiabo.

At a time when our commitment to peace is under considerable scrutiny by many on the world stage, this nomination puts us in an awkward position regarding our desire to prosecute Julian Assange.

McCullagh also reported that the Internet itself had been nominated for the roles in has been playing in revolts against authoritarian governments in the Arab world.  This one strikes me as more of a stretch.  It amounts to a confusion between agents (who would qualify as nominees) and agencies, which simply serve as tools for those agents doing things worthy of winning the award.  As I see it, the day we start thinking of the Internet as an agent is the day we “officially” elect to disregard those social qualities that make us the humans we are.

Does that argument not also apply to WikiLeaks?  While I grant that possibility, I am also willing to entertain the hypothesis that WikiLeaks amounts to a community of like-minded individuals who use the Internet as their primary agency.  I doubt that anyone would view the Internet in its entirety as a “community of like-minded individuals!”

Searching for and Interpreting Clues in Tucson

Peter Brooks’ review of Robert Darnton’s Poetry and the Police, in the latest issue of The New York Review, turns out to have a curious connection to this weekend’s tragedy in Tucson.  He begins by citing an essay by Carlo Ginzberg, whose title, in English translation, is “Clues:  Roots of an Evidential Paradigm.”  The argument in this essay grows out of Ginzberg’s attempt to compare the contemporary historian with a prehistoric hunter on the grounds of how one reasons about clues.  Here is how Ginzberg describes such hunters:

Man has been a hunter for thousands of years.  In the course of countless pursuits he learned to reconstruct the shapes and movements of his invisible prey from tracks in the mud, broken branches, droppings of excrement, tufts of hair, entangled feathers, stagnating odors.  He learned to sniff out, record, interpret, and classify such infinitesimal traces as trails of spittle.

Such sentences would not be out of place in a refereed publication on cognitive science for any number of reasons;  but I suspect that Ginzberg, as a practicing historian, would have seen “reconstruct” as the most crucial verb in this passage.

Having established its significance, he could then move on to the nature of reconstruction itself:

This knowledge is characterized by the ability to move from apparently insignificant experiential data to a complex reality that cannot be experienced directly.  And the data is always arranged by the observer in such a way as to produce a narrative sequence, which could be expressed most simply as “someone passed this way.”  Perhaps the very idea of narrative (as distinct from the incantation, exorcism, or invocation) was born in a hunting society, from the experience of deciphering tracks.

Considered in the context of Tucson, however, there must be more to the story.  The FBI “hunters” now have their “prey,” Jared Lee Loughner.  They know he “passed this way;”  and they know what he did.  However, as today’s news on National Public Radio’s Morning Edition made clear, FBI investigators still lack a narrative that will attribute any motive to Loughner’s acts, raising the question of whether they will ever be able to make sense of those acts as historians try to make sense of past events, whether it involves the assassination of Abraham Lincoln or the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

It was in this framework that I was drawn to read “American Tragedy,” Larry McMurtry’s post to NYRBlog.  For one thing I can appreciate McMurtry’s sense of scene (to invoke the terminology of Kenneth Burke’s pentad).  Not only does he live in Tucson, but also he shops at that Safeway in front of which Loughner opened fire.  More important, however, may be that, as a successful novelist, McMurtry has a respectable command of narrative in both theory and practice.  Thus, his credentials for writing about sensemaking are as strong as those of any good historian or FBI investigator.  Furthermore, he is also a hunter;  and, to be more specific, he is a gun-owning hunter.  Finally, he could write with personal knowledge about Gabrielle Giffords, having sat beside her on a flight from Dallas to Tucson.  In his blog post McMurtry makes it clear that they talked about movies, rather than politics;  but he also wrote that he “later learned that she was a staunch supporter of the Second Amendment.”

Of course McMurtry has not solved the sensemaking problem that currently occupies the FBI.  Ultimately, he is less occupied with explaining the past than he is with considering what is likely to happen next.  My own reading is that he is concerned with the broader problem of a culture that tends to confuse “metaphorical truth” with “literal truth,” particularly when it comes to how we think about hunting.  Thus, he cites that notorious map with crosshairs drawn up by Sarah Palin’s political action committee, adding parenthetically that Palin has sent a letter of sympathy to Giffords and that the crosshairs “aimed” as Tucson have been removed from the aforesaid map.

Nevertheless, both word and concept are still with us.  Whether we like it or not, they are part of “the American way of life.”  He thus concludes by reflecting on this mindset:

And I don’t believe that language drawn from the hunt is likely to vanish from our political speech. Words such as “target” or “bulls eye” are deeply ingrained. We will be polite for a while but once the slugfest resumes—and politics is a slugfest—the old invective will slip back in.

In other words there will be a requisite period of dignified mourning, after which the “slugfest” will resume;  and history teaches us that the only slugfest that draws interest is one that also draws blood.

Eterrnal Funding is the Price of Censorship

One of my favorite recurring themes has to do with the premise that just about any form of regulation, if it is to be effective, must follow the metaphor of an arms race. Udi Manber introduced this metaphor back when he was at Yahoo!, where his responsibilities included dealing with protection against malware; but more recently the metaphor has resurfaced in the context of preventing the next financial crisis while recovering from the current one. As I put it last February, financial security is more a matter of Wendell Phillips' concept of "eternal vigilance" than one of closing the barn door to keep the horses from being stolen. Unfortunately, whether you are in the Internet business or just chewing the fat with Socrates over the nature of an ideal republic, it quickly becomes apparent that, if you want eternal vigilance, you have to pay for it.

It appears that the People's Republic of China has now confronted this problem as it applies to their own issues of censorship. The following report appeared on the BBC News Web site this morning:

Reports from China say a controversial government-backed software project to filter internet content could be on the brink of collapse.

State media said the developer behind the Green Dam Youth Escort software had closed its Beijing project team because of a lack of government funding.

Its partner in Henan said without funding, its team would soon close too.

The problem appears to be that the Chinese government saw the problem of maintaining censorship as being a matter of a software product that could be developed and deployed with one year of funding. In other words they wanted to put a lock on the door while the horses were pretty much all in the barn. One could think of the locked door as a form of utopian "goal state." Once that state has been achieved, the system will remain in it; and the job is done.

To go back to the question of financial regulation, this is the fallacy that Benjamin Friedman explored in his review of John Cassidy's How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities. Friedman advocated Cassidy's plea that we recognize the difference between "utopian economics," which is all about finding goal states in clean mathematically-based systems, and "reality-based economics," which tries to take into account all of the messier aspects of human behavior. I raise these points not to advise the Chinese on how to deal more effectively with achieving their censorship goal. Rather, I see it as an amusing irony that the Chinese are running into the same problems of achieving the goals of their value system that the Western world has been forced to confront in matters of protection, whether from spam or financial malfeasance. The real irony is that we have two cultures with rather significantly different values, both of which have been drinking the technology-based "Kool-Aid of globalization" to dangerous excess. In Kenneth Burke's terminology the same act is taking place in radically different scenes, and in both of those scenes the agents are now forced to confront unanticipated consequences.

Twitter Diplomacy

I am trying to figure out whether or not there was irony behind Kim Ghattas, of the Washington Bureau for BBC News, deciding to file a story about Twitter on the Fourth of July. After all, in our new diet-conscious culture, Twitter may now be more American than hot dogs and apple pie; and it has definitely invaded the playing fields of our national pastime. (In spite of the advertising jingle that once linked these three themes, it is probably now irrelevant whether or not the Chevrolet is now "Twitter-friendly.") Indeed, the extent to which Twitter defines American culture was actually the theme of Ghattas' piece, because she pursued a consequence than many would not have expected:

If you want to know where Hillary Clinton is today, no need to watch the evening news or read the papers.

The US State Department's official Twitter account, @statedept, will keep you informed with timely tweets.

It will tell you what country she's in (Poland), what she's up to (signing a missile defence agreement), and who she's been speaking to (former Australian PM Kevin Rudd, by telephone).

Still want to know more?

You can check out the State Department's blog, sign up to its Facebook page, and watch behind-the-scenes videos.

Maybe you'd like to check out the interactive travel map, or follow the tweets of the various US embassies...

You get the picture. The department has embraced social media as a tool for diplomacy for the 21st century, with the strong backing of the Secretary of State herself.

Yes, Kim, I get the picture. As a matter of fact, I got it last March when your radio program, The Interview, invited Evan Williams, co-founder to Twitter, as a guest; and he used your bully pulpit to declare:

I think Twitter will be a fundamental part of how people interact with their government.

When Williams delivered that punch line, he scared the bejesus (yes, Kim, your own country's Shorter Oxford English Dictionary recognizes that word, albeit as an interjection rather than as the noun that many of us on this side of the pond engage) out of me, enough for me to vent my fears in an extended blog post. Today's story, however, had me thinking twice about my fears, because it included its own account of some unanticipated consequences:

Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton's senior advisor for technology, and Jared Cohen, from the office of policy planning, last month led a delegation of Silicon valley companies to Syria - one of only four countries still listed by the US as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The visit was billed as an opportunity to engage with Damascus on a different level and attempt to introduce into an authoritarian country new technologies that could help its people connect further with the outside word.

But when Cohen sent a tweet to share his amazement about having a great "frappuccino" in Syria, it raised a few eyebrows and questions back in Washington.

The frivolity of the tweet made some wonder whether this was the right tone to strike in a diplomatic conversation with a country that has not had an American ambassador since 2005.

There was also a tweet about a challenge to a cake-eating contest with a Syrian minister.

The ensuing controversy over that frivolity subsequently led to a structural change in State Department policy:

The State Department issued rules and guidelines about the use of social media only two weeks ago. For now anyone in the building can tweet about their work; the tweets are not monitored systematically but members of staff are urged to use social media "intelligently", according to PJ Crowley.

"We're still learning how to apply these rules individually and collectively, and our policy will evolve," Mr Crowley said.

As a comparison, the British Foreign Office and embassies have official Twitter accounts as institutions. Individual British diplomats do not tweet about work.

(I hope Anthony Giddens has been following this, since this whole episode is providing data to support his theory of structuration.) Still, there is a problem with that adverb "intelligently," because any motivated action can not be deemed intelligent strictly on the basis of the act itself. The "complex" of the act and the motive behind the act need to be evaluated as a single entity; and this is where the question of frivolity comes into the picture.

Ghattas used the adjective "delicate" to describe the mission to Syria during which the allegedly frivolous tweets were transmitted. This adjective tends to be diplomacy-speak for a tentative visit to a country usually taken to be in opposition to American interests, if not downright hostile. Now in the history of diplomacy it has long been the case that one deals with such opposition through the rhetoric of demonization: It plays well at home; and, if played properly, it can intimidate the other country. (On this particular day it is important to recognize that this rhetoric of demonization plays a major role in the text of the Declaration of Independence. See how appropriate your timing was, Kim?) From this point of view, tweets about frappuccinos and cake-eating contests tend to undermine this rhetorical strategy, humanizing the opposition, rather than demonizing it; and my guess is that Cohen had no motive other than to declare that, while being a stranger in a strange land, he was encountering "folks just like the rest of us." Remember that, as I cited yesterday, without that common foundation of humanity, any documents arising from a diplomatic encounter would be, for all intents and purposes, unintelligible.

This is where we come back to that question of acting "intelligently." Diplomacy has always been a (if not the) "great game." Like it or not, social software is changing the rules of that game, exactly as the theory of structuration predicts that such rules get changed. What, then, are we to do with the "old rules?" One answer may actually come from William S. Gilbert, who wrote that, during the Napoleonic Wars, the "House of Peers … Did nothing in particular,/And did it very well." Structuration theory explains that we do not change the rules; they change as a result of the motivated actions that occurring (and not just our own). Our responsibility is to be aware of change, rather than to impose it. This is not to say that State Department rules and guidelines may be counterproductive. They can actually be very productive, but only if they reflect that awareness of change taking place, rather than a resistance to it. If we wish to advance the practices of diplomacy, we should reserve the rhetoric of demonization for that counterproductive spirit of resistance, rather than for other countries that do not agree with us on all matters!

Preparing for the Valkyries

The San Francisco Opera production of Francesca Zambello's staging of Die Walküre, the second opera in Richard Wagner's cycle, Der Ring des Nibelungen, will not take the stage of the War Memorial Opera House until June 10; but I have always believed that it is never too soon to begin preparing for a Wagner experience. Today's full-page advertisement in the Datebook of the San Francisco Chronicle declaims the headline "TAKE A WILD RIDE WITH A VALKYRIE!" with all of the energy that Birgit Nilsson used to throw into her performances of Brünnhilde, particularly in the third act of Walküre; and the accompanying photograph (available in full color at the San Francisco Opera Web site) suggests that one will ride in the company of savage aviatrices, any one of whom could bring down "Red Baron" Manfred von Richthofen without dropping an appoggiatura. This is certainly consistent with Zambello's decision to stage the entire cycle in an American setting, even if my first reaction to the photograph was to wonder whether Nordic myth might finally resolve the question of whatever happened to Amelia Earhart.

Those who want to pick nits over temporal continuity might raise questions about how we have moved from the California Gold Rush setting of Das Rheingold to the dawn of military aviation in World War I; but it is important to remember that considerable time elapses between moving day at Valhalla (the final scene of Rheingold) and Siegmund's arrival at Hunding's house at the beginning of Walküre (although, since both of these scenes involve a massive storm, they are linked musically by Donner's leitmotiv). Furthermore, a good deal happens over that time to lay the groundwork for the narrative of Walküre itself. Most importantly, over this period of time Wotan, with a procreative zeal that he shares with his Greek counterpart Zeus, has brought about the births of the majority of the characters in Walküre! So, while much time elapses between these two operas, it is time over which Wotan has been very busy!

When I saw Rheingold here in June of 2008, I came away with the impression that Zambello's "American move" had been a good one. Reviewing those impressions this morning, however, I realize that her success may have come from her not letting the American references get in the way. In the terminology of Kenneth Burke's pentad, matters of scene are always subordinate to matters of the agents. In other words the primary significance of Rheingold resided in the characters (even the minor ones) and their flaws that are revealed to us as the narrative unfolds. Thus, as I begin to prepare myself for Walküre, I find myself wondering whether or not these priorities will still hold. It is certainly the case that the entire cycle emerges from the consequences of acts committed by flawed agents; but will this foreground priority be jeopardized by rampant aviatrices?

In an effort to purse this question, I turned to the account that Tim Page prepared for The Washington Post on March 26, 2007, after this staging was first presented by the Washington National Opera. Getting beyond his high praise for the performers, I found the following paragraphs about what those performers were actually doing (rather than just singing) up on stage:

This is the second installment in what director Francesca Zambello has called an "American Ring" ("Die Walkure" is part of an interrelated quartet of Wagner operas known as "Der Ring des Nibelungen.") Some of the visuals were attractive -- the opening tableau, set in the midst of a storm, called to mind Auntie Em's house, ready to be blown away, and there was a succession of beautiful filmic cloud ballets throughout the evening. I liked the sinister underworld Zambello created beneath abandoned freeways in Act 2; moreover, she made the most of the excruciatingly awkward, achingly conflicted but profoundly loving exchange between Wotan and Brunnhilde that closes the opera.

But a lot of Zambello's work seemed either obvious or secondhand. The idea of Wotan as uber-capitalist has grown tired (it dates at least to the Patrice Chereau staging at Bayreuth in 1976), and the imagery in the "Ride of the Valkyries" -- airplanes, parachutes, modern warfare in all of its atrocity -- seemed to be lifted directly from "Apocalypse Now." I suspect that Zambello feels the imperatives of drama more acutely than she thinks about them, which is not a terrible flaw in itself (and certainly better than the reverse condition) but still somewhat problematic when one is called upon to re-imagine a distinctly German opera and transport the action to America.

That second paragraph is pretty harsh, enough so to set me wondering what he had written after the first Washington performance of Rheingold. Before Rheingold opened here, the only report from Washington I had read was by Anthony Tommasini from the archives of The New York Times; and I am willing to admit that my own perspective on the relationship between agents and scene may have been influenced by having read this piece. Now I needed to figure out if that "obvious or secondhand" accusation may have had its origins in Page's Rheingold impressions.

Here is what he wrote on March 27, 2006:

The best way to approach Washington National Opera's new production of Richard Wagner's "Das Rheingold," which opened Saturday night at the Kennedy Center, is as a solid, abstract and sometimes very attractive updating of a classic.

In short, forget most of what you might have read about this being the first installment of an "American 'Ring' " -- that is, a staging of Wagner's four-evening "Ring" cycle based on what WNO calls the "rich history of the United States." It isn't, unless you count as pointed political commentary, dressing up the earth goddess Erda like the lady on the Land O' Lakes box, casting African Americans in the roles of the captive Nibelungs, and having the giants Fafner and Fasolt bop and swagger like wild 'n' crazy guy construction workers.

Perhaps the next three operas in the series -- a new "Die Walkure" will enter the repertoire next season, with "Siegfried" and "Gotterdammerung" promised for later -- will deepen the American subtext. For now, just enjoy Francesca Zambello's "Roaring Twenties" staging for its general usefulness, its evocative projections (mist, sun, water and some creepy snakes), its occasional moments of majesty and whimsy.

I am grateful, I suppose, that none of the characters wear antlers on their heads, but I am less happy that the production, for the most part, lacks the luminous beauty of the best traditional stagings (Otto Schenk's hypnotic rendition at the Met foremost among them) and the sort of genuine directorial vision that would make for a radical new understanding of the piece.

This leads me to believe that, like many of us, Page had become too hooked on Schenk's staging to allow for an alternative interpretation and that he had already decided that Zambello was letting scene get in the way in Rheingold, meaning he anticipated more of the same in Walküre. Note that I used the first person plural in that reference to Schenk. I think it is absolutely wonderful that his staging for the Met was captured on DVD, because it is the perfect way for anyone totally new to the Ring to form a good set of first impressions.

Once one has those impressions, though, one should always be open to other interpretations. Until I see Walküre for myself, I plan to take Page's swipe about feeling and thinking as unfounded. Zambello's Rheingold had no trouble dealing with both sides of that coin in equal measure; and I would conjecture that her success had much to do with always keeping her focus on the agents. Furthermore, as the prevailing buzz over this summer's Seattle Ring made clear, the second act of Walküre needs to be anchored in intense personal feeling in order to get beyond Anna Russell's characterization of Wotan as a "crashing bore," who has an argument (actually, yet another one) with his wife. After all, Rheingold is just prologue. The real narrative only gets under way with the events leading up to Siegfried's birth (since the overall narrative arc basically carries us from birth to death); and Walküre provides us with the account of those events.

Flawed Analysis

Since he is based in Jerusalem, it is hard to tell whether Associated Press Writer Matti Friedman is simply naive or just plain ignorant about the American political system and how it works. It is also unclear whether he was part of the press entourage that traveled with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to Washington or whether he wrote this morning's analysis piece strictly on the basis of interviews and reading matter. As a summary of how Netanyahu spent his time in Washington, the piece is at least adequate. The bottom line is that Netanyahu stuck to his guns, demonstrating that he was as capable of strong rhetoric as the Obama administration had been prior to his arrival; and, as might imagined, that rhetoric was at its most successful in the setting of his address to AIPAC.

More interesting, however, was that, in the context of tense relations with the White House, Netanyahu "was received warmly:" (Friedman's words) on Capitol Hill. This deserved analytical interpretation, which Friedman provided as follows:

Netanyahu's effusive reception on Capitol Hill was evidence of the power of Israel's arguments about the choices it makes for self-defense and the sway of its politically active supporters in the United States. The threat that Iran might soon possess a nuclear weapon has made Israel's case stronger and limited the pressure tactics available to a peace-minded American president.

You would think that someone actually living in Jerusalem would have a better understanding of the nature of power and how it is exercised, which is why I am inclined to go with the hypothesis that Friedman really does not understand how the American system works. As we are now well aware, regardless of what legislation or proposal is being debated, in our Legislative branch decisions are not made on the basis of sound arguments. They are made on the basis of the power of influence, usually exercised through a combination of financial support and membership endorsement. While it may be an exaggeration to propose that AIPAC "owns" both houses of Congress, it is not an exaggeration (in the face of documented evidence) that any candidate for Congress who lacks AIPAC support faces the most extreme of uphill challenges. Few organizations lobby with more power than AIPAC; and there is some chance that there may be only one of them, which would be the Pentagon.

This also throws a different light on the second sentence of the above quoted paragraph. We are so obsessed with Iranian moves that would threaten Israel and/or the United States that we willfully ignore evidence of the moves that both Israel and the United States make that are perceived as threatening by the Iranian government. As I recently observed, those Iranians with any memory of past good relations with Israel associate those relations with the Shah, which is hardly the basis for a strong argument to resume such relations; and, since the Shah was, for all intents and purposes, an "American agent" (at least in the lower-case terminology of Kenneth Burke's pentad), the promise of improved relations with the United States is no better.

Where Friedman is probably correct is in his conjecture that both the United States and Israel are counting on the strong rhetoric to blow over in the course of a brief period of time. After that, things will go back to business as usual; and any progress towards peace will be stuck in the same mud. Obama's time on Capitol Hill may have been relatively short, but it should have been long enough for him to get a grip on how the American political system works. Even a solid argument from the Pentagon on how our overt biases towards Israel can jeopardize our security (both domestically and internationally) is unlikely to put a dent in the extent of AIPAC influence to maintain a status quo that, in the course of a longer period of time, can only play out into a lose-lose situation.

Beyond Categories

As I have (too?) frequently observed, I have been heavily influenced by Gerald Edelman's proposition that our capacity for forming perceptual categories from our sensory signals constitutes the bedrock of our very consciousness. What I may not have emphasized enough, however, is that the sorts of categories Edelman has in mind are fluid, rather than static; and, indeed, from Edelman's point of view, memory is best regarded as an ongoing recategorization of both categories themselves and their membership criteria, meaning those criteria are necessarily fluid. This would imply the corollary that any individual who insists on rigidly defined and static category boundaries is suffering from serious cognitive impairment.

I suspect there are a fair number of readers who would appreciate my now following a free association path from the concept of cognitive impairment to the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, but that is a bit the way I reacted to scanning through the major Emmy Award nominations. While, from the point of view of those concerned with little more than selling soap, my television viewing is too insufficient and idiosyncratic to signify, when I compare what I watch against what has been nominated, I cannot help but conclude that the Academy has been making some really arbitrary decisions based on an ineffective system of categories. I refer specifically to the categories of "drama" and "comedy."

Granted, I may be one of the few people writing on a regular basis who appeals to Aristotle's ontology in which "tragedy" and "comedy" are subcategories of "drama" and are distinguished more by the qualities of the agents than by the nature of their acts (as Kenneth Burke would put it). Remote as it may be from our times, Aristotle's approach has some merit to it. Drama is ultimately about imitation, and we bear witness to drama for the sake of being informed by those imitations. If we are entertained as well as informed, so much the better. (Personally, I believe that if I am just informed without any entertainment, I might as well be spending my time on the pleasures of reading a book.)

Now I can understand why the Academy wants to avoid words like "tragedy." Not only does the word fail to sell soap; but it tends to be the case that, when something tragic does show up on television, all commercials get cancelled out of respect for the tragedy. On the other hand the semantics of "comedy," regardless of how Aristotle chose to characterize it, took quite a beating in the twentieth century. Consider how much critical ink was spilled over the question of whether or not Bonnie and Clyde was a comedy. It certainly satisfied Aristotle's principal criterion as "as imitation of baser men;" but people did not like to call a movie where someone gets shot in the face a comedy. By the time we got to The Sopranos, it was pretty hard to use the old words sensibly any more. As Alexander Pushkin had called his play about Boris Godunov a "comedy of the distress of the Muscovite State," it made perfect sense to me to call The Sopranos a comedy of the distress of organized crime in contemporary times. Needless to say, the Academy did not see it that way. As far as they were concerned, it did not make sense to put Tony Soprano in the company of the Seinfeld guys.

So I have no problem when something that may be "technically" comedy gets classified as drama. Drama is the "umbrella category;" so the distinction begins in a state of muddle and descends from there. This year, however, I found myself reacting to seeing one of the most serious and thought-provoking series I had encountered on television get classified as comedy. I refer specifically to the nomination of Toni Collette for Lead Actress in a Comedy on the basis of her work in United States of Tara. I have only written about this program twice on this blog, but on both occasions I did so to emphasize the significance of its narrative. I referred to that narrative as "the provocative suggestion that there are times when living with the problem my be preferable to living with the consequences of the solution." Such a precept is anathema to the entire institution of advertising, which is based on the premise that any product can be pushed off as a "solution." To make matters worse, in Tara's case the "solution" was a pharmacological one; so the real message was that sometimes it is better to go without your medications and just cope with your condition. I can imagine that every pharmaceutical company saw Tara as a dangerous ideological opponent and was probably relieved that it appealed to a rather limited audience.

None of this is to suggest that either United States of Tara or any member of its production team is unworthy of awards. There is no doubt that this has been Showtime's finest hour in the history of their internally-produced material. Indeed, in the history of televised dramatic narratives, I am not sure that I can compare Tara to anything other than Paddy Chayefsky's "Marty" (which I have done) when it comes to significant achievements. However, like "Marty" Tara was a paradigm shift away from the normative practices of television production (just as Thomas Kuhn's original concept of a paradigm shift involved a departure from what was accepted as "normal science"); and the shift was great enough that those determined to keep those normative practices in place have no idea what to do with it. For my part I could not care less what awards it does or does not win. All that matters to me is whether or not the suits at Showtime give it a crack at a second season.

Missing the Opera

In the terminology of Kenneth Burke, the underlying story of a narrative is basically a matter of motivated actions. More specifically, in the framework of Burke's pentad, acts are performed by agents, who have purposes. Every act takes place in some scene, and its performance may rely upon the instrumental assistance of agencies. However, scenes and agencies tend to supplement the basic questions of who does what and why.

One of the greatest hazards in revisionist productions, particularly when a war-horse grand opera is concerned, is that the secondary overwhelms the primary to a point where the primary becomes at best insignificant and at worst ludicrous. This is precisely the problem with Marta Domingo's staging of Giuseppe Verdi's La Traviata for the Los Angeles Opera, currently being performed by the San Francisco Opera. As she explained in a one-page "note" in the program book, she wanted to transplant the tragic tale of Violetta Valéry from the "world of the demimondaines" of late nineteenth-century Paris to the "world of the flappers" during the Roaring Twenties of the United States. This may make for good eye candy, but it tended to undermine the characterizations of the key agents (Violetta herself, her would-be-poet lover Alfredo Germont, and his bourgeois father Giorgio) and their underlying sense of purpose. That undermining may explain why, in reviewing this production for the San Francisco Chronicle, Joshua Kosman saw it as a story about Giorgio in which Violetta played a supplementary role. By subordinating acts, agents, and purposes to matters of scene, Domingo offered a topsy-turvy discourse for the story.

The success of such a radical approach involves a "social contract" under which the audience is willing to accept the terms of the director. Because Dwayne Croft put so much of his own sense of character into his performance of Giorgio (as both actor and singer), we in the audience certainly had reasons to accept this contract. On the other hand the two party scenes, where the eye candy was at its richest, kept bumping over potholes of inconsistencies with the libretto, some of which were deftly (or not) paved over with rewordings in the projected titles. Ultimately, the most successful scene was the final act, in which (with the exception of a choreographic interruption that was as inept as it was inane) everything was stripped away other than the bed on which Violetta would expire. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that this was the act in which Anna Netrebko's Violetta and Charles Castronovo's Alfredo rose to the same vocal heights that Croft had established the first time he set foot on the stage. Working together (and with conductor Donald Runnicles), the three of them made magic out of music that can too easily fall into cliché; but why did we having to slog through so much muddle before finally encountering the operatic experience that made it all worth while?

This may come down to support for the argument that, in a time of economic austerity, it is necessary to go back to the basics. That means concentrating on the agents (as both actors and singers) and that "sense of purpose" without which the acts lose their meaning. The best way to avoid missing the opera altogether is to keep the primary in its primary position.

What a Difference a Decade Makes

Ten years separate the two adjacent CDs in the EMI box of the complete recordings that cellist Mstislav Rostropovich made with them (which, incidentally, happen to include the recordings of his performances in the Soviet Union that he brought with him when he emigrated). CD5 includes the 1969 recording of the A minor double concerto by Johannes Brahms (Opus 102), with David Oistrakh on violin and George Szell conducting the Cleveland Orchestra; and CD6 offers the same concerto recorded in 1979 at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, with Bernard Haitink conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra and Itzhak Perlman on violin. There is a tendency to look back on Szell as austere, bordering on the sterile, providing readings known more for clinical accuracy than for more subjective elements of expression. However, it is hard to imagine either Oistrakh or Rostropovich being "merely clinical." Consequently, this is an instance in which the two soloists take the lead; and Szell dutifully escorts the orchestra in the directions they set. This is in sharp contrast to the later recording, on which it seems as if Perlman is the one so concerned with "accuracy" that there is almost a lassitude to his reading; so all the energy that drives this composition forward resides in the chemistry between Haitink and Rostropovich. Fortunately, that chemistry is very effective; but its effectiveness casts a less than complimentary light on Perlman's skills as a soloist. I have to say, however, that, on the basis of the few "live" performances I have heard by Perlman, I have been struck by how few opportunities I have had to really appreciate those skills. To the contrary, there have been too many occasions when he sounded as if his mind was already on his next engagement, if not on catching the plane that would take him to that engagement.

Thus, what is missing from the 1979 recording is that sense of performance in the immediacy of the moment. (If I may shamelessly appropriate from Bhagavan Das, born Kermit Michael Riggs, I would call this the "be here now" approach to performance.) One reason why that sense may be more pronounced in the 1969 recording is that it is, in many respects, a "document of a conversation" taking place between Oistrakh and Rostropovich, where Szell and his orchestra are basically providing what Kenneth Burke would call the "scene" of that conversation. There is a similar sense of conversation in the recording made by Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky in 1960 with Alfred Wallenstein conducting the "pickup" RCA Victor Symphony Orchestra. In both cases the conversation is facilitated by the soloists sharing a broad cultural context in which Brahms' "text" enables them to talk about many things, while it may very well have been the case that Perlman and Rostropovich just did not have that much to say to each other.

While both Rostropovich recordings were probably made under "studio" conditions, they were just as probably both post hoc documents of concert performances. The 1969 recording was made in Cleveland's Severance Hall at a time when Rostropovich was still a Soviet citizen. It is hard to imagine the Soviet government to allow both him and Oistrakh to travel to the United States solely for the purpose of making a recording. The presence of these two Russians must have made for a major "event concert" in Cleveland, possibly one of those gala events aimed more at generous patrons than at music lovers. Similarly, by 1979 even well-endowed institutions like the Concertgebouw had to worry about fund-raising; so this later recording may well also be a document of an "all-star event." Nevertheless, given the circumstances of the concerts, we have some grounds for assuming that both recording sessions were approached in the spirit of recreating the actual concert experience that had preceded those sessions; and EMI has an excellent track record when it comes to capturing that kind of spirit. Thus, if my argument is based more on the circumstances of a concert performance rather than those of a recording, it is because I am willing to acknowledge a level of fidelity to those performances in EMI recording operations. That being the case, I would say that Rostropovich's memory has been better served by the earlier of these two recordings.

Oliver Sacks and the Illusions of Scientific Method

I think I first became aware of Oliver Sacks when I read his essay "The Twins" (which would later be included in the collection The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales) in the February 28, 1985 issue of The New York Review. I found it absolutely riveting, in no small part because the style of writing was such a departure from the "scientific" (or, for that matter, "clinical") writing that I usually encountered in either the professional or popular press. However, it took at least a decade for me to cotton on to why his prose was as compelling as it was; and, having formed my hypotheses on this matter, I discovered, upon reviewing the Preface to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, that they are confirmed by his own observations, but in a terminology different from my own. Since I have invoked my own terminology in several posts on this blog, I figured I would take the opportunity to discuss the extent to which I read Sacks' text as a confirmation of my own ideas.

The common theme that runs through my observations might be called an awakening (since Sacks used that for one of his titles) from a very long nightmare of positivism. The fact that I should have thought of positivism as a nightmare at all was probably a result of a rebellious spirit that emerged when I was doing my doctoral research in computer music, but I have social theorist Anthony Giddens to thank for helping me to take those unkempt rebellious thoughts and put them into a bit of order. Closely aligned with positivism is the "gospel" of scientific method; so, having been more than adequately prepared by my readings of Giddens, I was delighted to discover that the literary theorist Kenneth Burke had devoted much of his professional work to develop a theory of "dramatistic" thinking, which would serve as an opposition to "scientistic" thinking. Burke was enough of a Hegelian to recognize that this was an opposition that would not benefit from either side dominating over the other; but his own career was more than sufficiently filled with the study of "dramatism." So he left it for others to resolve the opposition through synthesis.

One can either try to theorize about such a synthesis or jump in and try to achieve it. In my few brief exchanges with Sacks, the topic of Burke and his theory never arose. I would not be surprised to learn that Sacks is totally unfamiliar with the man and his writings. Nevertheless, were he still alive, I suspect that Burke would quickly see the dramatistic element in Sacks' writings and probably discuss it as pointedly and eloquently as he would any literary source. Sacks, himself, actually acknowledges this synthetic aspect of his work when he writes about

a certain doubleness in me: that I feel myself a naturalist and a physician both; and that I am equally interested in diseases and people; perhaps, too, that I am equally, if inadequately, a theorist and dramatist [eureka!], am equally drawn to the scientific and the romantic, and continually see both in the human condition, not least in that quintessential human condition of sickness—animals get diseases, but only man falls radically into sickness.

What, then, is the nature of Sacks' particular approach to dramatism? To some extent it is a synthetic approach to a matter of form, the idea (which, as Sacks observes, goes all the way back to Hippocrates) that a case history is as much a narrative as a scientific account. From a scientistic point of view, the most important element in the documentation of a case is description; but in a case history (by the very virtue of its name) that description is achieved through historiography. This then brings us to the most important element of Sacks' literary style, which is that his historiography is achieved through a subject-based narrative. A case history is ultimately the history of the individual enduring sickness, as Sacks puts it, "the experience of the person, as he faces, and struggles to survive, his disease." Thus, the case history, as Sacks has chosen to write it, probably comes as close to a synthesis of "scientism" and "dramatism" as we are likely to get.

Sacks then threw yet another radical declaration at me in his Preface:

The patient's essential being is very relevant in the higher reaches of neurology, and in psychology; for here the patient's personhood is essentially involved, and the study of disease and of identity cannot be disjoined.

This immediately reminded my of my favorite dialogue by Plato, "Theaetetus," which tries to define the concept of knowledge, fails, but still leaves us recognizing that knowledge is hard to define because it is so tightly coupled to the concepts of description, being, and memory. The path to knowledge is a path that leads through description, but only because it leads through fundamental questions of being. Indeed, if one wanted to be really dramatistic, one could accord the status of "personhood" (or, as Burke would probably put it better, agency) to the disease as well as the patient, which would mean that the case history embodies that concept of αγών fundamental to Greek drama. From this point of view, one might then view Gerald Edelman's pioneering research in how antibodies work as being based on further endowing those antibodies with agency, making for αγών between both patient and disease and disease and antibody. In the essays that I have read, Sacks never goes quite that far over the dramatistic line; but I know from his writings that he has a high opinion of Edelman's theories about consciousness. Since those theories are, in many ways, an extrapolation of his antibody theories, my guess is that Sacks would see the dramatistic element of Edelman's model were it called to his attention (unless he has already done so).

I have one final observation about Sacks methodology, and this one reflects on my recent citation of Daniel Mendelson. To a great extent Sacks believes that, if you want to understand how the body works, then you need to observe it in circumstances where it doesn't work. You learn little from the healthy state beyond some good hypotheses about normative conditions and behaviors; and that is not, as they say, "where the action is." Healthy bodies, like Mendelson's "good people" do not "make good subjects for operas" (or any other dramatic form). To go back to the Greeks, it is through the study of αγών that we get to the heart of what Sacks calls the patient's "essential being;" so, while it would be a flattering exaggeration to call Sacks' case histories Homeric, there is at least a modest spirit of the Homeric bards about them.

This all leads back to my personal "agonizing" (so to speak) over the sorry state of liberal education. We still seem obsessed with specializing as quickly as possible, in order to jump in and start doing "useful things." We thus see the study of anything as unscientistic as literature as a waste of time that will not equip us with additional instruments for our toolkit. Sacks provides us with specific examples that illustrate the fallacy of this reasoning. Given how long he has been writing these examples, one would think that our educational institutions would wake up and smell the coffee; but their reasoning along these lines remains deep in slumber. As Goya once told us, that kind of slumber produces monsters!

Away from the "Grand" Opera House

It is often forgotten that the first performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Zauberflöte took place in the suburbs of Vienna (the Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden). Sometimes the most interesting opera performances are found outside of "established" settings like the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco. I was aware of this when I was still living in Palo Alto and I saw news that Carlisle Floyd's operatic adaptation of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men was going to be performed by Opera San Jose. Not only was this an opportunity for me to make up for having failed to get a ticket the last time New York City Opera had presented this work, but also I learned that Floyd himself would be on hand to supervise the production. This remains the only production I have seen of this impressive work, and it was far more than highly satisfying.

In San Francisco one does not have to leave the city limits for a similar "suburban" experience "beyond the pale" of "grand" opera. I have already written about how one may have such experiences through the student work at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, not only in the Conservatory building itself but also in the better equipped Cowell Theater at the northern tip of the peninsula (which affords some of the best views of both San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge, fog permitting, of course). Cowell Theater is now also the home of the San Francisco Lyric Opera, which, according to the statement by its Board of Directors, "provides young artists with a unique opportunity to sing classical repertoire in the original language, thus broaden their repertoire and enhance their musical experience." In other words, to continue my Jane Austen rip-off, the "truth universally acknowledged" is that any aspiring vocalist "must be in want of" any performance opportunity, rather than just those for recitals; and the corollary to this "truth" is that any of these performance opportunities can then serve the rest of us as opportunities to hone further our listening skills.

The latest Lyric Opera production is a perfect example of such an opportunity from many points of view. Through June 7 they will be giving performances of The Turn of the Screw, the opera composed by Benjamin Britten to a libretto by Myfanwy Piper based on the novella by Henry James. However, beyond the utilitarian motives behind the Lyric Opera, there is an extremely important reason to venture out of the Civic Center in search of this production. The Turn of the Screw is the quintessential chamber opera: every "voice," instrumental, as well as vocal, is a solo one. The entire orchestra consists of one first violin, one second violin, one viola, one cello, one bass, one performer of flutes of several sizes, one performer of clarinets of different sizes, an oboe player (I did not catch whether Britten used an English horn), one bassoon, one horn, one harp, a single performer for both timpani and a percussion battery, and a keyboardist for piano and celesta. The delicate weaving of this transparent fabric of sonority with the six singing voices would be overwhelmed by the vast space of the War Memorial Opera House (as it would in the Metropolitan Opera House). It needs a more intimate scale in order to "breathe" properly; and the Cowell Theater provides that scale. (As I recall, my first exposure to this opera was in the Auditorium at Hunter College in Manhattan.)

Doing justice to the original acoustical conception is equally important to the listeners. Like many of Britten's works, this offers a listening experience that, on the surface, provides excellent support to the narrative thread while, beneath that surface, teems with structural subtlety and sophistication, beginning with the architecture of the entire score as a theme with fifteen variations. This is the sort of music that is inviting at the first listening and continues to offer new things to hear with each subsequent experience; and the level of detail is such that, while one may prepare through a recording, there is no substitute for "live" performance.

Then, of course, there is that narrative thread. Nothing that Henry James ever wrote can be taken strictly on the basis of surface structure, and both Britten and Piper plied their respective arts to take the resulting opera beneath that surface. This begins with honoring James' decision to introduce the narrative with a prologue, which introduces the narrative as having been documented in a manuscript "discovered in a locked drawer," written "in old, faded ink, and in the most beautiful hand. … A woman's." James structured his prologue as a dialog between two men, discussing a "strange tale" that had been told two nights earlier "round the fire;" and there is at least the suggestion that one of those men might be one of the characters in the narrative that is then related. Britten and Piper stripped away most of this detail and reconceived the prologue as a solo for tenor; and that tenor (sung originally by Peter Pears, of course) then appears in the narrative itself (but not in the same connection that James' prologue suggests).

At this point one cannot go into how the opera provides a perspective on the novella without reviewing the basic plot line. The Wikipedia plot summary is as good as any:

An unnamed narrator listens to a male friend reading a manuscript written by a former governess whom the latter claims to have known and who is now dead. The manuscript tells the story of how the young governess is hired by a man who has found himself responsible for his niece and nephew after the death of their parents. He lives in London and has no interest whatsoever in the children. The boy is at a boarding school whilst his sister, Flora, is living at the country home in Essex where she is cared for by the housekeeper, Mrs. Grose. He gives the governess full charge of the children and makes it clear he never wants to hear from her again regarding them. The governess travels to her new employer's house and begins her duties. Shortly thereafter, the boy, Miles, turns up after being expelled from his school. The governess infers that the headmaster feels that Miles is a threat to the other boys.

The governess begins to see and hear strange things. She learns that her predecessor, a Miss Jessel, and her lover Peter Quint (another former servant of the household), a clever but abusive man, died under curious circumstances. Gradually, she becomes convinced that the pair are somehow using the children to continue their relationship from beyond the grave. The governess takes action against the perceived threat, eventually culminating in Miles' apparent death.

I like this summary because it honors much of James' allusions to what may have been, rather than flat-out accounts of "known events." Ghosts figure in several of James' plots, and he tends to use them to exploit an ambiguity. In the terminology of Kenneth Burke's pentad of "the five key terms of dramatism," the ambiguity involves whether the ghosts are "agents" (which means they are characters performing motivated acts) or "agencies" ("instruments" used by other "real" characters in performing their motivated acts). Ultimately, this ambiguity has to be resolved by the stage director, since the first scene of the second act is a duet for Jessel and Quint. I have seen productions in which these two characters are alone on stage; but Heather Carolo, who conceived and executed the staging for Lyric Opera, had them sing in front of a bed in which the governess was suffering a restless slumber. In the former production the ghosts were presented as agents, but last night Carolo entertained the possibility that they were agencies of the governess.

That possibility was reinforced by the very first scene of the first act (after the Prologue), a solo for the governess set in the carriage she is riding from London to Essex. At the end of the scene, Carolo had the governess fall asleep; and the next scene shows us meeting Mrs. Grose and the children. Then, in the final scene of the opera, after Miles has (apparently) died, while the governess buries her head in sorrow, he gets up and leaves the stage. This puzzled me until I realized that Carolo decided to stage Britten's coda as a "silent replay" of the governess entering the country house for the first time. Thus, as long as we are talking about "apparent" situations, everything that occurs after the first scene of the first act may very well be the dream into which the governess slips while riding in her carriage, reflecting on her anxieties about the job she is about to begin. This would mean that the governess is the only agent in the plot structure; and all the other characters, as they appear to us in the rest of the opera, are the agencies of the dream world that is unfolding during her carriage ride.

This also provides an interesting take on Britten's choice of variations-of-a-theme structure. There is certainly a static quality to this structure, since it is basically a matter of repetitions, each of which is elaborated in a different way. Whether or not those repetitions "progress" is entirely in the hands of the composer (and, indeed, those compositions whose variations do not necessarily reflect any such "progress" tend to be the hardest to memorize). If everything that happens in the opera after the very first scene occurs in the "timeless dream world," then the variations form could be the most suitable structure for that sense of timelessness. I have no idea if such timelessness was intentional on Britten's part, but it provides a good way to approach Carolo's strategy as stage director.

An opera that asks this much of its audience, both as listeners and as witnesses to the unfolding narrative, had better be very well executed if the audience is to receive it accordingly. Those "young artists" on the stage certainly had the talent to deliver the goods. Tenor Trey Costerisan, who sang both Prologue and Quint, probably had the biggest shoes to fill, since just about anyone familiar with Britten's music is also familiar with recordings of Pears singing that music. Costerisan's voice had the clean clarity that Pears could deliver so well, but he also endowed his stage presence with his own personality without feeling a need to draw on previous performances. As the governess, Anja Strauss had no trouble with the vocal hoops that Britten provided and seemed to buy into Carolo's approach to the narrative without any difficulty. Also, the voices of the two children, Brooks Fisher and Madelaine Matej, were clear and solid, but not particularly strong (no surprise), which provided further justification for the use of a space on "chamber music" scale that did not put undue demands on their voices.

I suppose the main point of this post has been to demonstrate that there are as many ways to think about this opera as there are to think about the James text on which it was based. From that point of view, my greatest regret is that the work does not get performed enough. Of course most opera lovers would probably agree that no opera gets performed enough, even in cities that have longer opera seasons. However, by my calculations, the last time I saw this opera prior to last night was on a Public Television broadcast about ten years ago; and I would really not like to wait another ten years before my next opportunity!

The Complexity of that "Dimension of Domination"

Those who follow the comments submitted to this blog may have noticed that some interesting controversy has emerged surrounding the Truthdig article by Wellford Wilms that I used as a point of departure for my "Cautionary Tale about 'The Dimension of Domination'" post. At the heart of the controversy were extended Truthdig comments by two "insiders" at Baldwin Park High School, the "scene" (in the terminology of Kenneth Burke's dramatistic framework) of Wilms article. Those comments were highly emotional, but they also revealed substantive observations that cannot be ignored. The most recent of these comments apologized that the truth behind Wilms account was not as "theatrical" as his depiction (or, I suppose, my own efforts, which invoked the likes of David Mamet).

Reflecting on this new side of the story, however, I realized that there is a "theatrical" element to this whole affair; but it comes not from Mamet but from David Simon. More specifically it comes from the fourth season of The Wire in the plot line that involved a team of social scientists getting a grant to run an experiment at an inner city Baltimore public school by focusing on those kids who were most socially maladjusted. Details aside, Simon's punch line was that the social scientists got to deliver a paper at their professional meeting and nothing changed in the Baltimore classrooms (thus reinforcing the overall theme of The Wire about the deterioration of our most fundamental social institutions).

I do not feel that these "new data points" impact my original thesis: This is still a cautionary tale about "the triumph of domination of signification." However, as I observed in my own comment to my original post, it is also a cautionary tale about what Michel Foucault has called "the authority of the author." To invoke the Burke framework again, the "teller of the tale" is also an agent in the tale, which means that he is not the detached objective analytic observer he makes himself out to be. That observer would have us believe that all the elements of domination can be traced back to Los Angeles politics. What is omitted are the elements of domination that involve academic projects always in desperate need of funding.

My own "tragic flaw" is that I did not follow the hyperlink on Wilms' name (which I reproduced from the Truthdig site in this post as well as the original one) before writing anything about his analysis. The profile at the other end of the link is up front about his UCLA "insider" connection, which explains why his narrative overlooks that element of the plot concerned with those agencies that fund the abstract world of academics and encourage them to design and implement experiments in real-world classrooms. Simon's point was that the academics never have any stake in such projects other than their publication records. My wife was involved in a summer project (which involved bringing students into a professional research laboratory, rather than going into a classroom); and since then she has been very skeptical about allowing "academic theorists" into her classroom! From my point of view, I feel more than a little chastened for my failure to follow my own caveat lector precept!

The Sound of a Sextet

I sometimes feel at a disadvantage for not being able to play any instrument in the string family. (No, I do not count the washtub bass that I played during my brief engagement with a bluegrass group.) There is something about the rich diversity of sound one can evoke from just one of these instruments that compounds in such remarkable ways as the ensemble grows. One could hear this in the concert at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music that featured three members of the violin faculty, and one heard it last night in the Chamber Music Masters concert at the Conservatory that featured cellist Joel Krosnick. The first of these concerts progressed from duos to a trio; the second culminated in a sextet.

I have to confess that I am a real sucker for the sound of a string sextet with its equal pairings of violins, violas, and cellos. I think I got "hooked" many years ago, when Jaime Laredo organized a concert at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan, which consisted entirely of the two Brahms sextets, each one played on either side of the intermission. I have a similar weakness when Tchaikovsky's "Souvenir de Florence" is played in its intended sextet form. However, the ultimate in that sextet sound has to be Arnold Schoenberg's "Verklärte Nacht." When I wrote about the performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 515 string quintet that took place during Robert Mann's visit to the Conservatory, I described listening to it as being "a bit like eavesdropping on a very intimate and highly amicable social conversation." In "Verklärte Nacht" every instrument also has the personality of a unique voice, but the effect is more one of drama than of social conversation. Nevertheless, Schoenberg's approach to drama is rather unique; and this is what makes the listening experience so interesting.

One way to explain this would be through the terminology of Kenneth Burke, which seems appropriate, since the sextet is based on a highly narrative poem (of the same name) by Richard Dehmel. At its highest level of abstraction, the poem is a dialog between two agents: A woman confesses, and a man forgives. (This is not to reductively oversimplify the poem but, from a narratological point of view, to sort out the story from the discourse.) However, Schoenberg was not interested in the traditional approach of program music to illustrate the core story; and, as a result, he shifted his attention to the scene in which the story takes place. This is the "night" of the title, which is the focus of Dehmel's first stanza, briefly appears in the third stanza (which stands between the woman's confession and the man's reply), and serve to wrap up the final line, which characterizes the "transfiguration." In some ways the listener might to better to put aside the poem (which Schoenberg himself had suggested) and turn (which he had not suggested) instead to some of his landscape paintings (which I had the good fortune to see at the Galerie St. Etienne in Manhattan late in 1984. These canvasses are less interested in objects than in the play of color and light; and Schoenberg's approach to Dehmel's night and the critical role played by the moon (which may or may not anticipate the "moon views" of Pierrot Lunaire). From this point of view, the individuality of the instrumental voices almost constitutes an embodiment of brushwork in auditory form.

Now all this may be a ploy on my part. "Verklärte Nacht" is a rather long piece of uninterrupted music; and, while it may have five large sections corresponding to Dehmel's five stanzas, I still have trouble finding my way around its expanse of time. (This is probably why I leap at any opportunity to hear a concert performance. I can negotiate Gustav Mahler's longest symphony movements, but my ears still need more exposure to "Verklärte Nacht!") In this respect the Conservatory performers (Ian Swenson and student Daniel Jang on violin, Paul Hersh and student Alexa Beattie on viola, and Joel Krosnick and Jennifer Culp on cello) honored the seamlessness of Schoenberg's texture, consistent with his avoidance of sharp object boundaries in his landscape paintings. More importantly, though, they were sensitive to all the gradations of color in the sonorities, which is why I feel that the metaphor of brushwork contributes to the listening experience.

This sextet was sharply contrasted by the worked which preceded it just before the intermission, the Opus 7 duo for violin and cello by Hanns Eisler. Eisler studied with Schoenberg but is probably better known for his collaborations with Bertolt Brecht. This duo (which paired Krosnick with violinist Axel Strauss) had a much sharper sense of "objects," cast in rather traditional forms but rendered with an extremely free chromaticism.

This Eisler-Schoenberg axis was complemented by the opening of the concert, which was the Opus 1, Number 1 piano trio of Ludwig van Beethoven. It is interesting to compare the Opus 1 trios with the Opus 2 sonatas that opened András Schiff's performance of the complete cycle of piano sonatas last October. They both begin with an energetic ascending arpeggio line, they are both rich in wit, and they both involve what, in writing about the Schiff recital, I called "the rhetorical impact of the rest." Thus, once again the case was made that, even in his Opus 1, Beethoven was exploring how to stray from the beaten path, setting examples that would later be followed by Schoenberg and Eisler. For this performance Strauss and Krosnick were accompanied by piano student Kevin Korth; and as a group they knew exactly how to honor both the impact of the silences and the wit that makes the listening such a treat.

All this set me to thinking back to Krosnick's comments on Tuesday evening about not performing the notes too "factually." Each of these three compositions had much to communicate to the listener; but none of them communicated through "factual" means. To go back to the narratological framework, everything was in the discourse; and the "story" was incidental. Once this was accepted, it was easy to let the music speak for itself.

In Praise of JOHN's Gospel

Bill Carter has a piece in today's New York Times about the "stumbling" of HBO:

Has HBO, the pay-television channel stocked with so many outstanding shows that it declared itself in a category all its own — as in “It’s not TV, it’s HBO” — finally tumbled from its pedestal of prestige?

While the channel rejects that notion as both inaccurate and unfair, some of its long-suffering competitors are only too eager to advance that message. As evidence they point to the final exit from center stage of HBO’s greatest performer, “The Sopranos,” and the subsequent quick demise of the show that inherited its spot on the schedule, the quirky surfer tale “John From Cincinnati.”

Lest readers think that my review of Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of William Shakespeare's As You Like It was intended as another nail in Carter's coffin, I feel a need to say a few words in praise of John From Cincinnati.

First of all, I do not follow the media "buzz" when it comes to choosing my own entertainment. My wife and I watch what we want to watch; and, when it involves a series, we have periodic "sanity checks" over whether we really want to continue. Thus, I had no idea how John was playing to audiences in general. However, I was certainly not surprised that it "didn't resonate," in the words of Michael Lombardo, the president of the HBO Programming Group. I suppose I was also not surprised that, at least according to Lombardo, the series received "poor critical response." The truth is that it was not particularly easy to write a newspaper column on what that series was about or to classify it according to some familiar ontology of genres. Since I am currently immersing myself in the life and work of Lennie Tristano, I know that defying genre categories can be the kiss of death among both critics and the audiences who read them. So I feel some need to set down a few words about why I was as passionately supportive of this series as I was passionately antipathetic towards Branagh's latest attack on Shakespeare.

Most importantly, this series was, by no means, a "quirky surfer tale," although I am sure that Carter was far from the only one who described it that way. In Kenneth Burke's terminology surf culture, particularly that part of the culture centered in Imperial Beach (a key choice because of its proximity to the Mexican border), certainly establishes the scene but is relatively secondary with respect to the acts that constitute the narrative. This was best appreciated by a San Francisco Chronicle critic's reference to magical realism, which, in many ways, is a license to stretch logic to the breaking point, if not beyond; and one way of viewing magical realism is as a literary perspective on theology, the primary scene where it is acceptable to logic to be trumped (in the case of theology, by acts of faith and their consequences). From this point of view, just as Seymour Chatman had analyzed Mon Oncle d'Amerique as argumentation cast in the framework of narrative, John From Cincinnati is, at its core, a theological exposition rendered through narrative, instead of the more systematic structures of paragraphs that state and support a thesis. Furthermore, it is a theology of self-reflection. If prayer is the ultimate reflective act through which we try to confront who we are and what role we play in the complexity of the cosmos, then just about every character in this series engages in such acts; and, whether or not there were any thoughts of continuing the series (which seem to have been dispatched by now), all of those characters come to a closure that gave the final episode a satisfying sense of conclusion, however many petty questions of logic were still littering the narrative landscape.

Yes, I can understand why an exercise like this would not have a strong following. On the other hand I finally got around to watching Absolute Wilson yesterday, and I never expected that Robert Wilson would have a strong following. Indeed, Wilson's greatest supporters and enthusiasts remain outside the United States; so it would not surprise me if John From Cincinnati garners similar support in both Europe and Asia. My first exposure to Wilson was when I saw King of Spain over 35 years ago, and I had absolutely no idea what to make of it. John From Cincinnati left me just as stunned; but this time around I had more interpretive skills in my knapsack and enough eagerness to engage them that I could make something out of it all!

The Google Paradigm and its Discontents

A recent confused of calcutta discussion about search, in which phrases like "search fatigue" and "Google rage" emerged, made me realize that, by virtue (?) of an interface that is so deceptively simple and brutally efficient, we have become hopelessly locked into a "Google paradigm" for thinking about search. This was driven home to me by a comment that Lou Paglia contributed to the discussion. Here is his key paragraph:

The fundamental question for search to answer is to either through interface or algorithmically solve the user’s problem or task. It sounds simple but obviously not. And the solution sounds obvious but clearly not simple. There is the concept of “role-based search” that is emerging as well where by the engine itself ‘knowing’ the role of the user, it can can have a baseline of the type of data and information is important, and the types of questions/answers such a user in that role asks.

I would like to consider this point from my own perspective:

I think that what I (actually Habermas) call an “action situation” is a useful generalization of “the user’s problem or task.” The reason that simplicity eludes us is that this is such a broad category that we have to unpack it ontologically (and probably epistemologically, as well). I took a first crack at the ontology last month during the confused of calcutta discussion of the opensourcing of processes. However, the concept of “role-based search” taps into an epistemological issue that derives from this ontology and needs a lot of further consideration. As I suggested in the opensourcing discussion, we cannot talk about processes in any productive way unless we are as “epistemologically comfortable” with verbs and verb phrases as we are with nouns and noun phrases. Database technology has cultivated a mind-set that is so restricted to nouns and noun phrases (the foundations of all schemata and query languages) that we have pretty much deluded ourselves into believing that verbs and verb phrases are unnecessary. However, if we are going to talk about processes, we have to shatter that delusion, because processes are epistemologically verb-based; and, when Lou introduced the concept of role, he emphasized that search is fundamentally a process! Now there is obviously a lot more to the epistemology of processes than roles. Much of my own research in this area has focused on Kenneth Burke, who developed a terminological framework for motivated action; but I believe that framework can be generalized to any verb-based epistemology, such as an epistemology of processes.

I also think that the comment by Washington DC SEO on the virtue of librarians taps into an important distinction that is often overlooked. A librarian is a service professional, whose “role” is neither defined nor evaluated according to the criteria of a production economy. While search engines are definitely products and need to be evaluated as such, the support of search is, strictly speaking, a service. It is more likely that such a service will be rendered by people with particularly skills for using particular tools, rather than by making those tools available to anyone who needs the service. This latter alternative is basically the crux of the "Google paradigm." Like all paradigms it has confined us to a box, and it is about time that we start thinking outside that box!

Why Story Needs Discourse

Strictly speaking, that Burke pentad, to which I referred earlier today, focuses on only have of the domain of narrative analysis: the description of the events being recounted. In the terminology of Seymour Chatman, from whom I acquired my working knowledge of narrative theory, this half is called the story; and its complementary half is called the discourse. If the story is concerned with those elements that need to be accounted for, the discourse is concerned with how those accounts are rendered, such as the rhetorical devices that guide the reader of the text through the accounts. The significance of discourse is illustrated in almost painful clarity in a report of a recent sociological study about racism that is now available, as summarized by the author, at the Nieman Watchdog Web site. Here is the critical text of the summary:

In this experiment, I hired young men to pose as job applicants, assigning them resumes with equal levels of education and experience, and sending them to apply for real entry-level job openings all over Milwaukee. There were two teams, one white and one black. The two members of each team also alternated presenting information about a fictitious criminal record (a drug felony), which they “’fessed up to” on the application form. During six months of fieldwork, the two teams audited 350 employers, applying for a wide range of entry level jobs such as waiters, sales assistants, laborers, warehouse workers, couriers, and customer service representatives. The results of these studies were startling. Among those with no criminal record, white applicants were more than twice as likely to receive a callback relative to equally qualified black applicants. Even more troubling, whites with a felony conviction fared just as well, if not better, than a black applicant with a clean background. Racial disparities have been documented in many contexts, but here, comparing the two job applicants side by side, we are confronted with a troubling reality: Being black in America today is just about the same as having a felony conviction in terms of one’s chances of finding a job.

This is about as good an illustration as we can hope for of the critical role that discourse can play, regardless of the strength of the "underlying facts" of the story. The greatest virtue of this account is the way in which it presents its key result in a manner that is as vivid as it is meaningful. The implication that the "level of the playing field" for a black with a clean record is the same as that for a white with a felony conviction cannot fail to grab the attention of the reader! It would be nice to believe that the strength of that formulation will be enough to incite action to change this imbalance, but I am not holding my breath!