I can't vouch for the video, but you can hear the record here. I'm talking about Tom Jobim's "Surfboard" as recorded in 1966 by Roberto Menescal.
I previously knew this song in a recording by Herbie Mann and Stereolab on the compilation Red Hot + Rio. Good set, good track, but...well, the lesson here is that if you're playing bossa nova, you really want your rhythm section to be Brazilian. A previous generation learned that with Jazz Samba, a good record that nevertheless paled next to some of Getz's later cracks at bossa nova, in large part because Charlie Byrd's rhythm section just didn't have the light touch bossa nova requires. Neither does Stereolab, I guess - whatever else they may have going for them.
But Menescal's Conjunto does.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Sunday, December 21, 2008
Alan Mills: Christmas Songs From Many Lands
So when the Tanuki was a kid he, like everybody else of his generation, was obsessive about catching the Christmas specials on TV every year. No VHS yet, don'cha know. If you missed them, or your babysitter made you go to bed too early, you were out of luck. We were religious about pulling the TV listings out of the newspaper every week, circling the specials, and marking them on the calendar.
One of my favorites was How The Grinch Stole Christmas. The Chuck Jones animated masterpiece, of course: we ignore the Jim Carrey monstrosity, and hope karma takes care of everybody involved in it. We had the Grinch book, too, of course, but we also had one other artifact that the Tanuki remembers quite fondly. Evidently he's not the only one, because at least two others have blogged about it. Yes, we had the lp of Zero Mostel reading the book.
Now, this was awesome. But what was even more awesome was Side Two of the record, which had some guy singing Christmas songs from around the world, just voice and acoustic guitar. I loved this side; as a kid, I'm sure I loved it, but then as a folk-revival-obsessed teenager I loved it more.
This year I finally tracked it down. Turns out it was taken from a 1957 Folkways elpee called Christmas Songs From Many Lands Sung In English By Alan Mills. Like most of the Folkways catalog, it hasn't been released on CD, but you can buy it in mp3 form from the Smithsonian/Folkways website. It's also on Amazon and iTunes.
The full elpee has about twice as many songs as were included (pirated? Folkways used to be fairly lax about copyright, I understand, and I wonder if anybody respected theirs) on the Grinch record, and it's well worth shelling out nine or ten bucks for, if you at all like folk musick.
Mills is very much an early folk-revival kind of singer: impeccable diction, highly trained singing. Professional and classy. Everything that I, as a Dylan fanatic, have been schooled to hate in folk-revivalists. Ain't no mud, no bark, no husk on Alan Mills. And I probably would pass on it normally, but somehow his approach works perfectly for Christmas songs. The record sounds like a recital, not a hootenanny, and that's just fine. He's got a beautiful voice, with nice dark and mellow tones, and the folk-guitar accompaniment (by Gilbert Lacombe, not Mills himself) is nifty, nimble and tasteful.
The songs are well-selected, too: only a couple that are familiar to anybody but carol mavens. The rest are a nice mix of African-American spirituals, English ballads, and lesser-known European carols. Excellent renditions of the Greek "Saint Basil," the Russian "Kolyada," the Czech "Haidom-Haidom," the French "Bring A Torch." As you might expect from a folksinger of his generation, none sound especially "authentic," but they're all tuneful, enthusiastic, understated renditions. The perfect antidote to the schlock you hear over the mall muzak system this time of year.
A note: Folkways evidently made their mp3s from an old, battered vinyl copy of the record. You get fifty years worth of scratches and pops. A nice touch, actually.
Monday, December 15, 2008
Jethro Tull, Mk. 3
took shape when Tull Mk. 2 members Ian Anderson, Martin Barre, Glenn Cornick, and Clive Bunker were joined by keyboardist John Evan in 1970. Evan, of course, was a member of Tull Mk. 0, a/k/a the John Evan Band.
The primary trend we noticed with Tull Mk. 2 continues here, and would continue forevermore: the music seems to be entirely Ian's concept, not a band thing at all. It kind of gives the lie to what I'm trying (halfheartedly, occasionally) to do, which is think about each successive lineup as a band... But there it is.
Anderson himself gives us the key to understanding this edition of the band, in the liner notes to the 2001 reissue of this lineup's only album, Benefit. He writes that with the addition of Evan, "the resultant thickening of the musical textures allowed guitarist Martin Barre to focus more on monophonic riffs and solos rather than worry about banging away at chords most of the time."
Those of us who aren't musicologists can probably hear what he means in this lineup's best-known song, "Teacher."* The main riff on this is not quite monophonic - I believe Martin's playing a chord there - and in fact it's backed by the piano and bass, but at the same time it's a lot more out front than most of what Martin was doing on Stand Up. He's developed a sound here, a style: hard and focused, even a little heavy, a nice foil for the frilliness of Ian's flute lines. Certainly there's still a variety of things going on in Tull's music at this point, but Martin begins to take on this defined role right about here.
The album: to my ears the big advance in Benefit is in production. The album sounds clean and open in a way th
e last ones didn't. Gone is the coy mustiness of the first one (and very charming it was, too), which lingered over a bit into the second one. Here everything's more immediate. Take for example my favorite passage on the album, the one-two punch of "Son" and "For Michael Collins, Jeffrey, And Me." Both of these show off Anderson's new Idea, which is combining the idyllic acoustic stuff and bruising electric stuff in one song (wow, dude). They do it extremely well, too, perfectly realizing the father-son shouting match of "Son," and blending it into the escape fantasy of "Michael Collins." But more than the thematic appropriateness, consider the bite of the electric guitars, the very present strum of the acoustics. Very nice. This would be the sound of Tull for a very long time.
Not that every bit of the past had been jettisoned. Clean sound, for example, is dispensed with in one key aspect of "To Cry You A Song," whose ravenswing depressive guitar pattern
is overlaid with a very dirtily-recorded vocal, to ravishing effect.
Unlike its immediate predecessor, this album is only about half memorable; the other cuts I go back to are the acoustic closer "Sossity; You're A Woman" (in spite of the unforgivably jejune wordplay of the title: sossity=society, and he even spells it out at the end), the groovy little dance number "Inside" (which actually sounds like it was played by a band, and contains some of Cornick's finest work), and "Nothing To Say" (which is just this much shy of being an anthem of some sort).
This lineup's best work really came on the non-album stuff. This included the jazzy little "Singing All Day" as well as the reworked live "Dharma For One," both of which showed up on the 1972 compilation Living In The Past (the latter was an instrumental on the first album but grew lyrics later). Let's not forget the lush, romantic "Witch's Promise," either, probably Tull's best non-album track yet. Tull were a singles band up through this period, although that would all change with the next record.
"Witch's Promise" is worth a closer listen. In mood and subject matter it fits in perfectly with the mystic-folk strain that was starting to come to the fore in British rock in this period (viz. Fairport Convention, second-period Traffic, Led Zeppelin); Tull would always keep a toe in that pool, although Anderson's vision was
always much too cerebral to allow him to get really carried away with the white-witch stuff. But this song also boasts some really nice ensemble work. Most of it is Anderson: that's probably him on acoustic guitar, although Martin may be in there too, and of course that's Ian on flutes. But listen carefully and you'll hear really tasteful piano doubling a lot of the melodic lines. Clive contributes some gentle percussion work, and Glenn's bass comes to the fore with some nice woody lines. And then - heavens, is that a mellotron? Is prog rearing its ugly head?
*The b-side of "Witch's Promise" was "Teacher" - great a/b, that. And therefrom hangs a tail. The song was originally only released as a b-side in the UK, and not on the album; but it was added to the US version of the album. However, these seem to have been two different versions. I'm not entirely sure which is which, however. The familiar version is the one that's on the 2001 Benefit remaster, where it's included as a bonus track (because the album follows the original UK configuration), and labeled "original UK mix." But there's another version of the song on 20 Years of Jethro Tull, and this is labeled "b-side of 'Witch's Promise' UK single." I suspect what's going on is that the 20 Years version is the actual b-side, and the more familiar version (the only one you ever heard on the radio) is actually the US album version: it's the one that was on M.U. and other compilations. This may sound needlessly obscure, but the thing is, the 20 Years version is great. It's a little slower, and instead of flute it has a little more Hammond organ, and another guitar part added, a little raunchy, melancholy figure. Not huge differences, but they make for a sharply different mood, and suddenly it's a whole different song. The standard version is great, too, with that classic punchy riff, but the alternate version is so... seductive is an overused word, especially for outtakes, but this deserves it. I'd hate to have to choose between them.
The primary trend we noticed with Tull Mk. 2 continues here, and would continue forevermore: the music seems to be entirely Ian's concept, not a band thing at all. It kind of gives the lie to what I'm trying (halfheartedly, occasionally) to do, which is think about each successive lineup as a band... But there it is.
Anderson himself gives us the key to understanding this edition of the band, in the liner notes to the 2001 reissue of this lineup's only album, Benefit. He writes that with the addition of Evan, "the resultant thickening of the musical textures allowed guitarist Martin Barre to focus more on monophonic riffs and solos rather than worry about banging away at chords most of the time."
Those of us who aren't musicologists can probably hear what he means in this lineup's best-known song, "Teacher."* The main riff on this is not quite monophonic - I believe Martin's playing a chord there - and in fact it's backed by the piano and bass, but at the same time it's a lot more out front than most of what Martin was doing on Stand Up. He's developed a sound here, a style: hard and focused, even a little heavy, a nice foil for the frilliness of Ian's flute lines. Certainly there's still a variety of things going on in Tull's music at this point, but Martin begins to take on this defined role right about here.
The album: to my ears the big advance in Benefit is in production. The album sounds clean and open in a way th
e last ones didn't. Gone is the coy mustiness of the first one (and very charming it was, too), which lingered over a bit into the second one. Here everything's more immediate. Take for example my favorite passage on the album, the one-two punch of "Son" and "For Michael Collins, Jeffrey, And Me." Both of these show off Anderson's new Idea, which is combining the idyllic acoustic stuff and bruising electric stuff in one song (wow, dude). They do it extremely well, too, perfectly realizing the father-son shouting match of "Son," and blending it into the escape fantasy of "Michael Collins." But more than the thematic appropriateness, consider the bite of the electric guitars, the very present strum of the acoustics. Very nice. This would be the sound of Tull for a very long time.Not that every bit of the past had been jettisoned. Clean sound, for example, is dispensed with in one key aspect of "To Cry You A Song," whose ravenswing depressive guitar pattern
is overlaid with a very dirtily-recorded vocal, to ravishing effect.Unlike its immediate predecessor, this album is only about half memorable; the other cuts I go back to are the acoustic closer "Sossity; You're A Woman" (in spite of the unforgivably jejune wordplay of the title: sossity=society, and he even spells it out at the end), the groovy little dance number "Inside" (which actually sounds like it was played by a band, and contains some of Cornick's finest work), and "Nothing To Say" (which is just this much shy of being an anthem of some sort).
This lineup's best work really came on the non-album stuff. This included the jazzy little "Singing All Day" as well as the reworked live "Dharma For One," both of which showed up on the 1972 compilation Living In The Past (the latter was an instrumental on the first album but grew lyrics later). Let's not forget the lush, romantic "Witch's Promise," either, probably Tull's best non-album track yet. Tull were a singles band up through this period, although that would all change with the next record.
"Witch's Promise" is worth a closer listen. In mood and subject matter it fits in perfectly with the mystic-folk strain that was starting to come to the fore in British rock in this period (viz. Fairport Convention, second-period Traffic, Led Zeppelin); Tull would always keep a toe in that pool, although Anderson's vision was
always much too cerebral to allow him to get really carried away with the white-witch stuff. But this song also boasts some really nice ensemble work. Most of it is Anderson: that's probably him on acoustic guitar, although Martin may be in there too, and of course that's Ian on flutes. But listen carefully and you'll hear really tasteful piano doubling a lot of the melodic lines. Clive contributes some gentle percussion work, and Glenn's bass comes to the fore with some nice woody lines. And then - heavens, is that a mellotron? Is prog rearing its ugly head?*The b-side of "Witch's Promise" was "Teacher" - great a/b, that. And therefrom hangs a tail. The song was originally only released as a b-side in the UK, and not on the album; but it was added to the US version of the album. However, these seem to have been two different versions. I'm not entirely sure which is which, however. The familiar version is the one that's on the 2001 Benefit remaster, where it's included as a bonus track (because the album follows the original UK configuration), and labeled "original UK mix." But there's another version of the song on 20 Years of Jethro Tull, and this is labeled "b-side of 'Witch's Promise' UK single." I suspect what's going on is that the 20 Years version is the actual b-side, and the more familiar version (the only one you ever heard on the radio) is actually the US album version: it's the one that was on M.U. and other compilations. This may sound needlessly obscure, but the thing is, the 20 Years version is great. It's a little slower, and instead of flute it has a little more Hammond organ, and another guitar part added, a little raunchy, melancholy figure. Not huge differences, but they make for a sharply different mood, and suddenly it's a whole different song. The standard version is great, too, with that classic punchy riff, but the alternate version is so... seductive is an overused word, especially for outtakes, but this deserves it. I'd hate to have to choose between them.
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
The American Visionary Art Museum
I probably shouldn't be allowed to write about the AVAM - in fact, I probably shouldn't be allowed to mention "Baltimore" in the same sentence as "art" -without having seen a couple of John Waters movies. And I haven't seen any. So, you know, make of this what you will.
Lemme say right up front that I really enjoyed this museum. I dug things like the big falling angel sculpture in the main building, the glass encrusted hearse in the barn, the photos of crop circles, the kinetic sculpture of the guy at his desk... (Wish I'd made notes on the names of the artists and titles of the pieces. Wasn't really thinking about blogging that day.)
That said, I found that my reaction to it has a lot in common with how I feel when I listen to David Byrne - (probably not) coincidentally, someone else who grew up partly in Maryland and then went elsewhere.
I.e., I usually really enjoy his music, but as often as not there's something in the way he sings, if not his lyrics, that tells me he's embarrassed about the music (if he's in his American Naive mode) or embarrassed in the face of the music (if he's in his World Music mode). And I can identify - boyoboy can I identify - but at the same time, sometimes you just want him to shaddup and let the music be what it is. The best example of David Byrne being David Byrne is Rei Momo, an album with some real nice Latin music, real hot stuff, and Byrne playing Self-Conscious White Guy on top of it all. There's art in the tension that creates, of course - hell, I like the album - but sometimes you just want to enjoy the music without the precious ironic positioning. That's when I reach for my revolver.
So: the American Visionary Art Museum. Which is to say, a big three-building museum devoted to what seems still to be known to most as outsider art, but which the AVAM prefers to describe as visionary. There's the Byrne effect, positioning the art for us a little too forcefully. Like, isn't there a lot of art that could deservingly be called visionary, but not outsider? That doesn't fall under the AVAM's brief?
Similarly, you read the wall texts (I spend far too much time in museums reading wall texts, I know), and they spend all this space talking about the biographies of the artists, always emphasizing the same things. It ends up constructing this sort of hierarchy of outsiderness: you know, like, the more time the artist has spent in a mental hospital, the more we're supposed to respect the art. Mmm. I understand the message: you don't have to go to the Right Art School and get your stuff displayed in a Hoity-Toity Soho Gallery to be an artist worth looking at. But overturning the hierarchy isn't destroying it. Reverse elitism is still elitism.
The thing is, the stuff on display doesn't need all this. There's some really cool stuff in there. That is, stuff that satisfies any definition of Art you'd care to give. My definition of art is pretty all-inclusive, but even by a narrower definition: high degree of craftsmanship, high degree of thought, lots of Meaning, challenging subject matter, tantalizing intertextuality, startling imagery, etc. All the hallmarks of Art. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.
Did somebody step on a duck?
Lemme say right up front that I really enjoyed this museum. I dug things like the big falling angel sculpture in the main building, the glass encrusted hearse in the barn, the photos of crop circles, the kinetic sculpture of the guy at his desk... (Wish I'd made notes on the names of the artists and titles of the pieces. Wasn't really thinking about blogging that day.)
That said, I found that my reaction to it has a lot in common with how I feel when I listen to David Byrne - (probably not) coincidentally, someone else who grew up partly in Maryland and then went elsewhere.
I.e., I usually really enjoy his music, but as often as not there's something in the way he sings, if not his lyrics, that tells me he's embarrassed about the music (if he's in his American Naive mode) or embarrassed in the face of the music (if he's in his World Music mode). And I can identify - boyoboy can I identify - but at the same time, sometimes you just want him to shaddup and let the music be what it is. The best example of David Byrne being David Byrne is Rei Momo, an album with some real nice Latin music, real hot stuff, and Byrne playing Self-Conscious White Guy on top of it all. There's art in the tension that creates, of course - hell, I like the album - but sometimes you just want to enjoy the music without the precious ironic positioning. That's when I reach for my revolver.
So: the American Visionary Art Museum. Which is to say, a big three-building museum devoted to what seems still to be known to most as outsider art, but which the AVAM prefers to describe as visionary. There's the Byrne effect, positioning the art for us a little too forcefully. Like, isn't there a lot of art that could deservingly be called visionary, but not outsider? That doesn't fall under the AVAM's brief?
Similarly, you read the wall texts (I spend far too much time in museums reading wall texts, I know), and they spend all this space talking about the biographies of the artists, always emphasizing the same things. It ends up constructing this sort of hierarchy of outsiderness: you know, like, the more time the artist has spent in a mental hospital, the more we're supposed to respect the art. Mmm. I understand the message: you don't have to go to the Right Art School and get your stuff displayed in a Hoity-Toity Soho Gallery to be an artist worth looking at. But overturning the hierarchy isn't destroying it. Reverse elitism is still elitism.
The thing is, the stuff on display doesn't need all this. There's some really cool stuff in there. That is, stuff that satisfies any definition of Art you'd care to give. My definition of art is pretty all-inclusive, but even by a narrower definition: high degree of craftsmanship, high degree of thought, lots of Meaning, challenging subject matter, tantalizing intertextuality, startling imagery, etc. All the hallmarks of Art. Walks like a duck, quacks like a duck.
Did somebody step on a duck?
Monday, December 8, 2008
Franz West and the Baltimore Museum of Art
So, on the same trip to Baltimore that showed us the Basilica, me and Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki also went to the Baltimore Museum of Art.
Looking around the web at blogs that discuss Baltimore, it's clear that a lot of people feel compelled to write and talk about how the place is falling apart. I don't have much to say about that, at least not here; partly because that's not what this blog is about, and partly because, well, what is there to say about it? Parts of Baltimore make you realize that The Wire really isn't exaggerating. It's important to understand, but on the other hand, that's not all there is. For what it's worth, the city also has some good museums. Enough, at any rate, to make it worth a weekend trip, if you're into that kind of thing.
I've been to three museums in Baltimore: the BMA, the Walters, and the American Visionary. The Walters I've been to a couple of times before, but we didn't go this time, so I won't blog it. The AVAM I'll try to get to soon. Meanwhile: the BMA.
My overall impression is that it's not well-rounded enough to make it one of the great museums, but some of its collections are world class, and they make it well worth a trip.
The Cone Collection is probably the best part. Some really first-rate work by Picasso, Matisse, and their contemporaries. The highlight for me was a room that recreates one end of one of the rooms in the Cone Sisters' apartment, so you can get an idea of what this art looked like in its natural habitat. Quite revealing, even decadent. I firmly believe great art should be available for public viewing, which conversely gives the idea of the private collection sort of the thrill of vice for me...and like most vice, I wouldn't want to do it, but it's fun to look at sometimes.
The Cone Collection proper is complemented by some choice modernist works in other rooms, both adjacent and on the floor below. Some good representative Surrealists, a fun Klee (is there any other kind? asks Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki). Some Bellows that was a revelation if all you know is his boxers and New York street scenes.
But I also found - and this was true last time I visited the BMA, before I really developed the distrust of the modern that I've sunk into now - that their collection of European masters was quite exciting, if not necessarily all that voluminous. A couple of Halses, a Rembrandt or two, a couple of wonderful van Dycks, and the like.
The special exhibit on right now is Franz West. About whom I'll freely admit I knew nothing before we got there. Very intriguing exhibit. It got me liking things I never thought I'd like. Such as The Ego and the Id (check the link; look at the slideshow; watch the assembly video). You really have to sit in it before you start to get it; when I did, I decided I disagreed with the wall label that said the pink one is the id and the multicolored one the ego. I think they're both the id. Also I liked Mirror in the Cabinet with Adaptives: you pick up this oddly shaped objet and go into this cubicle with a full-length mirror on the wall. Don't worry: nobody can see you. And before you know it, you're doing weird things with the objet. Twirling it like a baton, shouldering it like a musket, whatever. Thing is, the things are so curiously made, with such perfect heft and provocative form, that you can't help but want to play with them.
Play. Like. That's about where I'm going to leave it with West. I'm sure there's something more complicated going on - his 2D work, collages and paintings, make your brow hurt with the insistence that There's Something More Complicated Going On (rather than earning your interest) - but his sculptures are real friendly, while somehow escaping the wiseass feeling that a lot of interactive installations give me. So: I played. I liked.
Looking around the web at blogs that discuss Baltimore, it's clear that a lot of people feel compelled to write and talk about how the place is falling apart. I don't have much to say about that, at least not here; partly because that's not what this blog is about, and partly because, well, what is there to say about it? Parts of Baltimore make you realize that The Wire really isn't exaggerating. It's important to understand, but on the other hand, that's not all there is. For what it's worth, the city also has some good museums. Enough, at any rate, to make it worth a weekend trip, if you're into that kind of thing.
I've been to three museums in Baltimore: the BMA, the Walters, and the American Visionary. The Walters I've been to a couple of times before, but we didn't go this time, so I won't blog it. The AVAM I'll try to get to soon. Meanwhile: the BMA.
My overall impression is that it's not well-rounded enough to make it one of the great museums, but some of its collections are world class, and they make it well worth a trip.
The Cone Collection is probably the best part. Some really first-rate work by Picasso, Matisse, and their contemporaries. The highlight for me was a room that recreates one end of one of the rooms in the Cone Sisters' apartment, so you can get an idea of what this art looked like in its natural habitat. Quite revealing, even decadent. I firmly believe great art should be available for public viewing, which conversely gives the idea of the private collection sort of the thrill of vice for me...and like most vice, I wouldn't want to do it, but it's fun to look at sometimes.
The Cone Collection proper is complemented by some choice modernist works in other rooms, both adjacent and on the floor below. Some good representative Surrealists, a fun Klee (is there any other kind? asks Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki). Some Bellows that was a revelation if all you know is his boxers and New York street scenes.
But I also found - and this was true last time I visited the BMA, before I really developed the distrust of the modern that I've sunk into now - that their collection of European masters was quite exciting, if not necessarily all that voluminous. A couple of Halses, a Rembrandt or two, a couple of wonderful van Dycks, and the like.
The special exhibit on right now is Franz West. About whom I'll freely admit I knew nothing before we got there. Very intriguing exhibit. It got me liking things I never thought I'd like. Such as The Ego and the Id (check the link; look at the slideshow; watch the assembly video). You really have to sit in it before you start to get it; when I did, I decided I disagreed with the wall label that said the pink one is the id and the multicolored one the ego. I think they're both the id. Also I liked Mirror in the Cabinet with Adaptives: you pick up this oddly shaped objet and go into this cubicle with a full-length mirror on the wall. Don't worry: nobody can see you. And before you know it, you're doing weird things with the objet. Twirling it like a baton, shouldering it like a musket, whatever. Thing is, the things are so curiously made, with such perfect heft and provocative form, that you can't help but want to play with them.
Play. Like. That's about where I'm going to leave it with West. I'm sure there's something more complicated going on - his 2D work, collages and paintings, make your brow hurt with the insistence that There's Something More Complicated Going On (rather than earning your interest) - but his sculptures are real friendly, while somehow escaping the wiseass feeling that a lot of interactive installations give me. So: I played. I liked.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Robertson Davies's Deptford Trilogy
So seeing Robertson Davies's portrait in the Yousuf Karsh exhibit at the MFA got me curious to read Davies. I had read at least the first book in the Deptford Trilogy back in college, so I started there. Here's my take on those books:
Fifth Business (1970)
Written as the memoir of Dunstable (Dunstan) Ramsay, upon his retirement as a history teacher at a Toronto boys’ school in 1970. He realizes the boys see him as ridiculous, and in a fit of indignation he decides to tell the headmaster the story of his life. Fair enough: I think
the narrator realizes what a silly figure he cuts trying to justify himself, but at the same time he succeeds in convincing us that his life has some dignity, primarily by claiming for it the precise measure of dignity he deserves and no more. This is where the ittle concept comes in: Davies invented it as a term of European opera, meaning a fifth role type besides male and female leads and second leads: the fifth business is the odd man out who moves the plot forward in key ways for the others. And that’s what Ramsay is: by the end of the story we realize he’s only a bit player in his own life, and in the life of the world. The real story is about Paul Dempster and Boy Staunton.
The central incident of the story happens in 1908 when Ramsay is ten. He gets into an argument with his friend Boy (Percy), who starts throwing snowballs at Ramsay. Ramsay dodges behind some passersby, and a snowball hits one of them, a pregnant woman, Mary Dempster. She collapses, has her baby prematurely, and is never right in the head afterward.
Ramsay’s mother takes it upon herself to care for Mary, and so Ramsay himself ends up doing chores for her. At the same time Ramsay feels tremendous guilt—she took a shot meant for him. The baby, Paul, survives, but is never accepted by the village. The boys all ridicule the Dempsters, and it gets worse after Mary is caught having sex with a hobo. They become outcasts, Paul runs away with a circus, and Ramsay’s guilt grows.
He comes to see Mary as a living saint. Her simple wisdom and charity impress him, and later he sees her raise his brother from the dead; much later, he has a vision of her superimposed on a Madonna, when he’s near death on the battlefield at Paschendaele; still later he learns that the tramp she slept with reformed his life and started a mission for hobos. Ramsay considers these the three miracles required for sainthood.
He’s interested in saints throughout his life, although he was raised Presbyterian (=no saints); as a scholar he becomes a celebrated expert on hagiography, driven partly by his desire to see Mary recognized as a saint, and partly by his attraction to miracles and the possibility of wonder in a world rapidly becoming devoid of it.
He maintains an uneasy friendship with Boy his entire life; Boy is successful at everything, and eventually becomes one of the richest men in Canada. Boy marries a girl Ramsay had once had a crush on and lords it over him ever after (Ramsay lets it get to him, although he had ceased to love Leola long before she marries Boy). Boy seems to feel no guilt at all over what happened to Mary; Ramsay feels it ever after, and as Mary’s family dies, and Ramsay’s, Ramsay becomes her guardian and supports her for the rest of her life.
Ramsay encounters Paul a few times as an adult; Paul has become a magician, something Ramsay had introduced him to as a child. Magic, wonder, mystery, synchronicity, spirituality all play a huge part in the novel; the characters all have one mythic overlay or another, and in the course of the story Ramsay encounters a holy fool Jesuit and a Swiss woman, Liesl, he sees as the Devil; she gives him some good advice and they become sex friends.
The whole thing ends with a revelation and a mystery. Boy, Ramsay, and Paul meet when they’re all old men, and for the first time Ramsay talks about what happened with Mary and the snowball. Paul never knew; Boy says he can’t remember. And Ramsay reveals that the snowball had held a rock, which he has kept all this time. In other words, Boy’s action was serious, more than just a snowball – it would have seriously hurt whoever it hit. Boy doesn’t care; Paul says little. But that night Boy is found to have driven his car off a pier and committed suicide, seemingly; the stone is found in his mouth. Did Paul hypnotize him and kill him? Is this a long-delayed revenge?
You see what I mean: Ramsay plays a key role, but the real actors are Boy and Paul. Ramsay just suffers, just feels guilt – enough for him and Boy. And yet the focus is squarely on Ramsay: the dignity and psychology of the Fifth Business, who knows that’s all he is, and is content with it. Is in fact dedicated to trying to understand life from that perspective.
So: Davies famously employs Jungian archetypes in his fiction. I don’t know much about them. But I can pick up on some of the myth here. Mary=Madonna, Dempster=redemptor; Boy=eternal boy; Liselotte=Satan, he who lies a lot; etc. If that’s all that was in the novel I don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much, but Davies gives each of these characters a life and a weight that makes them specific people, as well as archetypes; and sometimes they’re aware of their own or each other’s status as archetypes, although not to a metafictional degree.
There’s a lot here, a lot of plot strands I haven’t even mentioned; Ramsay’s relationships with women, for example, never very successful or ardently pursued. For a relatively short book, it’s packed with quite a lot of stuff. Davies doesn't waste a word, a scene, or a character. And yet it doesn’t feel like that: there’s time for verbal play, for attention to style, to the nuances of Dunstan’s voice, for scenes that feel relaxed and random even if they later prove to have moved key themes forward in an economical way.
Davies’s prose is interesting: at least in this book (which is trying to capture a sort of rusticated intellectualism slightly before the author’s own time), it’s a little more ornate than was standard for its day, and yet it’s recognizably modern. The humor is a little schoolteachery, a little fulsome, but this is balanced out by the novel’s pithy unsentimentality. The lack of sentimentality, on the other hand, never chokes off real emotion, never crosses into out and out cynicism. It’s a poised book.
It insists, most of all, on a spiritual dimension to life, on wonders and miracles as a part of human experience, even as its protagonist goes through all the disillusionment and soul-crushing of life in a claustrophic small Canadian town, the Depression,and service in the first World War. Boy becomes an atheist, but Ramsay points out that’s because he only ever worshiped himself anyway. Ramsay always knew there was more: Mary showed him that.
A peculiar book. Courtlier than what I’ve read of American fiction of its day, but no less modern.
The Manticore (1972)
In a way it feels like a middle book: interesting, but dependent on what came before, and ending in a way that only sets up the third book. Except that this doesn’t really resolve anything from the first book, and the third resolves nothing from this.
It’s about, and narrated by, David, the son of Boy Staunton, the guy who dies at the end of the first book. David is a lawyer, a bachelor, and an alcoholic, and he comes close to a breakdown just after his father’s death, and flees to Zurich to see if the Jungians can help him out. The book is mostly his conversations with Dr. Johanna von Haller, his psychiatrist, and as such it’s a straightforward explanation of the Jungian ideas that seem to have influenced the first book, but remained shrouded in mystery there. There’s mystery here, too, but lots of straightforward Jungian theory, too.
David’s story is essentially that he’s always been under his father’s thumb, but he worships his father. Took refuge in cold intellectualism—the law—partly because feeling scared him, with his mother dying and suspicions that she had been cheating on Boy with Ramsay (David is in denial about his father’s infidelities), and even suspicions that Ramsay might be his father… David’s life itself isn’t that interesting. One encounter with sex: his father arranges a night in Montreal with one of his mistresses. One encounter with love: a Jewish girl in Toronto whose parents decide he’s not good enough for her. One major discovery about his ancestry: that the first Staunton to go to Canada was not a respectable person but a bastard whose mother defiantly begged until she could take her child away from England. She had guts, is the word, and this stands David in good stead at the end… The one really new character we get, besides von Haller, is David’s nurse Netty, a domineering woman who may have killed, or at least facilitated the death of, Leola, because she always loved Boy.
In the end, on a break from therapy, David runs into Ramsay, Liesl, and Eisengrim in Switzerland, and they spend the holiday at Leisl’s castle. Leisl takes him up the mountain into a prehistoric cave once used as a chapel for worshiping bears: to get there they have to crawl through this tunnel for a quarter of a mile; coming out is terrifying for David, and he has to call on his great-grandmother’s strength to make it. A confrontation with the atavistic darkness and worshipfulness of the race, and a rebirth.
It’s definitely not the novel its predecessor is. Mainly I think this is because it seems to work so hard to explain the Jungian schematic. There’s more to it than that, but that’s where its heart seems to be, and it means that it falls a bit short of the delights of the first. On the other hand, it’s just as good a display of style, and in a different way. This is written in a pithy, measured, but still elegant style that reflects the lawyer’s love of simplicity, directness, and accuracy. And when it’s not trying to filter its characters through Jung it’s just as vivid a realization of character as the first book is.
This ends with the hint that David is just about to confront a very important woman, the next stage in his anima, someone who will help him complete his spiritual/psychological journey. But that's not what the third book is about.
(Or is it?)
(No, it isn't.)
World of Wonders (1975)
This one is told by Paul Dempster/Magnus Eisengrim. That’s not quite true: it’s Ramsay recording Paul’s life story as told by Paul in several marathon sessions. Paul’s audience is Ramsay, Liesl, and three people who are working with Paul to make a movie about the historic French
magician Robert-Houdin. The three are a Swedish film director, Lind; his cinematographer Kinghovn; and Ingestree, a British novelist who’s coordinating the project for the BBC. The narration is taking place sometime after David’s in the second book, and the venue is first Switzerland, and then London, but there’s very little action in the present, just conversation.
But what conversation! There are few things I enjoy more in a novel than well-written dialogue, and this book is all that. My favorite novel for this is Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, with conversations and monologues that go on for chapters at a time, but never get boring. This is a whole book of that.
I dug My Dinner with André, too.
Paul’s life story is this: he didn’t exactly run away with the carnival as a child, as we were told in the first book. He was abducted by the magician, Willard, who was a pederast. The carnival was called the World of Wonders, and Willard kept Paul for most of his teens, raping him regularly until Willard’s addiction to heroin robbed him of the will and strength to do it anymore. Meanwhile, Paul’s role in the carnival was to sit inside this huge, grotesque mechanical Oriental and do card tricks. The important point was that Paul’s identity was completely erased in this way: audiences never saw him, and he sat out of site of anybody who knew his existence for most of each day. It was self-effacement at its purest. Eventually Willard’s addiction killed him, and for the last couple of years Paul was the master conjuror, exhibiting Willard as a geek.
Paul’s carnival years fill essentially the first half of the book. The second half covers what he did in his twenties, which was to join the touring theatrical company of one Sir John Tresize and his wife. This was in the ‘30s, and the Tresizes, we learn, were actors in a romantic tradition that was all but dead by this point, thoroughly despised or ignored by modern critics, although they were still loved by unsophisticated audiences. Paul’s role here, too, involved self-effacement: he was Sir John’s double for athletic scenes, such as a high-wire bit in Scaramouche. This called for another kind of disappearance, as Paul was required to learn how to duplicate Tresize’s every move, every air.
This covers most of the rest of the book, and fills in most of the important points of the Magician’s Autobiography, a genre that is the topic of a lot of discussion in the first and third books, since Ramsay writes Eisengrim’s. From Willard Paul learned conjuring, from Tresize he learned showmanship. The final ingredient came during WWII, which Paul spent in Switzerland fixing mechanical toys for a rich man who turns out to have been Liesl’s father. Paul and Liesl fall in a kind of love, and her money and vision help him to become Magnus Eisengrim. The end.
And an interesting story in its own right, with lots of vivid detail about carnivals and theatricals, lots of entertaining grotesques and romantic cameo sketches. But what makes the book really interesting is that at the end of every chapter (after Eisengrim goes to bed, leaving everybody in suspense), we get the hearers interpreting what they’ve just heard. At first we get the spiritual and doomy Swede, Lind, versus his utterly practical photographer, debating whether or not it’s possible to find and or convey depth in a story like this. Lind is all about the mystery at the heart of human experience, but Kinghovn is all about surfaces: give me the right light, he says, and I can simulate any depth, but in the end it’s all about the light. Ramsay, meanwhile, is of course on the side of mystery, but his main interest is to find out once and for all if Paul killed Boy Staunton.
In the second half the running commentary takes on a different tone, because it turns out that Ingestree had been a youthful member of the theatrical company at the same time as Paul. But Ingestree hated and hates everything Tresize stood for artistically: Ingestree is a Modern, and he locks horns with the uneducated Paul over every detail of the company. This in itself is a very entertaining clash, as Paul tries to make the case for artistic values that are not necessarily in fashion, while Ingestree insists that only what is current is of any worth. It’s pretty clear where Davies’s sympathies lie, but to his credit he makes Ingestree a pretty sympathetic voice.
Paul is kind of an idiot savant: the fact that he has no formal education, but is very articulate and thoughtful anyway, is constantly emphasized (not least of all by himself: one of the more vivid bits of characterization in the book). But everyone around him is so hyperintellectual that it kind of undercuts his insistence on street learning; like the other two, it’s a very erudite book, even as it trucks with carnivals and melodramas.
The vividity of the worlds depicted in the novel present an interesting challenge after the second book. Having learned, supposedly, the basic tools of Jungian analysis in The Manticore, we get the feeling we’re supposed to be able to unravel Paul’s story according to archetypes, but the shiny surfaces (Kinghovn’s territory) distract us. That very tension is part of what makes the book entrancing, though. I don’t pretend to have penetrated its depths.
What of the trilogy? It turns out to be largely the same events, or three sets of intersecting events, narrated by three different participants, with three very different outlooks. Paul is the Doer, in the thick of life in all its unpleasantness: he’s intelligent, but not a Thinker. Liesl says he lives according to almost medieval codes for understanding the world. Ramsay is the Thinker, intentionally sidelining himself from the business of life so that he can study it. He has a late in life fling with action, hooking up with Magnus’s show, but even then he’s relegated to the role of scribe.
What of David, then? I think he’s a substitute for his father. David is a minor character in the first book, and entirely absent from the third; and his story is largely about his father, about him coming to terms with his father. Every boy’s story is, in a way—David is a boy/David is Boy. That’s facile, but if David is not Boy, then Boy’s voice is very conspicuous in his absence. The central event of the trilogy is the snowball that Boy throws at Ramsay that hits Paul’s mother. We get Ramsay’s account, we get Paul’s account, but we don’t get Boy’s. We do, however, get an account by the only member of Boy’s family who seems capable of self-reflection, his son.
So who killed Boy Staunton? This book gives an answer, but I’m not sure I buy it. I’m not sure we’re supposed to buy anything Magnus tells us. I think it was David, and for reasons that are totally outside the text, but I think right up Davies’s alley. Boy Staunton is a Goliath in his son’s life, and a small stone, once slung in anger, is involved in his death. Who slings stones at giants? Davids.
But then, I've just said I think David is his father.
Fifth Business (1970)
Written as the memoir of Dunstable (Dunstan) Ramsay, upon his retirement as a history teacher at a Toronto boys’ school in 1970. He realizes the boys see him as ridiculous, and in a fit of indignation he decides to tell the headmaster the story of his life. Fair enough: I think
the narrator realizes what a silly figure he cuts trying to justify himself, but at the same time he succeeds in convincing us that his life has some dignity, primarily by claiming for it the precise measure of dignity he deserves and no more. This is where the ittle concept comes in: Davies invented it as a term of European opera, meaning a fifth role type besides male and female leads and second leads: the fifth business is the odd man out who moves the plot forward in key ways for the others. And that’s what Ramsay is: by the end of the story we realize he’s only a bit player in his own life, and in the life of the world. The real story is about Paul Dempster and Boy Staunton.The central incident of the story happens in 1908 when Ramsay is ten. He gets into an argument with his friend Boy (Percy), who starts throwing snowballs at Ramsay. Ramsay dodges behind some passersby, and a snowball hits one of them, a pregnant woman, Mary Dempster. She collapses, has her baby prematurely, and is never right in the head afterward.
Ramsay’s mother takes it upon herself to care for Mary, and so Ramsay himself ends up doing chores for her. At the same time Ramsay feels tremendous guilt—she took a shot meant for him. The baby, Paul, survives, but is never accepted by the village. The boys all ridicule the Dempsters, and it gets worse after Mary is caught having sex with a hobo. They become outcasts, Paul runs away with a circus, and Ramsay’s guilt grows.
He comes to see Mary as a living saint. Her simple wisdom and charity impress him, and later he sees her raise his brother from the dead; much later, he has a vision of her superimposed on a Madonna, when he’s near death on the battlefield at Paschendaele; still later he learns that the tramp she slept with reformed his life and started a mission for hobos. Ramsay considers these the three miracles required for sainthood.
He’s interested in saints throughout his life, although he was raised Presbyterian (=no saints); as a scholar he becomes a celebrated expert on hagiography, driven partly by his desire to see Mary recognized as a saint, and partly by his attraction to miracles and the possibility of wonder in a world rapidly becoming devoid of it.
He maintains an uneasy friendship with Boy his entire life; Boy is successful at everything, and eventually becomes one of the richest men in Canada. Boy marries a girl Ramsay had once had a crush on and lords it over him ever after (Ramsay lets it get to him, although he had ceased to love Leola long before she marries Boy). Boy seems to feel no guilt at all over what happened to Mary; Ramsay feels it ever after, and as Mary’s family dies, and Ramsay’s, Ramsay becomes her guardian and supports her for the rest of her life.
Ramsay encounters Paul a few times as an adult; Paul has become a magician, something Ramsay had introduced him to as a child. Magic, wonder, mystery, synchronicity, spirituality all play a huge part in the novel; the characters all have one mythic overlay or another, and in the course of the story Ramsay encounters a holy fool Jesuit and a Swiss woman, Liesl, he sees as the Devil; she gives him some good advice and they become sex friends.
The whole thing ends with a revelation and a mystery. Boy, Ramsay, and Paul meet when they’re all old men, and for the first time Ramsay talks about what happened with Mary and the snowball. Paul never knew; Boy says he can’t remember. And Ramsay reveals that the snowball had held a rock, which he has kept all this time. In other words, Boy’s action was serious, more than just a snowball – it would have seriously hurt whoever it hit. Boy doesn’t care; Paul says little. But that night Boy is found to have driven his car off a pier and committed suicide, seemingly; the stone is found in his mouth. Did Paul hypnotize him and kill him? Is this a long-delayed revenge?
You see what I mean: Ramsay plays a key role, but the real actors are Boy and Paul. Ramsay just suffers, just feels guilt – enough for him and Boy. And yet the focus is squarely on Ramsay: the dignity and psychology of the Fifth Business, who knows that’s all he is, and is content with it. Is in fact dedicated to trying to understand life from that perspective.
So: Davies famously employs Jungian archetypes in his fiction. I don’t know much about them. But I can pick up on some of the myth here. Mary=Madonna, Dempster=redemptor; Boy=eternal boy; Liselotte=Satan, he who lies a lot; etc. If that’s all that was in the novel I don’t think I would have enjoyed it as much, but Davies gives each of these characters a life and a weight that makes them specific people, as well as archetypes; and sometimes they’re aware of their own or each other’s status as archetypes, although not to a metafictional degree.
There’s a lot here, a lot of plot strands I haven’t even mentioned; Ramsay’s relationships with women, for example, never very successful or ardently pursued. For a relatively short book, it’s packed with quite a lot of stuff. Davies doesn't waste a word, a scene, or a character. And yet it doesn’t feel like that: there’s time for verbal play, for attention to style, to the nuances of Dunstan’s voice, for scenes that feel relaxed and random even if they later prove to have moved key themes forward in an economical way.
Davies’s prose is interesting: at least in this book (which is trying to capture a sort of rusticated intellectualism slightly before the author’s own time), it’s a little more ornate than was standard for its day, and yet it’s recognizably modern. The humor is a little schoolteachery, a little fulsome, but this is balanced out by the novel’s pithy unsentimentality. The lack of sentimentality, on the other hand, never chokes off real emotion, never crosses into out and out cynicism. It’s a poised book.
It insists, most of all, on a spiritual dimension to life, on wonders and miracles as a part of human experience, even as its protagonist goes through all the disillusionment and soul-crushing of life in a claustrophic small Canadian town, the Depression,and service in the first World War. Boy becomes an atheist, but Ramsay points out that’s because he only ever worshiped himself anyway. Ramsay always knew there was more: Mary showed him that.
A peculiar book. Courtlier than what I’ve read of American fiction of its day, but no less modern.
The Manticore (1972)
In a way it feels like a middle book: interesting, but dependent on what came before, and ending in a way that only sets up the third book. Except that this doesn’t really resolve anything from the first book, and the third resolves nothing from this.
It’s about, and narrated by, David, the son of Boy Staunton, the guy who dies at the end of the first book. David is a lawyer, a bachelor, and an alcoholic, and he comes close to a breakdown just after his father’s death, and flees to Zurich to see if the Jungians can help him out. The book is mostly his conversations with Dr. Johanna von Haller, his psychiatrist, and as such it’s a straightforward explanation of the Jungian ideas that seem to have influenced the first book, but remained shrouded in mystery there. There’s mystery here, too, but lots of straightforward Jungian theory, too.
David’s story is essentially that he’s always been under his father’s thumb, but he worships his father. Took refuge in cold intellectualism—the law—partly because feeling scared him, with his mother dying and suspicions that she had been cheating on Boy with Ramsay (David is in denial about his father’s infidelities), and even suspicions that Ramsay might be his father… David’s life itself isn’t that interesting. One encounter with sex: his father arranges a night in Montreal with one of his mistresses. One encounter with love: a Jewish girl in Toronto whose parents decide he’s not good enough for her. One major discovery about his ancestry: that the first Staunton to go to Canada was not a respectable person but a bastard whose mother defiantly begged until she could take her child away from England. She had guts, is the word, and this stands David in good stead at the end… The one really new character we get, besides von Haller, is David’s nurse Netty, a domineering woman who may have killed, or at least facilitated the death of, Leola, because she always loved Boy.
In the end, on a break from therapy, David runs into Ramsay, Liesl, and Eisengrim in Switzerland, and they spend the holiday at Leisl’s castle. Leisl takes him up the mountain into a prehistoric cave once used as a chapel for worshiping bears: to get there they have to crawl through this tunnel for a quarter of a mile; coming out is terrifying for David, and he has to call on his great-grandmother’s strength to make it. A confrontation with the atavistic darkness and worshipfulness of the race, and a rebirth.
It’s definitely not the novel its predecessor is. Mainly I think this is because it seems to work so hard to explain the Jungian schematic. There’s more to it than that, but that’s where its heart seems to be, and it means that it falls a bit short of the delights of the first. On the other hand, it’s just as good a display of style, and in a different way. This is written in a pithy, measured, but still elegant style that reflects the lawyer’s love of simplicity, directness, and accuracy. And when it’s not trying to filter its characters through Jung it’s just as vivid a realization of character as the first book is.
This ends with the hint that David is just about to confront a very important woman, the next stage in his anima, someone who will help him complete his spiritual/psychological journey. But that's not what the third book is about.
(Or is it?)
(No, it isn't.)
World of Wonders (1975)
This one is told by Paul Dempster/Magnus Eisengrim. That’s not quite true: it’s Ramsay recording Paul’s life story as told by Paul in several marathon sessions. Paul’s audience is Ramsay, Liesl, and three people who are working with Paul to make a movie about the historic French
magician Robert-Houdin. The three are a Swedish film director, Lind; his cinematographer Kinghovn; and Ingestree, a British novelist who’s coordinating the project for the BBC. The narration is taking place sometime after David’s in the second book, and the venue is first Switzerland, and then London, but there’s very little action in the present, just conversation.But what conversation! There are few things I enjoy more in a novel than well-written dialogue, and this book is all that. My favorite novel for this is Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, with conversations and monologues that go on for chapters at a time, but never get boring. This is a whole book of that.
I dug My Dinner with André, too.
Paul’s life story is this: he didn’t exactly run away with the carnival as a child, as we were told in the first book. He was abducted by the magician, Willard, who was a pederast. The carnival was called the World of Wonders, and Willard kept Paul for most of his teens, raping him regularly until Willard’s addiction to heroin robbed him of the will and strength to do it anymore. Meanwhile, Paul’s role in the carnival was to sit inside this huge, grotesque mechanical Oriental and do card tricks. The important point was that Paul’s identity was completely erased in this way: audiences never saw him, and he sat out of site of anybody who knew his existence for most of each day. It was self-effacement at its purest. Eventually Willard’s addiction killed him, and for the last couple of years Paul was the master conjuror, exhibiting Willard as a geek.
Paul’s carnival years fill essentially the first half of the book. The second half covers what he did in his twenties, which was to join the touring theatrical company of one Sir John Tresize and his wife. This was in the ‘30s, and the Tresizes, we learn, were actors in a romantic tradition that was all but dead by this point, thoroughly despised or ignored by modern critics, although they were still loved by unsophisticated audiences. Paul’s role here, too, involved self-effacement: he was Sir John’s double for athletic scenes, such as a high-wire bit in Scaramouche. This called for another kind of disappearance, as Paul was required to learn how to duplicate Tresize’s every move, every air.
This covers most of the rest of the book, and fills in most of the important points of the Magician’s Autobiography, a genre that is the topic of a lot of discussion in the first and third books, since Ramsay writes Eisengrim’s. From Willard Paul learned conjuring, from Tresize he learned showmanship. The final ingredient came during WWII, which Paul spent in Switzerland fixing mechanical toys for a rich man who turns out to have been Liesl’s father. Paul and Liesl fall in a kind of love, and her money and vision help him to become Magnus Eisengrim. The end.
And an interesting story in its own right, with lots of vivid detail about carnivals and theatricals, lots of entertaining grotesques and romantic cameo sketches. But what makes the book really interesting is that at the end of every chapter (after Eisengrim goes to bed, leaving everybody in suspense), we get the hearers interpreting what they’ve just heard. At first we get the spiritual and doomy Swede, Lind, versus his utterly practical photographer, debating whether or not it’s possible to find and or convey depth in a story like this. Lind is all about the mystery at the heart of human experience, but Kinghovn is all about surfaces: give me the right light, he says, and I can simulate any depth, but in the end it’s all about the light. Ramsay, meanwhile, is of course on the side of mystery, but his main interest is to find out once and for all if Paul killed Boy Staunton.
In the second half the running commentary takes on a different tone, because it turns out that Ingestree had been a youthful member of the theatrical company at the same time as Paul. But Ingestree hated and hates everything Tresize stood for artistically: Ingestree is a Modern, and he locks horns with the uneducated Paul over every detail of the company. This in itself is a very entertaining clash, as Paul tries to make the case for artistic values that are not necessarily in fashion, while Ingestree insists that only what is current is of any worth. It’s pretty clear where Davies’s sympathies lie, but to his credit he makes Ingestree a pretty sympathetic voice.
Paul is kind of an idiot savant: the fact that he has no formal education, but is very articulate and thoughtful anyway, is constantly emphasized (not least of all by himself: one of the more vivid bits of characterization in the book). But everyone around him is so hyperintellectual that it kind of undercuts his insistence on street learning; like the other two, it’s a very erudite book, even as it trucks with carnivals and melodramas.
The vividity of the worlds depicted in the novel present an interesting challenge after the second book. Having learned, supposedly, the basic tools of Jungian analysis in The Manticore, we get the feeling we’re supposed to be able to unravel Paul’s story according to archetypes, but the shiny surfaces (Kinghovn’s territory) distract us. That very tension is part of what makes the book entrancing, though. I don’t pretend to have penetrated its depths.
What of the trilogy? It turns out to be largely the same events, or three sets of intersecting events, narrated by three different participants, with three very different outlooks. Paul is the Doer, in the thick of life in all its unpleasantness: he’s intelligent, but not a Thinker. Liesl says he lives according to almost medieval codes for understanding the world. Ramsay is the Thinker, intentionally sidelining himself from the business of life so that he can study it. He has a late in life fling with action, hooking up with Magnus’s show, but even then he’s relegated to the role of scribe.
What of David, then? I think he’s a substitute for his father. David is a minor character in the first book, and entirely absent from the third; and his story is largely about his father, about him coming to terms with his father. Every boy’s story is, in a way—David is a boy/David is Boy. That’s facile, but if David is not Boy, then Boy’s voice is very conspicuous in his absence. The central event of the trilogy is the snowball that Boy throws at Ramsay that hits Paul’s mother. We get Ramsay’s account, we get Paul’s account, but we don’t get Boy’s. We do, however, get an account by the only member of Boy’s family who seems capable of self-reflection, his son.
So who killed Boy Staunton? This book gives an answer, but I’m not sure I buy it. I’m not sure we’re supposed to buy anything Magnus tells us. I think it was David, and for reasons that are totally outside the text, but I think right up Davies’s alley. Boy Staunton is a Goliath in his son’s life, and a small stone, once slung in anger, is involved in his death. Who slings stones at giants? Davids.
But then, I've just said I think David is his father.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Karsh 100 and the new Ritts room at the MFA
There are two, count 'em two, photography exhibits going on at the MFA in Boston right now. The Tanuki got to take a good long look at both of them a couple of weeks ago.One is Karsh 100, a big retrospective on Canadian portrait photographer Yousuf Karsh. I've been aware of Karsh for a long time, although for an embarrassing reason: he did a portrait of Rush for their album Grace Under Pressure, and as an incredibly nerdy Rush fan in high school, I noticed this. Also caught an exhibit of his work at the BYU art museum in '95 or '96, must've been. The MFA's show is far more extensive, though.
It includes selections of his non-portrait work, to give a better picture of him as a technician, an artist, and I guess as a person; some of his experimental early work, before he discovered his gifts (and patronage) as a portraitist, and some of the photoessay work he undertook in his maturity, social-realist views of Canada's cities, industrial utopian jobs for corporate brochures. All interesting, but not as interesting as his portraits.
Which I'm not sure are interesting, at least not in a high-art way. I kept looking for something deeper in the portraits, but all I found was what the sitters wanted me to see - what, presumably, the people who commissioned the portraits (who weren't always the sitters) wanted me to see. Famous things like the iconic picture of Hemingway, all manly beard and weatherbeaten face; this is how people wanted to see him, and Karsh gave it to them, larger than life. Or, to pick an example less well known to people in this country, his portrait of Robertson Davies (can't find this anywhere on the web to link to - sorry), which makes the man look like a palimpsest of Dickens and Pound, which is kind of what his books read like.
And yet: there's usually a startling beauty in the portraits, because Karsh was a master of light and texture. Flesh takes on the luster of marble, hair becomes silk; he'll often focus not just on the face, but on one point in the face, the nose or the chin, and everything else is just a little blurry, but that one point is indelibly captured. How you feel about one of his portraits will often depend on how you feel about the sitter, and the persona he or she projects, but if you can ignore that, there's a lot of surface beauty to lose yourself in.
Which reminds me of a conversation I had recently about a Van Dyck in the Baltimore Museum of Art. When you look at a portrait of a wealthy Dutch patron, do you see the loveliness of light on silk, or do you see capital? They're both there, of course.
The other photography exhibit at the MFA right now is the inaugural rotation of the new dedicated photography rooms they've opened, the Herb Ritts and Clementine Haas Michel Brown Galleries. The theme of this one is the body, and it's a splendid collection of stuff to look at. It ranges from the most experimental of things to the most accessible, and it's all great.
The accessible end of things is Herb Ritts his very own self, and it's hard to argue with his humongous (that's an art historical term) portrait of Sinead O'Connor. I guess I really am hopelessly bourgeois, if this grabbed me as much as some of the thornier pieces in the exhibit. But it did.
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