WriteOutLoud

Opera: A Test of Character?

Strange pair of brainfellows, huh?  Iris Murdoch, British novelist, and Luciano Pavarotti, Italian tenor.  Welcome to my head, today.

At this very late stage in my so-called career, I am reading Murdoch for the first time, at the behest of a dear friend.  The Sea, the Sea won the Booker Prize in 1978.  (I spent many Friday nights that year baking in a sauna with another dear friend who raved on and on about Murdoch, but somehow I never got around to actually reading her.  I think I was saving her for emergencies, like I'm saving Mansfield Park and I forget which other Austen novel I haven't read.)

The Sea, the Sea is ostensibly the autobiographical ruminations of a celebrity, a fabulously successful theater playwright and director who has recently retired to a ramshackle house on the remote northern coast of England.  In his journal, he reflects on his professional career, his relationships with women, his family, and on his present location, its charms, its drawbacks, and the creepy things that are starting to happen.  Murdoch's writing is dense, intricate, and hypnotic.  As is always the case with any first-person narrative, the reader's initial task is to evaluate the character of the storyteller, whether s/he is reliable, and--most important--whether we like him.  I'm only about 100 pages in, but last night, I began to suspect that this guy is an asshole--possibly of epic proportions--owing chiefly to his record with women:  he never married, never wanted to, isn't gay, but blithely exploited an astonishing number and variety of women throughout his life, starting when he was 20 and got involved with a 39-year-old actress, which relationship carried on in various configurations for years until her death.  She and a few of her successors interested him, so he studied them rather like someone might study bugs or birds, and he notes their feelings and behavior but doesn't seem to care about them much; toward the feelings of the others, he is complacently cavalier.

So I'm just getting ready to wring his neck when he mentions that he hates opera.  "OK, that does it," I think.  "People who hate opera are--"  And then I remember that I don't like it, either.  I've only been to about three actual performances.  The plots were stupid, the costumes ludicrous, the makeup likewise, and if I wanted to read (supertitles--clumsy translations), I'd stay home.  I stood through two acts of Figaro (eugh, SO silly!) outdoors in Santa Fe before my aching feet sent me whimpering off in defeat.  Best thing about that experience was the visuals:  the stage itself seemed to disappear as dark fell, so the performers appeared to be floating; behind them to the south, a thunderstorm lit up the sky over the Sangre de Cristos, and to the north, the lights of Los Alamos blazed.

Another time, in San Francisco, Pavarotti gave a free concert at the band shell in Golden Gate Park about ten blocks from my house, so I thought I'd drop by.  But the crowds were so huge, I couldn't get anywhere near him--could barely get into the Park at all--so turned around and went home and pouted.  Told myself I wasn't asking much--it wasn't like I wanted to go to an opera--an expensive proposition, way beyond my means--I just wanted to see/hear Pavarotti because he's arguably the greatest ever, and I'm always interested in anybody who's the greatest at whatever they do.  Pitching a baseball, lecturing on Picasso, blowing bubbles--I don't care.  If they're really good, I want to see them do it. I'm scuffing around my backyard, muttering about this when all of a sudden I hear something.  It's a crisp fall day; the air is perfectly clear; I hear a voice.  Or I think I do.  It's faint, but it sounds like--but it can't be, he's ten blocks away, and there are trees galore between here and there, big ones.  I listen, though, and it is.  It's him.  The crescendo of the Nessun Dorma aria, floating out of the Park and down the block right into my back yard!  Goosebumps?  OH yes.  Almost tears, even; those notes pulled something out of my chest even from ten blocks away.  (And later I heard he hadn't been miked, but I never believed that.)

Now it's this morning, and there's no way around it, I HAVE TO do some housework, which I can't do without music.  LOUD music.  I think about the aria,  I put in the Favorite Arias CD, I crank it up, Luciano's blasting away, I'm shoving the mop back and forth (like the Sorceror's Apprentice?), loving it all and wondering, "Does this mean I like opera?"  Because it's not just Nessun Dorma on this CD, it's some other stuff, a couple of Verdi duets where he's going "rrrrrRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!" and she's going "twitterTWITTERTWITTER!" and I realize oooooh, this is sexy stuff!  Is this why people like opera?  Do I like opera?  I don't know. I never really thought so before.  But here just lately. . . . 

Anyway, I DO know that that guy in Murdoch's novel is a jerk for being a theater director who says he hates opera.  And I hope something terrible happens to him, which will make The Sea, the Sea a very good book!

"So How Come I Have to Learn This Stuff, HUH?"

One of the "orientation" seminars I attended today was actually interesting.  Imagine my surprise.  (The other one was pitiful, made me sorry for the students of these disorganized, none-too-bright, middle-aged, well-meaning but pathetically self-important teachers.)

The good one was about "General Education"--formerly known as Basic Requirements, I think, though not everybody was completely clear on the definitions or its attendant assumptions:  what they should be in the 21st century (if different than before), and what the subjects each of us teaches has to do with Gen Ed and with each other.  Or something. 

Well, I was off to the races.  Silently, of course.  What's the socioculturalintellectual interface of, say, nursing and fine arts?  Should a nursing student have to study Matisse?  Far more to the point for me: how the flaming hell are math and English related?  Just then, the math teacher at my table pipes up (I haven't said anything) about how he requires his students to frame math problems verbally--what we used to call "word problems." 

"And then do you do it the other way?" I blurt.  "Do you give them an equation and have them write a story about it?"  "Oh yes," he says as if this weren't a miracle, "three different stories, actually.  To pass my class, they have to be able to write three different verbal extrapolations of the same problem."  He gives me a quizzical look.  "Have you never enjoyed thinking about numbers verbally?"

"Um, gee, actually, no.  Until recently, it never occurred to me to do so other than the 'Dick has four candy bars, Jane takes two of them, how many does Dick have left?' model which never interested me at all because I'm a girl who likes a complicated narrative.  I thought words and numbers were mutually exclusive--UNTIL"--uh-oh, I'm off to the races--"I just recently read this fabulous book, Moneyball, about how Billy Beane almost singlehandedly rebuilt the Oakland As and possibly rescued the entire MLB by thinking outside the box about numbers, and I couldn't believe I was having such a good time reading a book about numbers because--"

I dwindle off because I've lost them.  They're glazing over.  I'm the only woman at the table, and they are reacting as if they'd answered their doorbells only to find JoWits on the porch.  Not everybody is a baseball fan; I keep forgetting that.  It seems so unnatural, why would it occur to me?--she said in self-defense.

But my point--and I do have one--(as Ellen DeGeneres would say) is that I felt a whole bunch of potential going on.  Which is, after all, way more than anyone has any right to expect who's been to more than three of these "seminars."

"Hey! Wait a Minute!" or How You Can Tell For Sure When Summer is Over

The envelope arrives from the school where you seem to remember you've signed up to teach somebody something, in some far-off time called "the fall."  You stare quizzically at the envelope, and then you open it.  Inside is a big fat packet called WELCOME BACK TO ALL FACULTY! that includes a schedule of two solid days of nonstop back-to-back seminars (starting tomorrow) in various aspects of how the school (ostensibly) runs, how to teach in it, who everybody is, where their offices are, blahblahblahblah.

If I could reclaim every hour I've wasted being dutiful at these orientations over the past 25 years,  I would be a much younger, happier woman, and possibly a better teacher because I would not have started every fall term with my teeth clenched.  Some of the preliminaries can be kinda fun--sometimes, if you're at a rich school, the food's good.  Some of the people are funny.  A girl like me can make a pal or two (and a passel of enemies if she's not careful).  I cemented a lasting friendship with now-famous fiction and film writer Tom Perrotta as he and I dragged folding chairs across a steaming lawn somewhere in the wilds of Massachusetts late one August afternoon.  Apropos  the endless bullshit pedagogical "discussion" (read: lecture) we had just endured, he grumbled, "I just don't find this stuff endlessly fucking fascinating, know what I mean, Doc?"  I barely knew Tom at that point, but I knew exactly what he meant; he endeared himself to me forever with that one wry remark.

Likewise a woman I sat across from at a seminar table while the then-director of the program rambled on and on about how much fun he'd had in New Orleans the weekend before and how hungover he still was.  This woman across from me managed to give the impression of rolling her eyes without actually moving them.  I was nearly in stitches.  Ran into her in the bathroom later and announced, "I don't know who you are, but if you don't stop doing that thing with your face, we're going to be in trouble!"  thereby making another great friend.

Now, though, the good news here, at the end of this particular summer, is that unlike every place I've ever taught, this public community college doesn't frogmarch its whole faculty through the welcome-back phase, thereby infantilizing and infuriating them.  Instead, it offers about 30 different seminars, requires that we attend at least six hours, for which six hours we are paid (never happened to me before), and lets us pick what we want to attend.   So I will go to a reception for new adjuncts (even though I've been teaching there since January, I came skidding in right at the beginning of last spring term, didn't even know where the bathrooms were), a session on building instructional websites (I've always meant to learn), something called Positive Attendance (required), and some free feeds of the meet-and-greet variety.  I will not be attending What To Do When Your Projector Doesn't Light Up although I probably should.  I refuse to PowerPoint my students.  I'd rather give them lobotomies.

So the Summer I Thought Would Never End is about to.  In many ways, it was the worst ever.  But I got a lot of reading done, and it was productive in other ways.  Overall, I'm grateful and hopeful.  Now let's just hope nothing happens in these seminars to fuck that up!

Crying in Baseball

Figures it'd be baseball would bring me back.

Not MLB—as one might expect, what with recent events (the As; dope; more dope; Pedro). Nope.

Little League. Specifically, the Western Regional Championships played in Waco, Texas, last Saturday and televised live on ESPN. Happily for me, I missed the first pitch, thrown out by Dubya (who shoulda stood in baseball, where he wasn’t so dangerous). I got to the game in the third inning, and they only play six, these little guys.

Funny thing: they’re little, all right, but they don’t play "little." The pitcher is throwing what looks remarkably like heat —and he’s 12 years old, 5’5", 135#. The beautiful Little League swing is beautiful in all the same ways as the beautiful MLB swing, and the sound of the ball on the sweet spot, and the trajectory of the ball—out of the park—are all the same. These 2/3- scale models throw as accurately, turn double plays as fast, and make as few errors (none that I saw), as the big boys.

The story develops: teams are Bryant, Arkansas vs. Lafayette, Louisiana. This is Bryant’s second straight year in the playoffs; they got snookered last year, so they’re super-double-determined, this year.

Their luck has been especially bad, though: while they were at a Rangers game on their way to Waco, all their equipment was stolen from the motel parking lot—all their bats, balls, cleats, helmets, 10 cases of Gatorade: everything, gone. When the good people of Bryant, Arkansas, hear about it (one assumes, right away), they instantly donate replacement Everything, which the Bryant Little League Commissioner loads up and drives like hell for Waco. He makes it in time. The boys play; they make it to the finals, which I am now watching and which the President of the United States showed up for (driving blithely past Gold Star Mother Cindy Sheehan and the other antiwar protesters outside the gates of his ranch), and threw out the first ball. Both teams are playing like pros now, though, no signs of nerves or fear or even much excitement.

But the boys of Bryant, Arkansas, are looking a little glum; they are almost shut out; then, in the 5^th inning, the leadoff batter hits a homer. The dugout erupts with delirious little boys jumping straight up in the air and all over each other—just like the big boys do. There is hope! This is baseball! Anything can happen!

But it doesn’t. Bryant loses. Six innings, it’s over, they lose 4-1, and I’m bouncing on my couch in California, yelling, "No! NO! Let ‘em play three more! They’ve got it in ‘em! Let ‘em do it!" But that doesn’t happen, of course. The little boys of Lafayette, Louisiana, scramble all over each other in a fountain of happiness—they’re going to Williamsport, PA, for the World Series!

And then the two teams line up for high-fives, and the looks on those faces—! Lafayette is gracious in victory, and Bryant almost stony in defeat. Almost, but not quite. Many of those little Bryant chins tremble; a few cheeks glisten with tears; nevertheless, they march in a straight line and do their high-fives just as if their hearts weren’t in smithereens.

I know, I know: it’s a learning experience. Losing is as important a lesson as winning—in some ways, more important, life being what it is for most of us. But it was excruciating, watching those little men of Bryant, Arkansas, learn that hard lesson. I wish I could give every one of them a hug.