Tag: Culture

The novel is quite different from the operas

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

You know the common declaration that the book was better than the movie. Almost nobody acknowledges the reality that a movie can cover no more than 20 pages of a novel, or so I’ve heard – basing it on a short story would be much more fitting. (Who’s counting, anyway? A lot of a movie script involves fleshing out details. Say for five pages here, five pages there, five more for the finale. You get the idea.) There’s also the problem that cinema presents surfaces, while fiction can delve into individuals’ perceptions, reflections, and emotions in ways that even a first-person narrator cannot equally convey. Falling back on a voiceover, from a critical point of view, usually reflects a shortcoming in the movie itself. Perhaps you’ll come up with exceptions, and I’m open to argument. The point is, a filmscript has to discard a lot to fit into an acceptable running time for commercial release.

All that got stirred up after hearing a broadcast of Puccini’s 1884 opera Manon Lescaut, a retelling of Massenet’s once popular 1874 opera Manon, which still gets performed, unlike Auber’s largely forgotten 1856 version.

Usually, the discussion involves comparisons between Puccini and Massenet’s works, which I’ll touch on later, but this time I picked up on a clue from Sir Denis Forman’s “irreverent guide to the plots, the singers, the composers, the recordings” A Night at the Opera, a go-to book I’ll highly recommend. Manon is not one of Puccini’s blockbuster hits, something Sir Denis dismisses as “rather a dim little affair. It is made up of scenes from the Abbe Prevost’s long novel and whole chunks of the narrative take place between acts. This is dramatically inept because we lose any sense of continuity in Manon’s downward spiral and the agony does not pile on as it should.” OK, so my lack of enthusiasm for this work isn’t my fault, even though there are dramatic high points throughout, as Sir Denis cites.

He really grabbed my attention when he proclaimed, “The libretto is not good. Puccini’s Manon has a worse script than Auber’s, a much worse one than Massenet’s, and all three fail to mobilize the original Prevost’s story, which is full of good stuff and could make a rattling good television series today.”

That was good enough to send me down the rabbit hole. The novel in question is Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut, the seventh and last volume of the Memoirs and Adventures of a Quality Man Who Retired from the World. First published in 1731, the novel was deemed scandalous in 1733 and 1735, seized and condemned to be burned, ultimately leading Prevost to revise and republish it in 1753, with an important episode added.

The operas – and I presume the stage and movie adaptations, too – all focus on the beautiful young woman in question, Manon Lescaut – but quickly diminish the storyteller, the young Chevalier des Grieux. The action begins when she’s being conveyed by coach on her way from school to a convent, accompanied by her brother, Lescaut. When they stop at an inn for the night, the normally shy des Grieux sees her, is stunned by her beauty, somehow strikes up a conversation, and immediately falls in love. Her brother, meanwhile, is engaged with Geronte di Ravoire, a very rich government official who instantly plots to abduct her, perhaps with her brother’s approval or assistance. In private, des Grieux boldly proposes that they run off to Paris together, she accepts, and they escape successfully. Just in time, of course.

End of Act I, more or less.

Puccini’s Act II begins with her being Geronte’s mistress, however bored and also yearning for des Grieux and some sexual stimulation. Massenet instead opens with her cohabitating in poor student squalor with des Grieux when his best friend, who plays a prominent role in the novel but is utterly absent in Puccini, arrives, ostensibly trying to intervene before des Grieux is surprised by the appearance of his brother, who abducts the kid and returns him to his father’s estate. The friend, in cahoots with the brother and stern father, has forewarned Manon, who then chooses to side with Guillot’s luxury (yes, the sugar daddy is given a different name, to the same effect). The novel paints a darker scene. Des Grieux has gloated of handing control of his purse over to his lover and is proud of all she’s been able to purchase; he’s shocked, of course, when he finally hears her explanation of “donations” from Geronte; she coyishly claims the exchanges do nothing to diminish her affection for the poor boy, who still believes she’s innocent in all ways. In the novel, she’s revealed as a coconspirator in facilitating the abduction, which then permits her to disentangle herself to commit to dissolute wealth and ease. Unlike the operas, the novel then plunges into des Grieux’ pits of despair and anger, including incarcerations, along with her string of rich patrons she fleeces and promptly flees, each time pulling des Grieux back into the picture to assist her escape. To thicken the plot, des Grieux has turned to seminary and priesthood, only to fall once more for Manon’s pleading and charms. In the book, she’s more manipulative, and the novel’s more about him than her.

Ultimately, in the operas, Geronte/Guillot has the police arrive as she’s trying to pack up jewelry she received in payment for her services. You might say she accidentally spills the beans. She’s imprisoned and convicted on theft and prostitution charges and sentenced to exile in frontier New Orleans. The operas cast her as a tragic victim of injustice in a cruel world. The novel, however, has her more of a repeat offender who never lives up to her end of the bargain with a succession of libertine benefactors. In contrast, des Grieux can be seen as darkly comical in his obsession even in the face of her repeated duplicities. Come here, come here, go away, go away. (The story painfully reminds me of a similar upheaval in my own past. I can’t say that he or I were truly victims of anything but our own fantasies or fancies.) The first stage adaptation cast the story as a dark comedy, but that effort fell flat.

From the novel one can venture that she’s not the innocent virgin des Grieux is when they run off together. Perhaps that’s the reason she was bound for the convent, a response to her earlier sexual behavior or escapades. She certainly appears experienced in their initial passionate coitus on the road to Paris, the deflowering of des Grieux. It’s enough for him to consider themselves married. Throughout both the book and the operas, it’s easy to view Manon’s brother as something of a pimp or procurer. He’s not exactly her protector at the inn or anytime thereafter. As Wikipedia says, despite its “poor critical reception, the novel quickly seduced the public.” Frankly, it does border on pornography.

The author, more formally Antoine Francoise Prevost, parallels much of his own life in Memoires and Adventures, which includes Manon.

And then? Let’s turn to Sophia Coppola’s third movie, Marie Antoinette, with all of the lavishness of French ruling class excess at the end of that century. Trace through the history of Marie’s husband’s grandfather, Louis XIV, and you’ll learn of the custom of mistresses – it seems every rich male had them, along with multiple estates – and clergy were often active in the arrangements.

In the end, I feel much more sympathy for the ill-fated queen than I do for the conniving courtesan. Puccini, though, compensates des Grieux with a big aria that expresses the rapture of desire, “Donna non vidi mai.”

~*~

The novel in digital formats is available for free in English translation at gutenberg.org and Internet Archive [https://archive.org/details/manonlescaut00pruoft or audiobook https://archive.org/details/manon_lescaut_1606_librivox%5D. It may also be purchased in Kindle and print editions at Amazon.

Dixie fiction friction

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In the Southern literary tradition was a linkage with Scotland, a love of Walter Scott and, unsaid, its Presbyterian literal Bible, clans becoming klans, some of the same intonations and expressions, a shared rebellious nature, plus the repulsion of Quakers in general.

Yet many of its young writers in the ‘50s devoured Jewish influences (Mailer, Malamud, Bellow) and then the Calvinist Congregationalists of New England (Updike, in particular) and then their own Thomas Wolfe and Faulkner. So I’ve read.

Their own writers had been presenting the Dixie heritage as all happy and macho, which did not fit what they observed. The Jews and Congregationalists, on the other hand, were presenting something hard and ugly about themselves.

From that, I’ve wondered: where and how my Midwestern heritage was being addressed or examined. I saw escape but no reality being addressed. Things that ought to be said but weren’t, at least in the mainstream view.

The best I’ve come up with is Jeffrey Eugenides, Greek-American of Detroit. And, my, how he delivers.

Situating the experiences and place

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

We can wonder how much of the history I could have captured if I had owned a camera. The images I’m digging up for this series help some, but skirt much of the grittier realities I faced.

Binghamton panorama in a Jeremy Purdom photo via Wikimedia Commons.

The city itself was already well into Rust Belt decline and probably would have been intolerable apart from the hippie-era adventure of living in a college-town slum.

This was my introduction to the East Coast, and my first time of living in proximity to mountains, albeit the Allegany foothills of the Apalachin range (New York spellings). I was still spellbound. The region was called the Southern Tier, to the west of the Catskills and south of the Finger Lakes. The city,- or Tri-Cities when neighboring Johnson City and Endicott were included, was generally working-class and infused with a spectrum of ethnic minorities.

Historic map via Wikimedia Commons shows the emerging city at the conjunction of the Susquehanna and Chenango rivers.

The city was nestled into the valley and once had water-powered mills along the riverbanks.

The factories were long gone by 1970, when I lived two blocks away. The dam and bridge, closed to traffic, however, remained.

The Susquehanna itself was a fascinating river, as I present in my chapbook of poems carrying its name.

A typical highway scene in Broome County, New York, by Dougtone at Wikimedia Commons. Those foothills were quite different from what I had known growing up.

 

As a stab at transplanting a sensibility

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Four Noble Plants [and a quest for American equivalents]

  • Bamboo, bends but never breaks in a storm = Oak, with its acorns
  • Plum blossom = Apple
  • Orchids = Sunflowers
  • Chrysanthemums = Dandelions
  • Now, to play with those starting with classic Japanese or even Chinese poems and substituting the equivalents. This could be weird.

Too bad those book collections are still in storage.

As for “noble,” in America? Even that needs an equivalent.

 

Thoughts on Genji and more

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Another gleaning from my files, one that had me thinking of the influence of Chinese and Japanese writing on my own.

~*~

Nearly a fairy-tale in its beauty and precision, the first two-thirds concerns Genji and his many affairs.

He’s the most shining, the best musician, becomes ever more attractive as he ages, et cetera.

And even while fooling around, still, in his own way, is devoted and faithful. But just as I’m forming a deep aversion for the bastard who’s little more than another spoiled, beautiful Rich Kid, etc. – I notice the real protagonist turns out to be his favorite wife, Murasaki, whom he raised as a child and trained to his tastes. She’s one of the rare Truly Good People in Literature who’s also interesting.

Indeed, the way she welcomes her rivals into Genji’s home compound, and so on, while overcoming her own hurt and transforming her own jealousy is wonderfully shaded. All the same, the reader makes much use of the list of characters in the end pages, a wise editor was at work there! Especially, when, in the final third, Murasaki and then Genji die the story focuses on two of his grandsons.

And there, the work turns dark, brooding, contemporary in its psychological depth – including the hanging ending.

And then My Lady of Hyde Park winter informed me of more, which I’ve unfortunately since lost.

~*~

More recently, a Chinese exchange student who spent a month with us in Dover gifted me with a pencil cup that was inscribed with the works of four great poets. She included a paper where she copied their translations.

To see where you live, just listen to an artist

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

I very much feel the vibrations of particular places, to the point that they become unacknowledged characters in my fiction and poetry. I know I’m not alone, even among writers.

Visual artists are also engaged in observing closely and progressing beyond, if they may. Some are not shy about acknowledging their insights, either.

For a few examples, let’s start by turning to Jamie Wyeth’s commenting about Mohegan Island and then venture from there.

  1. “You look at most paintings of gulls and they look like doves. If you really look at a gull, it is a beautiful bird, but it is a scavenger. It’s a mean, tough bird. To me they’re the sea more than anything else. The eye of a gull, you could paint a million seascapes and you don’t get the same sense of those eyes looking at you. They’re reptilian really.” Where I live, gulls are inescapable, even when you’d rather they weren’t.
  2. As for living surrounded by water: “Houses on the island are of as much interest as the people. They’re hanging on as tenuously as the people are. Unlike buildings in Pennsylvania which almost grow out of the earth, I always feel that if a big wind comes, everything would be just swept away.” I’ve already posted on this, looking at the town’s gable-style Capes. No wonder I tremble under a heavy wind, as I did in March so long ago in Ohio!
  3. “The danger with Maine is that it is so anecdotal and emblematic in terms of pretty houses, pretty lobster traps — ‘quaint’ things. Maine is not that way. Maine has a lot of edge, a lot of angst.”
  4. On blue sea glass: “Maine people must have drunk an inordinate amount of Milk of Magnesia.” I don’t think we need to go there.
  5. Taos Pueblo/Dine illustrator and designer Margeaux Abeyta also delivers some specifics: “I can’t count the times my father and I would take the long drive from Santa Fe to Gallup just for mutton sandwiches. … Every now and then we’d come across a perfect sky – a deep cobalt blue with rays of cerulean and clouds growing ever toward us as we drove under their long-cast shadows. They moved with one another in an effort to graze the land. Months later, I would recall our drive, lined on the canvas walls of his messy studio. He had documented that very day, an immortalized memory. Looking at across the room at half-finished canvases filled with underbrush of color, I saw the manifestations of a life lived. In this way, it became his own, his way to have a discourse with the world. Tracing back each part of himself, conversations and feelings embedded into each stroke, his very world as he dreamed it.” I must admit getting goosebumps just transcribing that rich passage. But she has more:
  6. “When my grandmother would take me chokecherry picking deep in the shaded paths, we would lift the bottoms of our blouses to hold the berries, staining the cotton with maroon impressions. While hauling home our treasures, she told stories of her own childhood. When she and her friends would walk the same trails only to be met by an old brown bear, quickly they ran, as gems of red fell from their hands, rolling down the hill behind them. I would look back into that shaded path where berries grew and feel the immense power of this strange world. Falling back beside my grandmother, I knew I was safe in this place she called home.” I am awed by how much deep memories of color inflect emotions here. The red could as easily be blood.
  7. Now for Alex Katz on his work done in New York City and Maine: “My paintings take all kinds of light. I’ve done a lot of night paintings, and twilight, and morning paintings. I think when people paint the same light all the time, it gets a little monotonous.” Do you ever think about the light where you live? Or the ways it inflects the colors your life?
  8. British painter Clare Thatcher returns to that connection of color to emotion: “I select a palette I have felt when at the location. My line drawings in charcoal or pencil suggest color to me. I aim to capture the mood and sensation that transports me back there.” What are the colors of where you’re living?
  9. For a bit of historical dimension, we have French master of the au plein Jean-Baptist Camille Corot: “I am struck upon seeing a certain place. While I strive for conscientious imitation, I yet never for an instant lose the emotion that has taken hold of me.” That points us back to the vibe.
  10. Nick Bantock, meanwhile, looks at another kind of color: “Art is like therapy; what comes up is what comes up. It may be dark, but that’s what comes up. You may want to keep some of it in a drawer … but never judge it.

Well, I am trying to think of what would have been representative of my native Ohio or neighboring Indiana as well as what would have emotionally internalized as a result. I’ve been much more aware in my moves since, as a poet and as a novelist.

As Aristotle said, “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” And also, Edward Hopper’s, “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.” Or, for me, to write.

Glories and quirks of AM radio, back in the day

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

My kids don’t even know what it is. How shocking!

Let’s look at a few based on their call letters.

  1. WLW, Cincinnati, the Nation’s Station, with ten times the wattage than permitted today. It lighted a barn a mile away. Back in those days, it had its own staff musicians.
  2. WOR, New York, with comedians Bob and Ray as the drivetime crew and storyteller Jean Shepherd in the evening. They originated on WHDH in Boston.
  3. WSN, Nashville, home of the Grand Ol’ Opry.
  4. WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia, Country Jamboree.
  5. WCKY, Cincinnati, with a very directional nighttime signal that plastered the South with its WCKY Jamboree country programming. It also made Reds baseball highly followed far into Dixie.
  6. WNOP, Radio Free Newport, an eclectic daytime jazz station broadcasting from Kentucky to the captive peoples across the Ohio River, or so they proclaimed.
  7. WAVI, the daytime big-band station in Dayton revolving around retired trumpeter BJ, who always signed off decrying the “arcane rules of the FCC in Washington that make us give way to a station in Philadelphia that can in no way serve the Greater Dayton area.”
  8. WJR, Detroit, with a full mix of original programming, including Adventures in Good Music with Karl Haas, the Redwings, and the Metropolitan Opera on Saturdays.
  9. WBZ, Boston, with its all-news format when I arrived in New England.
  10. If you’re of a certain age, you can add your own fond memories of a local station’s wild rock ‘n’ roll DJ or two who fed your adolescent rollercoaster with machine-gun delivery and often took requests in addition to a Top 40 countdown. Sometimes he even mentioned you by name. In my hometown, that was WING.

If you’re speaking of dances, for me, it’s New England 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My definition: contra, English country, squares, and rounds, or folk rather than ballroom or rock – though a tango fascinates, I do the Swedish  hambo, when a partner appears at one of our contradances.

~*~

This note came from before I discovered the line dances at Dover’s annual Greek Festival and then the “secret” of dancing them. The event took place every Labor Day weekend, though I did come to find other opportunities to dance in Greek circles.

All of them to date, though, have been in New England.

George Bernard Shaw wasn’t shy in sounding off on classical music

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The famed English playwright was also an esteemed music critic, though he wrote under the pseudonym Corno di Bassetto, 1888 to 1889, before moving on to a more respectable newspaper for four years. There, he signed his reviews G.B.S.

For perspective, he was an ardent advocate of Richard Wagner, which put him in opposition to Johannes Brahms.

Here are some sharp notes.

  1. “Hell is full of musical amateurs.”
  2. “A man who can tolerate Bach and Scarlatti on a modern piano can tolerate anything.” (He was the first converts to the original instruments camp of early music.)
  3. “Nine times out of ten, when a prima donna thinks that I am being thrilled by her vibrant tones, I am simply wrestling with an impulse to spring on stage and say ‘My dear young lady, pray don’t. Your voice is not a nail, to be driven into my head.’”
  4. “There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.”
  5. He did concede some points. “Mind, I do not deny that the Requiem is a solid piece of music manufacture. You feel at once that it could only have come from the establishment of a first-class undertaker.”
  6. He redefined the scope of the job, saying “I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was refined and academic to the point of being unreadable and often nonsensical,” or more to the point, “I believed that I could make musical criticism readable even by the deaf.” To wit:
  7. “Handel is not a mere composer in England: he is an institution. What is more, he is a sacred institution. … Every three years there is a Handel Festival, at which his oratorios are performed by four thousand executants, collected from all the choirs in England. The effect is horrible; and everyone declares it sublime. … If I were a member of the House of Commons, I would propose a law making it a capital offence to perform an oratorio by Handel with more than 80 performers in the chorus and orchestra, allowing 48 singers and 32 instrumentalists.” He was way ahead of his time on the size issue.
  8. Many of the musical affectations of the time drew his fire. Regarding one imposed on a Mozart aria, he commented, “The effect of this suburban grace can be realized by anyone who will take the trouble to whistle ‘Pop Goes the Weasel’ with the last note displaced an octave.”
  9. To him, a “poor performance was a personal insult to be treated accordingly.”
  10. Still, stridently avoiding pale cliché, he did praise those who surpassed his standards. Describing one singer, he wrote, “I was consoled by a human caress after an angelic discourse.”