What Would Pete Have Thought?

 I've kept viewing commercials on television for a car that begin and are accompanied throughout with Pete Seeger singing about waking up early to start a hard day at the mill. It shows a family or couple getting into  the fairly fancy car and backing out of their driveway but just missing being wrecked by a car passing speedily on the road.

Pete's tenor is of course unmistakable. I immediately began thinking about what he would have thought of his labor song being appropriated by a capitalistic car company to sell automobiles. Even though I see myself as a pragmatist (not to be confused with a foreign policy realist, thank you), it's very difficult for me to hear Pete Seeger singing and not be swept up in his love for the workers and the downtrodden. 

It makes me consider what I haven't done to strive towards the kinds of goals he espoused. And his voice has that timbre that always cuts right to one's essence. One of my favorite renditions was on an old Weavers album--maybe it was their reunion at Carnegie Hall--when the three tenors who had clocked time in the group joined in giving the old chestnut Wimoweh (which has since been popularized and somewhat profaned since the Weavers got it from its South African creators) a rousing workout. 

You hear Pete coming in and standing out with his extraordinarily distinctive tenor. It's almost as thrilling as his leading We Shall Overcome, shouting out a line after a huge rally crowd sings the one before.  Another similarly exciting moment hearing an even more marvelous voice stand out from a group is a now You Tubed scene from Showboat where Hattie McDaniel, Helen Morgan, and Irene Dunne start into Can't Help Loving That Man o' Mine. Right near the end, Paul Robeson walks into this 1936 movie clip and lends his glorious bass to the finale. It makes it absolutely perfect. I believe Pete was driving with Robeson to the concert at Peekskill when a right-wing mob stoned their car.

I remember being delighted when Pete was given the Kennedy Center Honors back in the 1990s, a solid achievement for Bill Clinton's Administration. Not everyone recalls that Pete and the Weavers were blacklisted and kept off television--then becoming the major entertainment medium--for many years. If someone had told me that that could happen... It was even better that underneath his uncharacteristic jacket up there in the Presidential box, he was wearing a work shirt.

I ended up wishing that this commercial had been aired before Pete passed on last year at 92. But I took some consolation from the probability that his estate would benefit--probably more richly than from any concert payday--and through it some worthy causes.

There Went the Judge

 It's not often that you are faced with the death of someone who was both a model and a mentor, a judge and a natural leader. For me, that was the late Chief Judge William C. Pryor, who passed away last Thursday at 88. At the District of Columbia Court of Appeals, where I was privileged to work when Judge Pryor was the Chief Judge, he was the effective man i n the middle, calming the judicial waters after the court had almost torn itself apart with personalities clashing.

As a judge, he brought to the appellate bench the skills and the attitude of a good trial judge, basing his decisions as much as possible on the facts with scrupulous impartiality.  He was soft-spoken yet firm when he reached a conclusion. And although he had no particular liking for administration, he led the court system in D.C. effectively through cooperation with Chief Judge Fred Ugast of D.C.'s Superior Court, the trial court. During the decade I spent at the court, that kind of collaboration hadn't occurred before him and did not exist after he stepped down.

So often it happens that the most effective leader is the one who does not seek the position but accepts the responsibility. By proceeding calmly but firmly, he earned the respect of contentious judges on both the appeals and trial courts.  He took no pleasure from ceremonial or social occasions--often, he would approach me during some get-together at the court or with the bar to ask if I wanted to go for a run with him. 

The testimonials in the media from a deceased judge's law clerks are invariably totally laudatory and also completely predictable. But everyone on the staff at the court appreciated how he would treat them as full colleagues. And although he focused on the evidence in criminal cases, never succumbing to demands for either excessive leniency or firmness, he often was hailed by men whom we ran by during jogs in D.C. After one such greeting, he remarked to me that he had sentenced the man to a term of several years.

He grew up in the District, starting segregated public schools. He was a good athlete, especially at basketball and tennis, and worked out for most of his life. He would chuckle at remembering that he had been recruited by Dartmouth where it had been assumed he was a good football player but which he hadn't played. He loved basketball and blamed his bad knees on playing on concrete courts growing up.

After Dartmouth and Georgetown Law, he took a Master's in Judicial Studies at the University of Virginia with my former boss, Prof. Dan Meador. Unlike many judicial education courses, this one was demanding and rigorous. He was not prone to parading his education. Once in a divorce case, where counsel for a well-heeled couple had condescendingly tried to explain to the trial judge, Judge Pryor, about the importance of the right summer camp for the couple's children, he saw that they assumed he knew nothing of that strata. He never disclosed his own attendance at Northfield Mr. Hermon, then Dartmouth and Georgetown.

In his last years, we would meet, usually serendipitously, at the same health club. Everyone in the locker room knew and respected him; he would enjoy getting into discussions with them about almost any subject. He was also proud of his two sons, doing his best to launch them on good careers. At home, the judge conceded that his wife of many years was in charge, pointing out that she was a teacher, who to him had more natural authority than a judge.

There have been far too few jurists who brought his temperament and skills to the job. In our ideologically-divided age, he has already been and will continue to be sorely missed. He was someone for whom you wanted to give nothing less than your best.

Things Get Weird

Over the years since first reading George Orwell's two masterworks, Animal Farm and 1984, it could be said that they prompted a look backward--we conjure up recollections of totalitarian and authoritarian states but have been less capable of recognizing rather than envisioning dystopic societies such as that depicted in 1984. But today there have been many clear indications that such a future is not so distant and unlikely. 

Orwell's perception, moreover, extended to a clear analysis of not only why socialism has not been widely accepted in the U.S. but the reasons why its prospects here remain dim--as evidenced by how easily the Republicans wielded the scare propensity of the very word to successfully resist any "Blue wave" that might have accompanied Biden's victory. This has usefully been summarized from what may be his most continually relevant work, The Road to Wigan Pier, published in 1937 :                    

    Why then are we not all socialists?

Orwell attempts to answer this difficult question. He points out that most people who argue against socialism do not do so because of straightforward selfish motives, or because they do not believe that the system would work, but for more complex emotional reasons, which (according to Orwell) most socialists misunderstand. He identifies five main problems:

1. Class prejudice. This is real and it is visceral. Middle-class socialists do themselves no favors by pretending it does not exist and—by glorifying the manual worker—they tend to alienate the large section of the population that is economically working-class but culturally middle-class.
2. Machine worship. Orwell finds most socialists guilty of this. Orwell himself is suspicious of technological progress for its own sake and thinks it inevitably leads to softness and decadence. He points out that most fictional technically advanced socialist utopias are deadly dull. He criticizes H. G. Wells in particular on these grounds.
3. Crankiness. Among many other types of people Orwell specifies people who have beards or wear sandals, vegetarians, and nudists as contributing to socialism's negative reputation among many more conventional people.
4. Turgid language. Those who pepper their sentences with "notwithstandings" and "heretofores" and become over excited when discussing dialectical materialism are unlikely to gain much popular support.
5. Failure to concentrate on the basics. Socialism should be about common decency and fair shares for all rather than political orthodoxy or philosophical consistency.

Applying Orwell's analysis to our milieu more than eighty years later, we can point to those who, in focusing entirely on economic factors, diminish the significance of the "culture wars". Recently, we have beginning to hear acknowledgment of the negative power of elitism, condescension, perceived favoritism toward minorities, and use of such terms as "deplorables" in firing up people who didn't go to college to turn to those who surely do not have their interests at heart or in mind except to draw on the anger of people who feel neglected, insulted, or passed over. Resentment remains and is now again being recognized as a powerful generator of negative voting.

This counts for a lot. Lincoln observed, "God must have loved the common people because he made so many of them." He also employed the self-deprecation tack since successfully used by politicians who seek to counter the tendency of many who are struggling to make ends meet to express misguided respect for rich candidates who inherited or made a fortune on their own. Some rich men may not steal; we have seen, however, that that is not true across the board, any more than it is the case that any economic group has a lesser propensity to engorge off the public trough. 

Asked about how his early life led to his success, Lincoln said that his early years could be summed up in a phrase from Gray's Elegy: "the short and simple annals of the poor." Lincoln was able to use these responses so well because he did rise from an impoverished and hard-scrabble background. Only those who did live a Horatio Alger rags-to-riches story are thus able to employ this approach: it is akin to the now-iron rule that only members of ethnic groups can make jokes about their group. 

Something to Cheer

 We were out walking along Connecticut Avenue here in the nation's capital at about 12:30 P.M. and suddenly we heard and saw a cacophony of horns honking, banners waving, flags flying in the breeze out of sunroofs, and a whole procession of cars parading down the avenue past the Zoo and on, presumably, to downtown DC as thousands cheered. 

It's been much too long since we had something to cheer about like this. Even election night was muted because of the Congressional results. But now it was as if all the pent-up enthusiasm--absolutely no curbing allowed, Larry David--was suddenly released and exploded in a merry pandemonium.

As with every time one gets loaded, there'll be sober second thoughts in the morning, but today is just a great beautiful--70 degrees and sunny here--day for celebrating. Reminds me of the ancient ad slogan from my much much younger days: "They said it couldn't be done..."

Sermons and soda water tomorrow, comedy tonight! Everything is forgiven for Joe--and yes, over the years, there was plenty. But everything changes--now and then. I just received a note saying that the Year of Living Dangerously is over. As one who lived for a while in Indonesia, it really was like that here. Only it was for four years. 

Skip Happy Days Are Here Again, even if they are. I like Ding Dong, The Witch is Dead!!

About That Court

 A good friend said to me yesterday that the new Supreme Court justice does have excellent qualifications, meaning legal ones. My response was that it was a given and should be a given that any nominee these days has the traditional academic success story. But teaching at law school and serving as an appellate judge for two years don't really provide much in the way of understanding the problems of ordinary people.  

I don't judge judicial nominees by their academic standing but I do pay attention to their previous decisions and writings. If  a nominee espouses down-the-line extreme conservatism, I'm not interested in how well she did in law school. She denied having fixed positions on major issues; this was ludicrous, because she has written specifically about why certain key past decisions were wrong. You expect her to reconsider those positions? 

We're in for a bad time. We may need a new president to expand the court's membership just as FDR was finally inclined to do after four years of the Four Horsemen of Reaction: Van Devanter, McReynolds, Sutherland, and Butler. And they were only four. Despite what you may read about the "court packing" episode of 1937, it failed not because the public was against it but because FDR muffed it. He didn't even go over it with his legislative leaders or prepare the ground in any way for the effort.

And FDR acted precipitously, without adequate planning as well as spadework, because his strongest political adviser, Louis McHenry Howe, had just died. Louis Howe never would have let him go into this legislative battle without extensive advance work. He would have made sure that depending on the legislator, either he or FDR or both would have button-holed all of them. 

As has been noted, expanding the court has been successfully proposed and effected by Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Jackson, and Lincoln. Another proposal in today's paper was to set up screening panels made up of rotating members selected from federal appeals court judges to decide what cases should go to the Supremes. That way, the high court justices cannot put a series of cases on the docket to move toward their own personal ideological goals, as several of the current reactionary bunch have been doing.

It's unlikely that we can ever go back to dealing with court membership apart from total political domination of the process. The cats are out of the bag. It's become increasingly partisan as the GOP has returned to its bad old days of putting extreme reactionaries on the court. Democrats for the most part acted as if things hadn't changed--they nominated candidates who were only slightly left of center or actually in the center. The so-called liberal wing hadn't been so liberal for a long time. But just as with the whole Republican party, their nominees have moved way over to the right. Scalia and Thomas set the pattern.

Now that the Supreme Court has jumped right into the political thicket that Frankfurter claimed with little basis that he tried to avoid, and as to which he was wrong, because gerrymandering won't go away when the pols who drew the district lines are the ones in office. Roberts's claim that the nation didn't  need the Voting Rights Act's preclearing was as much of a lie as Trump's saying the pandemic is over.

 

Two Papers: Their Coverage Diverges More Than Ever

 

For as long as I've lived in Washington, I've had the Washington Post and New York Times delivered every morning. It always was obvious that each had its strong and weak points; over the years, one never seemed clearly superior. But recently, major shifts in the way the Times covers many subjects bolster a strong feeling that the Post has taken a significant lead in quality.

National politics has always been the Post's stock-in-trade. It devotes many pages and many signed columns to this cornerstone of its news and opinion coverage. Both papers, despite having superb reporters covering the White House and environs, have of course devoted far too much attention to the current President. But both have probed and published major exposes of the corruption and malfeasance of this administration. Even the authoritative Bob Woodward, while holding the title of Associate Editor at the Post but not actually on current staff, still produces newsworthy accounts based on direct contact with presidents and their top staff members. 

The Times, however, seems to have fallen off in terms of its full coverage. It has produced some amazing exposes in recent weeks--the President's taxes, for one. Yet when one looked at its front page this morning, Sunday, October 25, the right lead was a story datelined Bethlehem, Pa., about why people there felt the current President had done a fine job with the nation's economy. The reporter apparently spoke to no one who disagreed with this dubious finding. Nor did the story suggest that there might be anyone who differed from this conclusion.

The need for significant improvement in both staff diversity and coverage when addressing gender and race issues was long evident. Now, one can rarely turn to the Times without every other story focused on one or both of these subjects. In the Times's arts coverage, in particular, there rarely seems to be room for anything but these two topics, as important as they are. If we still had satirical magazines, or if satire relating to these sensitive matters were allowed to be published, the Times's total focus on them would be ripe for targeting.

In contrast, the Post has had a columnist for the past year or more who addresses issues relating to how women are treated in our society; for much longer, it has had a succession of columnists who focus on problems of race.  News stories that involve these topics receive full coverage. Eugene Robinson is a top-notch writer and has been so recognized for his perceptivity; Monica Hesse strikes me as a fair-minded writer who has identified important areas where women's rights are threatened or unfulfilled, and dealt with them well.

The Convention

  

The national political convention as we have known it is gone. Aside from nostalgia--which ignores the incredibly unsavory aspects of the beast--we might give some thought to what will replace it. We may be surprised that the convention's demise will show us why it may be missed.

Reforms often do not turn out as anticipated. It's difficult to conclude that our primaries that now play the leading role in selecting nominees do a better job than the caucus or even the much-despised smoke-filled rooms. Primaries, in fact, have promoted the movement of each party toward the extremes; blame them in part for the chasm in legislatures, especially Congress, that prevents consensus from developing.

Yes, professionals, and that includes professional politicians, tend to prefer the canvas they know and on which they have been operating. But the entire raison d'etre of the convention--selection of the nominees--is gone. It's all over by the time they convene. Carl Hulse, the veteran Congressional correspondent of the N.Y. Times, emphasized today in an op-ed the role of conventions in providing a setting for political business to be done.

This is the real purpose of the parties, state receptions, impromptu caucuses, and their like. We need not mourn the demise of an opportunity for political pros to seek and gain employment on campaigns. That can happen without the need for a convention. More important are the chance and arranged meetings between attendees who may not be connected with any contender. This contributes to a political party maintaining its national focus. Understanding of the issues important in other locales spreads.

Lovers of the traditional political world--as well as those enjoying festivals of alcohol and smoke--may descry the loss, but it has occurred because the need has gradually disappeared. And some aspects of politics have not changed at all. One political chieftain--House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn was able to rescue Joe Biden's campaign with his endorsement just before the South Carolina primary. This was merely a slightly less dramatic version of the surprise switch at the convention depicted by such an admirer of the traditional politics as the late Allen Drury in his novel, Advise and Consent. 

 

 

Our Man

Richard Holbrooke passed on a decade ago but is still recalled by everyone connected with American foreign policy. He was brilliant, egotistical, arrogant, pragmatic, and likely had more enemies than friends. A book about him, Our Man, by George Packer, now in paperback, presents him, warts and all, as perhaps the last huge, significant figure in U.S. diplomacy. 

He started in the Foreign Service school with the class of 1962, at a time when diplomacy was a prized career in the U.S. In his class was Anthony (Tony) Lake, who for the next thirty-plus years would be a close friend and colleague, and also rival and even enemy. Both were dispatched in the hothouse that was Vietnam as the quagmire was building. 

Holbrooke learned early how politicians never looked beyond the immediate problems. Kennedy more or less let the coup and murder of Diem happen. He watched as special assistant to Henry Cabot Lodge, dispatched to resolve the situation, failed as everyone else had and would in the future. Johnson got caught in the domino theory and fear of losing. 

But Vietnam was where Holbrooke insisted on going into the provinces and managing projects to help peasants and other Vietnamese country people. His pragmatism got him some results but, unlike the military, which really called the shots, and even the others there in the American civilian cadre, he knew it was an incipient disaster. It taught him a lot worth knowing and he used it well, but when he would bring up Vietnam thirty years later, none of the next generation wanted to hear it. 

His last assignment was Afghanistan. He was past his peak, the dividend of a hard-pushing life, and he was no more successful than anyone else in figuring a way out of America’s longest war. His brief included Pakistan, which was equally impossible to negotiate a solution. This didn’t stop Holbrooke from trying. Even after he had alienated almost everyone on all sides, he still kept at it and amazingly, all of these players would meet with him. He was pressing to add India to his terrain when he collapsed in the State Department and was dead half a day later of  aortic shredding.  

Holbrooke’s peak accomplishment was brokering a settlement of hostilities in Bosnia, a republic of t he former Yugoslavia. He had built contacts there for some years dating back to his service as Ambassador to Germany. This made it possible for him to move from meeting with Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, for the Serbs, with President Franco Tudjman of Croatia, and with Alija Izetbegović, President of Bosnia, representing the Bosnian Muslims. Holbrooke had met with the Bosnian Serbs, but their intractability led him to keep them out of the negotiations and have them represented by Milosevic.  

He brought them to Wright-Patterson air base outside Dayton, Ohio, in the U.S.m because he wanted this conference to occur here and because placing it on the huge base would isolate the parties. There was virtually no where to go off the base except for a small commercial strip. He didn’t know if he would havean agreement until the very last hour of the meeting. But his familiarity with the leaders enabled him to know when to push one or the other, especially Milosevic, who seemed completely concerned only with his internal political situation in Serbia. Reaching the agreement ended a long, terrible war with casualties and the coining of the term “ethnic cleansing”. 

Holbrooke had become Assistant Secretary df State for Far Eastern Affairs at a remarkably early age. His progress slowed thereafter. While he did become Ambassador to the United Nations and was effective there, he constantly battled with the White House National Security staff, no matter who was President or National Security Advisor. His best chance to become Secretary of State saw him nosed out by his later sponsor, Hillary Clinton (when she later became Secretary), who wanted her husband to name the first female Secretary—Madeleine Albright. 

Holbrooke had great regard for the postwar predecessors who he believed had created the firm structures that defined world relations until relatively recently. These were Marshall, Acheson, Harriman, Kennan, and their contemporaries in State and Defense. They were The Wise Men, as their story was entitled in the Walter Isaacson-Evan Thomas book.  

Packer aims to show that Holbrooke may have been the last of the great American diplomats who was larger than life and strived hard to make the U.S. an important but benevolent world power. He sees Holbrooke as emblematic of the gradual decline of American influence worldwide. In this view, even if this diplomat had been more diplomatic, the age of the masterful foreign policy leaders had passed. 

Packer’s judgment of Holbrooke as “almost great” is judicious, and makes his story all the more enthralling because of his personal quirks, They made him the fascinating character he was but they also limited his achievement.

English Mysteries--Then and Now

 I've always been very fond of one particular author of mysteries which are mostly set in England although she was Scottish--Josephine Tey. She is the mystery savant's favorite: she only published eight novels, and as she died in 1952, there haven't been any new ones for quite some time. Until now, which means beginning in 2008 and continuing currently. A writer named Nicola Upson, whose bio in her books says she lives in Cambridge and Cornwall, which are two rather charming places to live, has so far produced a series of nine "Josephine Tey" mysteries, in which her detective is joined in some manner or other by the character Josephine Tey, the mystery writer.

Tey, as it happens, was also a playwright, and her most successful drama, produced in the West End in the early 1930's, was Richard of Bordeaux, about Richard II forms the setting for Upson's first Tey novel. The play was a success, running a year and a half, and starred a young actor named John Gielgud: it helped to make him famous at an early age. Her other plays were not as popular, but one that featured Mary Queen of Scots had another two members of the renowned English acting trio who all acquired the prefix "Sir" before their names, Ralph Richardson, who was followed in the part of Lord Bothwell, Mary's second husband, by Laurence Olivier, who of course ended up as Lord O. 

The plays were written under the name of Gordon Daviot, Daviot being a small town near Inverness, which was where Tey was from. And to make the story one more bit complicated, Tey herself used that name for the novels, but her real name was Elizabeth Mackintosh, The most famous of the novels is The Daughter of Time, in which her detective, Inspector Alan Grant, is laid up in a hospital bed so he is given a book about reversing Shakespeare's verdict of guilty on the last of the Plantaganets (recall that Elizabeth I was a Tudor, and the house's founder, Henry VII, was the Richmond who defeats and terminates Richard III at the end of that play). Probably because Richard III was one of Shakespeare's greatest villains, his play attracts more performances than another good Shakepearean classic, Richard II.

Anyway, Tey did such a fine job in her effort to rehabilitate Richard III, claiming that he did not murder  the Princes in the Tower, that although most historians still disagree, she was responsible for reigniting the centuries-old argument about his guilt. The controversy persists today, largely because people still enjoy reading The Daughter of Time. My introduction to Tey was being sent The Daughter of Time from England in the late 1950's by an English cousin named, of all names, Josephine.  It also should be noted that the Crime Writers Association in England voted this novel "the greatest mystery novel of all time" in 1990.

A more recent e "Tey" novel, Fear in the Sunlight, takes place at Portmeirion, and Upson mixes fictional and real life characters (whose actions in the novel are fictional). Portmeirion is a village resort in Wales which was reconstructed in the 1920's and the novel is based on Tey's negotiating with Alfred Hitchcock and his wife and partner Alma Reville, to turn her novel, A Shilling for Candles, into a movie, which ended up being called Young and Innocent, one of his last made in England. I plan to try to see it because although Hitchcock altered Tey's plot, it is said, almost beyond recognition, it has been heralded as his finest film made in England. You might also associate Portmeirion with the china made there, of which the original Botanical pattern is the most famous.

Tey was shy and avoided publicity as much as possible. Her character in Upson's novels is true to her nature but also captures both in her depiction and behavior and in the novel itself, her marvelous, sophisticated style. All of Tey's novels are worth reading: two of the most praised were early ones, Brat Farrar and The Franchise Affair. With a third good one, Miss Pym Disposes, they were collected in a volume entitled Three by Tey. I happen to like both A Shilling for Candles and To Love and Be Wise, two later ones, as well as her first, The Man in the Queue, and the last, published posthumously, The Singing Sands.

That last one is often regarded as the least of her work, perhaps because she never was around to put the final touches on it, but its opening scene in King's Cross station--a favorite locale for Tey, who often took the train from Inverness down to London, often to be involved in productions of her plays--where as Grant boards the night train to Scotland, he sees the rail porter every passenger tried to make sure never came near, Murdo Gallacher, known as Old Yoghourt, who was both lazy and delinquent--example, he rarely managed to serve a cup of tea to a passenger but if he did, the tea would be weak, the sugar and cream jugs dirty, and the spoon missing.

Tey almost rejoices in pointing out that one passenger has finally gotten revenge on Yoghourt, causing im more bother than any other and which he cannot slip away from: a dead body is discovered in his sleeping car. Not that he was the murderer, but now he will be enveloped in hours of questioning and being made to go over the details again and again when he normally would be sleeping in lieu of taking care of his passengers' needs.

Not only does Nicola Upson capture Tey's own personality but she in many ways provides a new version of her wonderful writing style. Here are nine more novels--I'm still making my way through them--that give you some more enjoyment in the great tradition of Josephine Tey.

Beach Week

I'm writing this while the whole East Coast is encountering Tropical Storm Isaias--the local TV stations have kept their weather and news people on the air so no Today or Good Morning America or CBS Morning News. They did just keep on jawing on Morning Joe. It's going to rain all day and yes, we needed it, but I do hope we don't lose power, which hasn't happened often here, but tornadoes haven't hit much either, and there have been quite a few already in Virginia.

But last week we spent at Middlesex Beach, which is between Bethany and South Bethany, in Delaware. It's the second year we were there, same house, just enough rooms for Vanessa, Dave, and Ethan to join us. We drive about two minutes to park near the beach, which because you need a pass, has never been crowded: physical distancing is easy and the surf is moderate--Vanessa and I love riding the waves and I've developed even more respect for the elements since realizing that I'm not as resilient when bowled over as I always was.

It was a wonderful week there because it was warm and sunny until Friday. In fact, it was very hot, too hot to stay on the beach for very long. But even with the strictures put in place by the pandemic, it was fun being at the beach. We grilled a lot because going out was less enticing. Crabcakes were great--both the ones we had at a local cafe and the ones we brought with us. Nic-o-bolis and baked ziti remain the great guilty pleasure of Rehoboth.

I've enjoyed beaches since I was very young and we drove out to Rockaway, first to my Aunt Ruth's in Belle Harbor and then changing at Curley's on Beach 116th St. where you could see grizzled regulars imbibing boilermakers at the oceanside open bar at 7:00 A.M. At the end of every summer, we spent a few days in Atlantic City, which was so pleasant, both the beach and the boardwalk, that I've never returned to see what a sad shell of its glory days A.C. (as Variety referred to it when reviewing its night club acts) has become,

Jones Beach was marvelous but it was a good distance from where I lived--in high school, an occasional expedition highlighted the summer. I grew loving the clam chowder you got get there, almost up to the standard of Lundy's in Sheepshead Bay. My dad, always expert on any waterfront matter, drew the line at going to the beach at Coney Island, because even in the 50's, he regarded it as too crowded and probably unsafe.

Visiting my cousins Herb and Eleanor in San Diego, I had two favorite beaches: the Cove at La Jolla, with its spectacular setting and cliffs, and the beach just below Del Mar, one of the few I know that still has some parking where you can drive right up and walk over the sand to the water. Once you travel north of Santa Barbara, the Pacific starts to become cold, just as the Atlantic begins to chill not too far above Boston, probably around Cape Ann. Vanessa and I once ventured in at Bath, north of Portland, with my cousin Bob Hertz,  where the ocean was clean enough for us to see the bottom but where we likely lasted a couple of minutes in the ice-cold August ocean.

The Straw Hat Circuit

Today's Times focused on outdoor theater in the arts section. One article recalled going to see productions of well-known musicals in the summer at theaters that were either outdoors or in less auspicious settings. The writer, one of the paper's theater critics, remembered when he was young, seeing shows like Gypsy with Angela Lansbury at the Valley Forge Music Fair in Devon, Pa.

That's a venue I recall well because I went there with my parents years and years ago in the 50's. It was where I first saw a production of South Pacific with good, second-level leads. My father was in that area checking out a film production located in Chester Springs, Pa., which is not much farther out near the Main Line. A director named Frank Perry was filming there--he had been well know for a time after he made David and Lisa. A rundown "resort" called the Allenberry was there and now I see ads for it, after it has apparently been renovated and is somewhat posh.

There were circuits of these summer musical theaters in those days. The Valley Forge one was one of the classier ones, run by some Philadelphia people and later expanded to theaters further up the East Coast. I think they originally started the Westbury Music Fair on Long Island. All are gone now, although Westbury still hosts trendy pop bands.

An operator named St. John Terrell ran theaters in Lambertville, N.J., and Rye, N.Y. His shows were not quite as well cast as the Philly outfit's.  Once when we were watching a production of Carousel at his Rye venue, they cut the Soliloquy from the end of the first act. Why? They needed more time at intermission for a fashion show.

Going to these and other summer theaters--the Times used to call them "the straw-hat circuit"-- was a great way to see a lot of classic musicals. Perhaps the last time I went to one was north of Boston near Route 128 where a theater-in-the-round, outdoors, presented Marlene Dietrich in what had to have been one of her last appearances, in the 1970s. She looked a little shaky but her voice and style were still pretty distinctive and worth hearing. She always kept her eyes totally focused on her conductor -- I'm sure he probably travelled with her, as was the case with Luciano Pavarotti when he made appearances on tour. I figured that she was afraid of losing track of everything if she lost that eye contact with her maestro.

When I was travelling through Vermont around 1974 and later in the 1970's, there was a chain of summer theaters where we caught plays. I remember that one playhouse was in Dorset, Vt. Usually they didn't have musicals, although those were popular, because it cost more to stage them. I recall seeing old chestnuts like George Kelly's The Show-off and George M. Cohan's Seven Keys to Baldpate. The latter was at the Hopkins Center at Dartmouth.

The piece brought back lots of memories and made me feel we've lost something even before what we're enduring now. As the writer said, you could see a lot of shows for tickets that were priced under $9.

Streaming Opera--La Forza del Destino

The Met has been streaming a different opera every day--you can start listening at 7:30 P.M. but you have to watch it before 6:30 P.M. the next day (I think) when it disappears from the free category. I managed to listen to a classic 1984 performance a week or so ago of one of my favorite operas, Verdi's La Forza del Destino (The Force of Destiny.

It was conducted beautifully by James Levine, then in his prime as Music Director of the Met, and starred Leontyne Price, Giuseppe Giacomini, Leo Nucci, and Bonaldo Giaotti. The traditional sets were by Eugene Berman, who was best known for his production at the Met of Don Giovanni, which was on the boards there for decades. Everything clicked, right of course from the glorious start--one of the most famous overtures in all of opera--to the magnificent finish--Price as Leonora singing the great soprano aria Pace, pace, mi Dio. 

Giacomini and Nucci as Dons Alvaro and Carlo, tenor and baritone, sang beautifully, especially the Act II and III duets. The plot, as with much of Verdi and opera generally, is nothing to merit much praise. But the whole cast did the libretto proud, as did Levine and the Met orchestra the music. Old Met hands like Bonaldo Giaotti as Padre Guardiano, Isola Jones as Preziosilla, and Anthony Lacira as Trabucco added verisimilitude to the story, which will always be a stretch at best, I didn't recall Enrico Fissore, who was Fra Melitone, but he too was excellent.

One of the factors that makes this a great opera is the way Verdi weaves his theme of destiny through the opera, He anticipated Wagner's use of the leitmotifs in The Ring some years later: La Forza premiered in St. Petersburg in 1862. The melodrama begins right after that fabulous overture in an opening scene that sets the plot quickly and definitively but then e are in the Inn scene, which is a rollicking excursion into the full world of eighteenth-century Spain. Preziosilla and Trabucco, who cater to the wants of the strong drinking crowd, make their first appearance, and when we get to the second act, with everyone transported from Spain to Italy, where Alvaro and Carlo, unknown to each other, are battling on the same side--whichever it is--while Preziosilla and Travucco, hoined now by Fra Melitone, sell to what seems like a remarkably similar crowd that populated the inn in Spain.

We also have the rousing music of Rataplan launched by Preziosilla and picked up by the mob/chorus. Fra Melitone is the bad-tempered monk whose misanthropy (and probably misogyny) are held in check by Padre Guardiano who reacts as a good priest that he is to Leonora's plea for refuge and consignment to a distant mountain refuge as a hermit. Melitone returns to start the third act by berating the beggars to whom he is ungenerously ladling soup; the Padre arrives to chastise him gently and then to direct Alvaro to where his love Leonora has gone.

Carlo is one of the most obsessed crazies in opera as he pursues Alvaro--for all of Act Two until the very end he does not know that his firm fighting friend is really the man whom he has been seeking to murder as revenge for Alvaro's accidental shooting of  Carlo and Leonora's father, the Marquis, in the first scene as Alvaro and Leonora were preparing (and taking too long) to make their getaway.

Alvaro and Carlo--Giacomini and Nucci--take out their swords in the opening of the last act and then Alvaro takes off to find Leonora. Carlo of course pursues him and after Price sings that fabulous aria, the opera ends in a classic bloodbath where two of the three perish.

There's wonderful contrasts in the opera--the somber tones of the Convent scene--sandwiched between the rollicking Inn and Camp Followers' settings. When I first saw La Forza at the Met, the delightful Inn scene had been cut. Levine restored it, I believe, which was an act of brilliance. The opera house had occasionally performed the Convent scene along with the Verdi Requiem as an alternative on Good Friday afternoon to the traditional Parsifal. 

La Forza has never been as popular as some of the Verdi canon in the spectacular middle period that gave us Rigoletto, Il Trovatore, and La Traviata, among others. But right from its mighty overture it is magnificent. I also watched much of Verdi's much less popular Luisa Miller, based on a Schiller play. It's a fine opera, but probably has languished as a lesser light in the Verdi firmament because it has few if any memorable arias. The Met did well by it, though, and I enjoyed seeing it all the way through. 

Bloomsday at Home

Two years ago I was lucky enough to be in Dublin on June 16, Bloomsday--celebrated by Joyceans the world over as the day Ulysses was published, and it appeared on that day in 1922 because June 16 was when James Joyce first took Nora Barnacle out for a walk. So there was a Bloomsday Breakfast at the James Joyce Society, featuring a prok kidney of course and black and white pudding and even a few other things that Eileen would consider consuming. There were talks on Joyce and a tour of Joycean sights--7 Eccles St., Bloom's home--and Belvedere College, where Stephen Dedalus studied--were two. There was also a one-man, two-hour rendition of Ulysses in a pub basement. And we stayed at the Gresham, not quite as snazzy, I suspect, as when Gabriel and Gretta stayed there in The Dead. 

This year, the annual reading of Ulysses I attended on June 16 occurred online. This reading covers a 111-page abridgement of the novel, and it started late. It took more than four hours--the whole book takes most of a day or more. I had attended this last year when it was at American University, but this year I had volunteered to read. I get a chance to read Joyce aloud on the first Thursday of every month at the meeting of the Capital James Joyce Group, now meeting online but otherwise at Politics & Prose, our locally-owned and operated bookstore.

Joyce is an author who benefits from being read aloud. He had a fine musical mind and ear, so the cadences of his prose gain in effect when heard. Although those of us assigned various sections attended a practice session a week previous, there were the usual technical problems that tend to occur at the start of every program requiring technology, both before and after the present situation.

Finally, we began. It hasn't taken too long for me to become very exhausted with meetings and lectures on Zoom, and this would have been no exception except that even the really dense parts of Ulysses are worth hearing and your comprehension is aided by each hearing. The high point of these annual readings is provided by Robert Aubrey Davis, who has been a classical music host on various DC radio stations. He always reads Chapter 3, Proteus, in which Stephen walks along Sandymount strand. 

To describe the chapter so, however, is to miss the many, many other subjects, allusions, and references which fill this chapter. Most readers find it especially challenging because of its complexity but Mr. Davis brings a fine accented voice to the task of presenting this material in the best way. It is a delight and it was only unfortunate that he only read half the chapter because of the ongoing technical problems.

The other readers were a mixed bag: too many people make careless mistakes and others don't know how to pronounce words in languages other than English--Joyce spoke eight languages and uses many of them, only glancingly, but it all adds up. Place names are important, too--Howth, the north side of Dublin Bay, where Bloom proposed to Molly, is pronounced HOE-th, for example.

They finally got to me, for I was assigned two sections of Chapter 11, Sirens, which takes place in the hotel bar of the Ormond Hotel, which I remember walking past in central Dublin near Trinity College, but much of the south side of the Liffey is near Trinity College. Among Joyce's themes in this chapter is music, and traditional Irish songs are sung by the men in the barroom. The scene opens with the two barmaids, Miss Douce and Miss Kennedy, conducting their mostly oral sparring with the men--in 1904, they were the only women in the barroom. Bloom appears but remains apart from the group, partly because he sees Blazes Boylan present, whom he knows will be shortly having an assignation with Molly that afternoon.

This was a comparatively challenging chapter to read, and I felt I acquitted myself well. I enjoyed it, tried to get into the spirit of the text, and made good efforts to pronounce the occasional almost unpronounceable words Joyce includes to capture some sounds. I'm not sure everyone was familiar with the close of the chapter, where, timing it to the noise of a passing trolley car, Bloom on the street passes gas, I'm told my rendition was credible.

A Chance to Contemplate

There have been quite a few essays and columns written about the current pandemic but most cite the two greatest classic pieces about previous such occurrences: Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year and Albert Camus's La Peste (The Plague). The selections all appear appropriate to our situation even if I will confess I haven't read the originals, which always makes me reluctant to comment too much about them. (I have Camus's novel in French somewhere upstairs and I intend to find it today!)

This is the first time that I'm feeling that we may be experiencing a moment of the kind this country knew in World War II, when life as people knew it changed forever. What didn't change, though, was the return of narrow-minded behavior right after the war. I was born in the month when the war ended so I never really got to experience how people for the most part worked in concert for a change. But people were still driving their old prewar cars when I was very young and there were some signs like that of how people felt then that they were all in this together. 

Living in Washington, of course, prevents me from getting rhapsodic about how people behave. The same craven lobbyists who operate here constantly peppered the stimulus package with gifts for the special interests. The Democrats did indeed make a terrible bill less terrible, but they didn't excise everything awful: the miserable Republicans were able to treat DC as a territory and thus cut its allowance of funds under the bill to half that of any state, many of which have fewer people than the District. The airlines got their bailout without having to eliminate their sheer greed displayed in the endless extra charges they have levied on travellers confined to ridiculously tiny seats--a condition that was superbly exposed last week by Columbia law Prof. Tim Wu in a N.Y.Times op-ed piece.

And the first thing the Kennedy Center did with its own earmark in the bill was decide not to use any of it to pay the National Symphony Orchestra players. On the plus side, Opera, the British magazine, sent out a list of operas being streamed by companies all over Europe and the Met is also making its recorded productions available for streaming. I do look forward to seeing a lot of worthy series on streaming television that I haven't bothered to watch until now.

Staying inside is indeed stultifying even if life-saving. We've gone for walks but I've decided to keep shopping trips to a minimum now. It seems too easy to make a wrong move and pay for it big time. I don't focus much here on politics but we are truly paying the price for our totally antidemocratic electoral system and our tolerance of malevolent and ignorant people in major leadership positions. Those who are skeptical of religion are certainly on point in fighting those who would elevate religion and wishful thinking above science in dealing with our crises. 

'Portrait of a Lady on Fire' and 'Emma'

Portrait of a Lady on Fire is a well-conceived French pic that is well worth the effort to see. It won't be on the wide distribution circuit, nor will Emma, which is also worth seeing.

One has an all-French cast and the other an all-British one. Both are excellent. The French one is set in the 1770s at a massive castle house in Brittany, right on the sea. The two leads are a young woman about to be sent off to marry a rich husband in Italy and a slightly older woman who has been hired to paint the first lady without her catching on. It's sort of a wedding present for the bridegroom but also is being done to ensure that she shows up, because her sister opted out--of life--to skip her wedding.

Eventually she figures out what's going on but surprisingly, the two get on famously, in fact, more than that. Things definitely get intense between the two of them and they also befriend a servant girl who needs an abortion, so we also get to see the social crusaders of the day. Adèle Haenel is a lovely-looking actress who plays the bride, while Noémie Merlant is more "interesting looking." 

I found the story worth following and the acting and directing were top-notch. The sex scene--there's only one brief one--is nicely done and hardly leering or offensive.

Emma is just the latest movie or miniseries based on a Jane Austen novel. Most of the critics recalled, as did I, that the best adaptation so far was the film Clueless, where Alicia Silverstone plays a California rich kid trying to remake her friend who's new to the high school so she can join the in crowd and find romance. Amy Heckerling, who directed the classic Fast Times at Ridgemount High, helmed that one. 

Here we have a cast of good Brit performers who were all new to me since I haven't resided in the U.K. for too many years. Anya Taylor-Joy is the title character and she is delightful as the heart of the story and the picture. Johnny Flynn is Mr. Right and Callum Turner is Mr. Wrong. Taylor-Joy makes the lead believable as a 21-year-old who enjoys her privileged life but tries to help a less well-born friend find an upper-class husband.

The veteran Bill Nighy is, as always, an absolute delight as her hypochondriac father, and everyone else fits in nicely. Needless to say, the settings in English country houses are magnificent and a lot of Jane Austen's social satire comes through loud and clear.

I liked the music--a combo of lots of Mozart, one major Beethoven sonata, some Haydn, and lots of English folk tunes.  The hapless vicar who gets into the plot as a would-be suitor when he isn't marrying others, played by Josh O'Connor, is a cross between the stiff Mr. Bliffel in Tom Jones and Rowan Atkinson's classic purveyor of malapropisms in Four Weddings and a Funeral. 

Dorothea Lange photography and Repositioned MOMA Collection

Managed to take in a preview of a new show at the Museum of Modern Art featuring the photography of Dorothea Lange. She was a photographer who shot scenes all over the country but especially in down-and-out places during the Depression in the 1930s in the Dust Bowl and other similar locales. Her work reminded me of Walker Evans and some of her photos are just as famous--one in particular called Migrant Mother was featured in the New York Times.

The show has been put together very deftly. Different walls are devoted to different phases of her career. As usual, problems in seeing the photos are significant--even at a members' preview, the crowd was making getting close to many items difficult. And it's always hard to read the descriptive panels. But enough griping. It is a terrific exhibit and if you get to MOMA, you should definitely take the time to see it. I suspect it's one of those exhibits that if you go starting in its second week, it may be far easier to get close to everything.

The reinstalled permanent collection at the museum is magnificent, as one would expect. The first room has versions of Munch's The Scream, Van Gogh's Starry Night, several Cezannes, and work by Gauguin, Mondrian, Henri Rousseau, and Vuillard. Many pictures are placed with others that may come from a different style and time, but the contrasts are fascinating. I happen to get a charge out of seeing the Italian Futurists, of whose work MOMA has a good sampling. I even spotted a Severini out in the hall as you come off the escalator and a familiar (from previous visits) golden Boccioni sculpture beckoned from across a gallery.

'The Mother of Us All'

There aren't too many opportunities to get to see a production of the three operas by composer Virgil Thomson, who was also a highly-regarded critic in an age when such conflicts of interest were not regarded as problems. So this past Saturday, an unusual combination of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Philharmonic, and the Julliard School of Music presented a semi-staged version of Thomson's 1947 opera about Susan B. Anthony, The Mother of Us All, in the Engelhard court which is located in front of the old Subtreasury building facade that once stood at Wall and Broad, but now fronts the American Wing of the Met.

The space was set up with a raised stage that stood amid three banks of folding wooden chairs for viewers. Surtitles were flashed on a well-suited space in the colonade around the court and pictures were flashed with major points on the front of the Subtreasury facade. Felicia Moore was the excellent soloist who portrayed Susan B. Anthony, and the many other parts, ranging from John Adams to Ulysses S. Grant were filled by Julliard students. A half-dozen Philharmonic musicians, dominated by the trumpeter, provided the orchestral component.

Thomson's music was most enjoyable. He used techniques that Charles Ives was employing--drawing on American patriotic songs, folk music, and marches among many other influences. The plot, if it can be called that, was hard to follow because it was disjointed and mixed real and fictional characters. (Images of many of the characters were flashed up on the facade and identified as appropriate "Real" or "Fictional".) But what would you have expected from the famed avant-gardist who wrote it, Gertrude Stein?

She also had provided the libretto for Thomson's opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, which had been written twenty years earlier in 1927-28. The Mother of Us All did win praise from many--an example comes from Opera News in 2013, regarding a Manhattan School of Music production:

"The opera remains riveting, too, in the lightness and wit of its approach to serious themes such as the struggle for women's suffrage. Preaching would soon pall, but Stein's playfulness, surprises and absurdities, like the Mozartean clockwork of so much of Virgil Thomson's all-American music, have a tonic effect, especially in their ability to keep the listener off guard."

The opera was originally produced at Columbia University, but later was presented (in this century) by the Santa Fe Opera and the San Francisco Opera.

It did not drag and I found myself wanting to know more about the long life and career of Susan B. Anthony, who lived to be 86 and died in 1906, fourteen years before the 19th Amendment giving women the vote went into effect.  

The Song of Names

Several years ago, which it must have been, since the book was copyrighted in 2002, I read a first novel by the English music critic Norman Lebrecht, called The Song of Names. It had been brought to my attention by my cousin "Doctor Bill" Hoffman (called that to distinguish him from his and my Uncle Bill, as families often behave with nicknames). I knew Doctor Bill was an opera aficionado but we had had few conversations during all the years and now that he's gone, I do regret not making more of an effort to engage him.

All this came back to me because Lebrecht's book was eventually developed into a motion picture, which opened within the last month. It is the story of a Polish Jewish violin virtuoso who is first saved from the Holocaust by being brought when nine years old to London by his father to live with the family of a Jewish impresario. When he returns to Poland and disappears, the host's son sets out to track him down. It got good reviews everywhere but in the local rag, the Washington Post. Most of the critics, however, thought that the movie, while good in total, had some dry spots; the critic for the Los Angeles Times gave it a strongly positive review and Variety noted its quality but thought it might have a limited audience, a way of saying that it might come off as too Jewish.. 

Doctor Bill had suggested the book to me because there is a reference to my granduncle Joe, who was formally known as Chief Rabbi of the British Empire Joseph H. Hertz . That was enough for me to go out and get it, which I did, and read it, which I don't always do.  The book was a lot of fun to read, mainly because Lebrecht, who writes a weekly music column in the London Evening Standard and occasionally appears in other British journals, such as The Spectator  sprinkles the text with appearances of British personalities, from Sir Henry Wood, the conductor who initiated the summertime Proms, George Orwell (Eric Blair), and Sir Neville Cardus, also a music critic and the most highly-regarded cricket writer as well. He also has a new book out on Jewish geniuses between 1847 and 1947. 

The movie,  also entitled The Song of Names, obviously lacks just about all these historical and personality references, which add a great deal to the charm of the book, since Lebrecht imparts his wide knowledge of English cultural and political life, and clearly has a built-in liking for British eccentricity. But there are two references to Chief Rabbi Hertz. The first:

There was only one impediment [to having a combined bar mitzvah for the two boys], raised by the unordained Goldfarb. Was it permissible in Jewish law, he wondered, to delay my confirmation in order to spare another boy's feelings? Father brooked no cavils from so lowly a functionary. He took me round to the Chief Rabbi's house on Hamilton Terrace, where the learned Dr. J.H. Hertz, a world-renowned scholar of notoriously short temper, caressed his well-trimmed beard and pronounced a psak, or precedential ruling, allowing the postponement of a bar mitzvah for the sake of emotional stability in times of war.

The mention of the house in Hamilton Terrace took me back a good many years to when we lived in London for most of a year. It had been broken up into apartments, but my cousin Jo, a daughter of the Chief Rabbi, resided in one of the flats, where we visited her often. The second reference occurs a few pages later:

Father went to see the Chief Rabbi, mainly to meet his red-bearded son-in-law, Rabbi Dr Solomon Schonfeld, who was running in and out of Poland in search of Jewish orphans. Dr Schonfeld took the particulars, made no promises. We met him weeks later at Victoria Station, heading a convoy of bewildered Jewish children. When immigration officials blocked entry, he blazed through the barriers with eyes of blue fire. Catching my father's eye, he shook his head slowly with a look of sorrowing exhaustion.

These incidents do not show up in the movie, nor do most of Lebrecht's Joycean recall of many notable persons, places, and happenings that he featured in the novel. But the film does a good job of telling the story, has wonderful music, especially the violin pieces played by the Taiwanese-Australian Ray Chen, and the exteriors take you back to prewar and wartime London. Tim Roth plays the son who shares his room with the violin prodigy David from Poland, and Clive Owen comes on masterfully later in the picture as the grown-up Dovidl.

My granduncle passed away in 1946, having served as Chief Rabbi since 1913, so I never met him, since I was was one year old then. I did encounter Solomon Schonfeld, called Oliver by his family, much later. I had read about his wartime exploits in enabling Jewish children to escape Nazi Europe, so it was compelling to meet someone who had been engaged in that heroic work.