Very Flat, Norfolk

The greatest 1/3 of a play in the 20th century is Act I of Noël Coward’s Private Lives. 

The scene is adjoining terraces of a high-class hotel in Deauville, France, where, unbeknownst to each other, a divorced couple have checked in with their new mates. (What would drama be without coincidences?) Elyot and Amanda, the divorcees, were originally played by Coward and Gertrude Lawrence. In the Youtube link below, the actors are Alec McCowen and Penelope Keith.

“Very flat, Norfolk.”

The most famous line in the play is spoken by Amanda. The inflection is as flat as the Norfolk landscape itself. However, the whole power of the play is in those three words—power that is belied by the flatness of the utterance. Amanda—and Elyot—underneath their cool, unemotional dialogue—are burning with passion for each other. 

Their divorce five years before freed them from having to try living with each other, but we see that it hasn’t freed them from their sexual attraction for each other. And at the end of the act, they give in to the fire burning inside them and run off to Paris, leaving their new spouses behind.  

*

The joke goes: There are two kinds of people in the world—those who divide people into two categories and those who don’t. 

KCM belonged to the group who doesn’t understand how divorced persons could re-unite for sex. “But they’re divorced,” she once proclaimed. “They separated. They can’t have those feelings for each other!” She obviously would not understand Private Lives. 

What she did understand was this: A friend of hers who was about to get married announced that she was going to have one last sexual fling before getting hitched. No alarms bells went off when KCM heard this. Quite the opposite, as she saw nothing strange about it.

I, on the other hand, was quite taken aback to hear about the friend’s intention. I, who completely understand the fact that passion (i.e., sexual attraction) does not disappear concurrently with the appearance of a court decree, cannot fathom a situation like this—how someone who has declared her love, her desire to be joined to another for life, can blithely go to bed with a different person. But I fully understand Amanda and Elyot.

*

So, in compliance with the old joke, I have here divided the world into two categories of people: the KCM people and the HG people. 

***

I started this post by praising Act I of Private Lives. The play consists of two more acts, in which we see Amanda and Elyot struggle to actually live together—which, of course, they hadn’t been able to do five years before. The two acts complete a raucous comedy, a first-rate comedy, to be fair. But Act I, standing alone, offers something deeper than comedy—insight into the irrational power of passion, which can surprisingly erupt, as if there was a volcano underneath the flat landscape of Norfolk. 

Musical Chairs

A week or so ago, a story appeared online about a woman who refused to change her first-class airline seat so that a family could be seated together.* She stated that she had paid full-fare and that the other party should have planned ahead in order to stay together.

The majority of TikTokers who commented on the issue sided with the refusenik. Much as I hate to be associated with a pile of TikTokers, I have to admit that I agree with the woman’s stance, for I was once in a similar position.

I was flying on Copa Air to Panama City (where I would connect with a flight to Buenos Aires) when I was approached by a rather pushy fellow who asked me to change seats with him so that he could sit next to his friend. As I was seated in the bulkhead aisle seat of business class (there was no first class on that flight)—a seat I had purposely selected—I declined to move. The fellow then had his friend change seats to sit farther back with him. And I got to have a nice companion—a woman travel agent from north Jersey—to converse with on the trip.

*

On the other hand . . .

About 18 or 19 years ago, when I was attending a recital by the pianist Richard Goode at Avery Fisher Hall, I was asked by a woman if I would switch seats with her so that she could sit next to her friend. Her own seat, she explained, was on the aisle and closer to the stage. I willingly moved from Z102 to the other seat, up front and across the aisle on the left.

During the intermission, the two persons in front of me—a young woman and an older man—turned and began a conversation with me. The man introduced himself as (I thought) Maxwell Cox and explained that he was Richard Goode’s recording engineer. I told him that I had several of Goode’s recordings (especially of Bach), and he was amused when I admitted losing track of what I had bought and had added duplicates to my collection. 

(Let me break off here to reveal that “Maxwell Cox” was a mishearing on my part. I discovered sometime later, when reading the liner notes of a recording on RCA by the quartet Tashi, that the recording engineer was Max Wilcox.** A mishearing like “Maxwell Cox” for “Max Wilcox” is known in language circles as metanalysis.)

Wilcox told me that he was involved with the selection of the winner of the prestigious Gilmore Artist Award, which is presented to 

an exceptional pianist who, regardless of age or nationality, possesses profound musicianship and charisma and who sustains a career as a major international concert artist.***

Wilcox, I later learned, was the favorite recording engineer of the great Artur Rubenstein and was known, I read somewhere, as the “golden ears of RCA Victor.”

I met Wilcox again in September 2004 at a recital given by the young woman, Julie Mech, who had attended the Goode concert with him. He was, once more, a delight to talk to, explaining how the Gilmore Award judges operated; they never revealed to the artists they were listening to that their playing was under scrutiny. It was a completely secretive process. And a successful one, considering that among the recipients of the Award were Igor Levit, Ingrid Fliter, Piotr Anderszewski, and Leif Ove Andsnes.

 

*

Several years later, I was at Carnegie Hall for a recital by the renowned pianist Murray Perahia. At the intermission, a patron in the row ahead of me turned to his friend and said,

Perahia is not the best American pianist; he’s not even the best pianist from the Bronx.

I took him to be referring to Richard Goode.

*

[Goode's] discs rank among the least-hyped and most beautifully made of all piano recordings, the bulk of them produced by Max Wilcox, who was Arthur Rubinstein’s partner in the studio.****

 ***

* https://dailyhive.com/vancouver/woman-refused-first-class-seat

** https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/31/arts/music/max-wilcox-dead.html

*** https://www.kronbergacademy.de/en/artists/person/kirill-gerstein#:~:text=Kirill%20Gerstein%20is%20the%20sixth,a%20major%20international%20concert%20artist.

****  https://www.steinway.com/news/features/richard-goode-balancing-act

What Liz Truss Didn't Say

Records, it is said, are made to be broken.

Liz Truss resigned as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom after a mere 44 days in office, thereby setting a new record for the shortest tenure in that office. Announcing her departure, Truss spoke, according to The New York Times, 

almost wistfully about how the collapse of her economic plans meant she would never achieve her goal of creating a “low-tax, high-growth economy that would take advantage of the freedoms of Brexit.”(1)

More important than what Truss said was what she didn’t say—what she didn’t have as goals for the United Kingdom and its people.

Britain, Derek Thompson, notes

is pretty poor for a rich place. U.K. living standards and wages have fallen significantly behind those of Western Europe. By some measures, in fact, real wages in the U.K. are lower than they were 15 years ago, and will likely be even lower next year.(2)

Britons are suffering not only from meager wages but from a breakdown in those services that make for a decent life. There are crises in the delivery of vocational, education, medical, dental, and ambulance services throughout the UK. Here are just two headlines from today’s Guardian:

‘I’m not very well and I need heat’: at the warm bank in Wolverhampton

Seven in 10 NHS trusts in England failing to hit cancer referrals target(3)

*

But instead of mentioning concern for those concrete essences known as human beings, Liz Truss could only be wistful about an abstraction: the economy. 

In the countdown to her departure as Prime Minister, Truss was outlasted by a head of lettuce.(4) Depending on what definition you wish to employ (“a time of inexperience or indiscretion” or “a heyday, when a person is/was at the peak of their abilities, while not necessarily a youth”) Truss’ tenure as PM was—or was not—her salad days. 

*

Rishi Sunak has become Truss’ successor at 10 Downing Street. And what did he proclaim when he threw his hat into the ring to succeed her?

I want to fix our economy.(5)

***

(1) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/22/world/europe/uk-brexit-conservatives.html 

(2) https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/10/uk-economy-disaster-degrowth-brexit/671847/

(3) https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news

(4) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/10/why-liz-truss-resigned-britain-political-instability/671805/

(5) https://fortune.com/2022/10/23/rishi-sunak-uk-prime-minister-bid-fix-economy/

Language Follies

We dedicate this blog post to some examples of strangeness, goofiness, and just plain language craziness.

*           

Dear Lipton Tea:

Thank you for giving me a reason not to buy your product. Since water is as good as your tea for hydrating, I can just drink the water and save money by not buying the tea.

*

Wegmans sets a new standard for a product:

Imagine: Cheese made from cheese!

*

From Newspapers:

*

Rock Bottom Translation: 

When Joseph Papp decided in 1976 to produce a revival of The Threepenny Opera, he ditched the Marc Blitzstein translation that was used in the very successful 1950s Theatre de Lys production, which ran for almost seven years.

In the new translation we get

instead of

There was a time

And now it’s all gone by

When we two lived together

She and I.

It should be elementary that the first priority of a translator is to render the original text into the idiomatic speech of the second language. So how could an abomination like “I and she” be any way acceptable? Brendan Gill, in his New Yorker review, says that the translation was made by “scholars.” 

Scholars who obviously don't speak English!

*

The Classic:

I once saw a sign in a barbershop window which read:

We specialize in all kinds of haircuts.

 

I'm a Good Guy

Recently The Guardian posted the number 486 million dollars.* That is how much the famous smiley face figure earned the Smiley Company last year from products blazoned with the yellow face. 

The company has 458 licensees in 158 countries for its trademarked version of the face. The company, needless to say, is celebrating its fiftieth year in business happily.

According to The Guardian, the smiley has been around in one form or another since the 1950s. 

A yellow and black one first showed its face in 1961, when it was printed on a promotional sweatshirt by the New York radio station WMCA to promote the news-talk show Good Guys.

I can’t speak to that origin of the WMCA sweatshirt, as I wasn’t tuned into that station until later in the decade, when WMCA and WABC-AM were the two biggest rock-and-roll stations in the Big Apple. They competed mightily against each other, attempting to be the first station to broadcast the newest recording by the Beatles and other mega-rock groups. 

I mainly listened to Cousin Brucie and his colleagues at WABC. However, I did defect to WMCA for its overnight show hosted by DJ Dean Anthony. Anthony’s shtick was to play a game called Actors and Actresses, the object of which was for listeners to call in to the station and try to identify a thespian by his or her initials. Was CC Charlie Chaplin, Charlie Chase, Charles Coburn, or someone else? Anthony worked from a list that was submitted by a listener—who, for his or her efforts, was awarded a WMCA Good Guy Sweatshirt.

In the fall of 1967, I submitted a list that was selected by Anthony, and I duly received a Good Guy sweatshirt—which, 55 years later, I still have (although it has shrunk a great deal and now comes down barely to waist level).

Now, the interesting thing is this: On the night that Anthony featured my list, my brother, who had been gallivanting around town until the early hours of the morning, called into WMCA and, without knowing it was my list, was able to name a lesser-known British actor, whose identity had stumped many other callers. 

*

And what has a half-century of change brought us?

WMCA now features “a Christian radio format consisting of teaching and talk programs.”

WABC has a daily show hosted by Rudy Giuliani.

***

* https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/sep/25/fifty-years-and-500m-dollars-the-happy-business-of-the-smiley-symbol 

More Herself? Queen Elizabeth and Selfhood

In Act III, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 Prince Hal, the heir to the English throne, has been summoned by his father, the King, to answer for the dissolute life he has been leading. The King cites the Prince’s 

inordinate and low desires,

Such poor, such bare, such lewd, such mean attempts,

Such barren pleasures, rude society

and wonders how such actions 

Accompany the greatness of thy blood

And hold their level with thy princely heart.

Hal’s response is

I shall hereafter, my thrice gracious lord,

Be more myself.

I have always been fascinated by that reply. What can it mean to be more oneself? What, indeed, is the self anyway?

*

I have an existentialist view of selfhood; that is, existence precedes essence—or, simply, you are what you do.(1) There is no pre-ordained “true you.” There is no set role to be followed, no fate that’s yours from birth. 

The death of Queen Elizabeth II has been the occasion for numerous magazine and newspaper articles about her life and her role as Queen of England. And has led me to think about her selfhood and whether her true self was other than the role she played for 70 years.

Here is one view to consider:

“She meant reliability and stability,” said Kate Nattrass, 59, a health recruiter from Christchurch, New Zealand, which is a member of the Commonwealth.

But the queen did so at the cost of great personal sacrifice. “In many ways, she was  a woman robbed of being able to be herself,” Ms. Nattrass said.(2)

This is a view that sees a conflict between the actions of the Queen and what may have been her true desires. The essential Elizabeth was suppressed to allow the ceremonial Elizabeth to thrive.

On the other hand, consider the words of 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth five years before ascending to the throne: 

And as Tom McTague wrote in The Atlantic, 

When the Queen devoted her whole life to the service of Britain’s “great imperial family,” she meant it and honored it.(3)

It was a life that at her birth she was not destined to lead. Through the abdication of her uncle, Edward VIII, and the death of her father, the role of Queen of England became hers, and while Elizabeth was not destined at birth to eventually become Queen of England, she completely embodied the role that fate thrust onto her.

Another writer at The Atlantic, Helen Lewis, pointed out that 

everyone here knows that being royal is a bloody awful job. Elizabeth II didn’t choose it, and she did it anyway.(4)

(Or did she choose it by accepting it?)

“Duty,” “self-discipline,” “work ethic,” “sense of service” were some of the terms used by other writers to describe the qualities that were evident in the seventy years of the Queen’s reign.

She was, as Beth Thames, reminds us, 

a woman who got up every day — yes, from a comfortable bed made up by other people — and did what had to be done. And she did that for 70 years. Duty called at 7:30 each morning and she answered day after day.(5)

*

Prince Hal had to be spurred by his father’s rebuke to be more himself. The self, in that hierarchal society, being independent of one’s will (indeed, the will— emotional, irrational—was a challenge to one’s true self) was aligned with destiny. 

Since Elizabeth never had to be rebuked or shamed or otherwise spurred into being regal, was her life a challenge to the belief that existence precedes essence—in that her self seemed to be governed by essence of royalty? Or would it be truer to say that Elizabeth totally accepted destiny, making self and role identical? By accepting, indeed embracing her role, she can be said to have chosen her selfhood, which was displayed for seventy years as she

remained determinedly committed to the hallmark aloofness, formality and pageantry by which the monarchy has long sought to preserve the mystique that underpinned its existence and survival.(6)

***

(1)  I discussed this many years ago in the following post: https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2011/08/ask-wrong-question.html

In another post, I posed the following thought experiment:

Charlie, walking down Main Street, spots a Baskin Robbins ice cream store ahead of him. “Boy, I’d like some chocolate chip ice cream,” he says to himself as he makes his way to the shop. “I really want some chocolate chip,” he says to himself again, as he takes a number and waits his turn. (You always have to wait on line at Baskin Robbins.) When the counterperson calls out number thirty-seven, Charlie steps forward. “I’ll have . . . er . . . that is I’d like . . . um . . . ok, two scoops of maple walnut ice cream with sprinkles.” Charlie finishes his ice cream cone and says to himself, “The maple walnut was good, but I really wanted chocolate chip.” Question: What did Charlie really want—maple walnut or chocolate chip?

https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2009/08/three-thought-experiments.html 

(2) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/10/world/europe/queen-elizabeth-uk-identity.html?searchResultPosition=58

(3) https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/09/queen-elizabeth-ii-death-global-legacy/671377/

(4) https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/queen-elizabeth-ii-funeral-british-monarchy/671475/

(5) https://www.al.com/life/2022/09/when-duty-called-queen-elizabeth-always-answered.html

(6) https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/08/world/europe/queen-elizabeth-dead.html?searchResultPosition=31

 

The Jokesters

A Belgian Man Has Been Pranked with Pizza Deliveries for 9 Horrible Years

https://www.foodandwine.com/news/pizza-delivery-prank-9-years-belgium

*

Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott are real cards—producers of laugh-a-minute knee slappers, they have you rolling in the aisles. They also happen to be governors of two states of our union, Florida and Texas, respectively. Lately, when they need a rest from limiting women’s control over their bodies, banning textbooks, and other primary activities deemed necessary for the head of a backward political entity, they metamorphose into red state gagsters. Their shtick is to prank residents of other states by sending them unordered pizzas people. 

Abbott literally had two buses deliver immigrants to the doorstep of Vice President Harris. (There was no word whether they came bearing pepperoni or meatball pies.) DeSantis went one better (or worse) by chartering two planes to fly immigrants from Texas to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. (Does any resident of Florida wonder why DeSantis is spending that state’s taxpayer money to transport people from Texas to Massachusetts, or are they all in on the gag?) 

Supposedly, the purpose of the stealth transportations was to produce a kind of neo-Candid Camera moment, in which the pranked liberal residents of the District of Columbia and of the Vineyard would be caught losing it over the arrival of the Latin American strangers. “Smile,” Greg and Ron would exclaim, “you’ve been revealed as hypocrites!”

Except things didn’t happen that way. To take the example of the Vineyard residents: they rushed to welcome the incomers bearing their meager belongings. According to the Vineyard Gazette,

A coalition of emergency management officials, faith groups, nonprofit agencies and county and town officials were organizing food and shelter for the migrants, who spent Wednesday night at St. Andrews Church in Edgartown. The Salvation Army, among others, was providing food. . . .

As word spread of the migrants' plight, a crowd of people — many eager to offer assistance — gathered outside the church. Edgartown Police Lt. Chris Dolby urged people not to deliver additional donations.

Speaking outside the parish hall Thursday morning, state Rep. Dylan Fernandes said the situation was under control “with local law enforcement jumping into action.”

“People were served breakfast this morning by the parish and served lunch by the school system. We are a community that helps one another and you can see that here,” he said.*

*

Perhaps the best summation of the transportation stunt is this headline in New York magazine:

DeSantis Tries to Prove Liberals Hate Immigrants As Much As He Does, Fails

*

I have two final points to make:

1) When I finish this post, I’ll be writing a check to HIAS, whose motto is:

Welcome the stranger.

Protect the refugee.

2) For my next pizza, I won’t have it delivered; I’ll pick it up myself.

***

*  https://vineyardgazette.com/news/2022/09/14/planeload-venezuelan-refugees-arrive-marthas-vineyard-airport