Category: Arts & Letters

The Metropolitan Opera broadcasts take on a new tone

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

One of the benefits of donating even a modest amount to the Metropolitan Opera’s broadcast fund is that you receive an annual schedule booklet, 36 colorful, glossy pages with the casts, broadcast times and estimated lengths, and summaries of the plots. The booklet arrives a month or two before the next season begins, and I keep mine as wonderful future references.

The upcoming Saturday matinee broadcasts, which start airing on Dec. 9, have already been controversial, due to the company’s shifting focus toward increased contemporary and sometimes realistically gritty works. The first presentation of the season, in fact, is Florencia en el Amazonas, inspired by the writings of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and only the third Spanish-language opera to be performed at the Met. (Carmen, after all, is in French and will be heard on Jan. 27.) Other works from our own era are Dead Man Walking (Jan. 20), X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X (Feb. 3), Fire Shut Up in My Bones (April 27), John Adams’ opera-oratorio El Nino (May 4), and The Hours (May 18).

That unprecedented string of operas by living composers doesn’t mean the usual masters aren’t on the menu. Mozart (3), Wagner, Verdi (4), Puccini (3), Bizet, Gounod, Donizetti, Johann Strauss Jr., and Gluck are all in the lineup, with two of the dates yet to be announced. Conspicuously absent is Richard Strauss.

Two of the archived presentations feature my favorite-ever conductor, Max Rudolf: Mozart’s Le Nozze di Figaro on Dec. 30, with Victoria de los Angeles and Cesare Siepi, and Donizetti’s L’Elisir d’Amore on April 6, with Luciano Pavarotti, Judith Blegen, and Ezio Flagello. As one conductor once told me, Rudolf could have been famous, if he had wanted that. At the Met, he worked largely behind the scenes as Rudolf Bing’s artistic administrator before going to Cincinnati and rebuilding that city’s great orchestra.

Also of note is that the long-running broadcast series has a new sponsor, the Robert K. Johnson Foundation, only the third in its history. The series was underwritten by Texaco from 1940 to 2003, followed by Toll Brothers luxury homebuilders (2005 to 2023).

Gee, have Texaco’s red-star gas stations been gone from the landscape 20 years already?

Even tradition changes.

Can it really be a whole year since the book appeared?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Have to admit it’s been an exciting, though not exactly lucrative, past 12 months since Quaking Dover appeared in print. The 255-page volume is quite different from my earlier publications. It’s history, rather than a novel or poetry, and its tone and outlook pushed my journalism training in new ways. I’ve even come to see this as my major creative nonfiction opus.

Reader reaction has been enthusiastic, and the book’s perspective has challenged the conventional take on New England history and its impact on the rest of America.

Friends Journal magazine called it an “eminently well-argued and documented account,“ while others declared it “a rich feast of a book” or said “It’s like you’re speaking right to me! It’s not like a history at all!” or simply “enjoyed your conversational writing style.”

Unlike my novels, its publication led to a festive book-release party in the Dover Quaker meetinghouse, followed by other events – some of them with unique PowerPoint visuals – in Dover, New Hampshire; Haverhill and Cape Cod, Massachusetts; and Eastport and Pembroke, Maine. Ten in all, and all well received. Didn’t get to do that with the novels. I’ve even had strangers stop me in the street to tell me how much they like my reading. And creating the presentations and accompanying illustrations has been fun in a whole new way for me.

One thing that’s impressed me is the way this has connected with people. It’s about places they live in or have visited, about families and communities they know, about values they share. It’s more concrete than fiction but no less personal.

Overall, it’s sold close to the U.S. average of 200 copies a year. Considering that the book is, at its core, the story of a small congregation in a small city in a small state, I’ll take that as a good start.

Time in the creation of poetry and much else

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Robert Bly once said that to write a line of poetry requires two hours. Not so much for the actual writing.  Not even for the inspiration. Though certainly for the revision.  As well as compression and redistillation. And more revision.

His estimate, to me, seems quite optimistic.

I’m thinking it can be applied to many more examples of where human creative action is involved, too.

Go ahead, name one where you wish you had more time for the project.

As I wrote to somebody, somewhere

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

“Gimmicks” is, of course, a loaded word, pejorative, “cheap tricks,” say in contrast to “devices” or structural support or a Greek chorus or some such. In Vonnegut’s day, his repeated quips made him hip, sassy, cool, droll, fun to read, on the same shelf as supercharged Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson. They were never dull, archly serious, overtly pedantic. Oh, maybe strike the last item, in retrospect. But somehow we always wanted another hit. I don’t mean that in the best-seller sense. No, that would be a sell-out. (Maybe that’s the crux of the issue you’re raising.)

As much as I loved Vonnegut’s work, especially Rosewater, I’m surprised how little I remember all these years later, apart from the asterisk, just don’t ask me which novel that punctuated.

By the way, I am taken with the ideal of a short novel, though obtaining that can be elusive.

One facet to consider is the way Vonnegut spoke from the Midwest, a region largely ignored or overlooked in American literature, in contrast to New York City mostly Manhattan but rarely Queens or the Bronx. That in itself was a major accomplishment, even if it was from his firehouse on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. So it goes.

Well, his father did run a hardware store and had to sell, uh, useful gimmicks. Drain stoppers, screws, nuts, hammers. (Bang, bang, expletive.)

It is amazing how much “bad writing” fills “great literature,” or even the New York Times Magazine, as one of my ambitious writing teachers led us to see. (He, too, had his own addiction to cool as in gimmicks.)

One question you stir up is how much a piece works for the time when it’s published and how much will still work (function) in later eras? And why?

What did your daughter think of the book, anyway?

When it comes to photos for blogging

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Have you ever thought about the best shape for a photo in blogging?

So much depends on the device your reader is using. A large PC screen offers many alternatives a cell phone or tablet doesn’t. My own frame of reference is a laptop.

My earlier posts often mixed the sizes of pictures in a post, for variety the way a newspaper photo essay would. But cell phones require a strong image rather than detail.

In general, then, I’ve been settling on full width but shallow – not that the visual content always cooperates.

Alas, those shots do lose some power in fitting into the blog’s formula width, unlike the full screen I use in selecting and editing.

In a grouping, I’ve been keeping them full-width rather than mixing and matching sizes. When our reader scans down, this functions somewhat like a moving camera roll shot. It’s not the way you’d “read” a photo on paper or in an art gallery, admittedly, but it’s an option the technology leads to.

But I’ve also been shooting a lot of square shots, which not too long ago was considered verboten by many observers.

And then, sometimes a deep vertical shot is dramatic, revealing itself portion by portion instead of fully at once.

What’s working best for you?  

 

When a painter writes poetry, too

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I love the idea of artists who are inspired by other artistic fields. Too often, alas, they’re stuck in their own genre.

The term for what I’m discussing here is cross-disciplinary.

For example, I’m primarily a writer, lately of fiction as well as a poet, but I’m moved most intensely by classical music and then opera, jazz, folk, film, theater, and yes, painting and related visual fields. And I consider myself essentially a visual person?

Maybe you get the idea.

So a few months ago, I got news that a friend now living in California had a new book, Roots, Stones, & Baggage, and I assumed it was a catalog for his most recent gallery presentation. He is, after all, a marvelous painter, still active in his 90s.

What arrived in the mail was mostly his selected poems, revealing a whole other side of himself. They’re good, by they way. He respects craft. And there is a sampling of his paintings over the years, too.

I remember his reply during a Q&A at his gallery show opening at the Ogunquit Art Museum in Maine when he said he understood Blake’s poetry, something that left many dumbfounded. Think of understanding as gut-level rather than legalistic, OK?

The new booklet’s worth getting even for the wonderful introduction by his son, the celebrated novelist Jonathan Letham.

And the poet slash painter in question is Richard Brown Letham, still going strong.