The Lure of Beauty

Three years after his last book, Pulitzer Prize winning writer Michael Cunningham has returned with a new novel titled, By Nightfall. Set in post 9/11 New York, the story—though rather short of plot—is one of mid-life crisis in the world of a semi-wealthy art dealer named Peter Harris.

Harris is a mid-forties gallery owner living in a large Soho loft with his wife, Rebecca, founder-editor of a failing art journal. Their daughter has quit college to tend bar and live a rather sad life with an older female friend. This daughter Bea, less than comfortable with her father, leads him to think that he has always been a less than supportive father. On another level, Peter regrets the lost opportunities that have kept him a mid-level art dealer who may never have the chance to handle name artists. Passion is scant in this man’s life, but what there is of it blossoms from his appraisal of art, and the eternal power of beauty. The role of beauty and its meaning is a virtual totem in Peter’s life, and his thoughts are an ongoing inquiry into the relationship between beauty and meaning.

His wife has a baby brother whom they call ‘The Mistake’ or Mizzy, a name fraught with symbolism of a lot more than just a late birth in Rebecca’s family. Mizzy turns up for a stay with his sister and brother-in-law following another of his vague uncertain passages from drugs to rescue and back again. Cunningham stamps this character’s emptiness and pretense at depth by showing him holding at times an open copy of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, a book he never seems to read from. Mizzy’s place in the novel is as an ideal of physical beauty, a catalyst to jar the protagonist from his stagnation, or impasse in the concerns of family and work. Order in Peter’s life is thus undone by the arrival of this undependable Adonis. Perhaps he is a beautiful ‘work of art,’ but one with destructive potential. Peter finds himself mesmerized by the young man’s beauty, and though troubled by the implications, longs to stare at, to touch him.

Mizzy maneuvers the besotted Peter into a position that guarantees his continued drug use will remain a secret from his sister, Rebecca. Unsure of his own sexuality, Peter considers throwing away all to pursue his wife’s brother. Interesting here is the contrast here between the character’s mid-life crisis and his teenager-like infatuation with Mizzy. Beauty can make fools of us all. And perhaps this is the purpose behind Cunningham’s use of a quote from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Duino Elegies”—‘beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror.’ Having exhausted Peter’s usefulness, the boy rebuffs his declarations of love, cadges plane fare from his sister and flies off to his next destination.

Peter and Rebecca, having seen through the veneer of their marriage, decide to remain together with a hope of restoring meaning to their lives together.

In his prize-winning book, The Hours, Cunningham used Virginia Woolfe’s Mrs Dalloway as a framework for his story. In his last book Walt Whitman was the springboard for his story. This time, we find repeated reference to Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice, and the elder Aschenbach’s infatuation with the beautiful boy, Tadzio. Cunningham is more than merely well-read and his use of literature, film, music, art and movies to color his character’s words and thoughts is impressive, to say the least. This time we are treated to Shakespeare, Styx, Bette Davis, Tolstoy, Seurat, Beethoven, Damien Hirst, Rodin, Joyce and Mann.

Cunningham’s writing is intelligent and elegant. Dialogue is pitch perfect, and his use of idiom to fine tune his characters is almost delicious. He opens his character’s mind to us through an ongoing inner monologue that reveals the simmering angst and uncertainty, the fear that life has reached its apogee.

As indicated in the title, By Nightfall is something of a dark novel. Not everyone will enjoy the gravity of this protagonist’s dilemma, but let us remind ourselves that Michael Cunningham does not often do light and airy. There is plenty to laugh or chuckle over in this new novel, but you won’t find Gidget.

Athens 2

Yesterday’s browsing through the yellowed pages of an old travel journal has stayed with me, and for much of today the days and hours of those pages have been in and out of my thoughts. Morning following arrival in Athens…

National Archeological Museum… The garden is filled with the busy twitter and warble of birds. Their song plays against the roar and screech of traffic on the crowded road fronting the museum, and while such counterpoint may seem inharmonious, it is in fact, a pleasing combination of sounds. I have always loved the sounds of a big city, and in this case the unexpected mix of birdsong and traffic falls naturally upon the ear, just as in another context, the sight of a 19th century building snuggled up to a modern skyscraper is a picture that can please the eye. The mix is exactly what is so beautiful. My nearby hotel room offers a similar cocktail of night sounds, the dominant voice there however is the dozen or so stray cats who populate the small park below, and whose quarrels I found not so soothing.

The museum building stands just fifty feet from where I sit. It is a huge museum and will require two or three short visits rather than one long and tiring marathon walk through. I expect too, the coolness of the museum interiors will also be a welcome relief from the August sun, and hopefully a balm to an already sun-reddened face.

I spend almost three hours inside the museum. After the first hour, seasonal crowds of tourists begin to dominate the galleries and my concentration wanes. Hard to see why national museums allow booming guided tours in the galleries. This is contrary to the very nature of art appreciation. Why not read a few pages from a book in order to glean some hint of what the art might be, or what it might mean?

The Mycenaean collection is impressive. The death masks, which are shaped from thin sheets of pure gold, are interesting in their lack of true portraiture. They are not portraits at all and are suggestive of only the most general facial features. A guidebook tell me that the splendid golden Mask of Agamemnon was named based upon mistaken identity. The actual king of that name lived 300 years after this death mask was made. There are also some gold drinking cups, simple in design and starkly beautiful—if solid gold can be described as stark.

Wandering through a gallery devoted to grave sculptures I come across an excerpt from Plato’s dialogue, Phaedrus. I am unfamiliar with this dialogue, so scribble the words in my notebook. Sophocles is speaking:

‘O beloved Pan and all other gods of this place

grant me that I be made beautiful in my soul within,

and that all external possessions be in harmony with my

inner man. May I consider the wise man rich, and may I

have such wealth as only the self-restrained man can bear or endure.

Do we need anything more Phaedrus?

For me that prayer is enough.’

Later in another gallery, a sculpture from the 3rd century BC holds my attention. It is a statue in marble of a small boy, five or six years old, stroking a goose with his left hand. The guidebook calls it ‘delightful and sensitive,’ and yes, it is that. But it is also enchanting in the subtlety of its modeling. Because it is a child, the strong, sharp lines of muscle are not visible. The figure glows with an almost tactile softness.

Outside the museum a still climbing sun beats down on sidewalks painted in sheets of glare, but I can’t allow myself to be a pantywaist and hide too long inside the cool galleries. Too many things to see, too many things to do. With sunglasses and cap in place, I push on with the sights of a sizzling Athens. Sometime today I must also look for another hotel. I’ve had enough of blood-crazed mosquitoes, yowling cats and rumbling motorcycles, and am ready to pay for air-conditioning.

Upon Arriving

Short of thoughts today. Rummaging through old files I came across a day in Athens, the first of about ten, and was pulled back to that very hot evening not many hours after my arrival there in August some years ago. My thoughts and impressions at the time were certainly through the eyes of a neophyte still puzzling out the what of Greece and its fabled capital.

From streetside on the Oktovriou-Patission Road…

Athens…The plane was about two hours late leaving Istanbul. From Izmir in western Turkey to Greece’s capital, the 175 mile distance is a complicated journey. Turkish airports, I found, are not quick with information on incoming and outgoing flights. During the two hours of waiting for departure from Istanbul the boarding gate shifted from 104 to 106 and then finally 103, changes not announced by loudspeaker but rather by security policemen standing in prominent places and shouting, in Turkish of course, that boarding would now be from a different gate. Confusion was compounded by an airport layout which has none of the switched gates in sight of the other. Other travelers were as rattled as I, an uncertain crowd of frantic faces, milling about fearing the plane might leave without us.

But here I am none the worse, seated at a sidewalk café sipping iced cappuccino. Haven’t yet gotten my bearings in this large city and can’t tell very well where I am exactly, other than to say it is across the street from the National Archeological Museum. In any case, it is near my hotel.

The hotel, appropriately enough, is called the Museum Hotel. Have some worry now that I might have made a mistake in the choice of a hotel here in Athens. But the reservation was made weeks ago in a distant country. On arriving, the reservation was in place, but now I’m not at all sure about sleeping six nights in a room WITHOUT air conditioning. The early evening temperature in Athens is ninety-nine degrees. My assigned room is bare enough to qualify for ascetic training; two small beds, a table, two chairs, bare walls, an uncarpeted floor illuminated by three naked forty-watt light bulbs. Arriving hot, tired and sweaty I wanted nothing more than a cool shower. There is a shower, however it includes neither curtain nor hook to hang the long, ropy shower nozzle on. In a clumsy attempt to be neat about it, I had a difficult shower and finished with the bathroom floor swimming in an inch of soapy water. Each time I let go of the nozzle it jumped and careened about like an angry snake, spitting water to all four walls.

The café I sit in now is very stylish and apparently one of a chain of cafés in Athens, called Flocafé Espresso Bar. I’ve had two coffees, practically gulping the first, so parched was I with the heat. The menu also lists beer, whiskey and sandwiches. Good to know that such a place is so near my ‘grand hotel.’

Trolley cars pass along the street in front of me, now and then igniting a flash of bluish electricity from cables over the street. Can’t remember the last time I was in a city of trolley cars. I am told that tickets are sold at kiosks near the trolley stops, a one-way fare of 100 drachma. Tomorrow will be my day to try them out. Taxis seem difficult to flag down. The custom appears to be for the driver to slow down with open window and the prospective fare shouts out a destination. If the driver feels it convenient, he stops, even though there might be another passenger already in the cab. Both passengers pay separate and full fares. I imagine this experience is in my future, perhaps as early as tomorrow. I took a taxi in from the airport, which proved a painless operation. Probably overcharged since the fare was negotiated rather than metered, but it didn’t impress me as exorbitant, though I haven’t yet gotten much of a handle on the value of the currency.

Cooler now, and sated with iced coffee, I figure a short stroll will be good, gradually making my way back to the hotel.

In the shower later, I manage on this second attempt to keep most of the water in the right place. I pass an uncomfortable night in my spartan room in the Museum Hotel. Much too hot to sleep without air conditioning, but I am bothered more by a swarm of insects coming in through the open veranda doors and plaguing me with bites and stings. There is also a gathering of motorcyclists in the park below who hang about racing their engines. Will look for a different hotel tomorrow. Sometime after 1:00 a.m. I finally drift off to sleep, my head tickled by thoughts of the Parthenon and Greek salad.

The Floating Mouth

Seems like a lot of people see a jellyfish and get the heebie-jeebies. On that account, there are certainly times when walking on the beach or swimming in the ocean are definitely not something those folks want to do. Jellyfish don’t bother me very much, and I’m not particularly concerned I might be stung when swimming in the ocean. Though I’ve been spared, it does happens on occasion; people get tangled up with a jellyfish and come out of the water none too happy. Where I’m situated on Florida’s eastern coast, it isn’t a problem that anyone need worry too much about. Painful encounters with jellyfish are not that frequent. More often than not, the jellyfish one sees on this stretch of beach are washed up onto the sand in a very visible blob, and easily avoidable. The photographs here are what you see a fair amount of on the beach, depending on currents and tides. There must have been a huge colony of them in the drift last night, because I passed a hundred or more of them on my walk this morning.

The common jellyfish in these parts is the Aurelia aurita, more commonly called the moon jelly or jellyfish, sometimes the saucer jelly. It is from five to forty centimeters in diameter, and depending upon the stage or phase of life, either clear jelly throughout, or colored by pink or purplish patterns. Most conspicuous are the four reddish gonads forming a clover-like shape in the center of the body mass.

The jellyfish is capable of only limited movement on its own, and even when swimming gets most of its movement from ocean currents. The animals’s primary aim is to stay near the water’s surface, whether by current or its own swimming. Food is most plentiful near the surface. Jellyfish are carnivorous animals and feed on plankton, which includes mollusks, crustaceans and young worms. They will also feed on other jellyfish. The tentacles, with their stinging cells are sometimes used to catch small fish.

Like anemones and corals, the moon jellyfish is an invertebrate, with a sac-like body, mouth and tentacles. It is made up of more than ninety-five percent water, and basically just a floating mouth and digestive system. They have no brain, no blood and no nervous system; have neither lungs or gills or tracheal system of any kind. They get oxygen by diffusion through their thin membrane. Aurelia jellyfish rarely live more than several months.

Fishermen do not always appreciate the presence of jellyfish, because they eat the larvae of commercially important fish. Jellyfish can also cause an outbreak of algae blooms, which neither fishermen nor tourists like.

Remember that the bell-shaped body of a jellyfish cannot sting, though it may be sticky with mucus. Should you be stung while swimming, aside from the pain, the sting is usually harmless. The best treatment for a jellyfish sting is household vinegar or—of all things—urine.

The movement of these strange creatures is truly beautiful to watch. Take a look at the short YouTube clip below.

Pumpkins & Dress Up

We are now a few days past Halloween, but in my little corner at least, the really good stuff didn’t show up until this morning. I got email from a friend with some photos of carved pumpkins attached. Almost couldn’t believe my eyes looking at pictures of these fantastic creations. Very obviously, the art of pumpkin carving has come a long way since the days of a zigzag mouth, a triangular nose and eye holes. This kind of halloween fun is clearly unrelated to the half-sharp knife and Mommy’s help that many associate with carving pumpkins. The wonderfully ghoulish pumpkins in the photos here are the work of Scott Cummins and Ray Villafane in Bellaire, Michigan. The background of these October marvels is rooted in Ray’s work with D.C. and Marvel comics designing models. The two artists use such tools as spoons, garden spades and scalpels to carve and slice their vegetable monsters.

Ray says that the choice of a pumpkin is critical, that weight plays a big part. A lightweight pumpkin is indication that the wall is not thick enough for the extreme carving. He also likes irregular pumpkins, those that have knobs and ridges which can enhance the ugly misshapen features.

Ray got his start carving pumpkins as an art teacher when the school asked him to do some Halloween decoration. His inspiration was to treat the vegetable as a piece of clay with infinite possibilities. Well, it worked.

••••••••••

Still dazzled by the pumpkins, I read a story on CNN by their weekly columnist David Frum, telling me that the origins of Halloween are not to be found in Celtic folklore—as many have long believed—but in modern gay culture. Huh? Wait a second. Run that by me again. Quoting directly from the former GW Bush aide’s CNN article… ‘To understand the GLOBAL APPEAL of the Halloween holiday, go back to it’s origins. Those origins are not found in mythic Celtic folklore, but in modern gay culture.’ Ah, okay. It’s the origins of the holiday’s global appeal the writer is getting at.

Mr Frum reminds us that Halloween has become overwhelmingly an adult holiday, with adults spending substantially more on costumes for themselves than for children. He traces the “adult dress-up party” to San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood, which blossomed as a gay mecca in the 1970s. According to the writer, the craze for “Gay Halloween” spread to other cities, and by the 1980s had reached West Hollywood, Key West and Greenwich Village. Apparently Frum drew some of his evidence from a 1994 book by Jerry Kugelmass, Masked Culture, which describes Halloween (in 1994) as an emerging gay “high holiday.”

And now, he says, the straights are imitating the gays.

Complete article here.

Can’t Shake it Loose

Despite great strides made over the past six months toward acclimating to a different, and in part less familiar culture, there are things I miss almost daily about Tokyo, my city of twenty-eight years. A look at the calendar tells me that 184 days have passed since arriving in this little Florida town on the beach. Half a year, quite a lump of days, but even still, few days pass when I don’t say to myself, ‘Wish I could run out to Tower and pick up a Monkey Majik CD.’ Or maybe, ‘Sure would like to have some ebi tendon at Futaba.’ ‘Maybe I’ll go to Maruzen tomorrow and check out the new Sailor ink.’

I wrote to a friend in Tokyo yesterday asking if she would mind sending something I badly need and can’t find here. Leaving Tokyo in late April, I packed six of the notebooks long used for both journal and first drafts of writing projects. Guess it’s because of more free time here, but now all but the last pages of the last Life Noble Note notebook are filled.

Been unable to find in my area here, a café or coffee shop where I can pass an hour or so doing a John Lennon—watching the wheels go round, scribbling in my journal and occasionally blotting errant drops of iced coffee from the pages. I miss the sunbright third floor of Doutor Café in Kugayama…miss that late afternoon coffee hour.

Think too about the numbers of young Japanese boys and girls I so often passed among, those of the green hair and pierced lips, the boys in skirts, the girls in hot pink hightop Keds. The hooked-up youth nose down in cell phones, plugged into iPods, draped in chains and dragging bushel-sized tote bags. The college kids on trains locked into comic books, wearing boots big and heavy enough to cross the Amazon jungle. I miss them all.

Shimizu-san was for years my regular supermarket checkout cashier at Peacock near the Kugayama apartment. She sent a New Year’s card each January first, and never a Valentine’s Day passed that she didn’t give me a box of chocolates. Now I think of her as I stroll the aisles of my beachtown Publix, remembering a faithful friend and wondering about the cost of soy milk at Peacock these days.

I had my hair cut last Friday, and not a bad job either, but it will take a lot to erase from my wants a few more haircuts from Hikaru at Minato 3710. Hardly a time that I look at my hair in the mirror and don’t miss the skill and caring service given by my Japanese barber. I wonder often enough what color Hikaru’s hair is this month. He pretty much switched colors once a month, from black to yellow, and then to orange and maybe the next month the ever popular favorite tea-brown chapatsu.

These Florida days continue to be crowded with thoughts of the daily, weekly sights and sounds that soothed and jangled my long passage through Tokyo and the whole Japan experience.

Red Communists

Every once in a while we come upon a name or figure with historical relevance that has somehow, despite school, books and Internet escaped notice. Obviously, we can’t know about, or be aware of everyone in the pages of history, and so it happens that we bypass the occasional interesting character. For me, early 20th century journalist and activist, John Reed was one of those. His life, writing and influence passed me right by until just recently.

John Reed was born in Portland, Oregon in 1887 and attended Harvard, where he got an introduction to socialist causes. After graduation in 1910 he set off to see England, France and Spain, returning to the US after six months to take up residence in New York’s Greenwich Village. There he began making a name for himself as a socialist minded journalist. Given his location and the tenor of New York’s liberal society at the time, Reed moved in circles that included radical journalist Lincoln Steffens, poet Edna St Vincent Millay, playwright Eugene O’Neill and anarchist Emma Goldman. They were heady times and saw the first stirrings of an American Socialist Party.

In 1916 Reed met and fell in love with Louise Bryant, who left her husband and moved to New York to be with Reed. The next year saw the two of them off to Russia, where they found themselves smack in the middle of the 1917 October Revolution, the globe changing event in which Bolsheviks, led by Lenin toppled the Russian government and established a communist state. This experience became fodder for Reed’s most popular and enduring book, Ten Days that Shook the World. (The photo above shows a marvelous cover on the 1922 German edition.) Reed died in Moscow in 1920 of spotted typhus, Louise Bryant at his bedside clasping his hand.

In 1981, Hollywood stepped in and Warren Beatty wrote, directed and starred in a movie covering the years of Reed’s and Bryant’s lives from 1916 to 1920. It was this movie that brought John Reed to my attention, and I was fascinated by Beatty’s sensitive handling of his material. It is an exceptional film, though it’s 194 minute length requires a comfortable chair. The movie is called Reds and stars Beatty as John Reed, Diane Keaton as Louise Bryant and Jack Nicholson as Eugene O’Neill. Maureen Stapleton won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Emma Goldman, as did Beatty for his screenplay and his direction. Reds is one of those epic films that has been beautifully crafted to achieve the best possible harmony in what is a huge collaboration. Watching the picture you get the sense that every element was lovingly mixed to create symmetry with the next. One of the better touches was the way the director interspersed commentary on Reed and Bryant and the social era from notable people of that time.

This film is great entertainment for an evening, if you can handle the two-disc length. It is especially informative on the socialist movement both here and abroad during the years between 1916 and 1920. And the whole thing is so very pretty to look at.