"Hole in Our Soul," Martha Bayles: Roll over, Schoenberg

Martha Bayles doesn't care much for the twelve-tone scale or 20th-century European composers (and she's not very fond of amplification either -- watch out, Leo Fender, you're next!). In the best tradition of American Bandstand, music's gotta have a beat or Martha's not dancin' to it.

While most readers of Hole In Our Soul (University of Chicago Press) would probably agree with Martha's basic premise that genuine art trumps artifice for authenticity, her argument that popular culture has been ruined by the artist's need to shock us is less secure. (Artists have been trying to surprise people since -- well, Martha herself traces it back to ancient Greece: cultured, classic-rocker Apollo and unruly, shock-rocker Dionysus).

Once her subjective, conservative-values discussion is opened, Bayles's book becomes a game of line-in the sand: what is genuine music, as opposed to the merely popular? Some artists neatly sidestep this issue by being simply great: Scott Joplin's syncopated rags were outrageous to some, and also became extremely popular. Still, great music (and art, too) finds an audience, regardless of how many people hooted during Stravinsky's "The Rite of Spring" in 1914.

Bayles continues to make her cultural point about the decline of American culture in forums from the Wall Street Journal to the New York Times, as well as her own online site Serious Popcorn. Over the years, though, her favorite targets have not changed, and her writing often takes on a reasoning all its own. In 2006, in reviewing the career of Miles Davis, she couldn't resist the following observations (in an article originally published in the Times) about the developments of music in the 1970s:

... inspired by Indian raga and other Eastern sources, composers like Philip Glass, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Mike Oldfield began in the 1960s to fashion a sound, all too familiar nowadays, in which a clear steady pulse is blended with repetitive, often tape-looped melodic-harmonic fragments. The aim, in Reich’s words, was to “facilitate closely detailed listening." But the result was nearly the opposite. Beginning with the use of Oldfield's Tubular Bells (1973) on the soundtrack of The Exorcist, minimalist-derived music became “aural wallpaper” for an increasingly image-driven culture.

In her books and articles Bayles's continuing dismissal of European culture and its effects on popular music reads like a misguided attack on dead white rock singers. Some of her conclusions about the influences of art, drugs, and music are an embarrassing stretch: say hello to Kurt Cobain, that Stockhausen-loving, European-influenced art-rocker who was bound to die by drug overdose because of his fixation with the poetry of French romantic Arthur Rimbaud.

A great deal of Martha's argument in Hole in Our Soul goes on like this, and a lot of conservative tsk-tsk comes through most of her connect-the-dots theorizing: once the Beatles ruin rock'n'roll with Sgt. Pepper in 1967, they open the gates for the misshapen, ugly form of "rock" music that followed, etc. etc. Really, her writing is pretty exhausting after a few pages, once the reader gets the drift of Bayles's augument. (Springsteen? He's outta here ... well, almost.) The Bayles beat goes on, for more than 300 pages.

Martha has her champions, mostly in conservative circles that see cultural disintegration in every new day and popular music as its herald. Sure enough, in online interviews, Bayles continues to bash at the deplorable state of pop, because new technology is making music ... well, too available:

... high tech is bringing all kinds of music to all kinds of people. This last situation, having everything at our fingertips, is part of what is meant by postmodernism. According to the academic experts, postmodernism puts everything on the same level - Monk, Mozart, the Monkees, the chanting monks. If this is true, then all music has lost its beauty and meaning. But it isn't true. Human nature is not mutating into some new, anti-musical form. Even in 2001, most people still seek in music the same things that human beings have always sought there: Not the formal complexity of high art, necessarily, but not ugly noise, either. Instead, people seek the elemental, the primal things: the motive power of dance, and the emotional power of song.

She's right about one thing: new technology makes everything available. But does that make everything equal? Nah. Postmodern forms -- one of Bayles's bogeymen -- may borrow from all sources, but it doesn't follow that music and art lose all their value. That's why most of us can say "I know what I like": the artist proposes, but the viewer, and the listener, disposes. The fault is not in the twelve-tone scale but in ourselves, to paraphrase Shakespeare, that original postmodernist who seems to have borrowed everything from plot to language on his way to originality.

Conservative theories like Bayles's always presume some golden era when things were more balanced, more "correct," but this balance never really existed. Popular culture is always a jumble of influences. (It does seem miraculous, though, when you hear a great song on the radio; no matter what your "pop" standard, from Gershwin to the Beatles to Beyonce, it makes every song around it sound like junk.) In the best oral tradition you can hope that Bob Dylan -- or in Martha's case, Robert Johnson -- is your next door neighbor and can pop in to sing you a song.

Most of us aren't that lucky to live on Mount Olympus. Agreed that some popular music can be art, and much music less so, but the business of popular music is sales. That makes everything beyond the song itself -- the recording of it, the marketing, the weekly sales chart -- the artificial, "popular" part.

Sartre and his Kafkaesque Nobel Prize moment, 1964

Over the years some have suggested that Nobel Prize awards (especially those for Peace) have been given for political or other ends, to cast light on civil inequities or the plight of political prisoners. Some have their own reasons for declining the awards of the Nobel Committee and find themselves in the awkward position of refusing the Committee's unwanted attentions.

The 59-year-old author Jean-Paul Sartre declined the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he was awarded on October 22, 1964, but not before writing to the group in Stockholm that he always refused official distinctions and declared that he did not want to be "institutionalized" by receiving literary awards.

After the award was announced, Sartre was interviewed by journalists outside the Paris flat of Simone de Beauvoir and told the press he rejected the Nobel Prize for fear that it would limit the impact of his writing. He also expressed regrets that circumstances had given his decision "the appearance of a scandal".

The circumstances turned out to be a bit more like Kafka than of his own invention, a bureaucratic slip-up on the part of the Nobel committee. A week before the award was to be announced, he sent a polite letter expressing his wish to be removed from the list of nominees. He also declared he would not accept the award if it were presented to him.

The letter was not read in time and Sartre was named the Nobel laureate in literature to the embarrassment of everyone involved. Sartre was compelled to further explain his position in a second letter which made his wishes clear. He wrote:

"This attitude is based on my conception of the writer's enterprise. A writer who adopts political, social, or literary positions must act only with the means that are his own—that is, the written word. All the honors he may receive expose his readers to a pressure I do not consider desirable. If I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre it is not the same thing as if I sign myself Jean-Paul Sartre, Nobel Prizewinner.

The writer who accepts an honor of this kind involves as well as himself the association or institution which has honored him. My sympathies for the Venezuelan revolutionists commit only myself, while if Jean-Paul Sartre the Nobel laureate champions the Venezuelan resistance, he also commits the entire Nobel Prize as an institution.

The writer must therefore refuse to let himself be transformed into an institution, even if this occurs under the most honorable circumstances, as in the present case."

Dizzy Gillespie: "To Be or Not ... to Bop" (1979)

Today is Dizzy Gillespie's birthday (1917-1993). The Gabriel with the bent horn and horn-rimmed glasses who started a musical revolution with Charlie Parker was born in South Carolina, staking a case for the Carolina Piedmont as the birthplace of bop: the one-and-only Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, NC eleven days earlier.

His own book, To Be or Not ... to Bop was published by Doubleday in 1979, a rollicking and roughhouse story of jazz at it was lived in the TOBA circuit: "Tough on Black Artists" was the name given to the management style that required three-to-five shows a day. John Birks Gillespie, with a growing reputation for eccentric dancing on the bandstand, became a stand-out. "Where's that dizzy cat?" the musicians (and fans) began to ask, and the nickname stuck.

The book is told in the self-effacing style of one who is present at the creation, and who enjoys the stories and camaraderie of life on the road, as well as off the record. There are also reminiscences by companions and players who shared stages with Gillespie, recalling the times with genuine fondness and not a little awe. Here's drummer Kenny Clarke, remembering the hot-house moments of the New York jazz scene as it developed in the 1940s and '50's around Diz and Charlie Parker:

"I used to follow Diz around to all the jam sessions and hear him blow against other trumpet players. He was young and he was blowing. Everybody was asking me, 'What is Dizzy playing?' I was just telling them to 'Listen....' We were with Teddy Hill's band together, Ella Fitzgerald, Claude Hopkins, so we've been barnstorming, early, you know.

I noticed something unique about Dizzy's playing, that's why I was hanging out with him. His approach to modern harmonies, but rhythms mostly. He could take care of all that harmony, but his rhythms interested me real profoundly, and I just had to find out about that gift he had hidden in him, the gift of rhythm. It wasn't only his trumpet playing, he was doing a lotta other things that some people didn't see, but I saw the rhythmic aspect of it. The way he played and the way he would hum time and things like that. I knew it was avant-garde, ahead of time, so I just fell in line with what was going on ....

The most important characteristic of this new style of playing was camaraderie, that was first because everybody, each musician, just loved the other one, just loved them so much they just exchanged ideas and would do everything together. That's one characteristic about it I liked very much. Another word for that is unity. That's right, and I think that era of jazz had more enemies than any phase of jazz.

It was sort of esoteric from the beginning. Only a few people understood what was going on. Everybody knew it was good, but they couldn't figure out what it was. And when somebody doesn't understand a thing, he has a tendency to dislike. But I mean the music has been so strong and was strong, and is strong now ...

Whew! Oh, yeah, we used to discuss it on the bandstand sometimes and write out little things. I would say, 'Hey, Diz, whaddayou think of this?', you know. I think when we left Teddy Hill, we definitely knew that was going to happen. We were pretty sure of it, and everybody worked toward the same goal. That's what made it happen."

(Photos of Dizzy Gillespie at a Washington, DC elementary school by Donna Wilcox, 1965. From the JazzWax website.)

Woody Guthrie meets Charles Olson, 1942: a letter by Pete Seeger

Charles Olson at Black Mountain College, 1950s

It may be true: the wonders of the information age are killing off the art of letter writing. If u cn rd ths, u txt 2 mch.

Undoubtedly this has meant the end of a certain form of communication. When was the last time a letter was written that didn't involve a calculated commercial pitch, at the current percentage rate, or an angry letter-to-the-editor fired off over a political "agenda" from someone who doesn't use (or trust) the internet? Imagine what the technological advance has done to the art of putting pen to paper.

Samuel Johnson (yes, I used the internet to look up this quote) wrote that the true character of men may be found in their letters. In the 1700s, letters -- no matter however ill-conceived or hastily-written -- could be intercepted over the course of delivery, and retrieved. Missives could be recalled, businesses saved, relationships salvaged: usually, calmer heads prevailed after last night's wine.

In the twenty-first century, the email response is instantaneous and mostly free (for the time being, as far as the politicians haven't yet legislated a fee), usually fired off at the height of the evening's outraged intoxication. At the same time, the ability to post an instant reaction to the world around us means that the considered response is in danger of disappearing: the momentary satisfaction of I'm furious! has replaced the thoughtful reply. We all don't trust each other, and there's no wonder why. Spontaneity breeds the zinger: Umm, no. Epic fail.

There was a time when things were different, though. In the early days of the internet -- 1988 to 1998, say -- there was a grand idea that "the word" might be freed from the bondage, and the price-scale, of the print-shop. The glories of free publication and a truly free press were charming to a class of writers who had previously been locked-out of publishing.

Exquisite Corpse was one such venture, and which now continues online. Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal were editors of The Corpse, based in New Orleans, and two volumes -- a generous helping -- of this first-generation net writing was published by Black Sparrow Press in 2000.


Those were the days. Some of the highlights: "Lives of the Poets," including Pete Seeger on Charles Olson (the Seeger letter follows below); Jan Kerouac on her father, Jack; John Kehoe on Charles Bukowski; Keith Abbott on Ted Berrigan; Edward Field on Alfred Chester; and (notoriously) Mark Spitzer on Ed Dorn. Fiction by Maxine Chernoff, Maggie Dubris, Barry Gifford, Eric Kraft, and twenty-three others. Travel notes (very loosely construed) by Hakim Bey, Andrei Codrescu, Pat Nolan, and Anne Waldman. Translations of Boris Vian by Julia Older, of Vladimir Pistalo by Charles Simic, of Attila Jozsef by John Batki, and of the Romanian poets of the 60's generation by several accomplished hands.

The internet seems to have been taken over by the immediate reply, the marketed and encouraged response, and the incensed consumer with a laptop: Marketing, marketing -- won't somebody think of the children! But there was a time when the web encouraged a thoughtful reply, as well as a bit of history in response. Here's Pete Seeger's reply to a Corpse article regarding Charles Olson, and Olson's part in helping Woody Guthrie compose Bound for Glory:

Woody Guthrie, 1943

I have been reading with interest the poetry newsletter, Exquisite Corpse, and came across the article on Charles Olson. I never got around to reading his poetry, but you might be interested to know that I did know him. It was a little bit over 50 years ago. I briefly had a job as a cook in Boston when I was a student, and the man I was cooking for invited Olson and another Harvard instructor around to supper; and I made so bold as to enter into the conversation and ended up getting fired a week later. But I stayed briefly in touch with Olson for a few months before I left college, and then lo and behold, a full four years later, I'm walking down Eighth Street in Greenwich Village, and I run into this huge tall guy who, of all things, remembers and recognizes me. "What are you doing these days?" he says.

"I'm living around the corner with some other guys, and we make a living singing songs, calling ourselves The Almanac Singers. Why don't you have supper with us?"

So Olson comes to supper and is completely charmed by Woody Guthrie and ends up asking Woody to write an article for a little magazine he is editing called Common Ground. The article was a beautiful description of folk music by one of the folks, "Ear Music," and started off with Woody explaining that by this term, he does not mean you pluck a guitar with your ear.

Next thing, Angus Cameron, one of the editors at Little, Brown Publishers sees the article and writes a letter to Woody asking him if he'd like to try writing a book. And Woody says, "Sure I'd like to try." And during the next year he's pounding out page after page rapid-fire, and in 1943, a little more than a year later, the book, Bound For Glory, is selling medium-well. At any rate, you might be interested that that's how Charles Olson helped to get Woody into being a published author.

On October 16, Pete Seeger, now 91, joined Patti Smith and others to perform at a benefit for ALBA, the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives, remembering Americans who fought in the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

The Dalai Lama at Emory University, Atlanta: a webcast on creativity

His Holiness the Dalai Lama is currently visiting Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. Complete event and live webcast information at http://dalailama.emory.edu/.

His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama, a Presidential Distinguished Professor at Emory University, began a three-day visit to the university Oct. 17. At a press conference on Sunday, Emory President James W. Wagner presented the Dalai Lama with four new English/Tibetan science textbooks.

The presentation is the latest development in the Robert A. Paul Emory-Tibet Science Initiative. ETSI brings together the best of Western science and Tibetan Buddhist intellectual traditions to create new knowledge for the benefit of humanity. Emory faculty work with Tibetan Buddhist scholars to create a science curriculum for Tibetan monastics. Here's more information about Tuesday's webcast scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. ET


THE CREATIVE JOURNEY:
Artists in Conversation with the Dalai Lama about Spirituality and Creativity

How do the arts help us to express, or indeed to uncover, our spiritual yearnings and questions or certainties? What do the artist and the spiritual master have to teach each other from their respective disciplines? What is the role of tradition (or, conversely, iconoclasm) in maintaining or renewing art and spiritual life? Is the human being innately spiritual, innately artistic?

Internationally known humanitarian and award-winning actor Richard Gere will join Pulitzer Prize-winning author Alice Walker for "The Creative Journey: Artists in Conversation with the Dalai Lama on Spirituality and Creativity" at Emory University on Oct. 19. The event is part of His Holiness the XIV Dalai Lama's return visit to the Emory campus in his capacity as Presidential Distinguished Professor.

For more information: http://dalailama.emory.edu/2010/index.html

Paul Bowles at 100: "Spells are being cast, poison is running its course"

Last night I awoke and opened my eyes. There was no moon; it was still dark, but the light of a star was shining into my face through the open window, from a point high above the Arabian Sea. I sat up, and gazed at it. The light it cast seemed as bright as the moon in northern countries; coming in through the window, it made its rectangle on the opposite wall, broken by the shadow of my silhouetted head...There were no other stars visible in that part of the sky; this one blinded them all.

(from "Notes Mailed at Nagercoil," 1952)

This year is the centennial of the birth of Paul Bowles, who delighted in confounding expectations and wrote extensively about cultural dislocation and its consequences in a series of novels, most famously in The Sheltering Sky (1949). This stance evolved quickly as Bowles travelled the world and found a home in the myth and ritual of the desert cultures of the Sahara. His collection of travel pieces dating from 1950-1963, Their Heads Are Green and Their Hands Are Blue, reveals a growing love of solitude and the unfamiliar road in a time when American influence began to dominate the post-war world. Seeking refuge from growing American conformity at home, Tangier, Morocco had become Bowles's permanent address in 1947.

The subtitle of the book -- Scenes from the Non-Christian World -- reflects Bowles's attraction to cultures and locales that, to Westerners, seemed exotic and bewildering. It was, of course, this otherness that attracted Bowles in the first place, as well as the possibility that anything could happen there. Tangier's position as an international free port encouraged its mix of cultures and languages (although French was universally spoken) and the resulting openness towards the habits of its residents and visitors made Tangier a "dream city," as he described in his 1972 memoir, Without Stopping.

Tangier made an ideal jumping-off point for Bowles, who visited Sri Lanka (Ceylon) in 1950, Cape Coromin, India in 1952, Istanbul, Turkey in 1953, as well as frequent trips into Morocco, where he documented and recorded its music and musicians. His travel writing can be at once witty and withering, and with a gimlet eye for detail:

The first time I ever saw India I entered it through Dhanushkodi. An analagous procedure in America would be for a foreigner to get his first glimpse of the United States by crossing the Mexican border illegally and coming out to a remote Arizona village. It was god-forsaken, uncomfortable, and a little frightening. Since then I have landed as a bonafide visitor should, in the impressively large and unbeautiful metropolis of Bombay ... however, I've seen a lot of people and places, and at least I have a somewhat more detailed and precise idea of my ignorance than I did in the beginning.

Bowles, 1970 (film image by Gary Conklin)

Bowles obviously relished his role as the cultural outsider; he enjoyed writing about drugs, sex, and traditions the West found taboo. The people he describes are individuals, sketched boldly and without reserve. A trip to Ketama, "the kif center of all North Africa," becomes a chance to provide an extensive description of Morocco's drug culture. His willingness to describe the whole of his experience -- from an unexpected swarm of flies, to the unrelenting sun, to the cool desert night and the noisy neighbors in an overcrowded hotel -- is what makes Bowles's writing so all-inclusive.

As Edmund White's introduction to this collection makes plain, the attention to detail in Bowles's writing "creates individuals, not types," and although he often trades in stereotypes for his central, Western characters, "these individuals do not always conform to his expectations." His travel writing was similarly unique, providing a novel-like richness of detail and experience that extended to the flora and fauna of Sri Lanka, Morocco, and elsewhere.

This included Bowles's experience with parrots while traveling in Mexico and Central America. His essay, "All Parrots Speak," is a delight, and an education. After acquiring a first parrot in Costa Rica, Bowles's Mexican journey becomes a succession of parrots (Amazons, African greys, cotorros), macaws and even parakeets with names fashioned by homonym, habit, or disposition: Buduple, Loplop, Cotorrito, Babarhio, Hitler.

I think my susceptibility to parrots may have been partly determined by a story I heard as a child. One of the collection of parrots from the New World presented to King Ferdinand by Columbus escaped from the palace into the forest. A peasant saw it, and never having encountered such a bird before, picked up a stone to hit it, so he could have its brilliant feathers as a trophy. As he was taking aim, the parrot cocked his head and cried, "Ay, Dios!" Horrified, the man dropped the stone, prostrated himself, and said, "A thousand pardons, Señora! I thought you were a green bird."

Sahara film image (1970) by Gary Conklin

"Each time I go to a place I have not seen before," Bowles writes in his foreword, "I hope it will be as different as possible from the places I already know." Bowles considered his first visit to Tangier (at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein) nothing more than "a rest, a lark, a one-summer stand;" the writer Edmund White suggests that he was away from America so long that this "consummate loner" became a shadow figure in his home country.

Not that he missed America much -- as White says, he was strongly against the "homogenizing force" of Western civilization -- but he realized other forces could threaten the desert landscape as much as any American influence. His essay "Baptism of Solitude" ends with this sad note during the Algerian War, 1954-1962: "The Sahara is not on display at the present time."

Mark Twain, from a great height, gets the very last laugh on the Gilded Age

Dinner held for Clemens, December 1900 (photo courtesy Twainquotes.com)

The Autobiography of Mark Twain receives the deluxe treatment this fall: the first volume of the three-volume, unexpurgated work of half-a-million words will be published by the University of California Press on November 15. Over the years the Autobiography has been issued in many edited forms. This is the first time the full work will be available as Twain dictated it in the last years of his life.

Not that there's still any lack of controversy with Mr. Clemens safely at rest in Elmira, New York. Vain Twain is a contemporary site that rips the veil off of Twain's still-scandalous religious views, and is worth a browse: The Contradictory Anti-Christian Attacks of the Narcissist and Freemason, Mark Twain. Here's a photo, courtesy of Vain Twain with caption, of "the ingrate" Mr. Twain striking sparks with the "anti-social narcissist," Nikola Tesla.

"The ingrate Mark Twain, enjoying the incredible technology that God allowed Tesla, an anti-social narcissist, to create." (photo and caption courtesy Vain Twain)

Clemens was a writer as concerned with crafting his legacy as any novel he ever wrote, and his instructions to publish the full Autobiography one hundred years after his death indicates he certainly meant to have the very last laugh on the Gilded Age. Here is a poem featured last spring on WSKG-FM's Off the Page program website that imagines the author traveling the vast reaches of the Universe -- and sending back a telegram about conditions there.

News item (from a great height, April 21, 2010)

M Bromberg

After he was described in the Atlantic Monthly as "Mark Twain, originally of Missouri, but then of Hartford, and now ultimately of the solar system, not to say the universe ... " he took pleasure in thinking of his name floating somewhere among distant planets.

Michael Shelden, Mark Twain: Man in White (2010)

Your correspondent here reports

that Sam Clemens has laid aside his pen.

Having once arrived on Mr. Halley's comet,

the author has it by the tail again.

His surprise at this astounding feat

can not be overstated in the least;

he was quite prepared to make the journey --

but not so much deceased.

Mr. Clemens tells us he is luckily unafraid of heights,

and daily enjoys one of St. Peter's good cigars.

Until some wires can be arranged, he sends regrets

that telegrams will be less frequent from these stars.

The author is off in search of a dark saloon. Until then, I remain

your reporter and most far-flung correspondent, Twain.