Kit Stolz

The Grand Canyon of the Colorado: l901

From Our National Parks, published in 1901:

No matter how far you have wandered hitherto, or how many famous gorges and valleys you have seen, this one, the Grand Cañon of the Colorado, will seem as novel to you, as unearthly in the color and grandeur and quantity of its architecture, as if you had found it after death, on some other star; so incomparably lovely and grand and supreme is it above all the other cañons in our fire-moulded, earthquake-shaken, rain-washed, wave-washed, river and glacier sculptured world. It is about six thousand feet deep where you first see it, and from rim to rim ten to fifteen miles wide. Instead of being dependent for interest upon waterfalls, depth, wall sculpture, and beauty of parklike floor, like most other great cañons, it has not waterfalls in sight, and no appreciable floor spaces. The big river has just room enough to flow and roar obscurely, here and there groping its way as best it can, like a weary, murmuring, overladen traveler trying to escape from the tremendous, bewildering labyrinthic abyss, while its roar serves only to deepen the silence.

I wonder — and so, no doubt, would John Muir — if that silence remains.

Dawn Upshaw takes a bullet for Ojai Music Fest

That's what it looks like in this picture, from a preview last Friday from NPR:

The featured music at the Ojai Music festival this year, Winds of Destiny, came from American composer George Crumb, which NPR helpfully allows us to hear next to the preview.

It's stunning — in a festival sort of way. Mark Swed, of the LA Times, described it admiringly:

Crumb summons up the deafening silence of the battlefield at night, conjures the ghosts of the dead and brandishes the nightmares of the living. In the process he also manages percussion writing of extravagant beauty, if arresting strangeness.

Yes. You can hear it yourself. It's festival music — harsh, austere, impressive. And not the sort of thing one wants or needs to hear often, despite the predictably great singing of Dawn Upshaw. Once is probably enough for nearly anyone for Winds of Destiny. Though with its serious themes and Peter Sellars stage antics — see above — it's as attractive to the press as honey to wasps.

By contrast a couple of days later, Dawn Upshaw sang another original piece for the festival, a setting of Ted Kooser's Winter Morning Walks by the new star Maria Schneider, that was adored by the crowd in Ojai. More than one person I spoke to wondered when a recorded version might become available.

A couple of years ago Upshaw had a bout with breast cancer. She's fine now. A few years before, the former poet laureate Ted Kooser also had a bout with cancer. He survived, too, but to try and maintain his strength found himself taking walks just before dawn. A poet friend, Jim Harrison, convinced him to write down his morning walk in a haiku, and send it off on postcard.

The result is all that Crumb's work strains to be, but without the laboring. Yet Swed admitted he didn't exactly like it, despite its undeniable emotionality, and the collaborative skill that went into it:

The texts are flickering glimpses of nature on pre-dawn walks taken while the poet was undergoing chemotherapy. Upshaw’s depth of feeling and Schneider’s gift for lyricism helped chip away at one listener’s mawkish defense mechanisms.

But that's an incorrect use of the word mawkish, isn't it? One might think the music was "sickly, sentimental" (even if it's not). But certainly its rejection – one's reaction to it — isn't mawkish.

It's a confusion of an action with an adjective.

Strange that a critic as experienced as Swed should make such an elementary mistake.

No matter. For the local paper, Karen Lindell not only previewed the performance, and gathered some great quotes from composer Maria Schneider, she even included one of Kooser's achingly real poems.

Perfectly still this solstice morning,
in bone-cracking cold. Nothing moving,
or so one might think, but as I walk the road,
the wind held in the heart of every tree
flows to the end of each twig and forms a bud.

Good to see a newspaper writer dare to admire poetry so unabashedly.

Tennessee Williams: The literary factory

In l937, when Tennessee Williams was twenty-six and just beginning to write plays as well as poems and stories, he and a friend named Clark Mills, who grew up to be a professor of French and poetry, set up what they called a "literary factory" in the basement of Mills' parents' home in St Louis. They would retire to their sanctuary and pound away at their typewriters.

Mills later described Williams' unique method of writing:

"I could never imagine anyone writing as he did. He would do, say, a half page or two pages, and it was fast — he was fast on the typewriter — he would be operating as if blindly. He was never sure if he knew where he was going, but when he got there — when he finished that passage and it might not be right — he'd toss it aside and start all over again. While he would do the whole business over, it would go in a different direction. It was if he was throwing dice — as if he was working toward a combination of some kind of result and he wouldn't have any idea what the result might be but he would recognize it when he got there. You know, usually one sits down to write and writes page one, two, three, four, and so on — but he would write and rewrite and even in the middle of a passage, he'd start over again and slant it in another way."

Because Williams was at the time writing poetry as well as plays, Mills had a chance to compare them.

I think he has more poetry in his plays than in his poetry. And, in fact, I would say there is a quality that I think is unique to him. It has to do with the flow of his language and dialogue: It has some kind of of a poetic quality to it. I don't know of any other American playwright, living or dead, who has it. That quality was present even in the early days when he would come to my house and write, banging out page after page and throwing them on the floor. I'd pick up and read what he'd discarded, and there still would be his magic quality to the dialogue — it wasn't the language or the words or the sentences or the way they were put together; it was the "sound" of the words that came through somehow. He seemed to "hear" the voice as much as he heard the words. And I think when you hear a voice like that, you're in the realm of poetry."

[from Tom: The Unknown Tennessee Williams, by Lyle Leverich, Crown Publishers, New York, N.Y. l995, 644 pages, pp206-207]

Williams did write some good poems — at an early age, one was accepted by America's best journal of verse, Poetry, an astonishing feat for a then unknown writer — but surely Mills had it right.

Gary Snyder: Still startling after all these years

Gary Snyder appeared last week at the Central Library in Los Angeles, as part of a tribute to his late friend Lew Welch. Snyder was in top form, about as focused and hard-hitting and charming as any man standing at a lectern could hope to be. We all should be so smart at eighty. Or fifty. Or twenty.

Here's one little anecdote from his Q & A. Reminiscing about his youth, he said:

Back in l947, when I was seventeen years old, [unclear] I got my seaman's papers to join the Merchant Marine, and on the wall of the Marine [something] and Steward's Union in l947 it said:

No Red Baiting — No Race Baiting — No Queer Baiting

And it said $100 for the first offense. Second offense, you're out of the union.

How do you like that?

Murmurs of amazement from the crowd.

Freedom is just another word for not being verbally abused.

Climate change and politicians: the Weiner edition

Somebody found a way to put this week's news together with climate change.

Not easy! Thanks, Jen Sorenson.

Weird CA weather linked to Arctic Oscillation, global warming

Forecaster extraordinaire Bill Patzert makes the connection, in a story in the Sac Bee:

This year, the blame [for the weird weather in California] falls on a complex interaction between La Niña and another phenomenon called a negative Arctic oscillation, Patzert and others said.

La Niña is marked by a cooling of equatorial waters in the Pacific – the opposite of El Niño. In the past, this pattern means an equal chance of wet or dry weather.

What made this year so wet was the negative Arctic oscillation.

Typical conditions make the Arctic colder than the mid-latitudes, which include the United States and Europe. This is a positive oscillation.

Negative conditions flip this around, making the Arctic warmer than usual and pushing cold air and a vigorous jet stream down into the United States and Europe.

The story seems stuffed into a small newspaper space, and the causation is hard to follow, but it's still compelling reading. Rain and snow in NorCal in June! Coldness in Socal! Plus tornadoes. What th– ?

Financial analyst: “Pack up and move to the virtual world”

A highly regarded financial analyst tells us not to worry about rising commodity prices, because the developing world is moving away from products made of the real world. Rick Bookstaber writes:

Given our evolved interests a few decades hence, most of us will be spending a fraction of our income on consumption. There just won't be a lot that we will demand that requires nonrenewable resources. What we will demand will be in the way of electronic products, which will only consume a few ounces of such commodities. We will basically eat, sleep, work and then veg out. Give us food, plumbing, heat and our two-hundred dollar experience machine games, and we will be happy as a clam.

People who are staring at a tsunami of demand for commodities from the developing world and predicting a doomsday of $400 oil and $4000 gold are missing the longer-term retreating tide of demand as citizens of the developed world actually demand decreasing amounts of energy, large goods, and heavy infrastructure. We won't be packing up and moving to Mars, as the science fiction solutions to resource depletion propose. We will pack up and move into the virtual world.

He says this like it's a good thing.

Sounds kind of like the devolved humans in Wall-E, doesn't it?

NBA stats guys pick Miami, but blew it on Dallas/Lakers

Here's an odd fact to mull going into the good-looking NBA Finals war between Dallas and Miami: Not one NBA statistician polled by ESPN picked Dallas to win this bout.

Henry Abbott explains:

The TrueHoop Stat Geek Smackdown features eight participants.

Two pick the Mavericks to win the 2011 NBA Finals — the other six pick the Heat.

But know how many of those quant analysts expect the Mavericks to win?

Zero. Nada. Nilch. Not even one.

(A couple of the analysts choose against Miami to be contrary, despite their statistical analysis.)

But! Dig a little deeper, and you discover that again, not one of these same wizards picked Dallas to beat the Lakers. And Dallas swept the Lakers!

So what do these alleged geniuses know?

Another NBA analyst, Dave Zirin, looks into the future for The New Yorker, and predicts that if Dallas can't stop Miami, the Heat will dominate the league for years to come, and change everything:

Now the Mavs are the last line of defense against the Heat taking a beautiful team game and possibly owning it for years to come. If the Mavs can’t do it, and if Dirk and Jason Kidd lose what might be their last great chance to win a title, then other teams will mimic the Heat: mortgaging complete teams to stockpile stars. We will have a league where a handful of Ayn Rand super-squads will consume all the oxygen, a dispiriting sporting version of the Talented Tenth model of uplift. Teams that are greater than the sum of their parts will be as quaint as shooting toward a peach basket or pro hoops in Seattle.

I picked the Mavs to win it all before the N.B.A. season began. My rooting interests are with their team. But ball don’t lie. The wing is king. The Heat in six.

I'm unconvinced. I've heard those dynasty predictions before. Which is maybe why I seem to be the one American outside of Florida rooting for Miami.

Even superstars can play the team game. That's Miami's message, I think.

As men become weaker, movie heroes get stronger

That's according to a Harvard psychologist quoted in yesterday's Los Angeles Times.

“As men have lost more economic power, more social power, they’ve wanted to look more pumped up,” [Emily] Fox-Kales said, pointing to the recent recession that disproportionately hit male-dominated jobs like construction and manufacturing. “Muscles have become an accessory, like pickup trucks.”

The piece in the newspaper is mostly fluff, focusing on the latest stars and their stupendous biceps, but it does include Fox-Kales interesting paradox, and a hilariously straight-faced graphic.

"A bit more brawny," indeed.

The piece also throws in some history, which helps make the point:

This isn’t the first time social forces have coincided with changing movie star aesthetics — the preponderance of bodybuilder action heroes such as Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone in the 1980s, for instance, came just as a generation of American women were marching off to work in record numbers.

Gotta love the remote in the American male's hand. Closest thing to a gun for a couch potato.

Beached white males: the Great Recession comes home

At a graduation ceremony, I visited with middle-aged men of my acquaintance, and found many of them — maybe even a majority — living like me without steady work. When I talked about it a little, they readily admitted they were hurting. Taking construction jobs for a $100 under the table, despite having careers in the media, for instance. A journalist friend pointed me to this Newsweek cover story on the phenomenon, which does bring out some new details, and makes its case powerfully:

…while economists don’t have fine-grain data on the number of these [middle-aged] men who are jobless—many, being men, would rather not admit to it—by all indications this hitherto privileged demo isn’t just on its knees, it’s flat on its face. Maybe permanently. Once college-educated workers hit 45, notes a post on the professional-finance blog Calculated Risk, “if they lose their job, they are toast.”

The chart below is based on a survey of 250 such "beached white males" around the country.