Quote of the Year

From former Ukrainian Defense Minister Anatoly Gritsenko, regarding the rifts in Ukrainian society between East and West and the prospects for a unified future:

"We will never agree if we think of Ukraine as the land of our fathers.  But we can easily agree if we talk about Ukraine as the land of our children."

Self-Conscious Excerpt from a Letter to a Friend

"You know, it's funny, I look back at some of this writing on my blog over the past few years and I think, oy.  How preening and insufferable I could be.  My only hope (and it seems, from looking at the dates of the posts as they progress, that there's some evidence for this) is that cancer finally (finally!) beat all that useless, adolescent shit out of me."

Stone Street Interview: The McDuffie Project

What to say about Robert McDuffie?  How to introduce him?  Maybe better to introduce the interview.  I'll start by saying I didn't do a very good job with it.  The recording quality isn't terrific, a hilarious final sign-off from Mr. McDuffie was inadvertently edited out, while some of the other edits are confusing and don't give enough context for the conversation.  For my money, the questions aren't thought out enough to elicit the really complex connections and insights that one would want to discover along with one's interview subject.  And it's several months late--Mr. McDuffie (who, by the way, would want us to call him Bobby) came to us in Vilnius in mid-October.  All of that is my fault.  What can I say?  Mea culpa.

But, what I hope comes through anyway is the utter irrepressibility of the man, the sheer force of his experience, intelligence and humor.  The example: when my wife and I first conceived of the plan to bring McDuffie to Vilnius (after hearing him on NPR's Performance Today), he responded to our emailed invite with an email of his own: "Great!  The last time I was in Vilnius, I was 19 years old, touring the Soviet Union, and I was smuggling gold for Rostropovich!"  I said to my wife, we have to have this man here, and interview him for Stone Street.  Well, at least we did get that story out of him, and it is predictably hysterical.  Enjoy it here, or via the RSS feed to right of this post.  Please listen.  It's worth it.

For more on Mr. McDuffie, his very famous (and expensive) violin, the +Rome Chamber Music Festival , and the McDuffie Center for Strings at Mercer University, see Bobby's website here.

O Vienna!

Is Vienna the most civilized city in the world?  Surely.  Vienna is almost what we mean when we say civilized - clean, competent, aloof.  Haughty.  Richly layered but not gross or vulgar.  There's schlock and depravity abroad, probably, but it would seem to be well cordoned-off and subject to sufficiently prohibitive disapprobation.  In the park there's a statue of Strauss.  Handel is played in the open-air Christmas markets.  Beethoven and Brahms were buried here, as was Mozart (twice).  The influence of Klimt and his Secessionists is all over.   There's cappucino and sachertorte at the Cafe Eiles behind the Rathaus, and down past the Staatsoper, there's Wilhelm, Jungmann & Neffe, tailors to the Imperial and Royal Austrian Court since 1881.  O Luxury! O Propriety!  O Worldly Refinement!

Well, ok.  Normally this is where I'd go all English major and begin to problematize, contextualize, qualify, hedge and second-guess.  But nuts to that.  Who has the energy?  And besides, I really mean it, I like this place and I wish I were a part of it.  With due respect to my otherwise innocent parents, I wish in every way that I were a different sort of creature, more Germanic, not subject to the dictates of these milky, broke-down Irish genes of mine.  If I could be anybody, I'd be one of these stolid, literal-minded industrialists, I'd be some financial bureaucrat, or engineer, or Austrian economist: fat, straightforward, healthy, bearded, bald, respectable and overeducated, square of jaw, shoulder and soul.  Untroubled by any useless sense of mystery, any sense of sin or surpassing purpose.  I'd have my lusts and duties, and I'd feel at home in the world.  In the processes of computation that would fill my days.

O functionality.  O stone and logic.  O Vienna.

The Gutter of Love, or, What I Might Have Learned From Lou Reed if I'd Ever Listened to Lou Reed

This small thing that feeds me,

it's quicksilver,

it puffs away.

I slip on as well,

Everyone just slips on,

crumpled.  We give up.

Our food gives up on us, 

it's a spat,

the knots of ego and exhaustion.

The gutter of love.

The Surprisingly Easily Overlooked Question of Whether or Not I Believe in the Soul

In the September 16 issue of the New Yorker, excerpts from the diary of a young (very young--21 years old) Flannery O'Connor are reprinted.  O'Connor apparently used her diary as a mechanism, a vehicle for prayer: she began each entry with the address, My Dear God.  There are pages of yearning, self-castigating entries which would be familiar, almost embarrassingly recognizable, to any intelligent Catholic kid.  And then in the middle of it all, standing alone, there is this:

No one can be an atheist who does not know all things.  Only God is an atheist.  The devil is the greatest believer & he has his reasons.

It's been a while since I last had reason to believe that such lightning lived in homely, ordinary folk.  My current circumstances get in the way of paying real attention to the soul, mine or anyone else's.  But I figure I must believe in it.  I must.  Otherwise I'd care more about the quotidian business of finance, trade, sales, etc., and less about such music as this above.  Such clarity, and such potential in a Southern girl...

An Argument for Unknowability

It is a strange thing to read characterizations of men (or women, of course).  As someone who deals in them, both as producer and consumer, I know how they can grip us and flip all our switches of recognition.  They are almost unbearably intimate things--if drawn with care and conviction, they can leave us trembling with insight.

But what are they, really, these conclusions about the general type of a person?  Or perhaps better, to what/whom do they correspond?  To ask this may well be nothing less than to ask that great wrenching question forever being tossed up by the western world: what is a man?  Is he ever, in whole or in part, that which somebody says about him?  And furthermore, irrespective of any Thomistic or Aristotelian essentialist-type issues, what has anyone's summing up got to do with the operational decisions faced by the individual in question?  Can a man learn what to do by following who he thinks he is?  Or is he fated to try to puzzle out who he is on the evidence of what he does?

My prompt for this predictably gooey and solipsistic meditation is Henry Kissinger's depiction of Richard Nixon at their first formal meeting as President-elect and would-be adviser.  This from Kissinger's hefty memoir, White House Years, v. 1:

"I did not know then that Nixon was painfully shy.  Meeting new people filled him with vague dread, especially if they were in a position to rebuff or contradict him.  As was his habit before such appointments, Nixon was probably in an adjoining room settling his nerves and reviewing his remarks, no doubt jotted down on a yellow tablet he never displayed to his visitors.

When at last Nixon entered the room, it was with a show of jauntiness that failed to hide an extraordinary nervousness.  He sat on a sofa with his back to the window overlooking Fifth Avenue, and motioned me to an easy chair facing him.  His manner was almost diffident; his movements were slightly vague and unrelated to what he was saying as if two different impulses were behind speech and gesture."

This is rich stuff, and compelling.  The subject is not a confused derelict, or a defeated, distracted sales manager from Indiana, but the President-elect of the world's preeminent nuclear power.  How do we reconcile this shaky man with the unarguably shrewd (if bitter) observer of foreign and domestic events, atmospheres, capacities, trends?  In fact, this breaks down into two questions: 1) To what extent is Kissinger's characterization, well, relevant?  Even if he's right (and he likely is), he's right about such a fraction of what constitutes a human.  He's right about a moment, one moment among the zillions which together make up a single life.  Here we edge up on the experience, in real life, of Derrida, who said that nothing is ever finished.  Kissinger's impressions may have held, Nixon, in some respects may have been consistent, a repeater of indicative behaviors, but so what?  The constant flux of phenomena, of emotional throughput in one human heart of the course of even a few moments produces a storm of data beyond all processing capability.  Our consciousness is ever on the knife's edge, tipping and tipping, by the milisecond.  In case you missed it, this is an argument for unknowability.  2) Since we don't generally sense, though, in our everyday lives, that we are unknowable to each other, this second question arises: What is happening inside a man (and in society) when he finds himself in a life to which he's both so ill-suited temperamentally and so drawn by his own obvious skill and effectiveness within it?  Is it self-discipline in pursuit of a higher goal? (Kissinger would, in other writings, say yes.)  Or is it something more mysterious and imponderable?  Something inaccessible even (or especially) to the subject himself?

I'm sorry, I know this is exhausting, and perhaps an odd exercise all around, but the take-away for us is this: Is there some ultimate merit in pursuing precisely that which we dread most, in binding ourselves to a life of dismay, uneasiness, confusion and disappointment?

I don't know.  By most accounts, Nixon was a miserable man.  Did he drive himself to it, to the rancor and paranoia that ultimately undid him, in service to a great ideal?  If he did, then the question for us is, Is that really a viable life choice?  Can I really sublimate my every instinct toward the right life to a vision of a possible life?  Would I necessarily be mad to do so?