Tag Archives: writing

The Power Of Satire

01 Sunday Sep 2019

Posted by in Books, Comedy, Life, Performance, Writing

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Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about parody and satire. A poster on one of the magic boards I follow declared that he doesn’t like satire; and he mentioned that Penn Gillette of Penn & Teller magic fame also felt this way.  Penn wants a comedian to just “Come out and say it,” comparing Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal unfavorably to George Carlin’s comedy. Penn feels they make similar points but Carlin is more direct. Well, of course historically, unfortunately, people have paid a heavy price to just “Come out and say it” directly. Now, why Penn, a very intelligent man, would gloss over that point is interesting, but I don’t want to get into that in this essay (maybe I’ll expand on this in the comments area). Instead, I want to share some thoughts I’ve been kicking around concerning how parody and satire actually work.

Satire is often conflated with its humorous kin, parody, but I don’t consider them synonymous.  I’m not that interested in making a semantic argument, scolding for misuse—use the words as you wish—but I do want to distinguish between two distinct categories of comedy, no matter what one calls them. And so for convenience, I’ll refer to the two categories as parody and satire. Though they are both categories of humorous critique, there are some important differences.

Oddly, it might be easier to understand my definition of satire, if I first begin talking about parody. Both parody and satire embody a subject of humorous critique presented in a given form. In parody, however, the subject of the critique is the form itself.  Let me give a few examples here: Mel Brooks is well appreciated for film parodies such as Young Frankenstein. The pleasure we get from watching Young Frankenstein is in how Brooks takes the tropes of the classic horror movies of the 30s and pokes fun at them: there’s the hunchback, the inarticulate monster, the creepy castle, and so on, which all trigger memories of what we loved about those kinds of films. We laugh because these are familiar elements, but in addition, Brooks jokes with the form by unexpectedly breaking with its conventions: the inarticulate monster, out of genre, puts on a top hat and grabs a cane, performs a Broadway soft shoe dance, and so on. The subject, then, of Brooks’s horror movie is the form of horror movies. We see a similar dynamic occurring in other Mel Brooks movies, such as High Anxiety, Spaceballs, and Blazing Saddles. The subject of each of these movies is a critique of their particular forms—the thriller, the sci-fi movie, the western, respectively—the target being the absurd aspects of their forms.

One more parody example: the current wave of literature parodies which somehow manage to shoehorn zombies into them. So, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, for example, takes the form of a nineteenth-century Jane Austen novel of manners, but subverts the form by importing characters from a completely different kind of genre. The humor is in the discordant clash of forms. Again the subject of the parody in this case is of the form itself. It’s not “about” anything other than the comedies of manners and the tropes of zombie tales.

But satire works differently. While satire takes a form of an already recognized genre, its subject is not solely about the features of that form. The subject of satire is something apart from its form, but talks about the relationship of the subject to the form; and in the best satire, the form indicates how the subject uses elements of that form to gain, consolidate, or maintain power.

To clarify, let’s begin with Penn’s example, Jonathan Swift’s classic satire, A Modest Proposal. The writer proposes that the solution to starvation and poverty among the Irish poor is to let Irish parents sell their children to the rich as a source of food. Now the subject of the piece is clearly the exploitation of the poor by the rich; but the form of that satirical piece is the political statement of a rational man serving the people. Here Swift takes that form and shows how the form of rational political discourse is used to advance monstrous conclusions by proceeding from unjust premises. So the essay is not just a critique of the position of the Irish poor in Swift’s time, but it’s also an illustration of the forms of discourse that had helped to maintain such an unjust power relationship. In other words, in A Modest Proposal, Swift is in effect saying, “This is how rich people think and act. And these are the forms of twisted rationality they use to advance their cruel arguments to make them seem less self-serving.”

Or let’s take another, milder, satirical example, an excerpt from a recent article from the satirical online newspaper, The Onion:

“2020 Presidential Candidate Pete Buttigieg Announces Bold Plan For 2,500-Mile Intercontinental Riverwalk

SOUTH BEND, IN—Touting the benefits in tourism and business revenue that such a project had already brought to his hometown, 2020 Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, IN mayor Pete Buttigieg announced Thursday a bold plan for a 2,500-mile intercontinental riverwalk. “At a time when Americans are more divided than ever, what this country needs is a riverwalk that will provide people from all strata of society with continuous strolling, dining, and festival opportunities,” said Buttigieg, gesturing to a watercolor architectural rendering of the Intercontinental Riverwalk that he described as his “core campaign plank,” which would revitalize the country’s heartlands by attracting sorely needed coffee shops, clothing boutiques, and artisanal cocktail bars in riverside locations stretching from coast to coast. […] At press time, the Indiana mayor went on to unveil diplomatic plans to broker a pact between Mexico, Canada, and the United States for a Transnational Farmer’s Market on Saturday afternoons.”

https://politics.theonion.com/2020-presidential-candidate-pete-buttigieg-announces-bo-1833302082

The Onion is not as sharp as it used to be, having to constantly churn out humor online, but this is a nice low-key satirical example. The subject of the satire is Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign bid. The form is the inbred local newspaper or Pennysaver giveaway press release article.  The piece is not just making fun of smalltown papers and Buttigieg’s campaign. What it also does is show how Buttigieg’s campaign (the subject of the critique) deliberately uses the tropes of the SmallTown America® press (the form) as branding to push its candidate forward. In an actual Buttigieg press conference or debate, South Bend, Indiana becomes the center of the civilized world; all knowledge, wisdom, and experience flows from there. Plain old front-porch common sense in partnership with local business leaders will solve all the world’s problems. The Onion piece catches the flavor of the campaign perfectly—by utilizing the form that it does.

Analyzing the differences between parody and satire in this way is useful in that it also allows us to see what factors might make for a stronger piece in both categories. Because in parody the object of humor is the form itself, the best parody tends to exaggerate features of the form, like a caricaturist might do with a person’s features in a cartoon.  But satire, on the other hand, works much better when the form is left alone; indeed when the form is a pitch-perfect imitation, but filled with the content of the subject of critique. That way, one can see how the subject uses the form to its own advantage.

So, while like Penn, I much admire the direct form of comedy as exemplified by George Carlin’s work, it’s important to understand that parody and satire allow for other kinds of humorous critique and observation to come into play. Parody and satire allow us not only to understand the subject of its critique, but also to understand the power that form, less visible and apparent,  holds over us as well.

 

Coriolanus: The Nihilism of War

23 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by in Life, Performance, Theatre, Writing

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Corn. After a long war against the Volscians, the hungry Roman peasants demand the release of the captured stores of corn. The victorious general Caius Marcius, later crowned Coriolanus, finds the revolting peasants revolting; he mocks their demands even as they agree to crown him Emperor. All they ask of him in return is that he say a word or two in support of the common people. But the narcissistic Coriolanus refuses to repeat niceties as any usual politician would; finally, all the various political factions find him so intractable and so obstinate that he is exiled. In bitter resentment, Coriolanus offers to lead the opposing Volscian army to victory against Rome, only to fall in crushing defeat.

It’s with some trepidation that I attend a Shakespeare play that I’m not already familiar with, but in Dan Sullivan’s recent excellent Public Theater production of Coriolanus at the Delacorte, the story line was always crystal clear, and each scene unfolded understandably even to these virgin ears.

It’s a play that has an obvious double in Julius Caesar: the Roman setting, the questioning of the godliness of the Emperor, the fickleness of the public, the perfidy and two-faced nature of professional politicians, the arrogance of the powerful, and the persuasive power of words. In terms of language, there are passages in Coriolanus that are the equal to anything in the Shakespeare canon, and characters that are as rich and complex as any that Shakespeare has written. And yet the play is not frequently performed in modern times. The Public Theater’s last production of Coriolanus was forty years ago. What is it about Coriolanus that makes it so … unpopular?

Perhaps because, as Dan Sullivan’s production suggests, the play is a remarkably uneasy and bleakly nihilistic tale. It’s an indictment of society’s glorification and morbid fascination with all things military, including the worship of military heroes, and the fetishization of them as a separate breed. There’s no easy patriotism, no stirring celebration of valor as in Henry V. Here, war is horrible, brutal, thoughtless, and accomplishes nothing; worse, each class in society is more self-serving and deluded than the other. It’s a play with not one hero. No one remains unscathed, the audience can applaud no one.

Which is not to say that the acting ability of some in this production is not heroic. The excellent actor Jonathan Cake’s approach to the role is to treat Coriolanus as an elite, highly trained specialist in the art of war who believes that the rest of society is incapable of understanding him. “You can’t handle the truth!” is always burning inside him, a hair’s breadth away from the surface. Cake reproduces the speech patterns we’ve come to associate with an Oliver North or a Navy SEAL.  He could have come from a television ad that extols, “The Few, The Proud, The Marines.” It’s  the persona of the man who thinks that in his ability to kill—and therefore to lead—he knows something that the rest of society is afraid to admit to itself: that nothing, nothing at all matters, not corn, not the trappings of power, not royalty, not politics. One thing and one thing only matters: the power of might, the power of the sword, the power of murder and death. It is only from that ability to kill that all other power flows.  And it is that knowledge, that absolute certainty,  that leads to the contempt of Coriolanus for everyone else.

Coriolanus was written around 1608, in the latter part of Shakespeare’s career. Shakespeare, like Coriolanus, had always been suspicious of the fickle rabble, and as Shakespeare settled more and more into his bourgeois life, it made sense that he would become even more intolerant of them.  It’s not surprising that an Elizabethan playwright would have a love-hate relationship with the common folk—he’s got to put bottoms into seats, or stiffs into the standing pit; if he fails to do that, then he’ll have as Hamlet says, a play that was “never acted, or if it was, not above once, for the play I remember pleased not the million…” And the peasants aroused to rebellion in Coriolanus were not just some far-off problem for the Romans; rather, A.L. Rowse reports that contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s later years there had been a peasant uprising in the English Midlands fueled by —wait for it—the price of corn.

And so Coriolanus is exiled. In about five years after Coriolanus‘s opening, Shakespeare, too, will himself become an exile, although in his case, self-imposed, leaving London for the big house, New Place, back in Stratford–Upon–Avon, some 100 miles from his theatre. He was a man of the theater who had gotten his hands dirty in London as playwright, actor, director, producer, financier—a man who had had his hand in all phases of the theater. The old legends had it that he had begun as a stable boy for the theaters; literally someone knee-deep in theater shit since his teen years. But now he must have been beginning to think of retirement. He’s come off a string of hits. He’s tired? Maybe. But I get the feeling of something else. What if this: what if for some reason he is in effect exiled from his own theater company? Maybe he thinks he’s entitled to more money or more shares in the theatre corporation that he and the others founded. Maybe he goes off in a huff because the rest of his company can’t get along with his dictatorial ways anymore. Maybe there are “artistic differences.” Maybe he feels disrespected the way Coriolanus feels disrespected. After all I’ve done for you. In this view, Shakespeare becomes what Coriolanus becomes—a talented bitter man who has done great service and who, betrayed by a fickle public, goes into exile.

This is all speculation of course. But that aspect of Coriolanus’s personality more than anything else stands front and center in this play: the disrespected man of action. What Coriolanus can’t see is that war is a monster that eventually swallows up everyone and everything. The business of making oneself a servant of war, a wager of war, is no guarantee that it won’t destroy everything for all time. Like theater, war is all encompassing.

In the end, in Sullivan’s production, the victorious soldiers of Volscia are as unpredictable as the Roman rabble: with Coriolanus’s dead body in front of them, they unexpectedly disobey their own general, Aufidius. They refuse to take up the body of Coriolanus as a respected fallen enemy general, as Aufidius commands them. Instead, the ragged soldiers seem to realize that Aufidius  has more in common with his enemy, Coriolanus, than with themselves. They are sick to death of other people taking their power and using it in the name of war and aggrandizement.  No, they will not listen to their general, and if Aufidius looks uneasy at the end of Dan Sullivan’s production, it’s because he knows that he may soon be the next to go.

In many of Shakespeare’s plays you see the old order restored, and the rightful heirs coming back to the throne, or the forces of good becoming the new line of royalty. But in Coriolanus there are no forces of good, and we see no glimmer of redemption. And maybe that’s why Shakespeare had to sell his story as a Roman one, safely distanced from his Jacobean reality: the leaders are no good, the public is no good, your patriotism is no good, your hero generals are no good, it’s all a pile of wreckage and ashes. Better to go back to Stratford, make out your will, and figure out who’s going to get that second-best bed.

“…Followed By The Pound Sign…”

20 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by in Comedy, Life, Performance, Theatre, Writing

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Mary Murphy

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Mary Murphy keeps you hanging on the line in her performance of my short comic sketch “At The Sound Of The Tone,”

Click on the triangle above to hear the sketch as broadcast today for Arts Express radio on WBAI 99.5 FM NYC.

 

From The Ear To The Page: Nuclear Activist Helen Caldicott

16 Friday Aug 2019

Posted by in Books, Life, Writing

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Recently I’ve been playing around with making hard copy transcriptions of some of the radio interviews I’ve done, and I’m happy to report that I’ve discovered an Internet browser-based transcription service that I can highly recommend. It’s called Transcribe and can be found here:

https://transcribe.wreally.com/

The versatile service allows you to upload an audio file, which then returns a written file in a short time.  I would say the accuracy is above 90% if the sound is clear. It also allows you to correct and make additions to the written file by providing various tools including an audio player that can play the audio at a slower speed while you make corrections in an integrated word processing window. You can then export the completed file into Word (docx) or txt formats.

You can also dictate in real time directly into the service, although I haven’t tried that.

The price is quite reasonable, based on the length of the recording and a yearly sign up fee. Below is an example based on a 15 minute radio interview; it took me about an extra 20 minutes of formatting to get it into shape after using Transcribe. It would have taken me hours and hours without the service, so it was definitely worth it to me.

On this month’s anniversary of the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the recent Skyfall nuclear explosions in Russia, I thought re-visiting this interview with nuclear activist Helen Caldicott would be particularly timely and relevant.

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JACK SHALOM: With tensions between nuclear nations ratcheted up to levels not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis, the necessity of world action to ban such weapons is more important than ever.

Our guest, Dr. Helen Caldicott, has been a tireless anti-nuclear activist for over 40 years. She’s the co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, author of several groundbreaking books including If You Love Your Planet, and was named by the Smithsonian Institute as one of the most influential women of the 20th century. She’s also the editor of a new book Sleepwalking to Armageddon, a wake-up call collection of essays about stopping the nuclear madness.

I’m happy to welcome Dr. Helen Caldicott. Hi, Dr. Caldicott.

HELEN CALDICOTT: Thank you, Jack.

JACK: Dr. Caldicott, in 1982 over one million people including myself gathered in New York City angrily proclaiming “No Nukes!” But now, thirty years later, the on-the-ground anti-nuke movement seems to have almost disappeared. What happened?

HELEN CALDICOTT: Well, what happened was that all of us together helped to bring the Cold War to an end, and finally Reagan and Gorbachev got together in Reykjavik and almost decided actually to abolish nuclear weapons in 1987. And when the Berlin Wall came down, all of us I think thought, thank God it’s over, we were so tired and exhausted, and we thought well, they’ll do the right thing and they’ll start getting rid of nuclear weapons.

And people and politicians starting talking about the peace dividend, but that was not good for the prevailing corporations of the time, the military industrial complex. They need wars to keep going and actually to steal the American taxpayers’ dollars to the tune of one trillion dollars a year. And unfortunately, because of that, and because of the power of the Pentagon, and because of the politicians and presidents who didn’t follow up on what the people desired, the weapons still stayed in place. True, many of them were decommissioned, but of a 16,400 nuclear weapons in the world today, Russia and America own 94% of them. So we’re still in a very invidious position where the whole of life on Earth could be destroyed with a decision by one man who is not entirely stable.

JACK: Do you think that we’re more in danger now that Trump is president, or is there an internal logic independent of any particular president?

HELEN CALDICOTT: Well, I’m not the only one who thinks that we’re more in danger. William Perry former secretary of defense is terribly concerned; General Cartwright, who is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is deeply concerned; many people in Congress are, so yes, we’ve got a man who many psychiatrists have written about, saying that he is volatile, mentally unstable, impetuous, narcissistic, childlike. Really, I mean, Dr. Strangelove has nothing on this. This is a most extraordinary situation and yet we’re treating it with a kind of psychic numbing and manic denial. We’re not facing reality. The Earth is in the Intensive Care Unit and we’re sort of walking away and pretending everything’s okay.

JACK: Talk a little bit about launch on warning and how subject to human error these systems are.

HELEN CALDICOTT: Yes, well, the man who writes very well about this is Bruce Blair who used to be a missle-ier himself. He was a Minuteman, and they’re called Minutemen in the silos because they have three minutes in which to get themselves organized to launch their missiles. There are hundreds of silos in the midwest; in each silo is a missile with up to three hydrogen bombs on it. There are two men in each missile silo, each armed with a pistol, one to shoot the other if one shows signs of deviant behavior. So suppose the deviant one shot the other one? The missles are operated with floppy disks. They have telephones which often do not work. In the last couple of years about seventy-eight men of those of Minutemen have been dismissed because they’ve cheated on exams, taken drugs, gone to sleep down in the silos. The way it works is that a nuclear war would be initiated if satellites picked up missiles coming from Russia, but this can be misinterpreted—so, once a flock of geese alerted the early warning system.

JACK: One of the essays in the book quotes Los Alamos director Harold Agnew as saying he would require every world leader to witness an atomic blast every five years, because we’re approaching an era where there aren’t any of us left to have ever seen the Megaton bomb go off, and it’s it’s all computer simulated now. Could you speak to that a bit?

HELEN CALDICOTT: Yes. I think that most people now don’t understand what a hydrogen bomb means. And so I’m going to just describe a hydrogen bomb exploding over New York City.

Mind you, you have at least 12, but maybe 40, Russian, very large hydrogen bombs targeted on New York City alone. Each port is targeted, each tunnel, each bridge, and it goes on and on and on. Universities are targeted, and every town and city with a population of 50,000 or more is targeted with at least one hydrogen bomb.

Okay. So the bomb — the missile—takes half an hour from launch to land, and it will explode with I think it six times the heat inside the center of the sun, digging a hole three quarters of a mile wide and eight hundred feet deep, turning the dirt below the buildings and the people into radioactive fallout, shot up in a mushroom cloud. Five miles from the epicenter in all directions, everyone is vaporized, turned into gas as they were in Hiroshima; twenty miles out, everyone is lethally injured or burnt. People are turned into missiles, sucked out of buildings, traveling at a hundred miles an hour.  Shards of glass, popcorn from windows are traveling at a hundred miles an hour, decapitating people; and then the whole area would eventually be engulfed in a firestorm 3,000 square miles where everything and everyone would burn. Even concrete will burn; steel, aluminium and the like will melt. People in fallout shelters would be asphyxiated and pressure-cooked as the fire uses up all the oxygen in the shelter as happened in the Dresden firestorm.

Now that’s just one bomb, but consider that all cities across America and Canada are targeted and that the fire will spread even in the middle of winter. They will coalesce from north to south, east to west, and the whole of the US and in fact much of North America will be engulfed in fire. And it’s interesting that when the Pentagon calculates the damage that nuclear weapons produce, they only think about blast effects and calculate blast. They never talk about fire. It’s totally ignored which is fascinating in that in itself, but very, very dangerous. So it’s just one bomb on New York City. You’ve got at least 12, but some people say 40.

JACK: Extraordinary. You know, some of the younger generation of environmental activists in their zeal to ban fossil fuels have actually advocated for nuclear power. Could you talk about the relationship of the nuclear weapons industry to the nuclear power industry? And is it possible to be against one and for the other?

HELEN CALDICOTT: Well, not if you’re scientifically literate.

The main thing, I think about nuclear power plants and meltdowns at Fukushima and Chernobyl and epidemics of cancer, leukemia, genetic disease, congenital deformities and the like is the nuclear waste. Nuclear waste according to the EPA must be isolated from the ecosphere for a million years, because some of the isotopes last very very long, some of the radioactive elements. These elements will leak in whatever you put them in: concrete, steel, whatever, within a hundred years and it doesn’t matter how deep you bury them or what. They’ll leak and they will eventually enter the water and then they will enter into the food chains.

And when you’re eating a fish with cesium in it from Fukushima that swam across the Pacific, you don’t taste the cesium. You can’t smell it and you can’t see it. These radioactive elements are invisible to human senses. So what we’re leaving to our descendants is a heritage of epidemics of cancer, leukemia, genetic diseases, because these elements concentrate in testicles and ovaries and can damage the genes of future generations. There are over 2600 genetic diseases now described. My specialty is one of the most common, cystic fibrosis, which is a fatal genetic disease. Those diseases will increase in frequency not just in humans, but in all species. Plutonium, which is a potent carcinogen which lasts a quarter of a million years, crosses the placenta because it’s an iron analog. The body thinks it’s iron and then the first trimester of intrauterine life it can do what thalidomide did, deform the right half of the brain or the left arm.

JACK: And the plutonium, of course, that is created by the nuclear power industry is used for the nuclear weapons?

HELEN CALDICOTT: Yes, it takes ten pounds of plutonium to make a nuclear weapon. That’s the fuel and each reactor makes 500 pounds of plutonium a year, and it’s absolutely deadly. One millionth of a gram will cause cancer. So any country that has a nuclear reactor of course can make bombs like India did and Pakistan did and France did, and the like. In fact your reactors were based in Hanford, Washington, which is just a cocktail of radioactive waste leaking into the Columbia River which in the past has been the most radioactive river in the world.

JACK: So what can we do, or is it too late? What can be done?

HELEN CALDICOTT: Well, I mean, we should close down every single reactor right now and not make any more of this stuff.

JACK: But through what mechanism? I mean, how can this be done? How can–how can people on the ground effect the situation?

HELEN CALDICOTT: Oh, well, it’s through politics. You know, if enough people care and they’re potent enough, the politicians react; if the people don’t care, don’t know—the politicians, you know, are in the hands of the corporations and the nuclear companies and they’re in essence corporate prostitutes. I think people have to understand that the people in Congress are your representatives and you are their leaders.

JACK: As far as I know, there’s nobody from any of the major parties that I had a chance to vote for who called for the dismantling of nuclear power plants and nuclear weapons.

HELEN CALDICOTT: Well, then you must educate your representatives. If they don’t understand, you must go in with some doctors, physicians, and make an appointment, have an hour with them, and then educate them just as I’ve been talking tonight, so that they know what you’re dealing with, and what you demand. And then you must keep the pressure on and say, if you don’t do this, you know, we’ll make sure you’re not elected next time. And then you will door knock and write letters to the paper and get on television and get on talkback radio. As Jefferson said, an informed democracy will behave in a responsible fashion.

JACK: I wish we did have one. I think you might be overestimating the level of democracy in this country.

HELEN CALDICOTT: Potentially, you’ve got a democracy, potentially and it’s not being used, it’s being wasted. It’s a democratic vacuum at the moment because you know, people are into buying stuff and drinking their lattes and manic denial and displacement activity.

JACK: Is there anything to feel optimistic about?

HELEN CALDICOTT: Yes, yourself. Think of what I did. I mean I turned up in America in 1978. I was on the faculty at Harvard, but you know, I was an alien, I was a young doctor, I was a woman, and yet because of my deep concern I revived Physicians for Social Responsibility. We recruited 23,000 doctors and I became one of the leaders of the nuclear weapons freeze, just because I was well informed and I was deeply concerned. Anybody can be a leader if they decide to do the right thing. After all, why are we here?

JACK: Well, thanks so much, Dr. Caldicott. I wish we had another half hour to talk. I know we’ve only scratched the surface here, and I would have liked to have gotten more into what everyday people can do, and what the limits are of the system we’re working under, but we’ll have to wait for another time.

HELEN CALDICOTT: Well, I don’t think there are any limits. I mean to my experience there aren’t, you just have to become a Joan of Arc or a John of Arc and get on and be determined and really look in the mirror every morning and decide what you’re going to do to help save the planet. We can do it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t even be talking. Well, thank you Jack. Thank you so much.

JACK: I’ve been speaking with Dr. Helen Caldicott, editor of the new collection of essays about stopping the nuclear madness called Sleepwalking to Armageddon. This has been Jack Shalom for Arts Express with host Prairie Miller.

“I Would . . . Prefer . . . Not To . . .”

13 Tuesday Aug 2019

Posted by in Books, Comedy, Life, Performance, Theatre, Writing

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This month we celebrate the birthday of Herman Melville. He’s best known for his epic Moby Dick, but Melville’s short story, “Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street,” about a strangely resistant office worker, is a favorite of ours. Though academics have long argued about Bartleby’s meaning, and we could outline our own point of view…we would…prefer…not to.

We hope you enjoy our adaptation and performance, as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI 99.5 FM NYC.

Click on the triangle above to listen.

“At The Sound Of The Tone”

02 Friday Aug 2019

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[Telephone rings five times]

Hello. Welcome to Freedom and Democracy, Incorporated. All of our representatives are busy at the present time. Please hold on while we downsize our workforce further.

Your estimated wait time is centuries of struggle.

Your call is important to us. Please hold on while we systematically violate your rights.

Please note, this call and your household may be monitored for quality assurance.

If you make more than $1,000,000, at the sound of the tone, please press 1.

If you are a straight white man, at the sound of the tone, please press 2.

If you are none of these, please hang up.

If you wish to continue in English, at the sound of the tone, please press 1; If you wish to continue in Spanish, please hang up.

At the sound of the tone, please state your political affiliation. If you are a Republican press 1; if you are a Democrat press 2; if none of the above, please hang up.

At the sound of the tone, please state the four digit pin number of your savings account, or you may use the keypad to enter it, followed by the pound sign.

So that we may serve you better, at the sound of the tone, please offer up your first born. You may use the keypad to consent by typing Yes, followed by the pound sign.

In order to process your order more efficiently, please remain on the line while a representative is sent to your home to assault you.

Thank you for calling. Have a blessed day.

 

 

Letter To A Principal

23 Tuesday Jul 2019

Posted by in Life, Writing

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My last day of working in a NYC public school was in June of last year. I had been coaching teachers and working with students the previous four years at a public International High School in NYC, and I had been teaching for two decades before that as well. When I went to tell the principal at the end of the school year that I would not be returning, she asked me what my thoughts were on improving the school. I told her I would write her a letter. Here are some excerpts of that letter I wrote to her.

Hi,

I greatly appreciated it when you asked me what my thoughts were about how the school could be improved. I wasn’t expecting that, and it shows a real commitment to education and the school to ask that…

As soon as one walks into this school, its greatest strength is immediately apparent: a sense of community and a sense of caring by teachers and administrators… That tone always comes from the top and is transmitted throughout the school, to the teachers first, a sense that their contributions and thoughts and lives are valued. That in turn is transmitted to the students, again, that their lives are valuable and that they are valued, that that is the whole point of this thing. And it’s not easy for the school leader, because in a very bureaucratic structure, one is always pressured to produce results with metrics and standards that are often meaningless to anyone but those in the bureaucracy. And the pressures can be substantial, as you well know. It takes personal courage and conviction to stand one’s ground in the face of those above as to what ultimately and really is most important for one’s school and one’s students, and the development of a democratic, egalitarian society. And when teachers and students sense that this is where the person at the top stands, a true community is born.

We live in the real world, so I must talk about the real world. Particularly with respect to our international students and the current political climate, I think it is important that our school forms alliances to protect itself from the vultures all around. First off, I think it important to build further alliances with the other public schools in the building. [The charter school in the building] is going to try to keep chipping away at any free space in the building it can. I’ve seen it happen elsewhere, we are not immune. I’ve seen it come to the point where schools which once had classroom space were squeezed out of their own homes and facilities. The alliance with other public school principals in the building is so important. We presently have a building-wide sports team; I think it might be worth investigating other areas where we can encourage other programs across schools. For example, we might be able to address the economics of Advanced Placement programs by having building-wide AP programs, one school supplying an AP English class for example, while another school provides an AP Spanish class (wouldn’t that be great for our students to be building on their strengths!) or AP Computer class. And building-wide orchestra and band classes, funded by outside grants…

It’s very important that the Network principals come to an understanding what they stand for, independently of what the Network Superintendent’s official position is. I will be very frank here: I do not know anything at all about the present Network superintendent, so what I am saying is not based on anything personal. I only say that Superintendents come and go easily, it is a politically sensitive position, and there have been times in the past when they didn’t even understand what the mission of our schools was, even while they were supposed to be leading it. It is up to you and the rest of the principals to keep that flame alive, and you can only do that by communicating and working together with the other principals and together taking the lead.

Frankly—and I’m probably over-stepping my bounds here, but here I go—I am very, very disappointed with some of the principals and the principal’s union in this city. Where are their voices??? Why is it only the teacher’s union that you see and hear consistently trying to get money for students and schools? Why is it only the teachers who are the public face of the pro-immigration and anti-charter movements here in NYC? Teachers have been so demonized in the public sphere that our clout on such issues have been lessened; but principals as school leaders should be talking out as a group about these issues and taking strong public stands about what helps to make their schools run best. Instead of fighting among themselves over a dwindling pot of money, dwindling resources, dwindling physical space, dwindling support staff, onerous bureaucratic rules, onerous amounts of standardized testing, and absurd evaluation schemes, principals, too, must stand together and say, “Enough. We are the experts. This is what we need, these are the conditions, money and resources for a school to run effectively, and for our teachers to teach our children effectively.” Which principals are going to speak up at a principal’s union meeting and bring these issues up to the union leadership and ask them to take a public stand for once? The principals should asking—demanding—that their resources and money not be stolen from them by the charters getting free space and disbursements at their expense. Principals could have great collective power, if they used it.

Okay, back to immediate school issues…

One of the most troubling things I have experienced at this school was the way that the boys’ bathroom was treated: continually trashed. Because that to me is a symptom of students not feeling as if they are a part of the community; it is a symptom of feeling that the school and teachers have one set of interests, but the students see their own interests are different. In no small part, the task of staff at most urban high schools is to effect that transition in students’ minds, where they go from seeing the school as an adversary, to understanding it as an ally for their future plans. In most schools in poor neighborhoods I have taught in, that shift does not occur until late junior year or senior year. I am happy to say that here at this school I see it happen more often in 10th grade or early 11th grade. And that is because after a disoriented 9th grade, students soon begin to see themselves as part of the school community. They pick up pretty quickly that we’re here to further their dreams.

But for some students, the idea of a better life just seems too impossible, and they don’t get it, and they try to put themselves outside the community by vandalizing. Our biggest ally in such cases are their older peers. When some 9th grade Yemeni boys were trashing the bathroom, the teachers figured out that we had to get to the 12th grade Yemeni boys, and explain to them, that just as they had matured from being knuckleheaded 9th graders who didn’t understand what the school was about, they had to explain to the present 9th graders how we do things in this school, and how the school has helped them. While it didn’t entirely solve the problem, some of the worst instances abated…

One last thing: one of the best staff building practices I encountered was the tradition we had at my old school to spend a morning set aside at the end of each school year to have staff reflections. Staff and admins would sit in a circle and read out loud their reflections about the year that had just past. They were the joys, sorrows, successes, frustrations, new ideas, hopes, dreams that we wished to share. There was no set format. Some wrote poems, some wrote essays (not as long as this, thank goodness!) most were serious, some were not. But we all did it, even as we complained and scrambled the night before, or morning of, to complete it. And it was one of the most powerful things we did: to sit and go round the circle and take the time to hear each other’s humanness, and understand how hard this thing we try to do is, and see each other and ourselves anew as the year wound down. It gave hope for the next year. The written reflections were all collected, photocopied, and a full set given to each member of the community.

I knew my old school was on the way down when the new admins did away with that reflection tradition “in the interest of time.” If you want teachers to go above and beyond, to do the real thing, then they have to be given a lot of autonomy, support, resources, and their deeper humanity has to be recognized.

Each teacher has so much more to give than may be evident on the surface. They would love to share their talents if given the opportunity, support and resources. Reflections provide a window into who each teacher is as a full human being…

I am confident that you have the strength to stand up for what you know is right in this time: to continue to build a vibrant democratic community of engaged and engaging human beings working to understand this world and each other.

Thanks again for giving me this opportunity to make my last years of teaching real and useful. That is the best gift any principal can give to a teacher.

 

Best,

 

Wall Poem

11 Thursday Jul 2019

Posted by in Life, Photography, Writing

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(Click to enlarge)

Florence, Italy

We saw a number of different poems pasted to walls in Florence. I know very little Italian, but here’s my best attempt at the English translation of this one, based on a variety of internet translation sites and a large dose of poetic license. Feel free to let me know if you have a better translation:

Flying

This shaded roof
with a fiery frame
its excess
piercing the air.

The view from up here:
calm,
alive.

The scary sky
cradles me
while I travel between its layers
and the next dream.

 

Federico Garcia Lorca And The Duende

30 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Books, Life, Performance, Theatre, Writing

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Federico Garcia Lorca was an extraordinary poet, painter, composer, actor, director, playwright, and socialist. We celebrated his June birthday on Arts Express today with a short selection of his poems read in English by myself and the wonderful Mary Murphy.

You can hear the poems and a brief intro as broadcast on WBAI 99.5FM NYC by clicking on the grey triangle above.

“I Like To-may-to, You Like To-mah-to”: Why You Like It, Part One

16 Sunday Jun 2019

Posted by in Books, Life, Music, Performance, Writing

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Why does one person enjoy listening to Mozart while another likes Taylor Swift and still another enjoys Kendrick Lamar? Nolan Gasser set out to uncover the roots of musical taste and ended up with a wide-ranging book about music, its origins, its structure, but above all else about Why You Like It.

Gasser, the author of Why You Like It: The Science and Culture of Musical Taste, talks with us about his Music Genome project for Pandora, and his explorations into the secrets of musical preferences.

You can hear part one of the interview I conducted, as broadcast today on the Arts Express radio program on WBAI 99.5 FM NYC, by clicking on the grey triangle above.

You can listen to Part Two by clicking here.

Rendering Shakespeare: Sonnet 126

02 Thursday May 2019

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At this year’s Shakespeare’s Birthday Sonnet Slam, where all 154 sonnets are performed, because of no-shows, producer Melinda Hall unexpectedly pressed some of us into double duty bound; in addition to performing our pre-arranged sonnets (mine was Sonnet 27) we performed other sonnets as well, with fifteen minutes notice.

And that is how I became acquainted with Sonnet 126. Here’s what I saw when the paper was handed to me:

O thou, my lovely boy, who in thy pow’r
Dost hold Time’s fickle glass, his sickle, hour,
Who hast by waning grown, and therein show’st
Thy lovers withering, as thy sweet self grow’st—
If Nature, (sovereign mistress over wrack,)
As thou goest onwards still will pluck thee back,
She keeps thee to this purpose: that her skill
May Time disgrace, and wretched minute kill.
Yet fear her, O thou minion of her pleasure;
She may detain, but not still keep, her treasure.
Her audit, though delayed, answered must be,
And her quietus is to render thee.
  (     )
  (     )

 

If this looks strange to you, you’re on the right track. It looks very different from all the other Shakespeare sonnets. As you probably know if you’re reading this, the Shakespearean sonnets are three quatrains of alternating rhyme, and then a final couplet to make fourteen lines. Now take a look at Sonnet 126—first of all it’s only twelve lines long—the last two lines seem to have been truncated—and what’s more the remaining lines are all couplets. It barely deserves to be called a sonnet. And, to my way of thinking, the content of it is more pessimistic than most of Shakespeare’s other sonnets.

Ever-reliable Wikipedia tells us that Sonnet 126 is the capstone to the group of sonnets known as the Fair Youth sonnets. As a group they speak of a young man of sexual power who, despite the ravages of time, will live on—either through his immortalization in the poet’s words, or through the siring of offspring. Sonnet 126 is the last of this group, but it appears to tell a somewhat different story: our Fair Youth might think, even as he gets older, that  he is cheating Nature and Time in his pursuit of worldly pleasures,  but it is all for naught. In the end, Time demands his due, despite Nature’s endowing the Youth with potency even in his later years—no, Nature must eventually render thee; that is, surrender him, as money paid in debt. Indeed, the end comes so suddenly, it can even come two lines too early. We have run out of Time.

It’s a bleaker outlook than many of the other sonnets. While Shakespeare never denies the inevitability of death in his writings, it is rare that he wags it so forcefully in the face of his sonnet subjects without some promise of remembrance. There’s a palpable jealousy there of the youth’s enduring power. There doesn’t seem to be a chance of redemption.

And yet, hidden within the last words is a double meaning that seems kinder. For the word render not only means “to surrender,” but also “to depict,” as in the rendering of a portrait. Nature may not only surrender him to Time, but will portray him. So once again, the Fair Youth has the opportunity of becoming immortal through his children or through Shakespeare’s rendering of him in his poems.

And so he has.

 

 

I Read The News Today, Oh Boy

25 Thursday Apr 2019

Posted by in Comedy, Life, Writing

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Photo by SplitShire on Pexels.com

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And here’s yet one more installment of the humorous news commentary that I wrote  a few times a week in 2014/15 for a local radio personality.  I don’t know that the references (or humor) hold up anymore, but I thought you might enjoy reading some of them, because remember:

Fame is fleeting, but Bad Jokes are on the Internet forever.

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Power-To-The-People Dept.:

A U.S. federal judge on Monday temporarily blocked President Barack Obama’s plan to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation. Some 26 states, led by Texas, sued the administration to halt the programs, arguing that Obama’s orders violated constitutional limits on his powers.

Comment: Because the President only has the right to secretly bomb the crap out of foreigners, not to give them asylum.

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See-This-Is-Why-We-Can’t-Have-Nice-Things Dept.:

Hoping to better understand the health effects of oil fracking, the state in 2013 ordered oil companies to test the chemical-laden waste water extracted from wells. Data culled from the first year of those tests found significant concentrations of the human carcinogen benzene, in some cases, levels of benzene thousands of times greater than state and federal agencies consider safe.

Comment: I’ll have my Vodka-benzene martini shaken, not stirred.

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I-Can’t-Remember-To-Forget-You Dept.:

Among the items discovered by Neil Armstrong’s widow, Carol, while cleaning out their suburban Cincinnati home was a bag containing long-lost Apollo 11 artifacts. Neil never told anyone on earth about the items and no one knew about the existence of the items during the 45 years since he returned from the Moon.

Comment: Armstrong’s widow declared, “Hey, that’s what happened to all my Helen Reddy, Strawberry Alarm Clock, and Peter Lemongello record LPs!”

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Five’ll -Get-You-Ten Dept.:

The national debate over so-called ‘education reform’ has come into sharp relief in Philadelphia, where a pro-charter organization has offered the cash-strapped city school district up to $35 million to enroll an additional 15,000 students in new charter schools; but the Philadelphia School District says it would cost as much as $500 million to enroll the new students in new charter schools—about 20 times more than the amount offered by the non-profit.

Comment: It’s the new math: we give you a few dollars with one hand, then take your shirt and pants with the other.

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Do-Not-Adjust-Your-TV-Screen Dept.:

Bacteria that haven’t evolved for more than 2 billion years have been discovered in the ocean floor sediments off Western Australia.

Comment: The bacteria were caught watching Milton Berle re-runs and explaining to their offspring that color TV has not yet been perfected.

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Don’t-Let-Science-Stop-You Dept.:

Pennsylvania groundhog ‘forecasts’ 6 more weeks of winter

The handlers of Pennsylvania’s most famous groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, said the furry rodent has forecast six more weeks of winter.

Americans Dismiss Climate Change And Reject Theory Of Evolution In New Survey

A new survey in the U.S. has revealed that huge numbers of Americans reject the theory of evolution and don’t believe that human activity is in any way responsible for climate change.

Comment: They do believe, however, that the weather can be predicted by a groundhog.

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Say-It-Ain’t-So-Ed Dept.:

Snowden files show that Canada’s electronic spy agency has been intercepting and analyzing data on up to 15 million file downloads daily as part of a global surveillance program.

Comment: In related news, thousands of Canadian intelligence agents reportedly quit, saying they couldn’t stand snooping on one more freakin’  phone conversation about hockey and Celine Dion.

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Seeds-Of-Faith Dept.:

Pope Francis will  push for climate change policies, in a year when global warming is shaping up to be a central issue both for the Vatican and Washington. He’ll  push United Nations leaders to  write an international agreement to reduce emissions and help poorer countries adapt.

Comment:  His Holiness will recommend green farming methods such as compost heaps and home-made fertilizers. However, he warned, Catholics may only use the fertilizers the three days a month when there is no danger of conception.

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Home Of The Whoppers

02 Tuesday Apr 2019

Posted by in Comedy, Life, Writing

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The New York Times, which unapologetically lies in its pages, from Judy Miller’s Iraq stories to the current daily pro-Guaido Venezuela propaganda, from time to time deigns to run correction notices—as if to reassure its readers that the rest of the paper is copacetic. Here’s my favorite New York Times correction notice ever, from yesterday’s news story on the production of vegetarian patties for Burger King:

Correction: April 1, 2019:
An earlier version of this article misstated the kind of seeds on Whopper buns. They are sesame seeds, not poppy seeds.

 

Thank You, New York Times, for keeping up Standards!

 

Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, Part One

24 Sunday Mar 2019

Posted by in Books, Life, Writing

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The young people tagged as Millennials have been called entitled, lazy, narcissistic, snow flakes and so on—but are those stereotypes the real deal? In his book, Kids These Days: The Making of Millennials, author Malcolm Harris investigates the political and economic forces that are squeezing and shaping his generation. In so doing, he also reveals some of the unique features of this stage of late capitalism.

You can listen to the first part of the interview I did with Harris as broadcast yesterday on Arts Express on radio station WBAI 99.5 FM NYC. Click on the grey triangle to listen.

You can listen to Part Two here.