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How David Bowie Came Out As Gay (And What He Meant By It)

Simon Reynolds | Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy, from the Seventies to the Twenty-first Century | Dey Street Books| October 2016 | 19 minutes (5,289 words)

 

Below is an excerpt from Shock and Awe, by Simon Reynolds.

* * *

People like Lou and I are probably predicting the end of an era … I mean that catastrophically.
Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost.

On Sunday afternoon, 16 July 1972, David Bowie held a tea-time press conference at the Dorchester, a deluxe five-star hotel on London’s Park Lane. Mostly for the benefit of American journalists flown in to watch him and his new backing band, The Spiders from Mars, in action, the event was also a chance to show off Bowie’s new ‘protégés’, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed. They had – separately – made their UK live debuts on the two preceding nights, at the exact same venue, King’s Cross Cinema.

Glammed up in maroon-polished nails and rock-star shades, Reed sashayed across the second-floor suite and kissed Bowie full on the mouth. Sitting in the corner, Iggy also displayed a recent glitter makeover, with silver-dyed hair, eye make-up and T. Rex T- shirt. Reed, Iggy and Bowie would later pose for the only known photograph of the threesome together, Bowie looking resplendent in a flared-cuff Peter Pan tunic made from a crinkly, light-catching fabric. That was just one of three outfits he wore that afternoon – surely the first time in history a rock’n’roll press conference involved costume changes.

During a wide-ranging and somewhat grandiloquent audience with the assembled journalists, Bowie declared: ‘People like Lou and I are probably predicting the end of an era … I mean that catastrophically. Any society that allows people like Lou and me to become rampant is pretty well lost. We’re both pretty mixed-up, paranoid people, absolute walking messes. If we’re the spearhead of anything, we’re not necessarily the spearhead of anything good.’ What a strange thing to announce – that you’re the herald of Western civilisation’s terminal decline, the decadent symptom that precedes a collapse into barbarism or perhaps a fascist dictatorship. But would an ‘absolute walking mess’ really be capable of such a crisply articulated mission statement? There’s a curious unreality to Bowie’s claims, especially made in such swanky surroundings. Yet the reporters nodded and scribbled them down in their notepads. Suddenly Bowie seemed to have the power to make people take his make-believe seriously … to make them believe it too. Something that in the previous eight strenuous years of striving he’d never managed before, apart from a smatter of fanatical supporters within the UK entertainment industry.

Some eighteen months before the Dorchester summit, the singer had looked washed-up. Deserted by his primary collaborators Tony Visconti and Mick Ronson, he put out the career-nadir single ‘Holy Holy’. (Can you hum it? Did you even know it existed?)

Yet a little over a year later, Bowie had everybody’s ears, everyone’s eyes. His fortunes had transformed absolutely: if not the biggest star in Britain, he was the buzziest, the focus of serious analysis in a way that far better-selling contemporaries like Marc Bolan and Slade never achieved. No longer a loser, he had somehow become the Midas man, a pop miracle-worker resurrecting the stalled careers of his heroes, from long-standing admirations like Lou Reed to recent infatuations like Iggy Pop and Mott the Hoople. Sprinkling them with his stardust, Bowie even got them to change their appearance in his image. There was talk of movies and stage musicals, the sort of diversification that’s tediously commonplace in today’s pop business, but back then was unusual and exciting.

‘People look to me to see what the spirit of the Seventies is,’ Bowie said to William S. Burroughs in a famous 1974 dialogue convened by Rolling Stone. This was not boasting, just the simple truth. How did Bowie manage to manoeuvre himself into place as weathervane of the zeitgeist? The battle was not won on the radio airwaves or at record-store cash registers. There are bands from the early seventies who sold millions more records than Bowie ever did, but they never came near to having the high profile he had at the time and are barely remembered today. Bowie’s theatre of war was the media, where victory is measured in think pieces and columns, controversy and the circulation of carefully chosen, eye-arresting photographs. Read more…

Trilby, the Novel That Gave Us ‘Svengali’

A scene from the 1931 film Svengali. Via Wikimedia Commons.

Emma Garman | Longreads | February 2017 | 6 minutes (1,788 words)

In the fall of 1894, a New Jersey reader wrote to George du Maurier, the Franco-British author and satirical cartoonist whose Harper’s Monthly serial, Trilby, had just come out as a novel. The concerned correspondent asked that his mind be put to rest regarding the decorousness of relations between Trilby, the young heroine, and musical genius Svengali, under whose hypnotic spell she becomes an overnight opera sensation. Du Maurier replied politely but briefly: “I beg to say that you are right about Trilby. When free from mesmeric influence, she lived with him as his daughter, and was quite innocent of any other relation.” His assurance was published in The Argonaut, a San Francisco weekly, thus alleviating any similar fears for the girl’s reputation among that paper’s readership. In Brooklyn, meanwhile, a woman had a disagreement with her husband over Trilby’s morals, culminating in her smashing an earthenware jar over his head. Luckily for the woman, the injured party declined to give evidence in court. Perhaps he appreciated that when it came to Trilby, emotions ran high.

Irish-Scotch-French model and laundress Trilby O’Ferrall was partly based on real women, including a 17-year-old girl, nicknamed Carry, whom du Maurier and his friend Felix Moscheles knew as art students—and amateur mesmerists—in Belgium in the late 1850s. With her “rich crop of brown hair, very blue inquisitive eyes, and a figure of peculiar elasticity,” Carry modeled nude for them and allowed herself to be hypnotized. Her soul, Moscheles later claimed, “was steeped in the very essence of Trilbyism.” Du Maurier’s granddaughter, the novelist Daphne du Maurier, concurred: “Carry . . . had the same camaraderie, the same boyish attraction, the same funny shy reserve.” Another inspiration was Anna Bishop, an opera star reputed to be in sinister thrall to her older lover-manager, the French harpist and composer Robert Nicolas-Charles Bochsa. In 1839, Bishop caused a scandal by leaving her husband for Boscha, and to his musical accompaniment, the legend went, she sang as she never had before. Read more…

Syracuse Transcript

THE MAN IN THE SHELL (OR CASE, DEPENDING ON WHICH TRANSLATION YOU READ, BUT IT IS KIND OF INTERESTING HOW “SHELL” AND “CASE” MEAN ROUGHLY THE SAME THING IN RUSSIAN, APPARENTLY)

So here are three frame stories, linked by various recurring characters. The first one opens with two men, one inside the barn, one outside; Ivan Ivanovich agitated and smoking in the moonlight, and Burkin asleep inside; at the end of the second story Ivan is asleep, and Burkin agitated and awake. (“I’m just kind of noting some broad things, so we can come in and look at them later.”)

[From here on, in this heavily abridged transcript, George’s remarks are in bold and everyone else’s, including my own, are not—just to simplify, because the rest of us just felt like one big student.]

One of the benefits of this framing stuff… and this is sort of hard to talk about, but in a room full of artists, we have to. One of the delights of this Belikov guy is that he’s so unlikable. Right? It’s such a beautifully cruel caricature of a guy, and there’s something about it that’s really fun.

If you hear someone saying, “You know what? I really did something bad.” And you say, “Well… I’m sure it’s not that bad,” and then he tells you, and it is really bad. You know. There’s something fascinating about that. It really is a basic human curiosity… or it’s a basic human delight in mocking someone else, or being able to look down on someone else.

So that’s one of the arrows in our quiver. And if you can do it, like we all can, actually—some of us do it better than others—that’s a valid… valence. You can almost feel Chekhov rubbing his hands together when he gets on that riff about: “He’s a man in a case.” “Yeah, that’s right! He always wears galoshes and—you know what else? His penknife! It’s in a case.

That’s a very simple pleasure. That’s actually what propels us through this story, is that there’s this despicable guy. Is he going to stay despicable? Yeah!—he is, actually. That’s kind of good.

Don’t you think that kind of necessitates the frame in a way? It’s easier to have one character tell a cruel caricature of someone else, than to have a narrative presence?

Now: how is it? I think you’re right, but how is this.

Because then we’re relieved of the burden of wondering like oh, is the narrator kind of a dick? Because ultimately, you enter other consciousnesses, but to some extent you want to trust the narrator the most. Absent “unreliable narrator” stuff. So here, you don’t have to worry about like: “Well, am I a bad person for laughing at this guy?” Because [a character in the story] is the one who’s doing it.

Yeah. Yeah. What it really is, is an unreliable narrator story with a sort of confirming device. You know, where the listener can go, “Oh, I don’t know! That’s a horse of a different color.” Or… he can kind of destabilize the main narrator. We’ll talk about this more, but it’s a really great technique, and Chekhov is the master of it…

That the stories are embedded, with another character telling it, everything becomes a little more acceptable: less trying to teach you, or preach to you.

Exactly. It’s like if I say, “I hate dogs.” You go, “Wow. What a jerk!” But if I say, “I hate dogs,” and this other guy says, “I don’t think you mean it”—already it’s a different rhetoric, you know.

The uber-narrator is saying he hates dogs—and we don’t know how we feel about that. As opposed to the uber-narrator seeming to say: “I hate dogs.” Maybe that’s the unreliable narrator, where we know the author isn’t the character. But this is a way of putting that right into the story. And it’s very, very powerful.

Other things about that central story that we should have on the map?

If he’s so unpleasant, why do all these chicks want to marry the guy off? I mean they pick the worst guy in town, and this beautiful girl?

[another student] … well, that’s the way it works.

[laughter]

That’s a good question; I mean, what was that—

I think it was something like—him getting married might fix him, or something? Like, as a solution to their problem, not a solution to his… get him a girl to focus on.

And he says, “he’d been in our town for ten or fifteen years,” I mean, that’s incredible.

She’s not exactly the most… um, marriageable… you know. I’m trying to say this in a nice way, but she’s “approaching thirty.”

[laughter]

The line was, “She was not young anymore, she was nearly thirty.” But these were, you know, they were different times.

But she was “a peach,” though! She was a peach.

Yeah, she’s a beautiful girl. She even walks with her arms akimbo! Which, to me… that’s it. Even though… I don’t even know what that means.

She’s a cyclist, though, he can’t get over the fact that she’s a cyclist.

Yeah. As in Tolstoy, one of the amazing things about this is the way that Chekhov can kind of peel off a very simple thing that we’ve probably seen millions of times in our own life and never thought of as literary.

There’s also the line about the women growing livelier and even better-looking, as if they’d found an object in life.

That “even better-looking” is a great addition to that, isn’t it.

And now… let me show you something in terms of just line-to-line stuff, the way this escalation might happen. Okay, so the marriage is suggested, and that great riff, that now Belikov is going to apply his same way of thinking to this marriage. Well, it’s very serious. We have to take this very seriously. “You don’t know what may come of it.

They handed you a peach! And you still don’t know how to take it.

So then, on 363, you can almost feel the storyteller working here.

Okay… we just got the beat that says Belikov is not overjoyed, he’s not really properly appreciative of this, he’s not a man in love, exactly; he’s sort of trying to be in love, but he’s too cautious. And Chekhov says, “And he did not propose; he kept putting it off, to the vexation of the principal’s wife and all our ladies.

Okay, so now Chekhov’s got a little bit of a checkmate going—he’s on the beat called, “we’re delaying the proposal.” Now you can see one good story might be, if he just keeps delaying. In other words, if his timidity disables him, and he can never get the job done, and she drifts off to another man; that might be possible. But then somehow Chekhov goes in another direction: “a colossal scandal.”

Now—so first he’s got to put some things into play here. I’m guessing that maybe he thought of this colossal scandal. Maybe he heard about it. Maybe he rejected the thing I just said as being too standard. But as soon as he said, you know: “If it had not been for a colossal scandal,”—I think he knew where he was going. But then he looks around a little bit and he says, all right, what do I need to pull this off. Okay. What do I have. Welllll, I’ve got this brother [of the “peach,” Varenka], with the big booming voice. I haven’t used him yet. Hmm. Let me turn my attention to him for a minute.

I must tell you that Varenka’s brother conceived a hatred of Belikov from the first day of their acquaintance and couldn’t endure him.” That’s an interesting thought. He’s there, but we haven’t thought about him.

And then the brother says what we’ve been saying. “I don’t understand how you can put up with that informer, that nasty mug.” There’s a little pleasure at that; our surrogate has kind of just stepped in. “The atmosphere you breathe is vile, stifling!” And you’re laughing, you know?

I think of this, where you know… “You’re marrying this guy? This is a lifetime of him sitting there going hmm. Hmm. This guy actually will take anything good in your life, and go hmm? ‘Are you sure you want to—oh, that’s—is that thing expressly permitted?‘“ You know? He’s death, actually. So Chekhov introduces the brother, lets the brother occupy our viewpoint, basically.

All right… Again, I don’t know how he does this, but first of all, look how deadly efficient it is. He’s got the brother calling Belikov a spider. Then he needs something else. You know, you can feel him thinking, all right, I’ve got to put the brother and Belikov in conflict. How do I do it? And some impulse of his says, I don’t do it directly. Let me reach for one other element. And he thinks up this brilliant caricature of “Anthropos in Love.” Just—it’s a perfect thing, because you know that’s exactly what would kill Belikov, to be publicly shamed. So somehow from the mystery of art, Chekhov comes up with that bit about that caricature. And that is like the catalyst for the explosion. That little illustration.

We might just pause at that moment and notice that most of us, myself included, would say, Oh, I’ve got the brother, and I’ve got Belikov; all I’ve got to do is get them in the same room. And that’s kind of true. Okay, once they’re in the room, what are they going to fight about? The obvious thing is the sister. But Chekhov somehow puts the [other] thing first; he comes up with that illustration, and puts it in the air first. Which then… I don’t know why that’s magical, but somehow it lets the confrontation feel more natural maybe… I’m not sure.

He was going to be in love, right? This was a guy who was ten, fifteen years being exactly the same. Now something happened in that guy’s life that creates mockery in this community. Who drew that caricature? And why didn’t he draw it five years ago?

No, that’s exactly… and I think you get the reason, one reason he did, is because, well, it’s “Anthropos in Love.” And this guy dared to budge. So the community’s a little bit harsh, I mean, this is not exactly a nice thing, either. So anyway, we’ve got that illustration; somehow, it’s a stroke of genius, he puts that in there before there’s any hint of a confrontation.

And then there’s the bicycle, which is a stroke of genius thing in that if he should be so outraged by the bicycle, it’s kind of the last straw for us, in a weird way. So again, we’re admiring, but there’s something about the constant escalation of this… also, notice how free of reality it is. Chekhov always gets called a realist, but this is as caricaturish or elemental as anything you’ll ever read, as elemental as Beckett, really. Chekhov doesn’t do soft edges. It’s kind of abrupt, and… okay, what else do you want to talk about here?

It’s kind of good to have the caricature and the bicycle, as well, because he’s kind of wronged by the caricature, whereas he’s definitely wrong, with the bicycle, so he goes into the confrontation armed and incorrect at the same time.

That’s right. And that confrontation is interesting because first Belikov says, basically, “I want to apologize, I want you to know that I had nothing to do with that caricature.” Well… duh. You know, then he wants to say—”This was very irregular, and I’m very sorry for my part in it and I apologize to your sister.” And then he segues and says: “And also. This bicycle.”

What I imagine is him at home, agitated by this double violation of his principles. One, he’s been caricatured—two, his fiancee! Is almost—is on a bike! Wait a minute! Wait a minute. Something’s going on here. I’m going to get myself together. I’m going to go take care of this… And he’s maybe not even sure what he’s going to say. And he says the first thing, and then he can’t help but slide into the second. Which is, “You know… you are wearing an embroidered shirt. Are you mad?” And then one more beat, into basically saying: “If the authorities found out about this!” And then the brother says, “Go ahead and inform.

The brother says: “Whoever meddles in my private affairs can go to the devil!” Now, he means Belikov; Belikov says, “He’s insulted our superiors!” and it escalates from there, and he says: “Well you know, I’m going to have to turn you in.” It’s a brilliant little escalation…

Doug Unger [who taught creative writing at Syracuse in 1983 – 91] used to talk about how, in dialogue—in good dialogue—people are never talking directly to each other. You ask me A, and I answer, A prime. You misunderstand A prime, and you challenge me with C. In bad dialogue, they’re always saying, well,

“How are you?”

“I’m fine!”

“Do you have issues with your mother?”

“I do! She’s always…”

[laughter]

They’re trying to reach out, but they’re like, poking each other in the eye as they reach, you know. So the way Doug used to talk about it would be that if I’m talking to James, I have a thought bubble here, and James has a thought bubble, and most of what we’re doing is, we’re dumping out our thought bubbles regardless of what the other person is saying. So if I wake up that morning feeling wronged in my life, and James says, “That’s a nice shirt!”—I say, “Yeah, but nobody ever—no one ever appreciates it!”

So that’s a really interesting way to take your dialogue from—I mean, he makes it poetry, basically. It’s two solitudes, trying to connect, and they fail. This is not a fight that had to happen, actually. But each person had their own little issues that they were bringing to it, so.

It’s [Belikov’s] attempt to regain authority, though. Here he’s terrorized these people for ten years, they all have to be all worried about what’s he going to think. Now the bicycle thing… and that was true, too, I remember like, Shaw writing about that, how bicycling was super eccentric and wild, like being on a skateboard, when you’re supposed to be having all this dignity? You’re not having dignity, and this guy was so into that. So now he’s going to assert his authority again, and be back in charge, and tell everybody how they are going to behave—and it completely fell to pieces!

Yeah. It’s like when you’re trying to get a big animal back in the basket and you have to use too much force. Not that I’ve done that a lot, but.

[laughter]

But he becomes overtly an informer for the first time, in that moment. It’s very sad, and tragic. And yet… let’s also note how much fun it is when he goes down the stairs. When someone finally stands up to evil, it’s really a thrill, you know. And that actually is, you know, that’s part of our job, to make situations where that thrill can be introduced. It’s kind of a guilty pleasure. I don’t know, maybe it feels a little movieish or something, but that’s fun, you know. When he grabs him by the… and gives him a push. And when she walks in at that moment, that’s even better. “Ha-ha-ha!

Before he’s been thrown down the stairs, he’s never been that offended in his life.

So he’s never been that offended verbally, he gets thrown down the stairs, and then the girl walks in and laughs. And all the Russian readers know that he has to die right away.

[Shocked laughter, here, but also acknowledging the justice of this observation.]

And then this narrator, at the bottom of page 368. It’s a tragic story, it’s a harsh story, it’s a little bit of an unbelievable story, actually, and you can kind of normalize it by saying, “I confess, it is a great pleasure to bury people like Belikov.” You kind of feel a bit of a shock, and you think, yeah it was! it’s a pleasure to get him out of the story, even. And that thing about him finding the case that he always wanted. Okay, that’s the story. Let’s see… so, when we sort of glance at that story, what’s coming off it, what are the themes, what vibe do you take from that story into what’s coming.

This is the thing about Chekhov. His themes are so photographic, that when you try to pin them down, you always reduce them.

One thing is that even the worst guy can be in love.

So even this lowly, terrible Man in a Shell has the desire for love. Now what Chekhov will always do is to present a duality. So… that’s true. And what’s also true is that that guy’s characteristics prevented him. So you see that it’s both possible, and impossible: a hundred percent.

Now at this point—the story, we’re done, right? And we’re reminded that there’s a frame. And this is a lovely little sequence, here:

The high school teacher came out of the barn.

Remember, we haven’t seen him yet.

He was a short, stout man, completely bald, with a black beard that nearly reached his waist.

That beard was kind of surprising: to his waist! Wow, really weird!

…two dogs came out with him.

Oh!—and he says:

“What a moon!”

You know. There’s that feeling of… what’s been in the dark, what’s been in the case, is out. And it’s a little crazy. We’ve got a long beard, and there’s two unexpected dogs, and you can see the moon. Just that kind of feeling. Now this is something very characteristic of Chekhov, which is [that] anybody reading that story, I think, is going to be struck at some level by that, right? It’s a story about compression, and closure, and darkness, and bluh. And when the story is done, and Belikov is dead—ding dong, the witch is dead—the barn door comes open, and Burkin comes out, and he’s kind of funny-looking, and he doesn’t mind, and the dogs come out… but. If we use our sort of, high-school minds and say, what’s the meaning? It’s a little beautiful… you know, it’s just a little beautiful. You can’t exactly say that it’s a metaphor… kind of, but… right?

Well… they start out, and they’ve gone outside, and they want to go shooting? And be in nature, and expose themselves to the beauty. And it’s also going to hurt you, maybe, to be outside. And that’s what happens to Belikov. He comes outside for a second, into the world, and it’s a disaster. So there’s this huge amount of shells, and inside, and outside, and exposing yourself to the elements or to feelings, or to life… it’s dangerous.

Right. So this is the way Chekhovian metaphor works is, you can say that this story is working with inside and outside. It’s in the barn, it’s in the story. But when your mind goes for the reduction, it can’t quite get it. It just knows that inside/outside is a thing. And that’s actually very sophisticated, because as we talk about those examples… sometimes the reading mind is just delighted by parallels, you know. Juxtapositions. It doesn’t really have to know what the juxtaposition amounts to. A good reader, where we are now, would be kind of aware that In and Out is working. Light and Dark is working. And I think that’s because of the barn. I mean, it’s not daytime: Chekhov goes a lot of trouble to point out that the barn is dark, and Burkin is invisible. That’s the subtlety of Chekhov; we feel that that’s a thing, but we can’t quite say why, and he’s not going to pause to tell us exactly.

The whole time I couldn’t stop thinking about the theme, like where fear makes humans animals? And that especially, like the Man in the Shell, I mean he was literally like a crab or something, in a shell. And thinking about in this period of dictatorship, and how sociological studies have shown that people hunker down and go into their family units, and are less on the streets, and have more privacy, and they’re more closed off.

I think that’s exactly right. I’m sure Chekhov at this time was feeling what was coming because what was coming was already happening. Which is that there were a lot of Marxists, and they were severe. I’m sure that there were already secret societies. And within the Tsarist regime, there were a lot of informers too. So this is something that he’s picking up on.

I was thinking well, yes, the story itself is a shell, but like, Chekhov and I—we know. We know what Ivan [the narrator of the story] doesn’t. I don’t know if anyone else felt that way.

Yeah, yeah, right. Well also because here, and at the end of “Gooseberries,” especially, we’re regarded as a sort of an accessory character. Which is a pleasure for reader and writer. So now, then, Burkin doesn’t want to hear that story. And Chekhov, for structural—for formal reasons, doesn’t want to tell it right here. So they went into the barn; now they’re both in the dark, they’re both covered up; and then they hear these footsteps—

[here you can hear the tick-tick-tick of the chalk against the board, as he draws the path of footsteps outside the barn]

—and that is Mavra, who started us off. So let’s not underestimate the pleasures of symmetry. Mavra is actually… she was the way we got into the story in the first place, if you remember. She’s the one who never left her town, and so on. There’s something—and it’s so simple, and I don’t know that there’s quote-unquote “meaning” in it. But there’s something really pleasurable about having her just come out there for a second. Again, this is subtle.

Now they’ve gone in. This is—in and out, they have both gone in now, and so that’s a change: one out, one in. And then… there’s something really sensual about the fact that she’s walking out there, this woman who’s never been anywhere is now coming to them a little bit, to see what’s going on, and it’s just symmetrical, which is very nice. It doesn’t make or break the story but it’s just a nice thing, that Chekhov remembered that that ball was up in the air. In a small way, Mavra was in her house, where she likes to be. And she came out, right? She came out why? Because she’s curious, I think, a little bit.

* * *

GOOSEBERRIES

Okay so now we segue into “Gooseberries.” Burkin goes, “Last time we were in the barn, you were going to tell me a story.” And [Ivan] says, “Yes, I wanted to tell you about my brother.” And we feel a little bit like, “Okay, good, let’s hear it.” And we think: This is a response to “The Man in a Shell”—what’s it going to be?

He heaved a slow sigh, lit his pipe, but then it began to rain.

Now we notice—I mean structurally—that is a three-page digression; he’s going to tell you a story, and then he doesn’t get to it until 374. “We were two brothers,” he began. And you know, a bad workshop would say, “Why don’t you cut that out that whole thing?—’I wanted to tell you about my brother; my brother, who was two years my junior… I went in for a learned profession.”

This is a great place for you to find out about your narrative instincts. Because we’re reverse-engineering this story, basically. There’s a three-page digression. As you look at it, you should be asking: Why is this necessary? Why is it justified? How do you do that? So let’s look at it, starting from 372-373, what are the main beats in there—and I say “beats,” like in the Hollywood sense—what happens? What are the elements.

They’re wet and uncomfortable?

Right [writing at chalkboard] so they’re wet… For me—when I say “beats,” I think what I’m looking for is action. There’s actions—not so much mood or tone, but the specific action that we notice as we go through. They felt cold; they meet Alyohin; they go to the house; so… on 372, I’m not finding anything that feels beat-ish, this is all sort of just stage mechanics.

We go to the house, a large structure, he lived downstairs…

They see the maid.

Yes. Pelageya. Now, again, we notice, one of the reasons she stays in our memory I think is because that little thing is so cool, where the two guys go: Whoa. She’s one of the most beautiful women in literature, even though she is never described, and it’s because of those guys, literally, in a stranger’s house—you just walked in, and you’re a little bit rude, you go: Ohhh. So she’s suddenly on the page.

Then they go swimming. Alyohin, a little funny bit where he gets in the water and it turns jet black. “I haven’t bathed in quite a long time.” Then Ivan comes out, and jumps in with him, and I think this is a beat: Ivan is so delighted by this. It’s a very unforgettable image, and we’ve all done it, coming out of a cool lake: Ah, my god! Life! You feel so good. He swam to the mill…

So that’s a beat [writing at board], let’s just say he’s delighted, let’s just call it that, he’s having pleasure. Then that is complicated by Burkin. “You’ve had enough!”

I think it’s neat to introduce her that way and then to have him be so dirty, actually? Because I thought oh, she’s beautiful, maybe she’s his mistress. But like it just adds to the energy of this contradictory guy. Maybe she’s not, and that makes me like him more.

Right. Here’s how I see it. Everybody can see it differently, and you’ll all be correct. You could take a Chekhov story and say, I’m going to look at this in terms of gender roles, and it will fall open at your feet. You could say, I’m doing it in terms of light and dark. It will fall at your feet.

But in this case, the one thing that I notice is that Ivan is having this moment of pleasure—just sensual, happy pleasure and indulgence. Burkin says ahahhhhh—stop it. Now, we feel that Burkin is playing a Belikovian role. We also then, suddenly—pleasure becomes a thing, again. Like In and Out was a—pleasure becomes a thing.

And jumping ahead a bit, Ivan is about to give a big speech about how there shouldn’t be any happiness in the world. Right? There is no happiness and there never should be—a very beautiful, convincing speech, that his actions directly contradict.

He does say, “Lord, have mercy.

So now we’ve got pleasure, is in the mix; there’s Pelageya, she’s a maid, but she’s so beautiful that they have to stop, you know, so there’s another beat of sort of, life. So now let’s get into the heart of the story here, to see if we can make more sense of this.

So he’s got a brother, they have a taste of the country, they’re little tiny petit-noblemen. His grandfather or father was a private, who just barely made it over the line into the nobility. Then they lose their money—so they’re not nobility.

On page 375, Ivan, there’s a little bit of an aside where he says—here Chekhov/Ivan is responding to Tolstoy—he’s got a story in which it says a man only needs six feet to be buried in. And Chekhov says, or Ivan says, “It is a common saying that a man needs only six feet of earth. But six feet is what a corpse needs, not a man.” And he makes a beautiful little speech that I totally believe, about what we need in the world. We need to be expansive and free. I think this is basically Chekhov talking; you know, you can read his letters and he says very similar things. But we just note that he’s attributed it to Ivan; this is not Chekhov talking, this is Ivan. Ivan gets on his soapbox there, a little bit.

Also, it recalls the last story.

Yes. That’s right. Right. Which is why he’s telling you, presumably.

So then, what happens. Oh, the guy kills his wife, right? The guy wants this land so much that it’s his single focus in life, and he gets married to a widow, and basically starves her to death and takes her money, and, you know—it’s really comic, the way it’s presented, and he’s looking through the ads, and he says, “Country life has its advantages,” and all this kind of thing. He draws a plan of the estate.

Now here’s a brilliant thing that Chekhov does, and it’s a habit we should all get into: When you find yourself in your stories asserting something general, then you always should be pushing, pushing to get to the objective throughout. “My brother loved the country life, and he had a big fantasy of getting a farm.” The inner editor in you should say, How so? Tell me more. Well, he always wanted an estate. What kind? Ah, well, different kinds, but always they had these four things. Da-da-da-da, gooseberries. Really? And then you push one more, and you say, Let’s just keep it simple. He wanted gooseberries. Let that be the emblem of everything that he wanted.

And somehow, you know, it bites.

They’re tart; they’re not the sweetest berries.

They’re not the sweetest.

They’re good!

When we get through this whole story, he gets his gooseberries, the brother comes to visit him. There’s that bit where everybody looks like a pig on his estate; that’s on 378. “It looked as though he might grunt into the quilt at any moment.” Because Chekhov knows that that’s where he’s going with these people. They are self-interested and selfish, piggish people.

Okay. So when we step away from that story, which actually is very sophisticated; the story is made a story by Ivan’s beautiful speech about the happy man. What do you take away from that?

Let’s make sure we have it truly right… At the end Ivan, who’s told the story, says, “Lord forgive us sinners,” and he pulls the bedclothes over his head—which again, evokes Belikov, a little bit—and goes to sleep. But he’s left his pipe on the table, right? And the pipe stinks, and keeps Burkin awake. And… but also, you remember that what keeps you awake is agitation, and so maybe Burkin is agitated, also… something like that.

Of all the things we’ll talk about this year, this is the most useful tip I can point out.

Get ready for this.

[laughter]

All right, so. We all know that one of the problems, when you’re young—younger than you are now—is that you always keep showing up in your stories. Your opinions keep showing up in stories. And at some point you’re told, that it’s not—the story is not just your opinion. The story is of you, but it’s not you, so let’s just…

On 381 there’s a beautiful speech. “Behind the door of every contented, happy man there ought to be someone standing with a little hammer and continually reminding him with a knock that there are unhappy people, that however happy he may be, life will sooner or later show him its claws”—I mean, to me that’s one of the most truthful statements about the purpose of fiction, maybe. But just, in general. Don’t, don’t—don’t you agree with that? And all he says about how, you know—most people are so happy, and it seems as if that happiness is supported by the misery of these silent masses, you know, it’s a really beautiful statement. And I’m going to say, that’s Chekhov. That if you go into his notebooks, and—that’s basically him. It’s pretty much his opinion.

So he embeds that in here. And I think anybody reading that goes, even if you didn’t like Ivan so far, you kind of go, well, you know what? I have to say… you’re right about that one, I agree with you on that. There’s something about happiness that’s a little… We’ve all felt that, too. You got everything you wanted, and you do feel a bit like a pig. It makes you actually insecure, when you get to have happiness…

But there’s something very comforting in it. Because life is going to come and show you its claws no matter how comfortable you are.

Well, that’s true.

So… it’s kind of this egalitarian, like—let’s all be quite comfortable that terrible things are coming, together.

Yeah. That’s right. But his thing here is, I don’t want to be happy. And he says, to his friend: You’re young! Do good, do good… he’s kind of a little bit obnoxious. So anyway, the mechanical move is simply, this is truth. Your truth. You go home right now and write two paragraphs that you really believe in. Your ethos, your manifesto, based on what you know so far. You know that that doesn’t belong in the story. People will yell at you for that, you know.

So this for me is a model. The thing is, okay. Are we limited people? We have limited imaginations.

Actually, no. Because if I say to you: defend Obamacare. You can do it. And if I say, I’ll give you a thousand dollars if you can tear Obamacare down, you can do it. Or if I said: come up with a scenario where abortion makes sense. You could do it. Come up with a scenario where you cringe when you read about abortion, that you feel so sad about it… you could do it.

We actually have quite unlimited powers of imagination. This is a little trick for allowing anything and everything you can make up into a story. And the trick is: attribute.

Anything you feel, if it’s an unholy impulse. You know. An evil thought. A naive thought. Just… if you say it clearly, then you just push it away from yourself, like Chekhov does. I just made a rant against the uh, Latvians. Whatever, you know. That’s not very nice. Do I really believe it? Well, no, but I said it. And I said it pretty clearly. Okay. Give it to somebody else, to say it, you know.

It’s a very powerful thing, because you have complete access to your imagination, in all the moods of you—you know? Your meanness, your idealism, your everything? You have access to it, because you don’t have to claim it. You make it and—that’s Dylan’s trick, actually. If you try to construct a coherent persona from Dylan’s body of work you can’t, it’s just an incredible multiplicity. But once you create it, then you can consider it an object to be used, as Chekhov does.

Let’s take a little break.

* * *

ABOUT LOVE

What Chekhov is doing is he’s stepping out, and he’s asserting at least two things on a given topic and then going, “Yeah.”

[laughter]

It’s very powerful, and it goes back to his statement that art doesn’t have to solve problems, it has to formulate them correctly. So the problem, one of the many problems this story raises: Can we trust our own pleasure, that is a simple way of saying it. Can we trust our own pleasure? And his answer is yes and no, and then he just walks. Because… he’s not here to answer that question, because it’s such a profound question that it’s not answerable.

But if you really look under the surface, you can manifest an unbelievable number of viewpoints. I mean… that’s called empathy, actually. Especially people who are as language-gifted as you are. You can do an exercise: Put in a box, fifty viewpoints. Even, onerous ones—it doesn’t matter.

Uh. Skinhead. OK. You could all do a skinhead, no question about it. But one of the moves is that you have to allow yourself to do it joyfully, without any kind of like… you know sometimes when we’re doing a viewpoint we’re not entirely sure of, we might undercut it as we’re doing it. But I would say do a full-out racist, crazy, xenophobic skinhead: just do it. You know. Now, it’s scary that you can. That’s a little scary; but then you have the text, then, what you do it from there. I mean, this is Shakespeare’s thing, right? Shakespeare can do anybody, and he has them talking to each other, you know. It’s very powerful…

But now let’s think about this in like, Tolstoy. Tolstoy is simpler; he’s more elemental, in a certain way, than Chekhov. Because Tolstoy will sort of build the opinion right into the story. Chekhov is a gentler soul, actually. There’s a great story that illustrates the two of them. Tolstoy was of course much older, and in youth a giant. Chekhov was also quite famous, but he was younger. And Chekhov was from peasant stock. His grandfather was a serf, and his father was this kind of brutal, I think he was some kind of church musician or something, but he beat the boys… Chekhov just barely made it out of the real difficult provincial life.

So Tolstoy was sort of bragging about what a player he was. He says something like—and Chekhov’s very goodlooking, you know—he says, “I bet you are a real,”—and in the translation it has an f and then a line, so you don’t know what the word is. And you think, I bet you are a real fucker, basically, or something. And Chekhov blushes, and he doesn’t answer. And Tolstoy says, “Ah, when I was young…” and Chekhov just kind of… you know, he’s actually more genteel than, uh, impulsive.

But I think Chekhov always—I think he was sort of a guy who was always having strong opinions, and then reconsidering. You can kind of feel that in his work. He’s able to put up these very strong, fiercely drawn caricatures, and then kind of say to the reader, “I know. I feel the same way, kind of. So, let me put this dirty pipe on the table. Now you know where we stand with him…” Then he says, “But also, didn’t he have kind of a good point?” There’s that constant back and forth which is very… That’s—that’s why we love him, I think…

Maybe we should start with this: What’s the thumbnail version of this one, this story here?

Like in a Hollywood version, like can you say it in one sentence, you know: “In a world where…”

Guy loves this woman that he can’t have…?

Yeah. Guy loves his best friend’s wife and does nothing about it. Right? And that’s basically it.

He gets taken in by this couple, falls in love with the wife, seems like the wife maybe falls in love with him. But he also kinda falls in love with the husband, right? He falls in love with the friendship. And in the end, it’s like a Waiting for Godot. They are attracted and they don’t do anything about it. Except at the last minute there’s a little burst of kissing in the train and then he gets in the next car, right, and rides a whole town down, gets off and walks home. That’s it. Very simple.

It seems to be a medium though… in the first story, under the guise of total deprivation in the other one people turn into pigs, right?—and here it’s like there’s a bit of indulgence in the love and the feelings. There’s also restraint and respect for the marriage, maybe.

I feel that very strongly. I always find it very moving when he doesn’t, you know, when his respect for the friendship is enough to counterweight his attraction; for him to say, “In this life I won’t have full love…” because it would be so damaging and that very… that practical consideration, about would her life be better?… I find that very moving.

A lot of times, if you were to bring up… you know, I saw on the news today, these people were convicted and I think they were innocent. A lot of people. because they don’t want to have to deal with the fact that the system is kind of broken, they say, “Oh no, it couldn’t be, couldn’t be.” I think that was really realistic.

And you know one thing that’s worth mentioning is that that, I often remember this story as being, a very good marriage, very good people, and this sort of possible interloper. But actually the husband in that story is a little bit less good than the narrator, he’s got that shut-down mentality, he’s a little dull, and yet he’s a good friend and so they don’t…and the thing about this story too is that there’s a cost, right?

You can see that they’re in love in a way that the husband and wife, I’m going to say, weren’t ever, maybe, would you say? So do they the right thing, which is to not pursue it and it’s not free… It’s corrosive. She starts snapping at him. Like, I love that whenever he would drop something, she’d say, I congratulate you.

She got nervous prostration. So that didn’t work out.

They both knew they’d missed the boat. They’re sweet, I guess.

Ok, let’s cut to the chase. I think this is a beautiful story and a beautiful ending of the trilogy. What is it that, if you were moved by the story, what moved you?

It’s like the ideal love is the one that doesn’t get satisfied, kind of like… the moment in the theater where their shoulders touch. It’s not going to get better than that. Like, that’s it.

And for me, like, I’m supposed to root for him…but the problems, I thought, were so… I’m not so sure there was a way for him to be happy, even if he had acted on it… I don’t know what they would have done. That’s a scandal, like to do something with his best friend. There’s so many things that go with that. Oh we’re in love, but …our lives are still ruined. In that sense, I was kind of happy. He kind of did the right thing. I kind of did not want him to do the other thing.

That’s what Chekhov does. He takes the argument at its highest level on both sides, and he puts them there and they both sit there. And I don’t think you can really…I never walk away from this story sure of what they should have done. As I’m getting older, I’m happier that they did what they did, I noticed. You can always think, “Oh, that’s so painful.” And also when you get older you think: imagine! He breaks off this marriage, she probably loses her kids. They go back to this house that we’ve been hearing about, and they’re living with Nikanor and Pelageya in this shithole. He’s gotta work 24/7 to keep the thing afloat. And then there’s that thing between them, where he’s always looking at her to see if she’s happy, she’s always looking… you know, it gets very complicated. I don’t feel like it’s gonna go very well.

But he doesn’t even remember why he liked her so much. That was what made me think: OK, you’ve dodged a bullet. Or at least, you’re now saying to yourself that you dodged one. Because this is all happening many years later, you’re hearing the—and he’s all fat and doesn’t bathe now. So, he’s remembering something, who knows how well or clearly. But because he doesn’t remember—if you really fall in love with somebody you know all the reasons why, you know? I think. I mean, I do. The ideas and stuff that a person had that attracted you to them? And it doesn’t really exist in her. She was just this beautiful, elegant, charming… those are the adjectives that keep coming up. But it’s not like, this is the one person who could make sense of the world for me, it’s not like that.

Whatever the reality of their relationship would have been, I think there was something that was sort of devastating about this that reminded of both moments of “In the Cart” [another Chekhov story] and “The Overcoat.” [Gogol] For me, the emotional core of the story was at the bottom of 393, when he says, “I would take the opera glass from her hands without a word and feel, at that moment, that she was close to me, that she was mine, that we could not live without each other, but by some strange misunderstanding, when we came out of the theater we always said goodbye and parted like strangers.”

And something about misunderstanding, there, is like in “In the Cart”, that sort of beautiful moment at the end. And then, in “The Overcoat”, there’s a sense, there’s this brief glimpse of an idea, of a life that you think could be yours. And it’s just, like, in this road that’s right next to where you are, and you can’t quite bridge it…

Now, we might, technically we might just notice this is a story—that’s exactly it—and that is something that doesn’t happen. You know, we always think we have to make drama. Well, you know, when you make a desire as beautifully as Chekhov has made it here, that’s the energy you have to work with. And at that point it’s kind of your choice. You know, you can do whatever you want with that energy. The only thing you can’t do is forget that you made it. So what he does is, he says is, they’re there, and at that moment they know. There’s like a mutual confession that, yeah, OK, all this time, yes: yes. And Chekhov just knows that there’s energy in that. And he does a very sophisticated thing, which is to have them not act on it.

That’s really hard to do, and to take away from the story. I feel like this is something I really would have loved when I was in high school, or something… and just like totally missed the point, insofar as I would have been like: “Oh, you can have a story where nothing happens! I want to write a story where nothing happens.” But that’s not what happens.

Right, and what it does though, maybe, is that it redirects our minds, because…it’s not really about what happens, but it’s about the energy that gets created by those things. The energy of the first story gets made by that delicious description of a jerk. The energy, you can feel it, the energy gets made. So in a certain sense, what you’re trying to do in prose, by any means necessary, is make that energy. I’m just calling it energy, you know. It’s just kind of a fullness that gets made. Once you make it, you have to be aware that you’ve made it, and then you somehow have to dispense with it.

It’s almost like… in a simple way, it’s a sort of three-ring circus where he raises the issue, here. Isn’t it terrible when people oppress one another? Yes.

Isn’t over-caution terrible? Yes it is.

Shouldn’t you be open-hearted? Yes.

All right then, come over to the second ring: let’s make it a little more complicated. Here’s a guy who, the brother, who’s very energetic in pursuit of what he wants. He loves, he has a great love in his life, which is his farm. Unfortunately, he killed a lady to get it, and when he got it, he turned into a pig! Well, what do you think now?

And then the reader might say, “Well actually, that’s true, you know.”

“And so how do we feel about pleasure? That swimming, that was pretty unclean, wasn’t it?”

“No, no, I didn’t mean that.”

Or maybe you come out of this saying, “Right, so what we need to do is be moderate in all things, and shoot for the greater good.”

Good! Come over here.

“You’re the guy who’s very moderate about love. How’s it working out for you?”

“Terrible.”

“Oh, you’re right, so he probably should have, you know, gone for it, right?”

“Yeah?”

“How would that work out for him?”

Terrible.”

I sometimes think Chekhov’s stories work like that. You get to the end and, the whole time you feel this moral presence: “Anton, what should I believe? What do you want me to believe? ‘Love is good.’ ‘No, it’s not good.’“ And he’s constantly guiding you by the shoulders. Every time it gets too simple he goes, “No no no no no…no no…no no no no…no no.” And at the end he just kind of drops you off a cliff.

[laughter]

So there isn’t any—he’s not gonna have—last week I sent that thing, you know, his “holy of holies” is freedom. So even freedom from being statically connected to any one idea, which is pretty…and also the freedom of not being connected to that one either, you know. He’s remarkable.

There’s a really, there’s a very symmetrical thing. That’s what resonated for me from your Hollywood idea, because there’s always a freedom speech in the movie. There’s a freedom speech in each of these stories, and it’s all against conventionality. It’s not that it’s necessarily going to work out for you, but there’s an underlying moral message of, “Consider taking a shot at freedom. Maybe it doesn’t work out for you, but it’s something to think about, rather than just like, hiding in the conventional bullshit.” And he talks about this, too. There’s a really good potted biography in the front of this book about how Chekhov escaped serfdom, and almost didn’t become a human being. Like—almost didn’t achieve the awareness. You know, he got enough education to bust out of conventionality.

For all the subtlety, all of which is present, there’s a very, very simple thing underneath there. You know, to be aware and to try to be free if possible.

And he talks about that, that his life has been a process of trying to wring the peasant blood out of himself. But even there—and I think you’re absolutely right—freedom, for him, he says, is “my holy of holies”…but then he does this very adult thing, which is say, “OK, you guys, be free.” And then see that you—that you’re not.

Freedom is also to choose not, too.

Right, but it’s laden with cost.

There’s that line in the first story: “Ah freedom, freedom! A mere hint, the faintest hope of its possibility gives wings to the soul. Isn’t that true?” Yeah.

That’s it.

* * *

Essay

Bowne Hall. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Bowne Hall. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Thursday in the Class With George

It was a cold, gray October morning, misty and drizzling, when I arrived at Syracuse University’s Bowne Hall, a handsome three-story brick building that first opened for classes in 1907. The Syracuse campus is postcard gorgeous; literally a city on a hill, with beautifully-tended grounds and fine Victorian buildings spread across acres of lawn. But Bowne 110 is as plain a classroom as you can imagine. There were standard-issue arm desks with molded plastic seats loosely arranged in a half-circle, facing a large chalkboard and desk. Classical musicians were rehearsing in a distracting manner next door; first tuning up and then practicing pretty loudly; nobody in class would pay them the slightest attention over the next three hours.

After a few minutes about about 15 students had assembled, all carrying backpacks heavy with books; a young man in a Mao cap; a woman in a striped shirt, who casually put her hair up in a bun before class began. The most fancifully dressed was a young woman in a button-up vintage wool vest and a boyish mint-green shirt, with a careful, tidily short haircut. Later I would speak with a number of them, including a wonderful young man recently returned from Iraq/Afghanistan who had just the wickedest sense of humor, and a beautiful “older” one of around 30, very gentle and delicate in her ways. Now they were all milling around, chatting, several finishing cups of steaming coffee or tea.

And then in came George, casually and plainly dressed—a soft black shirt with the top button undone, revealing a slender silver chain weighted with a pendant that I was too timid to ask about, and over that a heavy dark blue cotton zip-front sweater. He kibbitzed a little with this and that student. On television he comes off a little shy, but not here, in his element. Not that he looks so terrible in photographs or anything, but photographs don’t do Saunders justice; he’s very good-looking, approachable, lively, with an indefinably elegant way about him. We all arranged our effects—books, scarves, bags and coats, readied ourselves to converse about Chekhov. It changed my life.

George began by telling us about his own relationship to the Little Trilogy. He moves around constantly as he teaches, not in a theatrical way, but just from being so lively and animated in his thoughts.

I heard it for the first time when I was a student here; the first semester we were here. Tobias Wolff was around, but we weren’t in class with him. So, it was announced he was going to do a reading down at Syracuse Stage, but the day of the reading he was really sort of not feeling well. So instead of reading his own work, he read this whole trilogy… It was just incredible, you know. Just as he got to the end of “About Love” it started to snow in front of the big glass window.

So for me it was a huge moment, because I sort of knew Chekhov a little bit, and I’d always been vaguely bored by him. And when Toby read it, especially this first story, “The Man in the Shell,” it was so funny, you know, so something kind of opened up in my head about this relation between being humanly entertaining, and great literature. That was a big day. So this story, I think it’s almost impossible to get to the bottom of, but we’ll spend the whole three hours trying to.

In other words, these exact stories had been bred into his bones in this very place—and by Tobias Wolff, too. The stability and continuity described in these casual, homely opening remarks implied certain foundational values, I thought. A sense of order and artistry. Of permanence, too; of loyalty. Saunders met his wife Paula when they were fellow grad students here; he is very private about his personal life but he’s had a very happy marriage, it seems, and has two grown daughters; his whole life seems very much tied up in Syracuse. Class began with the understanding that we were taking part in a tradition, a ritual almost, and a history.

There was also an ambient atmosphere of luck, a continued quiet awareness of our good fortune, I thought, among all those present. There had been nearly six hundred applications for six places in the MFA program in 2013. Those selected spend three years in a space apart—like a twelfth house enclosure, if you’re into astrology—a place of reckoning.

But even at far humbler reaches than these, literature is a rarefied discipline. That is, you can’t be very concerned at all about literature if you’re struggling on the lower floors of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. If you were lucky enough to make it into a good college, maybe you’ve felt a little guilty about that luxury. Here you are, studying chemistry or government or history or geology or music or writing. Your life is totally saturated with privilege that you are told you must check. But no; there is no checking the priv. Not only have you got enough to eat, not only a clean, safe place to sleep every night, not only a hot shower every day and a place to do your laundry, but the time and space to read and think, develop goals for your life, be taught by wise and patient adults who wish only for your success.

Then let’s say you make it through undergrad and you decide that nothing else will do: you are going to get an MFA. There probably is not a lot of material “success” awaiting you in the field of creative writing, or in any of the fine arts. Maybe you will become the next Joshua Bell or David Foster Wallace. Or maybe you will teach. Maybe you will become a middle manager in a tech company. You may find fulfillment, or never find it, in any of these roles, and maybe you know that, too. You buy the lottery ticket. You come to Syracuse to learn to write from George Saunders, a very great writer. You are going to enter the most civilized confines that exist in the modern world. And here you will study Chekhov, who writes about: Peasants.

Among other things, obviously. In my three-hour window into this world I came to see literary practice as taught by George Saunders as almost like a priestly undertaking. It’s a path toward empathy and reconciliation as much as a matter of intellect or craftsmanship. It’s about the truth, and honors human impulses, ideas and personalities high and low. This sounds precious, I know. And it is. But it’s precious in both the dismissible way, and the literal way. Which I suspect is something Anton Chekhov meant for you to think about.

* * *

Living In the Now

Longreads Pick

Lonni Sue can paint, but not name a painting; learn new music without knowing a tune. Scientific American opinion editor Michael Lemonick explore what she’s is teaching us about memory.

Source: Aeon
Published: Feb 13, 2017
Length: 15 minutes (3,890 words)

This Was How Things Ended

Michael Hobbes | Longreads | February 2017 | 10 minutes (2,600 words)

 

“Wait, so your ex called your boss and tried to get you fired?”

This is me.

Genau.”

This is Andy. We are on a break from German class, 15 minutes between the future tense and the subjunctive. He’s from Baton Rouge and I’m from Seattle, but we’re speaking German, for practice. We are not very good.

“Er ist ein … Fucker,” Andy says. “He told my boss I was reading ebooks at my desk instead of working—which I totally was.”

“So, did you get fired?” I ask.

“No, my boss already knew I was a super shitty employee. But then I called up my ex’s boss and got him fired.” Andy’s former boyfriend is in Amsterdam; he’s a mechanic. A few months ago he told a customer that her car was totaled, bought it off her for a few hundred euros, then sold it the next week for two thousand.

Es ist nicht so gut,” I say, my German failing, as always, to reach the correct level of emphasis. We are both going through breakups. It’s been a week since mine and six since his. This is what we talk about every day, 15 minutes at a time.

Two weeks ago, Andy’s ex visited him here in Berlin. They had dinner, then sex, then Andy asked him to leave, told him he shouldn’t sleep over now that they’re not boyfriends anymore. Three days later, the cops called. His ex is filing charges for attempted murder. He says putting him out on the street in middle of the night in February is an act of violence. Andy has to be in court next week.

Es ist…” I say.

Read more…

We Spend Six Months Over the Course of Our Lives Searching for Lost Things

In the New Yorker, Kathryn Schultz writes about two forms of loss: grief and the misplacement of everyday objects. Regarding the latter, it appears we have a tendency to lose items on a daily basis, and spend half a year over the course of our lifetimes searching for them:

Passwords, passports, umbrellas, scarves, earrings, earbuds, musical instruments, W-2s, that letter you meant to answer, the permission slip for your daughter’s field trip, the can of paint you scrupulously set aside three years ago for the touch-up job you knew you’d someday need: the range of things we lose and the readiness with which we do so are staggering. Data from one insurance-company survey suggest that the average person misplaces up to nine objects a day, which means that, by the time we turn sixty, we will have lost up to two hundred thousand things. (These figures seem preposterous until you reflect on all those times you holler up the stairs to ask your partner if she’s seen your jacket, or on how often you search the couch cushions for the pen you were just using, or on that daily almost-out-the-door flurry when you can’t find your kid’s lunchbox or your car keys.) Granted, you’ll get many of those items back, but you’ll never get back the time you wasted looking for them. In the course of your life, you’ll spend roughly six solid months looking for missing objects; here in the United States, that translates to, collectively, some fifty-four million hours spent searching a day. And there’s the associated loss of money: in the U.S. in 2011, thirty billion dollars on misplaced cell phones alone.

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Swan, Late

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad.

Irina Dumitrescu | Longreads | February 2017 | 23 minutes (5873 words)

 

“Perfect is boring.”
— George Balanchine

I discovered I couldn’t dance when I was ten years old. My parents had signed me up for a ballet course in Toronto with a dour, shriveled Romanian teacher, chosen no doubt because of our shared totalitarian traumas. In her class I felt uncoordinated, impossibly gawky. My clearest memory is of trying to accomplish a gentle downward sweep of the hand. My teacher performed the movement. As I attempted to imitate her, she said, over and over, “but do it gracefully!” I could not figure out how to do it gracefully. I could not even see the difference between her gesture and mine. I came to the logical conclusion: I was terminally ungraceful. In fact, I couldn’t dance at all.

I quit ballet. I did have to dance again when I took part in the yearly audition held by a local school for the arts. I was terrible at acting and drawing too, but the dance test was my Waterloo. A teacher demonstrated a complicated choreography at the front of the room while we waited patiently in rows. Then he gave us a cue, and as if by magic, all of the other children repeated the combination perfectly. I, on the other hand, was a mess of arms and legs and confused desperation. I managed with twisted precision to be always facing in the opposite direction from the other kids, stumbling into them dangerously.

My inability to dance became a matter of faith, something I believed in unquestioningly for the next two decades. But I did so with pride and stubbornness. Everything about ballet felt wrong to me: all that Pepto-Bismol pink, ribbons and tulle, polished princesses executing their steps in martial unison, tight little buns behind tight little faces. Ballet represented hard beauty, ungenerous towards human flaws or quirks. It was a tyranny of perfection.

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Breaking Elgar’s Enigma: Cryptographic Genius or Crackpot?

Photo by Shawn Carpenter (CC BY-SA 2.0)

In New Republic, Daniel Estrin writes about how a former insurance adjuster claims to have solved the 118-year-old cryptographic mystery of the hidden message in Edward Elgar’s infamous Enigma Variations.

And far from the ivory towers of music academia, mostly on his blog, Elgar’s Enigma Theme Unmasked, Bob Padgett has emerged as perhaps the most prolific and dogged of all Enigma seekers. His solution, which has caught the attention of classical music scholars, lies at the bottom of a rabbit hole of anagrams, cryptography, the poet Longfellow, the composer Mendelssohn, the Shroud of Turin, and Jesus, all of which he believes he found hiding in plain sight in the music.

Over the course of seven years of work, and in more than 100 detailed blog posts, Padgett identified about 40 other clues that support his theory, weaving a confounding web of musicological, literary, theological, and historical references.

There is another way to experience music, and that is Padgett’s way: to dissect it, to learn its grammar, and, ultimately, to borrow a phrase from the sequence of coded letters he discovered, to know it better. For Padgett, who is very religious, wrestling with Elgar’s work is akin to studying the Bible. It is reassurance that a grand, intelligent design exists. “For him, it’s a religious text,” his wife told me. “But he didn’t want to go on faith alone. He wanted solid proof.” “I’m an outsider, you know. I’m not one of these credentialed academics. I’m not published,” he said.

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Digging Through The Past to Understand the Present

Revisit this fascinating story from Smithsonian Magazine on what the discovery of a 3,500-year-old soldier’s tomb in southwestern Greece tells us about the Mycenaeans, the Minoans, and the roots of Western civilization — and what archaeology tells us about who we are as humans.

“There were days when 150 beads were coming out—gold, amethyst, carnelian,” says Davis. “There were days when there was one seal stone after another, with beautiful images. It was like, Oh my god, what will come next?!” Beyond the pure thrill of uncovering such exquisite items, the researchers knew that the complex finds represented an unprecedented opportunity to piece together this moment in history, promising insights into everything from religious iconography to local manufacturing techniques. The discovery of a golden cup, as lovely as the day it was made, proved an emotional moment. “How could you not be moved?” says Stocker. “It’s the passion of looking at a beautiful piece of art or listening to a piece of music. There’s a human element. If you forget that, it becomes an exercise in removing things from the ground.”

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