Thursday, December 31, 2020

No Laughing Matter

Another undergraduate opus, this one from May, 1968. It was submitted to a class on Victorian theater taught by the late film critic Harry Geduld, who I was sad to learn died in 2016.

Edwardian Comedy: an Analytical Overview

Great comedy has traditionally distinguished itself as the most deadly serious form of literature. At the Dionysian festivals in ancient Athens, an audience at the morning's round of tragedies might well have experienced sublime catharsis in witnessing the fundamental order of the universe proclaim the dignity of man and the sanctity of his values, only to return in the afternoon to find the one deflated and the other mocked by a scathing indictment by Aristophanes. Both Ben Jonson, in the preface to Volpone, and Molière, in the preface to Tartuffe, deemed it necessary to mute the devastating effects of their respective plays, by qualification, argumentation, and sheer retraction, if only to save themselves from their shocked audiences, to whom self-recognition among the ridiculous characters on stage came as no laughing matter. Similarly, in the plays of Congreve the moral and social didacticism is as inextricable from the substance of the drama as is laughter from its effect on an audience.

The beginning of the Twentieth Century witnessed a renaissance of comedy with a "message," a comedy no less serious than the naturalistic drama of Ibsen, Strindberg, and Chekhov, with which it shrared a great many of its own origin and aims. The former, as it were, came about as a response to the latter, a parallel development of essentially the same dramatic material, which differed fundamentally in its point of view. Bernard_Shaw, who was first among British critics to recognize the birth of modern drama in The Quintessence of Ibsenism, has since been acknowledged as the creator of the quintessence of modern comedy, for his work brought to fruition the new comedy of social and philosophical awareness that has developed into the dominant mode of dramatic expression in the Twentieth Century. The Shavian tradition has been the determining force in the contemporary development of comedy as social criticism.

George Bernard Shaw

No less significant has been the new directions of dramatic criticism since the latter quarter of the Nineteenth Century. This critical trent, which marks the origin of modern comic theory, has tended to proceed upon either of two lines: the first, conceived by George Meredith in his "Essay on Comedy" (1877), defines comedy chiefly in terms of the social and economic structure of its audience, and is relative to the Marxist philosophy of historical materialism; the second, delineated in Henri Bergson's essay "Laughter" (1900), attempts to locate the essence of the comic through an analysis of the laughable or ridiculous, and owes its inception to the Darwinian controversy of the Victorian era-- a philosophical and psychological approach which culminated in the Freudian interpretation of literature.

George Meredith Henri Bergson

There exists an irony in the fact that these two traditions of criticism-- social and literary-- met each other eventually and brought about a reversal of roles: the dramatists became, in effect, critics of society and social philosophy, while the philosophers and interpreters of society, correspondingly, exercised their ingenuity at literary and dramatic criticism. The Twentieth Century is, perhaps above all else, the age of self-consciousness, and modern comedy has served as a means by which the dramatist has appreciated his own role in contemporary society and has examined the relationship of that society to the quality of dramatic art. In the history of English drama, this crucial juncture between comedy and criticism, for the first time since Dryden, occurred in the Edwardian age.

Meredith's lament that "good comedies are such rare productions that... it would not occupy us long to run over the English list," and that "the comic poet is not a frequent apparition" (Meredith, 3), is indicative of the decline of comedy, and of the English theater in general, in the Nineteenth Century. High tragedy had long since been reduced to its lowest terms and had degenerated into sentimental melodrama, a decline that can be traced to, among other things, a significant change over the years of the social topography of England and a corresponding change in the nature of the British theater-going public, no longer the aristocratic coteries that had dictated standards of public taste up through the Eighteenth Century. The largest single factors in this sociological trend were the enormous increase in population, the public mind's association of the theater and the lower classes, and the enormous changes in patterns of living as a result of the means of production and distribution initiated by the Industrial Revolution. Melodrama was in many respects the tragedy of the small man, the British equivalent of the tragédie bourgeoise, and, since it was to the tastes of the British population, that successful theater appealed, from popular melodrama there is much to be learned about the Victorian popular mind. Melodrama signifies a defiance, a refusal to believe, a reaction against the decline of aristocracy (in the traditional sense), the enormous hardships and increasingly mechanized way of living forced by the industrial system, and the redefinition of man being undertaken by the sciences, particularly the one proposed by Charles Darwin.

If melodrama reflected the retreat from reality in the form of an evangelical pipe-dream that the popular mind undertook in response to the great socio-economic upheavals of Victorian England, by the same token farce represented a parallel development in the opposite direction. Farce, like melodrama, was evidence of the democratization of the British theater; i.e., farce signifies comedy reduced to its most basic components. Moreover, the genre reflects a somewhat painful acceptance of the realities of the times, of the chaotic and arbitrary course of nature, and of man's helplessness in the face of the power of mere circumstance and coincidence. And it is primarily in farce, rather than melodrama, that the seeds of modern naturalistic drama are to be discovered. Generally speaking, objectivity and realistic perspective have always been more essential to comedy than to tragedy, and since by the turn of the century modern drama and dramatic criticism determined that realism was the temper of the times, inevitably it was comedy, not tragedy-- farce, not melodrama-- that received the honor of sustaining the British theater and carrying it forward into the Twentieth Century. As the Nineteenth Century sounded the death-knell for tragedy, it simultaneously produced the clarion call for a new golden age of comedy.

Was Edwardian theater a fulfillment of Meredith's dream of a return to the high comedy of Molière and congreve? Meredith maintained that such a development could occur, provided that certain sociological conditions would be in effect:

A society of cultivated men and women is required, wherein ideas are current, and the perception quick, that [the great comic poet] may be supplied with matter and an audience. The semi-barbarism of merely giddy communities, and feverish emotional periods, repel him; and also a state of marked social inequality of the sexes; nor can he whose business is to address the mind be understood where there is not a moderate degree of intellectual activity. (Meredith, 3)

Whether or not these are valid criteria for the sociological support of the comedy Meredith had in mind, the Edwardian period compares quite favorably, in various degrees, with all of them. Further, the caliber of the Edwardian dramatist, with Shaw at the head of a gifted and distinguished list, was certainly capable of creating comic drama that could stand beside virtually any of the masterpieces of comedy that English literature had theretofore produced. Yet into the Twentieth Century, even through the present time, the legacy of farce has prevailed over that of the comedy of manners in the shaping of modern comedy. For all his literary appreciation and sociological perception, Meredith failed to look to his own age for the dominant institutional trends toward the society and the theater of the future; it appears as if the appalling dearth of quality in the Nineteenth Century British theater were indicative of little more than a horrible accident of history, in Meredith's view. Even as Ibsen was gaining renown in the revolutionary Free Theaters in Berlin and Paris, Meredith refused to appreciate the significance of the modern dramatic movement or to acknowledge the potential of the comic muse in the era of realism.

The hallmarks of Edwardian comedy remain somewhat elusive to generalization and definition, both historically and dramatically speaking, for the age was one of transition, between the optimism of Empire and the pessimism of World War. In the theater the order of the day was reorganization and experimentation; already at hand among modern dramatists were deep divisions of purpose and a wide variety of approaches, each with a dramatist's manifesto rushed to its defense. In a period of some ten years there British theater had achieved a range-- from Shaw, Galsworthy, and Hankin to Granville-Barker, Maugham and Barrie-- that it had not seen for more than a hundred years.

With few exceptions, however, it could be said of Edwardian comedy that the drama reflected the concerns of its time in its urbanity and sophistication, its willingness to attack social problems positively and directly, its nouveau-riche pretentiousness and cluttered quality, and its increasing preoccupation with the intellectual controversies of the Twentieth Century. All of these concerns, with the possible exception of the last, derive a certain significance from the fact that they describe only the texture, the surface consistencies of Edwardian comedy. This is appropriate enough for a society whose main preoccupation seems to have been surface, external appearance itself. And in Bergson's view, the essence of comedy-- the psychology of laughter-- lies precisely in the relationship between the inner human being and the surface he exposes to the world.

More specifically, Bergson finds the ridiculous to reside in man's rigidity, in the restriction of the Élan_vital, in "something mechanical encrusted on the living" (Bergson, 84). His critical rule-of-thumb is, "We laugh every time a person gives us the impression of being a thing" (97), and he goes so far as to state , "The attitudes, gestures and movements of the human body are laughable in exact proportion as that body reminds us of a mere machine" (79). In considering Edwardian comedy from this philosophical and psychological perspective, the other end of the spectrum of modern comic theory has been sighted. It would do well at this point to cull an example from the period, in order that the relationship between the two lines of criticism may be further explored.

The "mechanical" indeed finds a place in St. John Hankin's comedy, The Return of the Prodigal (1904), and is highly responsible for the comic element of the play. A rigid mechanization prevails over not only the characters (e.g., Mr. Jackson and his son Henry), but situations as well, and even much of the language in the purely comic exchanges:

Eustace, bored: Quite so. Whose carriage was it by the way?
Baines: Sir John Faringford's, sir.
Eustace: Well if one's head is to be driven over, it may as well be by a member of the aristocracy, eh Baines!
Baines: Certainly, sir.
(Hankin, 103)

In fact, one of the major themes of Prodigal is concerned directly with the rigidity of the Edwardian social order, the lack of class mobility, and the parvenu's struggle to cope with the conventions of such a system. The "mechanical," it would appear, has played an enormous role in the everyday life of Twentieth Century bourgeois society.

This view of modern life was expressed considerably earlier by Marx, who considered the capitalist economy responsible for turning man into an extension of the machine. The relationship between the comic and the economic becomes clear at this point, and as laissez-faire had its heyday in Edwardian England, it is quite understandable that comedy should have functioned as vital a part as it did in contemporary social criticism. The analogy can, of course, be extended to help explain the phenomenon of the dominance of comedy, throughout the Twentieth Century, in social thought of the Western industrial nations. In addition to the social rigidity resulting from economic determinism, a parallel can be recognized in the biological-- and metaphysical-- determinism that has functioned as a corresponding strand of modern thought.

This biological determinism is the obsession of Eustace in The Return of the Prodigal:

It's not what I do but what I am that is the difficulty. What does it matter what one does? It's done and then it's over and one can forget it. The real tragedy is what one is. Because one can't escape from that. It's always there, the bundle of passions, weaknesses, stupidities, that one calls character, waiting to trip one up. Look at the governor... Do you suppose he could be like me if he tried. Of course not. Nor could I be like him...
Aren't we just the creatures of our upbringing, of circumstance, of our physical constitution? We are launched on the stream at our birth. Some of us can swim against the current. Those who can't, it washes away. (133)

What Hankin put into the above passage was nothing more than the philosophy of Naturalism, a primary force in modern drama taken to its logical conclusion, an integral assumption of comedy, that man is a predetermined victim of his environment and heredity. But the rigidity imposed by biological determinism is laughable to us only as long as we are unable to identify ourselves personally with it. Bergson perceived what is probably the fundamental psychological condition for laughter when he noted,

... the absence of feeling which usually accompanies laughter. It seems as though the comic could not produce its disturbing effect unless it fell, so to say, on the surface of a soul that is thoroughly calm and unruffled. Indifference is its natural environment, for laughter has no greater foe than emotion. (63)

To the extent that this is true, it would appear that laughter, as Freud conjectured, is an expression of man's sadistic impulse. We must feel a certain sense of superiority over the objects of our ridicule, for "objectivity" can denote little more, in Twentieth Century epistemology, than a sense of mastery over a subject, marked by a lack of sympathy or empathy; that is, the maintenance of a certain emotional distance between ourselves and the objects under consideration.

Because our self-esteem is largely dependent upon our conception of the self as a free agent, we are reluctant to accept a deterministic explanation of our own behavior. It is only with a profound dismay that we realize the power of fate and circumstance in our own lives, and even then, we can never fully identify ourselves as insignificant cogs in the machinery of the universe. For this reason we can never truly laugh at ourselves, because by nature the human mind conceives of itself as an active agent, rather than a passive object.

Hence the motif of despair in Twentieth-Century literature. Determinism has signified a fall from grace that has immeasurably affected our intellectual life, and contemporary art has reflected the schizoid tendency of the modern mind resulting from the paradox of the subjective viewpoint in conflict with the objective intelligence. The metaphor of man's divided soul has captured the spirit of the arts, and is highly relevant the current revolt against formalism in literary criticism. The destruction of Form, of the distinctions between comedy and tragedy, has developed into the preoccupation of an entire school of dramatic criticism, and receives its most comprehensive treatment in the plays of Luigi Pirandello.

Bibliography

Lauter, Paul, ed. Theories of Comedy. Garden City: Doubleday, 1964.

Sypher, Wylie, ed. Comedy: "Laughter," Henri Bergson; "An Essay on Comedy," George Meredith. Garden City: Doubleday, 1956.

Weals, Gerald, ed. Edwardian Plays, including The Return of the Prodigal, St. John Hankin. New York: Hill & Wang, 1962.

IN ROTATION

Oscar Moore, Oscar Moore Quartet (Tampa, 1954, 1955)

A needle-drop CDR from the vinyl LP, this is one more of a long series of recordings featuring my homeboy from Indy, pianist Carl Perkins; his rhythm-section mates include Joe Comfort on bass and George Jenkins on drums or Mike Pacheco, congas. The performances stem from two recording sessions, from September 1954 (billed as Oscar Moore Trio, Featuring Carl Perkins) and June 1955, both featuring Moore as primary soloist.

Perkins, fortunately, gets a bit of space to strut his stuff. Without percussion, the sets very much would resemble the Nat Cole Trio, of which Moore had been an integral part. Highlights include the series of "fours" with congas that climax "Samson and Delilah" and "Roulette," taken 'way uptempo with drummer Jenkins on brushes. Moore's opening solo on a beautiful rendition of the ballad, "Dinner for One, James."

NEXT: The Latest Poop

Friday, December 18, 2020

The "Root of Evil" in The Pardoner's Tale

This being December of a presidential election year, only weeks prior to the departure of the present Administration, the subject of official pardons (many sold for cold cash, without doubt) has become particularly pertinent. My undergraduate take on Chaucer and his "Pardoner's Tale" thus takes on new relevance.

Paul Strohm

My original MS is dated May 1, 1968, for L219 Prof. Anderson, but I'm quite certain I submitted it first to Dr. Paul Strohm, with whom I was able to stay in touch for some years, particularly to express our mutual enthusiasm for the works Thomas Pynchon. Since the last time we saw each other at IU's Ballentine Hall or his off-campus apartment, I now read that Prof. Strohm has risen to dizzying heights in the academic world: a long stint at the University of Oxford, and at present a chair at Columbia in New York. I'm set to read his recent essay, "The Man Who Insulted Shakespeare."

A work of pure imagination.

I wonder what Paul (not to mention Pynchon) is up to these days?

"Radix malorum est cupiditas," proclaims the Pardoner at the beginning of each of his sermons: avarice is the root of evil. But in an even larger sense than the Pardoner's sententious and cynically loaded references to avarice imply, the tale raises the question of the "root of evil" in a world which God called good at its creation. The Pardoner suggests that it is avarice and its-- and its counterparts glotonye, luxure, and hasardrye-- which is responsible, ultimately, for the sin of the world, and this explanation suffices in a cursory interpretation of his tale. Yet such an analysis seems to do no justice at all to the question posed by the tale and invites a deeper inquiry as to the significance of avarice and the location of evil within (and without) the context of the tale.

The Pardoner founds the substance of his sermon on this paradox of evil, the ironic ingratitude of man:

Allas, mankinde, how it may bitide
That to thy Creatour which that thee wrought,
And with his precious herte blood thee bought,
Thou art so fals and so unkind, allas.
(11. 572-5)

From this fundamental irony grows a multitude of smaller and more complex ironies. Not only the mechanism, but also the very substance and the surrounding context of "The Pardoner's Tale" is an artfully compounded irony and paradox: the Personification/ super naturalization of Death, the juxtaposition of the revelers and the old man, the significance and poignancy of everyday remarks, and, behind the scenes as it were, the Pardoner himself providing the living exemplum of avarice by manipulating the Christian desire for salvation to serve his pocket, using every sordid trick of his trade to prove that even a hypocrite-- again ironically-- can practice precisely what he preaches. The magnificently vital (and highly familiar) harangue against the sins of gluttony, lechery, and gambling is but a skillful ploy to gain our money. It is indeed avarice that provides the undoing of the Pardoner himself, as well as his three revelers, as it is specifically their unbridled greed which causes them to to pervert their respective moral missions, forget their respective susceptibility to sin and moral ruin, and meet destruction. The key episode in the tale of the revelers is the encounter with the old man, who himself seeks Death and realizes that sin and death come fully only to those who are unmindful of its omnipresence and who expect it least. Thus are the revelers led to forget their mission to destroy Death, and it is avarice that reverses the situation and pays them all in kind.

But it is this same episode with the old man that leads us to suspect that it is something other-- or, rather, something more-- than mere avarice that is responsible for the mind of the sinner and is, hence, the catalyst of his undoing. The old man recognizes something more than avarice in the revelers, something more explicitly integral to their nature, and that is the arrogance of their youth out of which they mock and humiliate him. Tho old man sees this arrogance, this pride, as the source of man's potential for sin:

But sires, to you it is no curteisye
To spaken to an old man vilainye
But he trespass in word or elles in deede.
In Holy Writ ye may yourself wel rede,
"Agains an old man, hoor upon his heed,
Ye shal arise." Wherefore I yive you reed,
Ne dooth unto an old man noon harm now,
Namore than that ye wolde men dide to you
In age, if that ye so longe abide.
And God be with you wher ye go or ride:
I moot go thider as I have to go.
(11. 411-21)

This pride, of course, is more than the rudeness youth shows to age. It appeared earlier in the tale in the manner of one of the revelers toward his servants, and in fact pervades the entire attitude of the revelers toward the Death they seek to kill; their pride makes them incapable of conceiving of Death as anything greater than a neighborhood bully who deserves a thrashing. And while the object of setting out to rid the world of death is a noble idea derived from an essentially Christian sentiment, it is also as arrogant as it is ignorant of the power of Death and the fallibility of man.

Thus it is a kind of hubris that leads the revelers to their destruction; indeed, had their motives been higher, their station more exalted, and their perception greater, they might have been participants in a tragedy à la Oedipus, instead of a mere exemplum of the sin of avarice. Avarice, within and without the tale, is indeed a sin; that is to say it is a result, an end-product of the flaw in human nature which permits man to sin. The Pardoner's Tale locates this flaw in man's pride, his proneness to overextend himself, his tendency to challenge those those things (e.g. Death) which are beyond challenge. In the same vein, the Pardoner exhibits pride in his cynical attitude toward both his subject and his listeners, the attitude that he alone is immune to punishment for the same sin he would have others eschew. Chaucer's epilogue to the tale gives us the satisfaction of seeing the Pardoner cut down to size.

IN ROTATION

Voz e Violão

Gilberto Gil, Gil Luminoso (DRG Brazil, 2006)

João Gilberto, João Voz e Violão (Universal, 2000)

Caetano Veloso, Caetano (Nonesuch, 1987)

Lightly and Politely

Cliff Jordan and John Gilmore, Blowing in from Chicago (Blue Note, 1957)

Joe Henderson, Lush Life: The Music of Billy Strayhorn (Verve, 1992)

Sun Ra, Cosmic Tones for Mental Therapy (Saturn/ Evidence, 1963)

NEXT: Lenny Bruce

Friday, November 6, 2020

Fall Breaks And Back To Winter

NB: Copying an old manuscript is so much easier than actually writing fresh stuff. Most of the text that follows was published originally under the title "THE WONDERFUL RESURRECTION AND TRANSFIGURATION OF SMILEY WILSON" by ESQ in May, 1988. Coincidentally, I do have another ms. titled "Fall Breaks..." on another topic entirely. A dilemma wrapped in an enigma, etc.

It reveals an author who was snarky, precious, and without doubt completely stoned at the time of writing. More than twenty years later, I reread it with some irony.)

The Beach Boys, Smiley Smile (Brother, 1967)

This 2011 CD remaster comes in a cardboard sleeve. The first eleven tracks display the original monaural version of the album; the following eleven are in true stereo. Because of the circumstances surrounding the master recording of "Good Vibrations," a digital-electronic trick had to be played to obtain a stereo version.

I've never quite understood the carpers who write about Smiley Smile as if it were a piece of shit. Yes, I too was disappointed when it first came out in 1967, especially in the light of Jules Siegel's article in Cheetah ("Goodbye Surfing, Hello God"). Nobody, of course, has any problem with "Good Vibrations" or "Heroes and Villains." But it has taken me twenty-one years to catch up to and begin to understand most of the rest.

Jules Siegel

The first thing I came to realize is that the album's primitivism (compared to the group's prior work and the contemporaneous music of George Martin's clever lads) was its response to the dizzying gyrations of the mid-Sixties scene. It reflects, moreover, the protracted identity crisis of the Beach Boys, tearing their sound down to an essence and recombining it on a plane altogether the antithesis of all that went before, particularly the baroque confection/ confession that was Pet Sounds. But in 1967, on first listening to shards of "Fall Breaks and Back to Winter," "Little Pad," and "Gettin' Hungry" in the dorm (this was the summer of Jimi Hendrix and the rest of those mostly-boring San Francisco acid heads), you mainly felt the pain of its creator, Brian Wilson, picking up the cross he would carry for the rest of his life.

Siegel's aforementioned account, along with nearly everything else devoted to the SMiLE, period, laments what we never had heard, the legendary tracks across the prairies and up to the stars, the album started out to be. Many years ago, I received a cassette from my little brother on the west coast. It turned out to be the first installment of a yardstick with which to compare to the album that finally appeared in the fall of 1967. The tape, a fifteenth-generation dub by the sound of it, included about forty-five minutes of karmic redemption, with stuff I'd never heard before, labelled "Barnyard," "Do You Like Worms," "Can't Wait Too Long" (straight from the heart of Jesus), "The Old Master Painter," "Tones," "Bicycle Rider," and the flaming "Mrs. O'Leary's Cow," coming at me like Beelzebub himself. Including some of the few genuine SMiLE pieces to emerge in the late '60s, different and/ or incomplete verstions of "Surf's Up," "Good Vibrations," "Cabinessence/ The Iron Horse, Grand Coulee Dam," "OurPrayer," "Child Is Father of the Man," and "Wonderful."

This last tune, in its first-released version is more than a remarkable work of art and must be singled out for special attention. Surely, it should be our national anthem.

On Smiley Smile, the tune features one of the most appealing and revealing combinations of melody and lyric ever to appear on a Beach Boys record. The span of this song, an entire lifetime, gives at the same time a mere "day in the life":

She belongs there left with her liberty,
Never known as a non-believer.

She laughs and stays in the

Wah, wah, Wonderful.

All of Carl's vocal proceeds above a bed of childhood noises, toys, etc., as does the following:

She knew how to gather the forest when

God reached softly and moved her body.

One golden locket, quite young,

And loving her mother

And father.

Farther down the path was a mystery,

Through the recess, the chalk and numbers,

A boy bumped into her

Won, won, won Wonderful.

Na na na na na

Now comes the insert: the disarming simplicity of Carl's voice against a cracked piano and muted harmonica gives way to a few bars of jazzy doo-wop-- actually taken from one of SMiLE's versions of "Vegetables"-- led by Mike's "hey poppa rebop" scat riff, suggesting all the righteous joy of our lifetimes.

After a chorus of this, we are returned to Carl's voice and the ontological liberty with which the song begins:

She'll return in love with her liberty

Never known as a non-believer.

She'll smile and thank God for

One, one, one Wonderful.

This is the sort of song-- a kind of androgynous poppa mom mow mow OM, mind you-- that changed the course of my life and, in the lingo of my onetime roommate Bloy, an axis mundi that one could fight and die for. We lit another nutmeg cigarette as "Whistle In" whisked us to the exit groove and speculated upon the dumb and the brilliant, the sacred and profane.

Flash forward to my first hearing of the original SMILE version in 1986: picture an embittered old fart, fat and married, oppressed by seeing trampled everything he loves and respects in this world* and wondering whether, indeed, he will live to see the Revolution. He slips this cassette into his AKai CS-797D, little knowing he is about to experience the Second Coming. "Wonderful" arrives on the heels of "Our Prayer," but gone is the childlike simplicity of the Smiley Smile arrangement. The stentorian bass tones of a harpsichord introduce the more urgent voice of Brian and are answered, as in a Bach fugue, by another harpsichord and flugelhorn in counterpoint. The pastoral elegy of the released version now, suddenly and unexpectedly, darkens into a narrative of sin and redemption. After "A boy bumped into her..." there is no longer the cosmic rave-up the old fart has replayed since the summer days (and summer nights!!!) of virginity. There is, instead, a new fourth chorus and a significantly different final chorus:

"Heroes and Villains"

Brian raps about Smiley Smile

"Fall Breaks and Back to Winter"

All fall down and lost in the mystery

Lost it all to a non-believer,

And all that's left is a girl

Who's loved by her mother and father.

She'll return in love with the liberty

Just away from the non-believer.

She'll sigh and thank God for

One, one, one Wonderful.

"She'll sigh and thank God... " Brian isn't very smiley here in the original version. The song, no longer in love with the liberty, is consumed by the mystery, but Brian promises to return. He is, for now, on the dark side of the moon; yes, there is another side to this life.

Suddenly, apparently from about the early 1980s, there has been an explosion of bootlegged Beach Boys material, ranging from uncatalogued demos pirated from Brother Records to completed album-length unreleases. How much SMiLE is potentially out there has been estimated many times over the years, by Brad Elliot, Domenic Priore, and others, but very little of it has been in circulation, and some of it may have been destroyed. (There is at least one bootleg LP-- "Brother ST2580, but alas, it doesn't include the mind-bending version of "Wonderful." However, it does have a more finished version of "... Worms"/ "Bicycle Rider" and two additional tracks, the stately brass chorale "Holidays" and the humorous brass conversation called "George Fell Into His French Horn,"a sort of updated "Our Favorite Recording Sessions."

"Vegetables"

Now comes the big news: Rick Edgil swears to God that I can die happy at last. Brian Wilson himself, not content with recording "Love and Mercy," is going to smile once more alongside Van Dyke Parks: their album is scheduled for release this year. What should be the final product be like to match our dreams? The possibilities are stretched between issuing a session-by-session SMiLE of all existing tapes (the collector's Nirvana, but not likely from a commercial point of view) and the staggering thought that Brian may really complete the damned thing at last, having achieved the liberty to solve the mystery, so to speak.

Brian could not fail us twice, in two successive incarnations, could he? Only one thing is certain: people will still go on bitching about Smiley Smile. Brian, forgive them; they don't know what they're doing.***

NOTES:

* All the more so in 2020.

** Not until three years later would Wilson and Van Dyke begin their project at all. The result was Orange Crate Art in 1995.

*** Brian released a solo CD in 2004, Brian Wilson Presents SMiLE, and in 2011 Capitol Records released its mammoth box set, The SMiLE Sessions.

**** I am nearly certain I was stoned when I first wrote this piece. I am quite certain I was when I revised it.

IN ROTATION:

A brief Miles Davis tour.....

The Miles Davis All-Stars Featuring John Coltrane, Broadcast Sessions 1958-1959

Miles Davis, Volume 2 and Volume 3 (Blue Note, 1954)

What the hell happened to Volume 1? It's a long story.

Thelonious Monk, Complete Prestige Recordings

NEXT: Chaucer's "Pardoner's Tale"

Tuesday, October 20, 2020

The Yiddish Question in the Twenty-First Century

Winter, 1991

How To Talk About Lenny Bruce And Influence People | scoopsmentalpropaganda

While reading Baugh and Cable's History of the English Language, I was both surprised and a little annoyed to find no mention of the Yiddish language in either of the two places I had expected to find it. I searched the first chapter for the relationship of Yiddish to the Indo-European family of languages, which has since medieval times shaped and nurtured it; I perused the final chapter on the development of American English, hoping to find at least a word on the impact of Yiddish. Both times I came up empty, and my conclusion is that Yiddish is difficult to classify and subtle in its influence upon American English.

My own knowledge of Yiddish has never been extensive, though I grew up in proximity to Yiddish speakers. I remember hearing from my parents such choice tidbits as "Gei kochen ahfen yom," "Is nisht gefiddelt," "A kocher nemt a pisher," and "Ich hab dir in bud," but only later came to realize how much of it was obscene. My parents, both first-generation American-born Jews who ordinarily used garden-variety midwestern American English, used Yiddish as a code that their children could not understand, so we picked it up only in dribs and drabs.

My mother's parents, however, brought Yiddish with them from Europe as their primary language, though both of them could speak Russian and became proficient in English. My grandmother would sit at her kitchen table, sipping her tea through a sugar cube as in the Old Country, reading her copy of Vorwarts with column upon column of strange Hebraic characters without vowels.

For second-generation American Jews such as myself, religious education was in Hebrew, not in Yiddish. Hebrew, moreover, was the revived language of the modern state of Israel, while Yiddish appeared to be an idiosyncratic expression of survivors of the European shtetl and ghetto. Clearly, there was a generational pattern at work pertaining to Yiddish in America.

Jane Eisner on US politics - Saturday Extra - ABC Radio National

Perhaps the major reason for the reluctance of our textbook authors to discuss Yiddish is that it appears to be a linguistic and historical anomaly. It did not receive its distinctive characteristics before the eleventh century, when Jews were invited from the Rhineland to Poland and Russia as a merchant class in between the nobles and the serfs. Yiddish developed as a peculiar amalgam of Indo-European and Semitic languages, Hebrew ion its orthography, Low German in much of its vocabulary and syntax, with a leavening of Hebrew and Aramaic from the Scriptures and Talmud, and later a heavy overlay of Slavic and a few Romance elements. Until quite recently, it was regarded as essentially a folk-tongue without a written grammar and a language that seemed to defy strict grammatical analysis.

Over the centuries between the Middle Ages and the Second World War, Yiddish produced a very rich literature of folksongs, tales, and folklore. German-Jewish literature, except for the Hebrew lettering, differed little from its gentile milieu, unlike its counterpart in Poland and points east. It was the spoken language of the masses of European Jewry up until the Holocaust, surviving even the Haskalah, the mass enlightenment movement of the late nineteenth century led by Moses Mendelssohn, which translated modern European literature into Yiddish. The 1860s and '70s brought a temporary decline of Yiddish, as Russian schools and culture were opened to Jews, but by the 1880s Russian pogroms facilitated its revival. The flowering of Yiddish literature, in both Europe and America, took place in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Yiddish theater, influenced by the works of Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Chekhov, likewise flourished for many years.

The nemesis of Yiddish language and culture, particularly in America, has been the acceleration assimilation of Jews into the mainstream of modern secular society. Aside from the shrinking immigrant generation served by the Vorwarts, the chief medium for the transmission of Yiddish language in America has been show business, particularly the work of Jewish stand-up comedians of the second or third American-born generation. Through them there has come about in this country a hybrid, which some have dubbed "Yinglish," wherein the expressiveness of the Yiddish language is used to pepper English for mass-media consumption. It is primarily through show-business usage that some five hundred Yiddish expressions-- such terms as schmaltz, goyish, and goniff have entered the English language and earned listings in the Oxford English Dictionary. Ironically, many of the individuals who helped familiarize America with such Yiddishisms, such as the comic Lenny Bruce, learned them only at second-hand and used them onstage in place of taboo English expressions.

The decline of the Yiddish language has occupied the past half century and has inspired clamorous debate in Jewish publications for at least that long. Between the large-scale emigration of surviving European Jews to Israel and the ongoing process of assimilation, the question has often been posed whether the end of Yiddish as a living language might mean as well, the disappearance of the Jewish people, at least if we define "Jewish" in terms of the traditional lore of Judaism accumulated during the past millennium. Efforts are ongoing in many parts of the world to preserve the literature and traditions of Yiddish for the generations to come, but the time seems to have passed when anyone can seriously expect Yiddish to occupy the place it once did in Jewish life. It may well be that whatever Yiddish is heard on a mass scale in the next century will be understood because of its present penetration into English.

Thank you, Lenny Bruce.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Birnbaum, Solomon A. Yiddish: A Survey and a Grammar. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1979.

Fishman, Joshua A. Yiddish in America: Socio-Linguistic Description and Analysis. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1965.

-------, ed. Never Say Die! A Thousand Years of Yiddish in Jewish Life and Letters. The Hague: Mouton, 1981.

Kogos, Fred. A Dictionary of Yiddish Slang and Idioms. New York: Citadel, 1966.

Rosenbaum, Samuel. A Yiddish Word Book for English-Speaking People. New York: Van Nostrand, 1978.

Samuel, Maurice. In Praise of Yiddish. New York: Cowles, 1971.

Turan, Kenneth. "They Told Me That Yiddish Was a Dead Language," Smithsonian 21: 10 (January 1991), 60-71.

IN ROTATION:

Carl Perkins, Introducing Carl Perkins (Dootone/ Fresh Sounds, 1956)

My interest in the L.A. pianist Carl Perkins began with the WBEZ-Chicago broadcasts of jazz d.j. Dick Buckley back in the 1990s. Buckley, a native of Indiana himself, used to recall the times he heard Perkins play in his own hometown, Indianapolis, and eventually fulfilled my request to hear him play this album in its entirety.

Perkins died of a heroin overdose at the age of 29, and Introducing, from February 1956, turned out to be his only recording as a leader (discography). Here he is joined by his Indianapolis homey, bassist Leroy Vinnegar and the lifelong Los Angeles drummer Larance Marable. Of the eleven tunes on the record, six are popular standards and the remaining five Perkins originals: "Way Cross Town" (later renamed "Mia"); "Marblehead,"a relaxed blues; "Westside," another blues, uptempo; "Why Do I Care," a brisk and memorable AABA tune that effectively employs block chords; and "Carl's Blues," at a bright, medium tempo, probably his best-known composition. On ballads ("You Don't Know What Love Is," "It Could Happen to You"), Perkins usually takes a dreamy, rhapsodic approach modeled on Bud Powell's and Erroll Garner's, but generally a bit faster and with more swing.

It is a pity that Perkins's work both here and under the leadership of a who's who of other musicians, is not better known and appreciated, not to mention that his name is often mistaken for that of the rockabilly writer of "Blue Suede Shoes."

Perkins's odd posture at the keyboard, using his left hand and elbow in a crablike fashion, has often been remarked upon. I wish I'd been around to see him play in person.

A more recent CD release on the Phono label includes an additional eleven additional tracks from sessions recorded in 1954 and 1957, plus an informative booklet. There are four unaccompanied solo performances of standards and and a selection of tracks Perkins recorded as a sideman with Oscar Moore and Jim Hall.

Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Lick My Decals Off, Baby (Bizarre/Straight / Rhino, 1970)

Captain Beefheart - Lick My Decals Off, Baby.jpg

I seldom play this album, though it is often praised. The title track is mesmerizing; hardly a day goes by without my humming the guitar line or mouthing the lyrics. Most of the rest bores me, especially compared to Beef's immediately previous release, the double LP Trout Mask Replica. But "Space Age Couple" ("whyn't you flex your magic muscle") has become one of my mantras. A few of the tunes seem just plain silly, but all the instrumentals are good.

The Kinks, The Kinks Present Schoolboys in Disgrace (RCA Victor, 1975)

Here's another record I've neglected for quite some time, having had nothing but a needle-drop CDR to listen to. but hearing at last the actual CD in all its glory, I have a new appreciation for it. The Kinks' lineup included, besides the Davies brothers, John Gosling on keyboards, John Dalton on bass, and longtime drummer Mick Avory. The liner notes inform that Ray and Dave were able to maintain some brotherly harmony through the recording sessions, and it shows here.

Schoolboys is a kind of prequel to the Preservation dramas from a few years back, with the principal characters being young versions of themselves. Unlike some of that, this album stands well on its own, without a narrator, because of the strength of its songs. "Education" has possibly Ray's finest vocal performance and a female chorus well used. "The Hard Way" is introduced by Gosling's piano solo, almost a sublime moment itself. "No More Looking Back," a perennial theme for the group, is perhaps the album's finest track, boosted by Ray's cherished horn section.

Count Basie and His Atomic Band, Complete Live at the Crescendo, 1958 (Phono)

This recent double-CD release is an important find. This performance took place on June 23, 1958, at Gene Norman's Crescendo nightclub in Hollywood.

Ari Barroso, ???? (???, 1930-1942)

Lightly and Politely

Carl Perkins Memorial

Carl Perkins, Memorial (Fresh Sound, 1956, 1957)

Pianist Perkins could boast a huge discography as a sideman, but only one studio album and a handful of singles under his own name. This release is a welcome addition to that discography in the form of excerpts from three Los Angeles television appearances, most from the KABC Stars of Jazz series popular in the late '50s. Perkins appears here as sideman to the Leroy Vinnegar Quartet, the Herbie Mann Quartet, and the Curtis Counce Quintet, wherein he participated memorably in studio sessions for the Contemporary label, as well. Short as they are, these selections nevertheless provided ample opportunity to strut his stuff.