Great moments in reparté (a continuing series)

Great moments in Yohalemesque reperté and riposte, first in an ongoing (we should be so lucky) series:

"Were you a rocker?"
"No, I was more of a Récamier chaise-longue."

"Why would I want to join a group that would accept me as a member?"
"Thank you, Groucho Marx."
"We're in a chat room. Try communicating on-line in the style of Harpo Marx."

"What are you doing after Pride?"
"Well, lust is traditional, but this year I think I'm going for gluttony and sloth."

The Past is a Foreign Country

"The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there" - L.P. Hartley

At a family brunch today, given by my cousins Carl and Bonnie Seligson, my uncle Mark Yohalem told me a story about Joe Diamond. Around 1910, when he was courting Jennie Yohalem (a cousin of my grandfather's), the proud but one-eyed beauty of her family, Joe was so overwhelmed with passion in anticipation that whenever he knew he was going to call on her, he would go to a bordello first so as to arrive in a calm state. Her parents found out about this (he probably told them), and they thought it a splendid sign of his prudence and foresight, exactly the qualities they wanted in a son-in-law.

Since it was Mark that told me this, it might actually be true.

Fashion statement - Czech it out

I don't do fashion. Not interesting. I go to stores with sales, but my favorite clothes seem to be discards left in the laundry room. I can't find shoes that fit anyway. I used to wear black, but in SoHo everyone wears black, to prove they're nonconformists, and I'm rather fond of colors, so I am the only conformist in SoHo.

But I have one whimsy: soccer scarves. They are colorful, they are inexpensive, you can find them anyplace on earth except in the U.S. I buy them whenever I travel outside the U.S. and I wear them according to the nationality of the opera I am going to hear, or the restaurant I am going to eat at, or whatever doesn't clash with my jacket. (Mario, in Herzegovina, tells me there's a store where I can get them all. Unfortunately, it's in China, near the factory where they are all made.) Anyway, they're great for inspiring conversations in waiters and tourists who think I am a fan (or double-dyed enemy) of their home team, and I get jolly conversations out of it, which are among my great soul-soothers in any case.

Today I was wearing - for no good reason but the colors are pretty: blue, red, yellow - the Prague scarf. I was dizzy from copy editing in the Vandam Diner (and having a brainstorm I wanted to run home and write down for my novella), and I did not know what to make of the three big bruisers staring at me and saying, "Porto?" Obviously they had mistaken me for someone else (who else might I logically be?), so I hurried around the corner and there were four more guys - big bruisers in similar colors and caps - "Czech" prominently ran a (checkered) lapel - who stared and grinned at me: "Porto?" they said. By this time I looked down and found I was indeed wearing the Czech national scarf (I can't be sure until I look), and then I grinned self-consciously (for having led them on) and then I hurried up the block - not quite fast enough to miss three more great big footballer types - the team? or just fans? is there a game on? where do soccer teams play in New York? I had no idea they even bothered. I thought they just sort of hung out in bars with 24-hour cable hookups to watch the games in Ankara and Sydney and Valparaiso. I don't even know the proper drink for such excursions. ("Beer," Nora advises - she was in Berlin, doing grad work on Gluck, while the Cup was in contention, and had a blast.)

You will be surprised to hear I made it home without a soccer player in tow. It does make me sigh - slightly.

Poetry footnote

In Seattle I knew a guy - Paul? - quite extraordinarily handsome - mercifully I was not attracted to him except as one is, casually, to anything beautiful - he had a lover and was delighted NOT to be sexually interested in anyone else; he was laying out the Seattle Gay News where I wrote and edited, and later he moved on to The Weekly (where I did some reviews). He'd moved to Seattle (with his lover) from Colorado, and told me that when he was in college two professors had been madly in love with him (perfectly believable) and had vied for his favors by writing poems to his beauty, each one topping the other. I said, "What a compliment! Poems!" His response was to stick a finger in his mouth - the whole notion seemed to him silly to tedium if not nausea. His lover was neither of those professors, some kind of forestry service scientist.
Typical, eh? Did the Dark Lady even CARE what Big Bill the Bard was saying?

(Well, in college, a woman wrote me a couple of sonnets, and I was friendly, and I think I kept them, but ... )

I don't often write poems, and they become kind of over-literary, historical/artistic, Amy Clampitt-like when I do. I loved Clampitt - she could do historical and artistic references like nobody - I used to feel she'd written them for me! And we'd never met.

One of the poems I wrote when I was coming out (LOTS of poems THEN!) compared the guy I had a crush on to Byzantine emperors on coins - it was about counterfeit love, y'see - "perhaps the Caesar I adore be heretic/ or the symbol on the obverse no salvation" - that should be "reverse" technically, but the scansion demanded "obverse" and I never could bear to change it - I left him a copy with my phone number and he never responded. Maybe he was a closet numismatist ...

Calendar

I chose the wrong calendar this year.

I'm not hard to please - the calendar should be colorful, and different from the one last year, and have big white squares with the numbers in them (plus, ideally, the phases of the Moon and the major holidays of several religions - I can remember the Pagan ones, but movable feasts are a great nuisance). I like to alternate between scenery one year and art the next, and I have a fondness for leaving the choice up to chance.

I wanted to find a calendar in Turkey, with scenes of Istanbul or of the rest of that inexhaustibly scenic nation, but they have not got the hang of great big white boxes around their numbers there, and a calendar is not useful to me otherwise - I need to be able to write in my appointments, my opera and theater dates, and the due dates of work projects or there is hardly a point in having one at all. The only calendars I saw in Turkey were quite small, with no space in the number boxes.

So, as last year's calendar was European castles (too many Scots and Irish if you ask me; not nearly enough East European or Mediterranean), this year was set for art. I went to a bookstore sometime in December, and none of the calendars I saw there pleased me: the scenery was predictable (I prefer mountains to tenements) and the artists a bit ho-hum - does Rothko really elucidate times of year? Does Braque? So I settled on a calendar of Victorian illustrators. Each page shows three or four herbaceous borders or wallpaper samples or fabric designs by a different Victorian draughtsman. (Or -woman.) Big boxes, small numbers, phases of the moon.

The trouble (as I put up page four, April - Kwiecien if you are Polish!) is that while the colors are different, and the patterns, and the arrangements have been chosen to be different, there is far too much sameness here - one colorful pattern of gilded leaves followed by another - one set of bells or pears after another - one meandering ribbon symmetrically balanced by another - and the riot of color is too much of a muchness. After a while you can't tell them apart. The year does not pass or change; it's always the same damn thing. This is too much like life - it's not at all what I want in the metaphor for passing life that a calendar should be.

Otherwise I am in a very cheerful place after a depressed winter - all of which, I think, must be credited to creativity, the juices humming, the sparks flying, or vice versa. For a week or more, now, at least since my second performance of Tristan und Isolde - last Tuesday, March 25, Lady Day, Frodo-Destroys-the-Ring-in- Mount-Doom Day - I have been writing something like 5000 words each day of a novella, awaking each day with ideas for another point in the story that needs to be enhanced, having wild, wonderful ideas for new events and new characters, writing my very first battle scene (what a delight that was! and I've always been terrified of the prospect), jokes and sadnesses (it's very funny and very sad), and every day just - going at it - and at the slightest sign of slack, playing some version of Tristan - bless you, youtube! - and that cranks the motor again, and off I go. I have hopes of first draft completion this week (but I've told myself that before). My mantra is: Finish It. We can worry about what works or doesn't work or who the bloody hell would ever want to read it later - just Finish It.

Maybe I'll finish it.

Except I just got assigned five jobs by St. Martin's and HarperCollins and Hyperion and Palgrave, and two of them are Rush. (Who needs money? I need to WRITE.)

Today I am starting at 46,000 words and aiming for 51,000. The dentist intrudes. But I'm awake early and there's no opera tonight.

The Holy Grail - What was it?

On a newsgroup, someone brought up the question of Wagner's interpretation of Christianity, a thing that much vexes Wagnerians because ... frankly ... it seems so smarmy ... and unchristian ... and because it's hard to enjoy Parsifal, his last drama, without dealing with it. (I love the opera myself.)

The guy who brought it up asked if it was true Wagner thought Christianity was NOT derived from Judaism at all -- I knew he was part of a very large group of European Christians in the late 19th and early 20th centuries who wished to believe this, but was unaware of their justifications for it. (I've seen Otter Zell's, which are quite bad enough, and have to do with Christ dying for our sins -- hardly a Jewish doctrine, now, is it?)

To this someone who knew a great deal more than I do on the matter responded by quoting letters from Wagner to Liszt that averred that Christianity was really an outgrowth of Buddhism, bypassing all Jewish connection (hard to fit the life of Jesus into that time line but ... whatever), and that the basic message of early Christianity (per Wagner) was renunciation of unnecessary experience (hard to fit that into Wagner's lifestyle ... but whatever) and ending the cycle of reincarnation. That certainly fits with Parsifal's heroine, Kundry, who besides being a figure from the medieval Parzival epic, is in the opera the Wandering Jewess, a reincarnation of Herodias, who in this version was cursed by laughing at Jesus as he carried the cross down the Via Dolorosa.

So I wondered if you had heard anything in any of your classes about the "influence" of Buddhist thought on early Christianity, through some spurious link (trade links undoubtedly existed) between the Middle East and India, and a possible visit of Jesus to India (en route from Glastonbury no doubt)?

Meanwhile, back at the Kaaba, still another mystic chimed in on the thread with word that the Holy Grail -- and I'd always heard that this was originally (paganly) a wish-granting Stone rather than an all-sustaining Chalice (outgrowth, that latter, of the Celtic mythic cauldron of the Dagda or whosever it was -- Lugh? Cerridwyn?) -- was originally a magical ithyphallic stone dropped from heaven upon the place beneath, the sort of thing (meteoric iron?) often worshipped by oriental peoples, notably the Heliogabalus stone in Aramaea and, of course, the Kaaba in Mecca (last survivor of these cults). Somehow the cultic, ethereally-derived sanctity of these stones got tied in with the Stone of Scone and the visit to Britain (with or without chalice) of Joseph of Arimathea. (Or his visit to the Priory of Sion, for that matter -- backdated.)

Is there a traceable line here, from cult A to cult B to cult C to the medieval epics (were they influenced by talk of the Kaaba? Were the Templars during their sojourn on the Mount? Were the crusaders who visited Spain and might there have been introduced to Islamic mysticism?) to Wagner's great game of symbolic musical chairs?

In Istanbul last October (I always re-set to Istanbul nowadays), in a little mosque that had once been a sixth-century Byzantine church (the oldest in town), the sexton (if that is the word, and it's not) proudly showed me little squares of black stone inset in the mihrab and above the portal: cut from the Kaaba in Mecca! he said. The only mosque in Istanbul with stone from the Kaaba! Fortunately the place had other charms. But a link -- a palpable link.

Ideas?

More Moon Magick

Last night, after attending Purcell's (or, rather, Mark Morris's) King Arthur at the City Opera (Purcell and the singers and dancers got applause; Morris got some boos; radiant, he shanti'd to us as usual, and gave the finger to the balconies - shame and abashment are not to be found in his gestural vocabulary), I sneaked over to the Met for Act III of Lucia di Lammermoor.

I'd seen the controversial Mary Zimmerman production and the same cast except for the tenor three times last fall, liking it less each time, feeling the singers were out of their depth and the director out of her proper employment - she seems neither to understand opera nor to respect it, nor to want to understand it better - and not wild about the sets either. But my pal Suzanne was in town from Wisconsin, determined to get into Lucia, so that she'd even bought herself a $15 standing room upstairs. I told her not to be silly; we strolled the plaza before the performance and found her a nice Dress Circle seat for sale instead (dodging the scalpers, out in force), from a group of South African tourists one of whose group was ill. Suzanne went to Lucia, I went to Arthur with friend Tom, and she gave me the standing room to do as I wished with.

So the moment Arthur was done, I ran over to the Met, got a fistful of Grand Tier tickets from departing suburbanites, and whisked Suzanne to that lower level, bumping into Dan Foley of the Ottocento Grand Opera (Mercadante e Pacini per sempre!) and Gabriel, who congratulated me on my published letters in the Times and The New Yorker. (In the old days, he would have congratulated me on my essays in the Met program, but the Gelb folks have decided I am too esoteric for the Met - moi! - and these no longer appear.) Suzanne had saved me half a brownie.

She didn't care for the production, "but I wanted to see your Polish prince as Enrico. He looks great!" Yes, well, Kwiecien always does that. But I wish he would sing, not scream. "You're right," she said. "When he doesn't scream, the voice is caramel. You could just melt into it." "Yes, he's utterly seductive - when he doesn't scream. Catch him in Mozart - he doesn't scream in Mozart." I can't decide whether to go stay with Suzanne later this month to catch the Mariusz's Onegin in Chicago. "Oh go ahead," she said. "I'll lend you some frequent flyer miles."

We nestled in Row C center and the curtain rose. Act III of this production, you may recall, is a grand curving staircase to a low balcony and, in the final scene, a huge rusticated arch beside a graveyard. The backdrop for the whole act is a huge ominously blue night sky with a cratered moon the size of forty thousand pizzas filling most of it. "I love the backdrop," I told Suzanne, "but don't ask me what it has to do with the story." She considered. "It's the moon - isn't that the woman's ruling planet? And it's supposed to drive people mad?" "That's very good - thank you!" said I.

Nothing like fresh eyes on confusion to straighten matters out. Onstage (after some mild hysteria between Kwiecien and Filianoti and some decent singing with the beginnings of an old man's wobble from Relyea, who is too young for such a trait, Dessay, having gone mad on her wedding night and stabbed her husband 29 times, came dribbling down the stairs dabbled in scarlet and sang a much stronger mad scene than she had last fall. I think she has got the measure of the house, perhaps. Still not Sutherland, still an unwieldy trill, but impressive. "I saw her do it in Chicago two years ago," Suzanne said. "That was a lovely production. But she's marvelous tonight." So was Filianoti in the tomb scene. I shut my eyes when (the director's idea) the ghost returned so I could focus just on the singing. It shouldn't be necessary to do that at an opera, but these concept directors make me crazy that way.

The Moon for Madness, especially in overwrought, sexually abused women. Very good.

"And I love this opera," whispered Suzanne as we departed. (So do I.) "Of course we have to see it again tomorrow." That was a joke. Tonight we're going to Tristan und Isolde, which isn't quite the same story, though it shares the Celtic element and the darkness and the double deaths.