“In 1865, when Bruckner was nearly forty, he first hear Wagner’s music in Linz. He was overwhelmed. The experience fueled his own need to compose. His latent genius began to ripen, and he composed the D minor mass, an orchestral overture in G minor, and several choruses for male voices. Most important, he began sketching his first symphony, which would be performed at Linz in 1868. Johann Herbeck, an influential Viennese conductor, recognized Bruckner’s promise and helped him obtain a position teaching organ and theory at the Vienna Conservatory. Bruckner had at last fulfilled his long-standing dream of living in the Austrian capital. Alas, he did not fit in very well in these sophisticated circles. A thick, provincial dialect, atrocious manners, and ill-fitting peasant clothes hampered the acutely shy Bruckner. His head seemed too large for his meager body, and his bulging eyes held a disturbing and vacant stare. His poverty and general awkwardness were compounded by an unfortunate and desperate propensity for falling hopelessly in love with teenage girls. Many thought him to be a bungling fool. Poor Bruckner was lonely and miserable—he never married and had no personal life. But music and his unshakable religious faith sustained and nourished him.” – David Dubal, The Essential Canon of Classical Music
“No one who did not live in Italy before 1848 can imagine what the opera house meant in those days. It was the only outlet for public life, and everyone took part. The success of a new opera was a capital event that stirred to its depths the town lucky enough to have witnessed it, and word of it ran all over Italy.” – John Roselli, Music and Musicians in Nineteenth Century Italy
“Composers of [the early Nineteenth century] seldom saw their work published, royalties were rare, and copyright laws were nonexistent. Various middlemen prevented composers from knowing what their real box-office receipts were. What money they did earn had to be divided with hack librettists. Most impresarios viewed composers and librettists as quickly replaceable commodities—they were far more concerned with the digestion of the prima donna and the mood of the tenor than the quality of the opera. Audiences were usually unruly if not outrageous. Talking, eating, smoking, and screaming over high notes were all good sport. A night at the opera could be pandemonium.” – David Dubal, The Essential Canon of Classical Music
“A good dog is a natural super-soldier: strong yet acrobatic, fierce yet obedient. It can leap higher than most men, and run twice as fast. Its eyes are equipped for night vision, its ears for supersonic hearing, its mouth for subduing the most fractious prey. But its true glory is its nose.” – Burkhard Bilger, “Beware of the Dogs”
Ninety-eight years ago on this very day the so-called Great War (aka, the World War, aka the First World War) “broke out,” as wars are said to do. How did this misfortune come about? Through an unstoppable cascade of double-dog dares, to wit:
A Serbian nationalist assassinated an Austrian (aka, Austro-Hungarian) duke;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) demanded some stuff from the Serbians for reparations;
The Serbians said, No way, man;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) said, You don’t give over, we’re going to attack;
The Serbians said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The Russians said to the Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians), We be friends with the Serbians and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians) said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The Germans said to the Russians, We be friends with the Austrians (aka, Austro-Hungarians, though we prefer the Austrians) and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Russians said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The French said to the Germans, We be friends with the Russians, since their dukes and duchesses and stuff all speak French, and if you be attacking them, we be attacking you;
The Germans said, So attack, we double-dog dare you;
The British, who more or less wanted to stay out of things–or, truth be told, wanted to play all these other folks off against each other so they could scoop up the pieces–said, We don’t really have a dog in this fight, but we do be friends with the Belgians so if anyone (and Germans, we mean you) thinks to march through Belgium to get to, oh, let’s say France, perchance, well, you see, it would be a terrible bother, but we can’t see how we would have any choice other really, than to come to their aid, what with it being impolite to do otherwise;
To which the Germans said, We double-dog dare you, you irrelevant English swine (which was fisticuffs-provoking insult to those British who were not English).
All the double-dog dares being in place and ignored, the attacks and counterattacks and countercounterattacks and countercountercounterattacks ad nauseam began and forty million (40,000,000) dead people later they ended. Along the way, Japan and the United States entered the war, also as part of the double-dog-dare cascade, to wit:
Japan saw an opportunity to pitch in with the what were called Allies and scoop up German territories in the Pacific. They double-dog dared the Germans to try and stop them, to which the Germans muttered, We cannot stop you, all our dogs are in other fights.
The United States just wanted to make money and when the Germans started fucking with the money-maker by sinking United Stateser ships, the United States said, Stop it or we’ll pitch in with the what are called Allies and we will show you a thing or two.
The Germans said, You are degenerate Americans and we double-dog dare you.
So the degenerate Americans from the United States Thereof pitched in and the what were called Allies won and the decline of Western Civilization, which began on this date ninety-eight years ago, continued apace, with the American Empire coming along after yet a second world war (they couldn’t get it right the first time?) to shine and burn brightly as the final efflorescence of what for a half-millennium had been a powerful civilization pretty full of itself but quickly at its end going to the dogs.
Colorado is one of the places where God kissed Mother Earth. Susanne and I spent the past few days there, in and around the Conejos River valley.
When we arrived at our lodge, the first thing management wanted us to know was that a bear had been through the compound the night before, thoroughly inspecting the trash cans. The District Wildlife Manager had been by later that morning and had left a supply of circulars to be circulated, “Be Bear Aware.” We have bears near where we live, so we already generally were. One of the things the circular instructed one to do “if bears are present” is to “remove all bird feeders, including hummingbird feeders.” Lodge management had taken down the hummingbird feeders not long before we arrived. The hummingbirds were pissed off. They were diving down on the chains from which the newly-removed feeders had been hanging, and were flying about with the angry buzz they put in their wingbeats when they are upset. They’re fiercely territorial animals, as anyone who’s ever been buzz-bombed by one can attest.
We didn’t get to see the bear, it didn’t come back around while we were there. We saw deer, which is not hard to do in Colorado. They were mule deer, so common they might be considered the four-legged finch of the Rockies. There were also plenty of GEICO squirrels, playing Truth-or-Dare with passing vehicles. And free range cattle, there were those, at one point a herd of them being driven down the road by two mounted drovers (“cowboys,” yes) and an Australian sheepdog.
There was a train, the Cumbres & Toltec, which pulls carloads of tourists through the mountains along a narrow-gauge track that a century and more ago was the way to get around up there. The train is pulled by one of the little engines that could, chugging along, slightly sulfurous black smoke pouring from its funnel. Susanne and I rode it, taking the parlour car, which is the last car on the train, far removed from the smokestack. We were served Danishes, fruits, and rum cake, while the car attendant was quick to evict anyone from the car who hadn’t secured parlour-car passage. No, the attendant did not throw the miscreants under the railcars, simply shooed them back to the cattle-car where they belonged. Several of the Republican guests in the parlour car complained, having preferred to see the interlopers tossed from the train and made to walk back down the mountain to the station, but the Democrats, who always outnumber the Republicans though at times are slothful and inattentive, would have none of it and proposed that everyone on the train be allowed into the parlour car. “Let them eat rum cake,” the Democrats said, “a crumb apiece for everyone,” to which the Republicans struck up a chant of, “Nanny-staters! Nanny-staters!”, until the car attendant got everyone settled down and back in their proper and duly-purchased places.
Susanne and I spent the next day along the banks of the Conejos, sitting under the trees while the waters rushed by. Downstream a little ways, a fly-fisherman cast and cast again. Susanne had her pencils and her sketchbook, and she sketched. I had a copy of the manuscript I’ve been working on, and on it I did work. Robins and crows and other birds were about. Mosquitoes sought meals, and many died for their efforts. Hummingbirds remained angry and went elsewhere.
“Conejos” means “rabbits,” but we didn’t see any of those.
Amtrak runs the Southwest Chief between LA and Chicago. Last week, Susan and I took it eastbound from Albuquerque. She was born and raised in Chicago* and we went there to be wed and to honeymoon.
(*Onion-town, the legendary, big-shouldered, fog-footed Kenyan capital of the glittering island kingdom of Kansas, where edible dogs are raised up to be served shoreside in deep dishes of Italian and other Slavic spices.)
It’s a twenty-six hour ride by train from Albuquerque to Chicago. Same amount of time going the other way. It is a pleasant and civilized way to travel in these terrified times, given that going anywhere in America by commercial airliner nowadays is to find oneself at that nexus where the axes of paranoia, learned helplessness, bald-faced greed, bureaucratic sloth and incompetence, and sadomasochism all meet. Amtrak, from the evidence we saw on our trip, is staffed by capable and committed people who are usually cheerful, sometimes cranky, always professional, and who work their asses off. The food is good. The trains run on time.
If you have to get someplace in a hurry, you have to fly, I’ll grant you that. I am grateful I don’t live the kind of life wherein I must fly the commercial airways. While there is something to be said for the exhilaration of take-off and the views from above, there is much to be savored in traveling overland. You get a sense for the vastness of the country when you cross better than twenty-six hundred miles of it by train. You get a sense for the people and the places where they live and work. You may find yourself taking notes and later writing a little something about your trip.
We saw antelope on the high arid grasslands of northeastern New Mexico, small herds of a half-dozen or so. One antelope who had become separated from the herd and was in the railroad right-of-way galloped madly along the fence line, looking for escape. Another, a buck, stood on a hillock beside the right-of-way and watched our train as it passed. In the mountains of northern New Mexico, as we crossed Raton Pass, we saw elk grazing by the tracks.
There were cattle. Cattle cattle cattle, grazing on ranges and in pastures across New Mexico, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois. Many, many cattle. Horses, too, of course, and a few goats. No sheep or pigs.
A notable number of farmhouses and houses in small towns in southeastern Colorado and into Kansas flew American flags from tall poles, as though the inhabitants sought to convince themselves and others that they really were in the United States. The inhabitants further to the northeast seemed to have a more relaxed confidence regarding their nationality.
We crossed Kansas largely by night. I caught a glimpse of the ghost of Dorothy walking the streets of Dodge City after closing time, her little dog in the basket she carried in her arms, their once-fertile farmlands devastated by overgrazing. Tears stained her dirty cheeks.
Outside Kansas City at night, by the tracks, a small building burned.
The parts of American life you see from a rail car (we had a compartment in a sleeper, and also spent time in the dining car and the lounge car) are somewhat different from the parts you see from an automobile on the interstate. There were many instances of what I came to think of as “shacks by the tracks.” There was much graffiti, some quite clever, in those places fronting the right-of-way and where the local graffiti eradication teams rarely go (they have enough to do in those parts of town where the graffiti is more visible). In some places, particularly in the cities, there was an immense amount of trash, usually of the metallic, industrial kind, in lots along the rail line. Only a wealthy country could have so much trash.
And it is a wealthy country. The immense, fundamental wealth of the farmland as we crossed Missouri, Iowa, and Illinois was ever evident. Toss aside all your pieces of paper claiming who owes what to whom, get down to the dirt, run your hands through it, and you will see.
There were many white clapboard houses. This may not be notable to persons from the Midwest who are accustomed to white clapboard houses, but in New Mexico where I live, they are much rarer. There were whole little towns in Missouri and Iowa where it seemed nearly every structure was of white clapboard. Some of them needed a fresh coat of paint, and some did not.
Susan and I, who have been together nine years now, married in a civil ceremony at City Hall in Chicago, in Marriage Court, Judge Williams presiding. We had dinner later with her family, up in Skokie. They are a warm, kind, and generous people. The weather was cold and rainy, but soon as it cleared up a bit, we went to the lakeshore and walked along the beach.
There could be more to tell, but for now, this is all.
“Though prudence, intrepidity and perseverance united are not exempted from the blows of adverse fortune, yet in a long series of transactions they usually rise superior to its power, and in the end rarely fail of proving successful.” — from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. XIV, Ch. VII
I went out this morning to water my back yard, which is mostly desert with a few patches of wild grass and herb borders and a vegetable patch, and there was a falcon there, eating a breakfast of fresh dove. I went back inside and called my wife and said, “Come quick!” We watched the falcon for a few minutes through a window, then I went back out to water. The falcon continued its breakfasting, which included the plucking of feathers from its entree, until I turned on the hose, at which point the falcon gathered up its meal and flew a couple yards over to finish.
The house my wife and I live in is near the geographic center of Albuquerque, New Mexico, in the Uptown part of town. Our neighborhood was built about fifty years ago, during the great expansion of Albuquerque that followed the Second World War. Adjacent parts of our neighborhood weren’t built up until the past twenty years or less, remaining desert enclaves until that time. Roadrunners who used to live in those enclaves migrated to our neighborhood and found they could survive here, so now we have about a half-dozen or so roadrunners about. We have various songbirds, doves and pigeons; in the winter we have crows and in the summer we have grackles.
The grackles have already started returning. One of them was perched on the top of a neighboring juniper this morning, giving warning cries about the falcon. I don’t imagine a falcon would go for a grackle with so many pigeons and doves around, pigeons and doves being essentially the sheep and cattle of the urban bird world. The falcons live down by the river (the Rio Grande), in the woods there, but we’ve had one in our neighborhood for at least a year. I’ve lived in the American Southwest most of my life, and this is the first time I’ve seen a raptor with its prey in my own back yard.
Leonard Cohen has inspired me to set out in search of that elusive and ideal reader, the one who is otherwise unemployed and bored enough to read my work from the alpha through to the omega.
I had a Joomla website, but had neither time nor capability sufficient to get it to look like anything more than something half-assed and tossed up on the web, so I switched over to this WordPress bloggy thing, the advantage to which being, I don’t have but the most minimal of capability with it, either, but it’s not so obvious. I hope. Of course, now that I’ve confessed my broad incompetence, the cat is out of the bag, scratching the furniture, and pissing on the bookcases. “Marking,” they call it. It smells pretty bad.
I plan to post more stuff on this webby bloggy thing, but I do believe I got the Gordon Lish notes up–I should double-check to make sure–and that’s most all of what anyone came to my Joomla site for, anyway.