Margotlog: Headscarves and Arranged Marriages: Orhan Pamuk's Museum of Innocence
I know no one from Turkey, but some of my students practice an African version of Islam. They are Somali, have come here as refugees, often after spending years in Kenyan refugee camps. Thus I have acquired a small education in the vast culture of Islam. But nothing could have prepared me for the range of lifestyles represented in Orhan Pamuk's novel The Museum of Innocence.
Set in the fifteen years from the early 1970s to the middle 80s, the novel (so far) is told exclusively from Kemal's point of view--Kemal, the second son of a rich, Westernized industrialist, who on the eve of his engagement to another child of wealth, Sibel, falls in love with a beautiful and much younger shop girl named Fusun.
Let's pause here: the shop where Fusun works is called the Champs Elysee. Kemal is made aware of it because Sibel notices the beautiful clothes in the shop window. Thinking to buy her something lovely, he enters and selects a handbag. The "girl" who serves him has long blond hair, wears a mini skirt. He instantly becomes fascinated with her. His fiance, Sibel, who's studied at the Sorbonne and knows French fashion, spots the handbag as a fake. In the process of returning it, Kemal discovers that Fusun and he are distant relations. They knew each other as very young children. And she is studying for a university entrance exam. He becomes her math tutor at an empty apartment his parents retain for their cast-off furniture. Here in this apartment Kemal and Fusun make love, day after day for months.
Another pause: the two have no worry that their violating the Islamic tabu against sex before marriage will result in a long train of sadness and loss. In fact, they become so wedded--through touch, smell, small gestures, and the quiet of the apartment--that they create a world apart. Then comes Kemal and Sibel's engagement party. WAIT! the reader wants to shout. Are you sure this is a good idea? But Kemal does not think deeply or clearly. He even invites Fusun and her parents to long drunken night. It is a disaster. From then on the lives of these three rather innocent people will be changed forever.
I will not reveal all the agony and beauty of these changes only jump ahead to the 8 years Kemal will spend visiting Fusun and her parents in their seedy apartment, lovingly welcomed by "Aunt Nasife." Fusun now wears a headscarf. She is married to a sweet movie-maker. Kemal's incessant appearance for dinner and TV watching is one of the oddest stories of wooing I've ever read, for still in his innocence Kemal hopes to induce Fusun to divorce her sweet husband, escape the headscarf "retirement" and marry him.
But she is deeply wounded. She has let her hair grow out black. As politics in Istanbul unravel into street fighting and bombs in coffee houses and shops, the movie industry where Fusun hoped to become a star, degenerates into porn flicks. Kemal becomes an obsessive collector of objects from Fusun's home, which he takes back to the isolated apartment and fondles, trying to absorb her essence through what she has touched.
Is her life in late 20th-century Turkey much different from that of a harem girl a century or so earlier? She takes to painting images of Istanbul birds, in the style of Persian miniatures. She wears a headscarf and especially after the street violence escalates, she becomes enclosed in her parents' apartment. Any ambition she has for a modern life, slowly ebbs away, and she becomes remote and sullen.
I am more than halfway through, listening to the book. Disks 14-17 are left. I do not know what will happen. But the author's way of framing the story with frequent, brief mentions of these 8 years, and what the narrator Kemal will do with the objects he collects, how he will later tour musuems all over the world, not only heralds an end to his wooing of Fusun, but hints that at that end he will be alone.
It is a very long book, but only half the size of, say, Anna Karenina, which it somewhat resembles--a story of an upper-class woman who attempts to live outside marriage with her lover, and eventually finds her own fiber disintegrating. Where the books mainly differ is in the obsessive, first-person narration. In Pamuk's novel we don't get outside Kemal's point of view; whereas Tolstoy revels in parallel stories, especially that of a landowner, his love and eventual marriage to the aristocratic young woman he adores, their care of his tubercular brother, his love of the land, the various peasants who are his helpmates in agriculture. This parallel life changes the way Anna and Vronsky's story affects us. It expands the world, presents an alternate universe to their obsessive, diminishing choices.
Still I admire Pamuk's narration: subtle as it weaves through Kemal's and Fusun's constant psychological changes, as their options disintegrate, and it's becomes clearer and clearer that they will be bound together in loss.
Monday, April 30, 2012
Friday, April 27, 2012
Margotlog: Southern Historical Confections
Margotlog: Southern Historical Confections
I don't mean white-washing atrocities or making up glories that never existed for the sake of local pride. This is a far more personal, individual venture--person to person, reader to reader. In the last twenty years, let's say, there's been a mini explosion of creative works--poetry, fiction, drama--based on historical people, eras, movements, secrets.
For me this contemporary rush to redress the past in passionate, alluring, and yes accurate costumes begins with sitting upstairs in my mother's house, in the turquoise bedroom that used to be my sister's, and in the evening reading The Blue Flower. This book by British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1997) concerns the young German poet Novalis, and his strange attachment to a young (I mean really young) girl. The novel is a model of concision, with brief chapters that show us various aspects of the family life, poor yet aristocratic, mother downtrodden yet insightful, friend amazed at the helter-skelter of drafty manor existence. The father is dictatorial yet sympathetic; the wealthier family of the young girl is hospitable and easy-going; the young girl's operation of the lungs--all crisply and sympathetically portrayed until the reader feels satisfied enough to credit young Novalis' intense love for this rather common wisp of a girl--named by the author after the blue flower of German romanticism.
As a teenager, Charleston, South Carolina, on the cusp of the civil rights movement, I loved historical romances set in the antebellum south. My father was a history professor at the Citadel, but I hardly credited his rantings about states rights, interposition and nullification. For me, history had to mean romance that made the heart sing, or at least transported me over the moon. Then came the marches and the night-stick-wielding police with their snarling German shepherds. Though I felt in my bones the wrongness of segregation, I didn't know enough history to have predicted this nonviolent, determined effort to create political change.
As an outsider Yankee in South Carolina, I neither truly penetrated white southern culture, nor had any real contact with African-Americans. By the time I'd made my way north, first to college in Baltimore, then to graduate school in New York, then to marriage and more graduate school at the University of Minnesota, I had read my way into historians of slavery, reconstruction, the great migration. I was ready to create my own historical novel called "Effluvia," suggestive of the tidal waters that bathed the oyster beds of the black oystermen I dared to create, and the southern whites who, like me, were shaken and educated down to their roots by the Civil Rights Movement.
My mother, a librarian at the Charleston County Free Library, helped me with research for this novel, which I wrote for my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Minnesota (along with a 200-page bibliographic explication--heaven help me!) But the minute I mentioned that I was trying to publish it (I had worked at Doubleday Anchor Books in New York and knew something of the publishing world) my mother had a fit. She wrote a two-page typed argument against such a thing. "If you publish this, it will kill your father. He'll never let me forget it." I was furious, of course, but also clear-headed enough to enjoy (in a sardonic say) the contradiction she supposed: if my father were done in by my publication, how could he "never let her forget it?"
In fact, there was no publication, in part because I gradually gave up and turned to poetry, thinking, "My mother will never understand this!" Meaning I'd be free of her interference. Not to mention that I intended to tell her almost nothing about anything I ever published.
Race as a subject in the southern United States still evokes controversy, secrecy, and fear. A few weeks ago, I visited the two dear friends I still have in Charleston. They are natives to Charleston, but they are quite aware of the inequality, meanness, and repression still practiced by whites against blacks. Much has changed since the 1960s, we all recognize that, but that the anger of white men at any hint that their prerogatives might be threatened still lashes out. In their case, at them, as white women who dare express what I'd call liberal views. And this hatred directed at them comes from middle-aged men in their own family--sons, brothers, cousins.
No wonder they lower their voices to a whisper as we sit in a crowded restaurant. Some black couples sit at adjacent tables. Black and white servers take our order and bring our food. But it's very clear there remains a highly charged atmosphere around privilege, race, and (this is where the outsider is stunned) around white women who dare to insist on their freedom of expression, their freedom to disagree with unquestioned white, male privilege.
There are and have always been white southerners who work for equality. Who abhor and resist the ugly and subtle expressions of white power--lynching, KKK cross burnings, beatings of black men in back alleys by gangs of whites, and the silence and whispers across a meal. For my money, the novel Help, and the movie made from it, go right to the heart of how cruel white women have been, can be toward the black women in their kitchens.
As a teenage girl in love with the romance of the south, I had no idea of the system of repression and dominance I was unwittingly adoring. Now I do. Whatever work I might write today about the south would
have to address it.
.
I don't mean white-washing atrocities or making up glories that never existed for the sake of local pride. This is a far more personal, individual venture--person to person, reader to reader. In the last twenty years, let's say, there's been a mini explosion of creative works--poetry, fiction, drama--based on historical people, eras, movements, secrets.
For me this contemporary rush to redress the past in passionate, alluring, and yes accurate costumes begins with sitting upstairs in my mother's house, in the turquoise bedroom that used to be my sister's, and in the evening reading The Blue Flower. This book by British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1997) concerns the young German poet Novalis, and his strange attachment to a young (I mean really young) girl. The novel is a model of concision, with brief chapters that show us various aspects of the family life, poor yet aristocratic, mother downtrodden yet insightful, friend amazed at the helter-skelter of drafty manor existence. The father is dictatorial yet sympathetic; the wealthier family of the young girl is hospitable and easy-going; the young girl's operation of the lungs--all crisply and sympathetically portrayed until the reader feels satisfied enough to credit young Novalis' intense love for this rather common wisp of a girl--named by the author after the blue flower of German romanticism.
As a teenager, Charleston, South Carolina, on the cusp of the civil rights movement, I loved historical romances set in the antebellum south. My father was a history professor at the Citadel, but I hardly credited his rantings about states rights, interposition and nullification. For me, history had to mean romance that made the heart sing, or at least transported me over the moon. Then came the marches and the night-stick-wielding police with their snarling German shepherds. Though I felt in my bones the wrongness of segregation, I didn't know enough history to have predicted this nonviolent, determined effort to create political change.
As an outsider Yankee in South Carolina, I neither truly penetrated white southern culture, nor had any real contact with African-Americans. By the time I'd made my way north, first to college in Baltimore, then to graduate school in New York, then to marriage and more graduate school at the University of Minnesota, I had read my way into historians of slavery, reconstruction, the great migration. I was ready to create my own historical novel called "Effluvia," suggestive of the tidal waters that bathed the oyster beds of the black oystermen I dared to create, and the southern whites who, like me, were shaken and educated down to their roots by the Civil Rights Movement.
My mother, a librarian at the Charleston County Free Library, helped me with research for this novel, which I wrote for my Ph.D. thesis at the University of Minnesota (along with a 200-page bibliographic explication--heaven help me!) But the minute I mentioned that I was trying to publish it (I had worked at Doubleday Anchor Books in New York and knew something of the publishing world) my mother had a fit. She wrote a two-page typed argument against such a thing. "If you publish this, it will kill your father. He'll never let me forget it." I was furious, of course, but also clear-headed enough to enjoy (in a sardonic say) the contradiction she supposed: if my father were done in by my publication, how could he "never let her forget it?"
In fact, there was no publication, in part because I gradually gave up and turned to poetry, thinking, "My mother will never understand this!" Meaning I'd be free of her interference. Not to mention that I intended to tell her almost nothing about anything I ever published.
Race as a subject in the southern United States still evokes controversy, secrecy, and fear. A few weeks ago, I visited the two dear friends I still have in Charleston. They are natives to Charleston, but they are quite aware of the inequality, meanness, and repression still practiced by whites against blacks. Much has changed since the 1960s, we all recognize that, but that the anger of white men at any hint that their prerogatives might be threatened still lashes out. In their case, at them, as white women who dare express what I'd call liberal views. And this hatred directed at them comes from middle-aged men in their own family--sons, brothers, cousins.
No wonder they lower their voices to a whisper as we sit in a crowded restaurant. Some black couples sit at adjacent tables. Black and white servers take our order and bring our food. But it's very clear there remains a highly charged atmosphere around privilege, race, and (this is where the outsider is stunned) around white women who dare to insist on their freedom of expression, their freedom to disagree with unquestioned white, male privilege.
There are and have always been white southerners who work for equality. Who abhor and resist the ugly and subtle expressions of white power--lynching, KKK cross burnings, beatings of black men in back alleys by gangs of whites, and the silence and whispers across a meal. For my money, the novel Help, and the movie made from it, go right to the heart of how cruel white women have been, can be toward the black women in their kitchens.
As a teenage girl in love with the romance of the south, I had no idea of the system of repression and dominance I was unwittingly adoring. Now I do. Whatever work I might write today about the south would
have to address it.
.
Wednesday, April 25, 2012
Margotlog: The Laurel Poetry Collective
Margotlog: The Laurel Poetry Collective
It's not my first one--this collective. Early in my poetry writing, I took part in the Lake Street Writers Group. It was the 70s, with an explosion of interest in personal expression, in poetry about streets and lanes, farms and factories, childhood and memories. Like feminists, we gathered to talk about craft in relation to ourselves. Across town, the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota was meeting to form their gallery, their journal, their careers. We Lake Street Writers were undoubtedly influenced by feminism, though we contained as many men as women.
Lots of little magazines grew up around us. When I started to publish a poem here, a poem there, Minneapolis/Saint Paul offered many choices of little magazines: The Lake Street Review, edited by Kevin Fitzpatrick; Sing Heavenly Muse, edited by Sue Ann Martinson, Milkweed Chronicle, edited by Emilie Buchwald, with art and design by Randy Scholes. There were others that came along later, like the Great River Review. Many of us writers found work in what was first called Poets in the Schools or PITS--sure to evoke a smirk. Then came an expanded version: Writers in the Schools, and finally Writers and Artists in the Schools, WITS and WAITS. A poet could make something of PITS, WITS, WAITS. A poet could make money with PITS, WITS, WAITS.
This literary proliferation also spawned book publishers like New Rivers Press, and Milkweed Editions, Holy Cow! Press and others. This love of literature, contemporary and voiced on the spot, led a group of poets to form one the Twin Cities' finest artistic organizations (my opinion, of course), The Loft: A Place for Writers and Readers. The Loft started above a bookstore in Dinkeytown, then moved to space above a former dry cleaners on Lake Street. then to a school building in Tangletown, and finally to its lavish (by comparison) offices and performance space within a renovated brick building on Washington Avenue, called Open Book.
With all this expansive growth, certain efforts drew national attention and expanded to a national audience--like the publishers mentioned above, and Greywolf, which migrated here from the West Coast. Other literary efforts slowly disappeared for lack of funds, exhaustion of primary movers, or who knows what. Soon academies got into the act. The wonderful "teaching artists" from WAITS wanted a living wage. Couple them with eager younger writers, and it's natural that MFA Masters in Fine Arts in Writing) programs would sprout up around the country.
The Laurel Poetry Collective was spawned from just such a program at Hamline University. As Hamline's wonderful poet and poetry teacher Deborah Keenan guided poet after poet to a final manuscript, and kept them writing in weekly sessions after graduation, a hunger arose. Many of them wanted a full-length book. Yet finding publishers was complicated. An older idea emerged: the collective.For ten years the Laurel Poetry Collective has been publishing "beautiful and affordable" books, designed by Sylvia Ruud with a similar format and "look," linking them as part of a whole.
Now we are celebrating our final gathering: an anthology called Body of Evidence. It's a beautiful and affordable book. Tonight we will read from it at The Loft. Delight, exhaustion, and applause!
It's not my first one--this collective. Early in my poetry writing, I took part in the Lake Street Writers Group. It was the 70s, with an explosion of interest in personal expression, in poetry about streets and lanes, farms and factories, childhood and memories. Like feminists, we gathered to talk about craft in relation to ourselves. Across town, the Women's Art Registry of Minnesota was meeting to form their gallery, their journal, their careers. We Lake Street Writers were undoubtedly influenced by feminism, though we contained as many men as women.
Lots of little magazines grew up around us. When I started to publish a poem here, a poem there, Minneapolis/Saint Paul offered many choices of little magazines: The Lake Street Review, edited by Kevin Fitzpatrick; Sing Heavenly Muse, edited by Sue Ann Martinson, Milkweed Chronicle, edited by Emilie Buchwald, with art and design by Randy Scholes. There were others that came along later, like the Great River Review. Many of us writers found work in what was first called Poets in the Schools or PITS--sure to evoke a smirk. Then came an expanded version: Writers in the Schools, and finally Writers and Artists in the Schools, WITS and WAITS. A poet could make something of PITS, WITS, WAITS. A poet could make money with PITS, WITS, WAITS.
This literary proliferation also spawned book publishers like New Rivers Press, and Milkweed Editions, Holy Cow! Press and others. This love of literature, contemporary and voiced on the spot, led a group of poets to form one the Twin Cities' finest artistic organizations (my opinion, of course), The Loft: A Place for Writers and Readers. The Loft started above a bookstore in Dinkeytown, then moved to space above a former dry cleaners on Lake Street. then to a school building in Tangletown, and finally to its lavish (by comparison) offices and performance space within a renovated brick building on Washington Avenue, called Open Book.
With all this expansive growth, certain efforts drew national attention and expanded to a national audience--like the publishers mentioned above, and Greywolf, which migrated here from the West Coast. Other literary efforts slowly disappeared for lack of funds, exhaustion of primary movers, or who knows what. Soon academies got into the act. The wonderful "teaching artists" from WAITS wanted a living wage. Couple them with eager younger writers, and it's natural that MFA Masters in Fine Arts in Writing) programs would sprout up around the country.
The Laurel Poetry Collective was spawned from just such a program at Hamline University. As Hamline's wonderful poet and poetry teacher Deborah Keenan guided poet after poet to a final manuscript, and kept them writing in weekly sessions after graduation, a hunger arose. Many of them wanted a full-length book. Yet finding publishers was complicated. An older idea emerged: the collective.For ten years the Laurel Poetry Collective has been publishing "beautiful and affordable" books, designed by Sylvia Ruud with a similar format and "look," linking them as part of a whole.
Now we are celebrating our final gathering: an anthology called Body of Evidence. It's a beautiful and affordable book. Tonight we will read from it at The Loft. Delight, exhaustion, and applause!
Saturday, April 21, 2012
Margotlog: Apple Blossoms
Margotlog: Apple Blossoms
When Fran and I settled into this century-old house in Saint Paul, twenty-five years ago, there was nothing planted in the yard except grass. I mean no bush, no flower, no tree except the boulevard ash. Nothing to soften the angular blockiness of the house.
I wasn't a gardener then. In my first marriage, the husband did it all, and I raised the child. But this was a second marriage, with a man who befriended all kinds of people, loved cats, good company, books, games, but turned rather a blind eye to "nature." He did not, on purpose, get his hands dirty or his feet wet.
Something compelled me. I began to plant: silver maples in the back yard, shoots from the Arbor Day Foundation of spruce and white pine, a Russian Olive and Honey Locust in the postage-stamp front yard. Lilacs beside the porch, and against the western fence in the back, a flowing crab apple tree.
It began straight as an arrow, probably ten feet tall. Over the fence in the adjacent yard, it could spy a full-grown cousin that bloomed in snowy scented array, an old tree with thick trunk and branches. Several years into our life together, my shoot of a tree had to watch that old cousin be hacked to death by a young man in frenzied control of a buzz saw.
There was one consolation: with the shade from that cousin gone, my tree grew fast, soon over-topping the board fence and draping its snowy blossoms into the adjacent driveway. By then the frenzied chopper had decamped, and after the house next door passed quickly through several hands, a young gardener bought it and began her own project of beautification.
Her style is quite different from mine. Whereas I mulch with every leaf I can collect, she scrapes up all fallen leaves and bags them. Whereas I let my grass revert to whatever will come up--creeping charlie, Virginia waterleaf (misnamed--it should be Minnesota waterleaf), along with huge bunches of white violets--she maintains a nice sward of regularly bladed grass and tidy flowering borders. I don't exactly want a forest primaeval, but I like a wild, "lived-in" look. Yet, there are fences between our front and back yards. We manage to restrain our variety to the edge of her driveway.
That is, except for the flowering crab. About five years ago, she planted her own crab apple shoot in her backyard, almost exactly where the old tree had been hacked to pieces. Thus my crab was given a younger cousin, who has grown into a lovely, columnar shape. When I stand at the kitchen window, my face tilted toward the setting sun, the blowsy blossoms of my old crab seem to touch the thin, green-white blade of its younger attendant. This view is exquisitely beautiful:, though a visual illusion. Actually there's a driveway between them.
What is it, this year, that lets the flowers of my tree linger, porcelain-white cups against grey skies, or pale flames jouncing in the wind? Its wide-spread branches carry its easy burden like a child whose arms are full of lace. Then again, its hair, done-up in wide wings, belongs to an old dame, the guardian of the neighborhood.I hold my breath and ceremoniously bow to its beauty, knowing it is transitory. Soon green leaves will push away the flowers, its virginal beauty transformed into another season of green and fruit.
When Fran and I settled into this century-old house in Saint Paul, twenty-five years ago, there was nothing planted in the yard except grass. I mean no bush, no flower, no tree except the boulevard ash. Nothing to soften the angular blockiness of the house.
I wasn't a gardener then. In my first marriage, the husband did it all, and I raised the child. But this was a second marriage, with a man who befriended all kinds of people, loved cats, good company, books, games, but turned rather a blind eye to "nature." He did not, on purpose, get his hands dirty or his feet wet.
Something compelled me. I began to plant: silver maples in the back yard, shoots from the Arbor Day Foundation of spruce and white pine, a Russian Olive and Honey Locust in the postage-stamp front yard. Lilacs beside the porch, and against the western fence in the back, a flowing crab apple tree.
It began straight as an arrow, probably ten feet tall. Over the fence in the adjacent yard, it could spy a full-grown cousin that bloomed in snowy scented array, an old tree with thick trunk and branches. Several years into our life together, my shoot of a tree had to watch that old cousin be hacked to death by a young man in frenzied control of a buzz saw.
There was one consolation: with the shade from that cousin gone, my tree grew fast, soon over-topping the board fence and draping its snowy blossoms into the adjacent driveway. By then the frenzied chopper had decamped, and after the house next door passed quickly through several hands, a young gardener bought it and began her own project of beautification.
Her style is quite different from mine. Whereas I mulch with every leaf I can collect, she scrapes up all fallen leaves and bags them. Whereas I let my grass revert to whatever will come up--creeping charlie, Virginia waterleaf (misnamed--it should be Minnesota waterleaf), along with huge bunches of white violets--she maintains a nice sward of regularly bladed grass and tidy flowering borders. I don't exactly want a forest primaeval, but I like a wild, "lived-in" look. Yet, there are fences between our front and back yards. We manage to restrain our variety to the edge of her driveway.
That is, except for the flowering crab. About five years ago, she planted her own crab apple shoot in her backyard, almost exactly where the old tree had been hacked to pieces. Thus my crab was given a younger cousin, who has grown into a lovely, columnar shape. When I stand at the kitchen window, my face tilted toward the setting sun, the blowsy blossoms of my old crab seem to touch the thin, green-white blade of its younger attendant. This view is exquisitely beautiful:, though a visual illusion. Actually there's a driveway between them.
What is it, this year, that lets the flowers of my tree linger, porcelain-white cups against grey skies, or pale flames jouncing in the wind? Its wide-spread branches carry its easy burden like a child whose arms are full of lace. Then again, its hair, done-up in wide wings, belongs to an old dame, the guardian of the neighborhood.I hold my breath and ceremoniously bow to its beauty, knowing it is transitory. Soon green leaves will push away the flowers, its virginal beauty transformed into another season of green and fruit.
Thursday, April 19, 2012
Margotlog: Bubba
Margotlog: Bubba
My friends in Charleston, South Carolina, are wandering huge Magnolia cemetery with me, pausing at my parents' grave on "Green Isle" where the magnolia my mother planted soon after my father died in the early 90s has grown high as a roof. Its glossy, dark green stateliness expresses all that my Northern mother yearned for and sometimes found in Charleston.
Nearby we visit one of my favorite grave "ornaments": a marble seated dog, the foxy kind. And near that another grave nicknamed "Bubba." "Every Charleston family has a Bubba," comments the mother of my friendly mother/daughter combo. She should know, having been born in Charleston and rarely left except for trips to the mountains, and several times to England and once with me, her daughter and Northern friends to Paris, Chartres, Giverny.
Bubba: nickname for brother, a nonexistent commodity in our small Northern family, since my father was the only male. Yet, he himself was a brother three times over, and, now that I think of it, occasionally acted like a Bubba.
Bubba: etymology: derived from "brother." The Southern U.S. slur of consonants and emphasis on softening the final "er." A diminutive which over time fulfills its prophecy, i. e. a grown man who occasionally acts like a spoiled child, tantrums and all.
And how are the women implicated: It's true that some Southern women, in their stylized helplessness, can give the impression that they're weak and fluttery, easy prey for the grand-standing tantrums of a Bubba. It's a gender stereotype that we in the upper Midwest do not understand. I joke to my friends: "In northern Minnesota they like to brag, "The men are men and the women are men too.'" We laugh.
We skirt politics most of the time, though over the years of our friendship, we've learned that we share many of the same values--education, home and family, beauty in nature and civilization, and yes, even equality, though here, without being brazen and nasty about it, my friends evince preference for old-fashioned establishments which for years were "whites only." They are a little embarrassed when I head off to the Charleston Free Public Library to do research on Civil Rights agitation in Charleston.
Yet, when we tour Middleton Plantation with a soft-spoken Southern guide of our largely Northern batch of visitors, the guide describes the Civil War as it's designated in Charleston: "the War of Northern Aggression, or the War Between the States, or The Late Unpleasantness." My friends and I laugh at that last one. We nod knowingly: it's that soft gliding over what is difficult and strange which is the essence of Southern gentility.
Yet, as we stroll the beautiful sloping grounds down to the Ashley River, and enter a small brick house which was once a "slave chapel," the daughter portion of my friends whispers to me: "They were strapped onto pallets and slid in tiers on those slave ships." I gasp: this is worse than I'd thought. A little later, she adds in a low voice, "On a slave register at another plantation, the listed causes of death were 'suicide, snake bite, suicide, suicide.' But," she pauses and takes my arm, "the owner hired workers for the rice fields. He didn't want his valuable slaves being bitten by snakes." We look at each other with distress in our eyes.
We do talk politics though no mention of Santorum who won the Republican primary in South Carolina, a man who intended to remove women's reproductive rights and maybe their right to vote. "We have an excellent mayor," say my friends. "Joe Riley. He's for open, equal treatment of all kinds of people. But this is his last term." They shake their heads. "We afraid the next mayor is not going to be like that."
As we sit over dessert and the restaurant empties out, the lights begin to glimmer across the Ashley River in the city proper. We're high above the river in the roof-top glassed restaurant of the Holiday Inn. It's a wonderful prospect for adoring this so beautiful city which has never allowed skyscrapers to ruin its skyline dominated by church spires.
"We have young men with families in our lives," my friends lean close, "who are often nasty to us about politics. They even attack the older generation. Angry young white men, is what we call them."
I draw in my breath, concerned for their peace of mind. "I don't understand it," I say, "but I remember my father doing the same to me, during the 'more recent unpleasantness,'" I add, meaning the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 60s and 70s. "He became furious, and he wasn't even Southern. It's as if a toy were being taken away from him, or his manhood besmirched."
They nod. It's the Bubba phenomenon. "We don't let them talk to us in their angry voices," say my friends. I know exactly what they mean. The women become the verbal whipping posts for this anger which is so misplaced, yet so virulent. And though I don't say this outloud, I think of countries where outraged men repress women to the point of invisibility. It's a scary prospect. And for an instant I flash on all three of us in head scarves with veils over our faces.
My friends in Charleston, South Carolina, are wandering huge Magnolia cemetery with me, pausing at my parents' grave on "Green Isle" where the magnolia my mother planted soon after my father died in the early 90s has grown high as a roof. Its glossy, dark green stateliness expresses all that my Northern mother yearned for and sometimes found in Charleston.
Nearby we visit one of my favorite grave "ornaments": a marble seated dog, the foxy kind. And near that another grave nicknamed "Bubba." "Every Charleston family has a Bubba," comments the mother of my friendly mother/daughter combo. She should know, having been born in Charleston and rarely left except for trips to the mountains, and several times to England and once with me, her daughter and Northern friends to Paris, Chartres, Giverny.
Bubba: nickname for brother, a nonexistent commodity in our small Northern family, since my father was the only male. Yet, he himself was a brother three times over, and, now that I think of it, occasionally acted like a Bubba.
Bubba: etymology: derived from "brother." The Southern U.S. slur of consonants and emphasis on softening the final "er." A diminutive which over time fulfills its prophecy, i. e. a grown man who occasionally acts like a spoiled child, tantrums and all.
And how are the women implicated: It's true that some Southern women, in their stylized helplessness, can give the impression that they're weak and fluttery, easy prey for the grand-standing tantrums of a Bubba. It's a gender stereotype that we in the upper Midwest do not understand. I joke to my friends: "In northern Minnesota they like to brag, "The men are men and the women are men too.'" We laugh.
We skirt politics most of the time, though over the years of our friendship, we've learned that we share many of the same values--education, home and family, beauty in nature and civilization, and yes, even equality, though here, without being brazen and nasty about it, my friends evince preference for old-fashioned establishments which for years were "whites only." They are a little embarrassed when I head off to the Charleston Free Public Library to do research on Civil Rights agitation in Charleston.
Yet, when we tour Middleton Plantation with a soft-spoken Southern guide of our largely Northern batch of visitors, the guide describes the Civil War as it's designated in Charleston: "the War of Northern Aggression, or the War Between the States, or The Late Unpleasantness." My friends and I laugh at that last one. We nod knowingly: it's that soft gliding over what is difficult and strange which is the essence of Southern gentility.
Yet, as we stroll the beautiful sloping grounds down to the Ashley River, and enter a small brick house which was once a "slave chapel," the daughter portion of my friends whispers to me: "They were strapped onto pallets and slid in tiers on those slave ships." I gasp: this is worse than I'd thought. A little later, she adds in a low voice, "On a slave register at another plantation, the listed causes of death were 'suicide, snake bite, suicide, suicide.' But," she pauses and takes my arm, "the owner hired workers for the rice fields. He didn't want his valuable slaves being bitten by snakes." We look at each other with distress in our eyes.
We do talk politics though no mention of Santorum who won the Republican primary in South Carolina, a man who intended to remove women's reproductive rights and maybe their right to vote. "We have an excellent mayor," say my friends. "Joe Riley. He's for open, equal treatment of all kinds of people. But this is his last term." They shake their heads. "We afraid the next mayor is not going to be like that."
As we sit over dessert and the restaurant empties out, the lights begin to glimmer across the Ashley River in the city proper. We're high above the river in the roof-top glassed restaurant of the Holiday Inn. It's a wonderful prospect for adoring this so beautiful city which has never allowed skyscrapers to ruin its skyline dominated by church spires.
"We have young men with families in our lives," my friends lean close, "who are often nasty to us about politics. They even attack the older generation. Angry young white men, is what we call them."
I draw in my breath, concerned for their peace of mind. "I don't understand it," I say, "but I remember my father doing the same to me, during the 'more recent unpleasantness,'" I add, meaning the Civil Rights demonstrations of the 60s and 70s. "He became furious, and he wasn't even Southern. It's as if a toy were being taken away from him, or his manhood besmirched."
They nod. It's the Bubba phenomenon. "We don't let them talk to us in their angry voices," say my friends. I know exactly what they mean. The women become the verbal whipping posts for this anger which is so misplaced, yet so virulent. And though I don't say this outloud, I think of countries where outraged men repress women to the point of invisibility. It's a scary prospect. And for an instant I flash on all three of us in head scarves with veils over our faces.
Sunday, April 8, 2012
Margotlog: Schubert's "Great" Symphony (aka "Bombast")
Margotlog: Olivero's "Neharot, Neharot," then Schubert's "Great" Symphony (aka "Bombast")
Forgive me, I'm headed toward a slam of one of the great orchestral numbers. Last night we heard our favorite orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, preform several Schuberts and one modern amazement: Betty Olivero's "Neharot, Neharot," which means "Rivers, Rivers" in Hebrew. The review in the StarTribune suggested that we might adore Schubert's "Great" and last symphony--the poor man died in his early 30s, probably of syphilis. But that Olivero's work might challenge us, especially the recording of Israeli women singing the word Neharot and elegies and love songs, to mourn the war dead from a Lebanese Hezbollah attack in 2006.
The opposite happened. As we watched the stage hands prepare for the Olivero--hauling out rack after rack of gongs, two marimbas, not to mention a huge snare drum--we prepared for bombast. There was even an accordion, strange visitor to an orchestra. The viola soloist might be drowned out. But no. This haunting piece begins with a subdued, grating overlap of sounds--mostly strings, plus the accordion. Pitch hardly changed; there was no melody. Then came the voices, and last entered the rich, vibrant song of the viola. I am rarely moved to tears by a piece of music (movies, all the time). But after the accordion added an occasional echo of Jewish celebration (Think "Fiddler on the Roof" very tamped down), and the viola returned again and again, soaring and dipping, I honored the composer Betty Olivero, the violist Kim Kashkashian, and the orchestra for transforming modern warfare into a sublime evocation of loss. This should be recorded!.
Intermission, then Schubert's "Great." I know, I've set you up to expect a slam. Starting at the end and reeling back, let's note that the orchestra won a standing ovation. There was a lot to appreciate in its rendition--especially the third movement, "Scherzo: Allegro vivace," which the orchestra played with jaunty care and tenderness. Schubert is best at evoking the glories of nature--music that sends us to a leafy mountaintop, beside a sparkling stream, surrounded by the trill of birds. In his songs and, for instance, the "Trout" Quintet, Schubert's music brushes us with nature's delights. The touch is tender or stormy but always in the service not of bombast, but of evocation. We are enfolded in sound that carries with it nature's most delicate kiss or deep roll of thunder, and soon we have forgotten we're in an auditorium, listening to humans with instruments. Pan, the god of woods and streams, has us all in thrall. We might dance in the fairy ring. (Schubert, the program notes remind us, was expert at writing dances.) After the experience, we walk away feeling refreshed and joyful.
There are delicate, danceable moments in this last "Great" symphony, but except for the third movement, the work is overwrought and repetitive. This was not helped by excessive crescendo and almost military precision on the part, let's say, of the conductor. Schubert's own ineptitude with orchestral heave and thrust--think Beethoven--is, of course, at the heart of the trouble. Out of a beautiful lyric passage suddenly thrusts gigantic bombast. Over and over we are subjected to this. The melodies and dynamics are repeated until we want to cover our ears. It's a bit like eating a delicate salad, which is suddenly smothered in mountains of mashed potatoes. We get a little nibble, our taste buds are alive and delighted, than "Bam," down comes the weighty potato.
This work was snubbed and not performed until ten years after Schubert's death. Since then it has enjoyed a great appreciation, so say the notes. Our favorite orchestra did not embarrass themselves but in the hands of another conductor, more sensitive to the work's limitations, they might have given the work more coherence, greater nuance and variety. As it was, the too emphatic treatment of the "big sound" parts--truly I could hear the emphasis coming and covered my hears-- brought out the weakest elements, leaving us to stand and applaud the flutes, piccolos, woodwinds, French horns, trumpets, and trombones, who were less subject to the conductor's manic approach.
But we were happy: we had experienced one piece played to perfection, and to our surprise, it was modern!
Forgive me, I'm headed toward a slam of one of the great orchestral numbers. Last night we heard our favorite orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, preform several Schuberts and one modern amazement: Betty Olivero's "Neharot, Neharot," which means "Rivers, Rivers" in Hebrew. The review in the StarTribune suggested that we might adore Schubert's "Great" and last symphony--the poor man died in his early 30s, probably of syphilis. But that Olivero's work might challenge us, especially the recording of Israeli women singing the word Neharot and elegies and love songs, to mourn the war dead from a Lebanese Hezbollah attack in 2006.
The opposite happened. As we watched the stage hands prepare for the Olivero--hauling out rack after rack of gongs, two marimbas, not to mention a huge snare drum--we prepared for bombast. There was even an accordion, strange visitor to an orchestra. The viola soloist might be drowned out. But no. This haunting piece begins with a subdued, grating overlap of sounds--mostly strings, plus the accordion. Pitch hardly changed; there was no melody. Then came the voices, and last entered the rich, vibrant song of the viola. I am rarely moved to tears by a piece of music (movies, all the time). But after the accordion added an occasional echo of Jewish celebration (Think "Fiddler on the Roof" very tamped down), and the viola returned again and again, soaring and dipping, I honored the composer Betty Olivero, the violist Kim Kashkashian, and the orchestra for transforming modern warfare into a sublime evocation of loss. This should be recorded!.
Intermission, then Schubert's "Great." I know, I've set you up to expect a slam. Starting at the end and reeling back, let's note that the orchestra won a standing ovation. There was a lot to appreciate in its rendition--especially the third movement, "Scherzo: Allegro vivace," which the orchestra played with jaunty care and tenderness. Schubert is best at evoking the glories of nature--music that sends us to a leafy mountaintop, beside a sparkling stream, surrounded by the trill of birds. In his songs and, for instance, the "Trout" Quintet, Schubert's music brushes us with nature's delights. The touch is tender or stormy but always in the service not of bombast, but of evocation. We are enfolded in sound that carries with it nature's most delicate kiss or deep roll of thunder, and soon we have forgotten we're in an auditorium, listening to humans with instruments. Pan, the god of woods and streams, has us all in thrall. We might dance in the fairy ring. (Schubert, the program notes remind us, was expert at writing dances.) After the experience, we walk away feeling refreshed and joyful.
There are delicate, danceable moments in this last "Great" symphony, but except for the third movement, the work is overwrought and repetitive. This was not helped by excessive crescendo and almost military precision on the part, let's say, of the conductor. Schubert's own ineptitude with orchestral heave and thrust--think Beethoven--is, of course, at the heart of the trouble. Out of a beautiful lyric passage suddenly thrusts gigantic bombast. Over and over we are subjected to this. The melodies and dynamics are repeated until we want to cover our ears. It's a bit like eating a delicate salad, which is suddenly smothered in mountains of mashed potatoes. We get a little nibble, our taste buds are alive and delighted, than "Bam," down comes the weighty potato.
This work was snubbed and not performed until ten years after Schubert's death. Since then it has enjoyed a great appreciation, so say the notes. Our favorite orchestra did not embarrass themselves but in the hands of another conductor, more sensitive to the work's limitations, they might have given the work more coherence, greater nuance and variety. As it was, the too emphatic treatment of the "big sound" parts--truly I could hear the emphasis coming and covered my hears-- brought out the weakest elements, leaving us to stand and applaud the flutes, piccolos, woodwinds, French horns, trumpets, and trombones, who were less subject to the conductor's manic approach.
But we were happy: we had experienced one piece played to perfection, and to our surprise, it was modern!
Saturday, April 7, 2012
Margotlog: Orhan Pamuk's Magic
Margotlog: Orhan Pamuk's Magic
Of Turkey, not the bird but the country, I know almost nothing except its largest city Istanbul, curves around a beautiful harbor called the Golden Horn which leads to the Bosporus, that narrow pathway into the Black Sea.
Yet listening to a reading Orhan Pamuk's lastest novel, The Museum of Innocence, published in 2008, translation published in 2009, I feel as though I'm walking the streets of a familiar city, but in the guise of a pampered, rather dilitante young man. I fall in love at first sight with a beautiful girl, virtually half my age, and since we have known in the past as distant cousins, it is easy for me as the handsome older (but not too old) man to entice her into my arms. She "gives her virginity to me" within the first 50 pages of the book. It's as if I, the narrator, savor her body like a feast--her skin like oranges, her mouth like dates.
What can come next? Ah, the hints are already there, as the narrator occasionally drifts forward to a much later period when he is actually recalling this idyll, and the sadness that will come.
Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006. That much I've known, but when I tried to read a translation of Snow, published in 2002, I found myself bored by the narrator's self-preoccupation, and delight in complications. Of course, I dare not judge, but can only hope that the Museum of Innocence will not devolve as well into complex, twining pathways, where the narrator loses guilt in the play of intelligence.
This business of guilt tweaks a memory: years ago I found on the shelf of a writer's room at Ragdale, the writers' colony outside Chicago, a book with the odd title of Haremlik. It was written by an Anglo woman who was living in what was then Constantinople. Since the city's name became Istanbul when the modern secular state of Turkey was created by the hero Ataturk in 1923, I assume Haremlik was published before that.
Haremlik was told in the voice of a cultured but poor young woman who was lodged in a harem. Over her ruled the "first wife," if that would be the appropriate term. Let's say the chief odalisque. Images of odalisques are rampant in 19th-and early 20th century French painting: Ingres, Delacroix, even a head portrait by Benjamin Constant, American 19th century. This is a male fascination, no question, but the book Haremlik also fascinated me, for its sense of a life confined, yet ready to burst forth. Which, I just discovered, actually happened.
For there, on the Amazon.com site, Haremlik: Some Pages from Life of Turkish Women is for sale in an affordable paper version. The author, Demetra Vaka Brown, was born a Greek Ottoman slave in Constantinople, somehow escaped the harem (one must read the book) and became a journalist. She published Haremlik in 1909.
Orhan Pamuk's magic lies, I sense, in his careful, even minute depiction of a wealthy Istanbul family, and its wayward, sensitive son. (Already in the first 50 pages, there's a vivid, grimy description of the city in the throes of lamb slaughter, in accordance with the patriarch Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command, then saved from this horror by the interposition of a lamb. As the narrator and the girl who will become his lover drive around Istanbul, they witness the slaughter of lamb after lamb until the reader is soaked with guilt, disgust, sorrow and blood.)
In the quiet, retrospective voice of the narrator, this moment attains the power of personal memory. As vivid and powerful as scenes from many books in English. Yet with a strangeness that cannot be denied. And a lingering question: what would the language be like, read in the original by a modern Turk?
Of Turkey, not the bird but the country, I know almost nothing except its largest city Istanbul, curves around a beautiful harbor called the Golden Horn which leads to the Bosporus, that narrow pathway into the Black Sea.
Yet listening to a reading Orhan Pamuk's lastest novel, The Museum of Innocence, published in 2008, translation published in 2009, I feel as though I'm walking the streets of a familiar city, but in the guise of a pampered, rather dilitante young man. I fall in love at first sight with a beautiful girl, virtually half my age, and since we have known in the past as distant cousins, it is easy for me as the handsome older (but not too old) man to entice her into my arms. She "gives her virginity to me" within the first 50 pages of the book. It's as if I, the narrator, savor her body like a feast--her skin like oranges, her mouth like dates.
What can come next? Ah, the hints are already there, as the narrator occasionally drifts forward to a much later period when he is actually recalling this idyll, and the sadness that will come.
Orhan Pamuk won the Nobel Prize in literature in 2006. That much I've known, but when I tried to read a translation of Snow, published in 2002, I found myself bored by the narrator's self-preoccupation, and delight in complications. Of course, I dare not judge, but can only hope that the Museum of Innocence will not devolve as well into complex, twining pathways, where the narrator loses guilt in the play of intelligence.
This business of guilt tweaks a memory: years ago I found on the shelf of a writer's room at Ragdale, the writers' colony outside Chicago, a book with the odd title of Haremlik. It was written by an Anglo woman who was living in what was then Constantinople. Since the city's name became Istanbul when the modern secular state of Turkey was created by the hero Ataturk in 1923, I assume Haremlik was published before that.
Haremlik was told in the voice of a cultured but poor young woman who was lodged in a harem. Over her ruled the "first wife," if that would be the appropriate term. Let's say the chief odalisque. Images of odalisques are rampant in 19th-and early 20th century French painting: Ingres, Delacroix, even a head portrait by Benjamin Constant, American 19th century. This is a male fascination, no question, but the book Haremlik also fascinated me, for its sense of a life confined, yet ready to burst forth. Which, I just discovered, actually happened.
For there, on the Amazon.com site, Haremlik: Some Pages from Life of Turkish Women is for sale in an affordable paper version. The author, Demetra Vaka Brown, was born a Greek Ottoman slave in Constantinople, somehow escaped the harem (one must read the book) and became a journalist. She published Haremlik in 1909.
Orhan Pamuk's magic lies, I sense, in his careful, even minute depiction of a wealthy Istanbul family, and its wayward, sensitive son. (Already in the first 50 pages, there's a vivid, grimy description of the city in the throes of lamb slaughter, in accordance with the patriarch Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac at God's command, then saved from this horror by the interposition of a lamb. As the narrator and the girl who will become his lover drive around Istanbul, they witness the slaughter of lamb after lamb until the reader is soaked with guilt, disgust, sorrow and blood.)
In the quiet, retrospective voice of the narrator, this moment attains the power of personal memory. As vivid and powerful as scenes from many books in English. Yet with a strangeness that cannot be denied. And a lingering question: what would the language be like, read in the original by a modern Turk?
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Margotlog: The Poetic Impulse
Margotlog: The Poetic Impulse
Walking the neighborhood this time of year with the azalea bushes blushing from winter's nip under their skirts, the "green fuse" sparks, and I'm channeling some great poet whose name I've forgot.
Words form in my head as I stride along, and soon I'm sounding to myself like the sly Polish poet, Nobel-prize-winner, Wislawa Symborska. She died recently. Her Polish was direct but difficult to translate. She made up words. She took bullies down to size: Hitler, for instance, who invaded Poland in 1939. Who is this someone in his itty-bitty something? So I half-remember one of her lines.
I've far from memorized her work (in translation), but its impulse to find irony in common voice energizes me. Like a careful botanist, she scrutinzes humankind under a microscope. With a bemused expression.
Words or more like an attitude form in my head:
It's come to my attention
that I'm on the job today,
along with leaves pushing
into their socket.
No namby-pamby
camel vitamins for me.
I'll swallow a thousand
meagwhams, ten-
thousand gametes.
On I walked, lines pumping me full of purpose, making themselves up we moved along. How odd, I think in retrospect. The renowned Wislawa lay on her couch, paper propped up ready for the pen. But that scarcely ever works for me, if you can call "working" this flow of notion that is lost virtually as it's formed, leaving nothing but a sense of camaraderie with the day and a good stretch to the legs.
For years, Emily has been my muse, meaning I can channel her too, having seen her upstairs room facing a street corner, her low table and chair--she was a small woman--spread with papers while a pen of sorts stands erect. It's helped recently to read Lyndel Gordon's "Lives Like Loaded Guns" where I learned that Emily woke at 3 a.m. and did much of her writing in that intense hush before dawn. Then she slept, her father and sister excusing her from most housework.
No one does that for me (I'm not complaining--there are the electric friends), but the predawn impulse to rise and skim the words off the half-dreaming brain before they sink, leaden into day--that too is mine. Often I'm sitting before the lighted screen writing this blog, while the house and neighborhood are hushed with sleep. No bird sounds. No whoosh of wheels past the closed window. This dark is potent, fluid. No telling where it will take me on this journey into a kind of waking dream.
Walking the neighborhood this time of year with the azalea bushes blushing from winter's nip under their skirts, the "green fuse" sparks, and I'm channeling some great poet whose name I've forgot.
Words form in my head as I stride along, and soon I'm sounding to myself like the sly Polish poet, Nobel-prize-winner, Wislawa Symborska. She died recently. Her Polish was direct but difficult to translate. She made up words. She took bullies down to size: Hitler, for instance, who invaded Poland in 1939. Who is this someone in his itty-bitty something? So I half-remember one of her lines.
I've far from memorized her work (in translation), but its impulse to find irony in common voice energizes me. Like a careful botanist, she scrutinzes humankind under a microscope. With a bemused expression.
Words or more like an attitude form in my head:
It's come to my attention
that I'm on the job today,
along with leaves pushing
into their socket.
No namby-pamby
camel vitamins for me.
I'll swallow a thousand
meagwhams, ten-
thousand gametes.
On I walked, lines pumping me full of purpose, making themselves up we moved along. How odd, I think in retrospect. The renowned Wislawa lay on her couch, paper propped up ready for the pen. But that scarcely ever works for me, if you can call "working" this flow of notion that is lost virtually as it's formed, leaving nothing but a sense of camaraderie with the day and a good stretch to the legs.
For years, Emily has been my muse, meaning I can channel her too, having seen her upstairs room facing a street corner, her low table and chair--she was a small woman--spread with papers while a pen of sorts stands erect. It's helped recently to read Lyndel Gordon's "Lives Like Loaded Guns" where I learned that Emily woke at 3 a.m. and did much of her writing in that intense hush before dawn. Then she slept, her father and sister excusing her from most housework.
No one does that for me (I'm not complaining--there are the electric friends), but the predawn impulse to rise and skim the words off the half-dreaming brain before they sink, leaden into day--that too is mine. Often I'm sitting before the lighted screen writing this blog, while the house and neighborhood are hushed with sleep. No bird sounds. No whoosh of wheels past the closed window. This dark is potent, fluid. No telling where it will take me on this journey into a kind of waking dream.
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