Sierra Hull, who we celebrate on this Saturday Soundtrack, has been playing music professionally since before she reached her teens. Her debut on the Grand Ole Opry came at age 10, she brought her exceptional mandolin skills to Carnegie Hall at age 12, had her first deal with Rounder Records at age 13, and at age 17 became the first bluegrass musician to receive a Presidential Scholarship at the Berklee College of Music. As a 20-year-old, Hull played the White House.
The way I best remember how young she was when she burst on the music scene is from her performance at the Merlefest music festival in 2012. When introducing the band, she noted that the bass player was a good musician, but he was also “the only one of us old enough to rent a van.”
Sierra Hull and bassist Ethan Jodziewicz at the 2016 Red Wing Roots Music Festival
I’ve heard Hull play over the years at both the Merlefest and Red Wing festivals, and she’s always had the chops to play amazing bluegrass and traditional music. Her first album post-Berklee hinted at new directions, but it wasn’t until 2017’s Weighted Mind (produced by Bela Fleck) that she came into her own and broke away from the “I can play incredibly fast and clean bluegrass” camp. Hull and bassist Ethan Jodziewicz (recommended by no less a talent than Edgar Meyer) have toured together, and she’s also on the road with her multi-instrumentalist husband, Justin Moses. In a 2019 review, Rolling Stone noted “that the couple fluttered around each other with dueling mandolins, leaving the listener hanging on every single fluctuating note.”
Hull’s “Black River” video from the national show eTown is a good example of the direction of her newer stylings, while you can still catch her more traditional work on the 2011 “Bombshell” video from WAMU’s Bluegrass Country.
Regrets and grief can plague us at any time of the year. But for some individuals, the holidays are a time when regrets are easy to recall and often hard to dismiss. At this time when people around us appear happy and full of joy, grief can suddenly arise in our souls.
For too many, the darkness of the coming winter takes on personal overtones.
A winter nightfall in Roros, Norway (photo credit: Andrew Brown)
We may have lost a loved one and feel that emptiness deep in our being. Broken relationships or health challenges can be exacerbated in a season when society calls out for gaiety. Those seeking employment see the over-the-top consumerism of the holidays while they wonder where they’ll find next month’s rent. Depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses can lead to an increase in suffering and grief because of the dissonance between one’s life and what one sees out in community.
I’ll be the first to admit that I can struggle to get past the regrets in my life. Likewise, I find that grief is an all-too-familiar response to the sorrows of our times. As we near the darkness of the winter solstice, I’ve been thinking about ways to live in order to emerge on the other side of regret and grief. To live with hope.
Let’s begin with regrets.
Virtually everyone has regrets. Even Frank Sinatra, although his were too few to mention. Edith Piaf, the famous French singer who sang, “Non, je ne regrette rien” (I have no regrets), may be one of the few to realize how to just live in the moment.
We should all be so lucky. Instead, too often we blame ourselves, feeling a sense of loss or sorrow over what might have been. That’s the classic definition of regret.
My regrets tend to congregate around goals not achieved through fear of failure. Corners cut when a more thorough approach was required. Relationships not built. Relationships not maintained. Acceptance of mediocrity when the occasion called for work of distinction.
Studies show that there are gender differences in the ways we experience regret. Perhaps your regrets are similar to mine; or, you may face different concerns and challenges.
To add to our personal challenges, I—like many of my fellow citizens—head into this particular winter with some sense of dread, regret for years of complacency in the face of the growing authoritarianism in our government, and grief about life ahead. As the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry, said so eloquently last Sunday during his sermon at the Washington National Cathedral, the cries that we hear in the politics of the U.S.; in the street demonstrations in Hong Kong; and in elections from the U.K. to Sri Lanka, all echo the ancient cry of John the Baptist: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we wait for another?”
There’s certainly dread, regret, and grief in those cries, but there is also hope. We are all looking for hope.
The Most Rev. Michael B. Curry in the Canterbury Pulpit of the Washington National Cathedral on December 15, 2019
Bishop Curry phrased it as, “Dare we hope that this world will be a world where somehow we learn how to lay down our swords and shields, down by the riverside, and study war no more? Dare we hope that every man, woman, and child, everyone, will be treated as a child of God?” I would ask, dare we hope that we can pull ourselves out of the morass of our current political climate of lies, fear, and hatred and use this experience to grow closer to our ideals as a nation?
Regret and grief are very real. But there are ways to address the disconnect between our suffering and the hope and joy of the season.
For those able to step aside and see the situation through less emotional eyes, there can be value in how regret can lead to corrective action. In those instances, I try to think of life more as a journey and past decisions and losses as educational lessons. Likewise, taking actions in response to our current political upheaval has been shown to move people from grief and dread to optimism.
In my extended family, there are both mental health professionals and individuals who suffer from mental health problems. I have seen the value that comes from seeking and receiving professional treatment to address life’s challenges.
Spiritual and faith communities have also recognized they can play a role in the healing process, especially during this season. St. Albans Episcopal parish in D.C. held its annual Blue Christmas liturgy last week to acknowledge the realities of all our feelings in challenging days. Personally, I found that several phrases in the well-known and well-loved Night Prayer from the New Zealand Prayer Book—which was used to close that liturgy—spoke of ways both within and beyond the Christian tradition to respond to my regrets and grief. It begins with,
Lord, it is night. The night is for stillness. Let us be still in the presence of God.
I find that night is an especially difficult time to hold back the flood of thoughts around what could have been as well as concerns over the challenges ahead. Yet, the night can also be a time to still your mind. Or it can if we cut off our electronics, disengage with social media, and do something to slow the thoughts racing through our head. Reading can be a source of balm. Slowing down the brain may come as a result of a prayer to whoever or whatever you believe created the universe. Or it may be as simple as focusing on your breath to calm mind, body, and spirit.
The prayer continues.
It is night after a long day. What has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done; let it be.
These two sentences spoke directly to me. First came the recognition that our days are long and our work often tiresome. Even work that we enjoy. Then, acknowledgement is followed by the recognition of reality: what has been done has been done; what has not been done has not been done. We’ve had our successes, failed, heard the accolades for our work, battled our demons. It is what it is. Now, let it be.
So easy to say. So hard to do.
But as one expert suggests, think about “what you would say to a loved one in the same situation to make them feel better. Most people have an easier time forgiving others than themselves.” We need to find a way to forgive ourselves in letting the past actions remain in the past.
The next two phrases of the Night Prayer call us to use the darkness and quiet as means to rest our fears in what’s beyond us.
The night is quiet. Let the quietness of your peace enfold us, all dear to us, and all who have no peace.
To seek a quietness in the creator, or in the vastness of the universe, is to allow it to enfold us and think beyond ourselves to those we love and to those “who have no peace.” Taking our thoughts beyond ourselves to others gives us a sense of perspective.
And finally,
The night heralds the dawn. Let us look expectantly to a new day, new joys, new possibilities.
Night leads to dawn and a new day, where new possibilities await. It will be a day different from the one just completed. And we can begin anew.
As 2019 draws to a close, I’m sharing my annual list of the books I’ve read over the past twelve months. As regular readers of More to Come know, since returning from sabbatical early in 2016 I’ve committed to reading more, and to seeking out a wider range of works beyond my favored histories and biographies. With that in mind, here—in the order I read them—are the treasures I found on my reading shelf this past year.
“Thomas Paine Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations” by Craig Nelson
Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern Nations (2006)—Craig Nelson’s excellent biography of Paine captures the relevance today of the man who wrote three of the bestsellers of the eighteenth century, topped only by the Bible. Paine’s famous opening to The American Crisis—“These are the times that try men’s souls”—was written in the winter of 1776, yet it resonates today as much as it did when Washington’s small army was fighting for its life at Trenton and Princeton. The coalition that controls America today repudiates much of Paine in following the John Adams/Alexander Hamilton approach of a ruling class of multimillionaire plutocrats and their corporate sponsors. However, Adams and Hamilton would be shocked to learn that their “admired ruling elite no longer even pretends to lives of virtue.”
Field of Blood by Joanne B. Freeman
The Field of Blood: Violence in Congress and the Road to Civil War (2018)—This book by Yale Historian Joanne B. Freeman had me absorbed in the riveting tales of mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests…and that’s just on the floor of Congress! During the turbulent and violent three decades leading up to the Civil War, bowie knives and pistols were regularly drawn on members by other members. Duels happened with alarming frequency, including one that led to the death of one representative at the hand of another. All involved, with the exception of the poor victim, were handily re-elected. Slavery, and its future in America, was the key issue that led to this bullying, fighting, and total breakdown of civil discourse. Parallels to today should be heeded.
Humility Is the New Smart: Rethinking Human Excellence In the Smart Machine Age(2017)—In an era when the best research indicates that 47 percent of U.S. jobs will be replaced by technology within the next ten to twenty years, authors Edward D. Hess and Katherine Ludwig make the case that humans must change how we think, work, and communicate to survive and thrive. The authors define humility as “a mindset about oneself that is open-minded, self-accurate, and ‘not all about me,’ and that enables one to embrace the world as it ‘is’ in the pursuit of human excellence.”
The Is Not Baseball Book(2013)—This quirky little work is from the Are Not Books series, a micropublisher and academic research program. The program’s goal is to “facilitate cultural transactions that are not based on competition, measurable ‘success,’ or the accumulation of capital,” but are focused instead on a gift economy made up of “friends who care.” Whew! In any event, I think you have to love a book which begins with a first chapter of “Sports Is Not a Metaphor. It’s a Symbol.”
Hiking With Nietzsche: On BecomingWhoYouAre(2018)—John Kaag, a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, writes about two journeys he took to Piz Corvatsch, the Swiss mountain so important to the writing and life of the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. One journey was when he was 19 and the other came while in his 30s, with his wife and child. Kaag argues that there are lessons in Nietzsche lost on the young who don’t understand the ease with which we can be lulled into being satisfied with mediocrity or how “difficult it would be to stay alert to life.” Kaag aligns with Nietzsche’s thought that transformation into becoming who we are requires that we physically rise, stretch, and set off. It is a world view about “aims once more permitted and sought after.”
“Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process” by John McPhee
Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process (2017)—John McPhee’s book on writing examines how to get from a good first draft to a great fourth draft. As a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, McPhee explains that, “The way to do a piece of writing is three or four times over, never once.” McPhee takes the reader on a delightful and well-considered journey from ways to structure a piece of writing to an ending chapter on omissions. That last feature is just as important as the first. A mantra McPhee continues to use with his writing students is, “A thousand details add up to one impression.”
A Crisis Wasted: Barack Obama’s Defining Decisions (2019)—Reed Hundt makes a compelling case, in the words of reviewer Steven Wiseman, that “The president-elect forgot how he got elected, and favored Wall Street over homeowners, deficit hawks over the middle class, and costly health care reforms over the chance to make a difference on climate change.” The outcome was an insufficient response to the crisis that favored banks over the middle class and, subsequently, led to the Tea Party revolution and the election of Donald Trump. Strong, provocative words.
A Gentleman in Moscow (2016)—Amor Towles novel about a Russian Count who, during the Russian Revolution, is ordered to spend the rest of his life inside a luxury hotel is a good, if light, read. Towels is a gifted writer who can turn a phrase and tell a story.
Founding Gardeners: The Revolutionary Generation, Nature, and the Shaping of the American Nation (2011)—Author Andrea Wulf’s work had me absorbed in her illuminating study of the passion for gardening, agriculture, and botany of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison—America’s best-known founding fathers. These four gentlemen (plus Abigail Adams) tied the beauty and bounty of the American landscape to their concepts of liberty and the greatness of their new country. As expected, Thomas Jefferson was a recognized leader in this work, but the surprises here are more with the passions of George Washington, John and Abagail Adams, and James Madison.
Hiroshima(1946)—John Hersey, the author of the landmark 1946 report/essay on Hiroshima in The New Yorker, once wrote that, “What has kept the world safe from the bomb since 1945 has not been deterrence, in the sense of fear of specific weapons, as much as it’s been memory. The memory of what happened at Hiroshima.” Hersey’s reporting led the U.S. government to revise its narrative about why dropping the bomb was necessary. The report was serialized in some 70+ newspapers (back before all the major newspapers were owned by a small handful of conglomerates), turned into a book (never out-of-print), produced as a national radio reading, and became a touchstone for the nuclear non-proliferation movement. I bought a copy of the book at the Hiroshima museum in Japan and finished reading it in two nights. Very powerful.
“The Strange Career of Jim Crow” by C. Vann Woodward
The Strange Career of Jim Crow(1955)—C. Vann Woodward’s seminal work has been cited by none other than The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. as “the historical Bible of the Civil Rights movement.” The book has stood the test of time as a landmark history that also made history. Woodward’s major thesis—that segregation and overt bigotry were relatively recent developments of the 1890s and were not inevitable—had a tremendous impact on our understanding of the South since Reconstruction and the opportunities available to the country in the 1950s and 1960s.
The Fifth Risk(2018)—Author Michael Lewis believes the rift in American life “that is now coursing through American government isn’t between Democrats and Republicans,” but “between the people who are in it for the mission, and the people who are in it for the money.” This short work—written in Lewis’s crisp, clear, yet entertaining style—shows, as others have before him, how decisions made for short-term gain are ripping apart our nation’s social compact.
Life on Earth(2018)—I read David Attenborough’s 2018 edition of his classic Life on Earth while in the U.K. And while I didn’t blog about this book, I was nonetheless taken by the strength of his positions and the clarity of his writing. Early in this work, Attenborough compresses the 4 billion years that have elapsed since the Last Universal Common Ancestor (a population of simple bacteria) lived on earth down to one year. Each day, then, represents around ten million years. In that setting, the oldest worm trails were burrowed through the mud of the Grand Canyon in the second week in November. “The first fish appeared in the limestone seas a week later. The little lizard will have scuttled across the beach during the middle of December and humans did not appear until the evening of 31 December.” Fascinating reading in a richly illustrated edition.
The Source of Self-Regard (2019)—Toni Morrison, Nobel Prize-winning author and arguably our First Lady of Letters, passed away on August 5th as this new book of essays and a recently released documentary entitled Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am, introduced long-time fans and new readers alike to her towering intellect and broad vision. At the end of “Peril,” the very first offering of the 43 essays found here, Morrison makes the bold statement that, “A writer’s life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity.” And through 350 pages of speeches, essays, and meditations, she shows why.
“Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark” by Alva Noe
Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark (2019)—This short and entertaining work, written by Alva Noë, a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, and a lifelong New York Mets fan, led me to go against my standing policy of rejecting books with jacket blurbs by George Will. Instead, I took a flyer on this set of 33 essays, most of them repurposed from National Public Radio’s discontinued science blog 13:7:Cosmos and Culture, and came away finding challenging and intriguing points-of-view on topics that every fan—philosopher or casual observer—would understand.
Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (2015)—Long time New Yorker copy editor Mary Norris has not written a style manual, per se, but rather a memoir of a life lived with an obsession for clear writing. Her memories from The New Yorker and beyond are told with the wit of a natural-born storyteller. I am pretty confident that I’ve never laughed out loud when reading a book on grammar; yet, I did so more than once on the subway while devouring Between You and Me.
Sacred Liberty: America’s Long, Bloody, and Ongoing Struggle for Religious Freedom (2019)—Steven Waldman’s new work is a companion, of sorts, to his earlier Founding Faith, and it stands as an impressive overview of America’s long struggle to craft a new way forward in supporting religious freedom. Waldman goes into some depth to describe James Madison’s “ingenious, counterintuitive, and often-misunderstood blueprint for the religious liberty we enjoy today.” Madison argued that the best way to promote religion was to leave it alone. That was—and still is—a radical concept.
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City by Paul Goldberger
Ballpark: Baseball in the American City (2019)—This magnificent new book by Paul Goldberger—Pulitzer Prize-winning architectural critic, Trustee emeritus of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and a personal friend—is an elegant and engaging work on a subject that’s clearly as dear to his heart as it is to mine. In slightly more than 300 pages, Goldberger takes the reader through a detailed, intriguing, often unexpected, and richly-illustrated history of the intersection of baseball parks, the American city, architecture, urbanism, business, sports, and culture. If you click through on the link, you’ll also get a detailed update on my personal quest to visit all 30 Major League ballparks.
Whose Story is This? Old Conflicts, New Chapters (2019)—Rebecca Solnit is one of my favorite essayists writing today. This collection of her most recent works includes an opening piece that ends with this equal parts hopeful and challenging observation: “This country has room for everybody who believes that there’s room for everybody. For those who don’t—well, that’s why there’s a battle about whose story it is to tell.”
“Leadership in Turbulent Times” by Doris Kearns Goodwin
Leadership in Turbulent Times (2018)—Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book is a study of the life of four presidents and the ways in which they addressed major issues in fractured times: Abraham Lincoln (winning the war, ending slavery and saving the union); Theodore Roosevelt (responding to the sharp inequities and unfairness of the industrial revolution); Franklin D. Roosevelt (rebuilding a country out of the Great Depression); and Lyndon B. Johnson (the fight to ensure civil rights for all Americans). As with most of Kearns Goodwin’s work, it is thoughtful, insightful, and more than timely in this day and age.
Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (2018)—Political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s smart, insightful, and timely book is a thoughtful take on how our nation, and how much of the world, came to a place where we are identifying ourselves with a series of smaller and smaller tribes while also expanding our resentments into larger and larger grievances. I found it to be, ultimately, hopeful as well.
Demystifying the French: How to Love Them and Make Them Love You(2019)—This delightful advice manual for travelers and others interested in living more successfully with the French, was written by family friend Janet Hulstrand. After 40 years visiting and living in France, Janet has much to pass on of value, with writing that is clear, breezy, and digestible. Five essential tips for “even brief encounters” followed by ten chapters to help understand the French mentality are passed along as if you are sitting by the fireplace with a wonderful French wine and a good friend who is giving you a crash course before you venture out on your first trip to France.
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One (2011)—Stanley Fish has written a marvelous work, one that not only includes wonderful example after wonderful example from a wide range of writers, but one that also takes the time to teach us how to analyze a sentence in order to gain payoff and pleasure in reading.
Beach Reading – the best kind
I hope you’ll find one or two things to pique your interest among this collection of works.
It was about 15 years ago when I first heard the beautiful vocals of English folksinger and songwriter Kate Rusby. I was walking through a small shop in the U.K., and the album that was playing on the shop’s sound system was her 2003 offering, Underneath the Stars.
I walked out—with a copy of the CD in my bag—as a new fan, and I’ve been enjoying Rusby’s forward-looking traditional folk stylings ever since.
Late last month, Rusby released a new album of Christmas music, Holly Head, which features tunes ranging from the traditional Lu Lay to the quirky Hippo for Christmasto Christina Rossetti’s classic Bleak Mid-Winter (Yorkshire).
In addition to her vocal stylings, Rusby is also an excellent songwriter. Her work is covered by other artists, such as the international vocal group VOCES8 with their beautiful arrangement of Underneath the Stars. (VOCES8’s recent holiday concert in Georgetown was the subject of an earlier post this month.)
From her breakout recordings in 1999 all the way through her most recent releases, Kate Rusby has remained true to her acoustic and folk roots. I’m glad she found her calling, and I’m also appreciative that a chance encounter in a shop in her native land led me to this talented musician.
I knew I was going to enjoy Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sentencewhen the first chapter included this little gem from John Updike:
“It was in the books while it was still in the sky.”
The sentence comes from Updike’s famous account of what it was like to see Ted Williams of the Boston Red Sox hit a home run in his last at bat in Fenway Park on September 28, 1960. To refresh my memory, I just went back and re-read Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieuin The New Yorker, and was reminded once again of how it has stood the test of time as an incredible piece of writing.
Fish is right to call out this marvelous 12-word description of The Kid’s final home run as something special within the overall masterpiece. His breakdown of what makes it such a powerful piece of writing begins as he notes that the “fulcrum” of Updike’s description is the word “while.”
“(O)n either side of it are two apparently very different kinds of observations. ‘It was in the books’ is metaphorical. Updike imagines, correctly, that this moment will be memorialized in stories and at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and he confers that mythical status on the moment before it is completed, before the ball actually goes out of the park.”
As Fish notes, the ball — in Updike’s sentence — never does get out of the park. Instead, it is still “in the sky.”
“On the surface ‘in the books’ and ‘in the sky’ are distinct registers, one referring to the monumentality the home run will acquire in history, the other describing the ball’s actual physical arc; but the registers are finally, and indeed immediately (this sentence goes fast), the same: the physical act and its transformation into myth occur simultaneously; or rather, that is what Updike makes us feel as we glide through this deceptively simple sentence composed entirely of monosyllables.”
I wanted to showcase this particular example, because it is simple and straightforward, yet telling. Fish has written a marvelous work, one that not only includes wonderful example after wonderful example from a wide range of writers, but one that also takes the time to teach us how to analyze a sentence in order to gain payoff and pleasure in reading.
Fish’s book was first published in 2011 and is just one of the works on writing that I have been enjoying during my gap year.* As I took a break from a personal writing project, I thought it was an appropriate time to delve into Fish’s exploration of a particular aspect of writing—constructing an effective sentence—in more detail.
Why sentences? Fish begins by quoting Annie Dillard in The Writing Life. She tells the story of a fellow writer who is asked by a student, “Do you think I could be a writer?” The writer responds, “Well, do you like sentences?” She compares that to a conversation she once had with a painter who, when asked how he came to be a painter, responded, “I like the smell of paint.”
The point is that we don’t begin work as a painter or writer with grand conceptions. We begin “with a feel for the nitty-gritty material of the medium, paint in one case, sentences in the other.”
There are so many places in this work to highlight, that I’ll simply note that the chapters on first and last sentences are worth the price of the book alone, just to read the examples. For instance, it is hard to improve upon Agatha Christie’s opening to the book Nemesis.
“In the afternoons it was the custom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her second newspaper.”
So much information in 16 words, if we take the time to consider it. And Fish’s description of what to consider is worth quoting in full.
“The sentence seems simple; but in fact it communicates a surprising amount of information (and more) in its brief space. Even before we meet Christie’s detective-heroine, Miss Marple, we know a great deal about her. She has a routine, she follows it, and it occurs daily. Indeed, it is more than a routine. It is a custom, a word that suggests tradition, duration, and an obligatory practice tied to social and class norms. (These suggestions are enhanced by the slow progress of her full title, “Miss Jane Marple.”) Moreover, one senses that “custom” is not for her a thing easily trifled with. Her customs, we intuit, are methodically, even ritualistically observed. We know this from the word “unfold”; unfolding is so much more formal than opening; merely opening a newspaper, in any which way, would seem indecorous and overhasty to her. As she unfolds it, she can take its contents in the order in which they are given, from the important news of the front page to the (to her) equally important news of the obituary page. The word that sets the seal on this mini-portrait is “second.” The word is casually delivered, but because it comes late and constitutes a small surprise—it tells us that this is part two of her custom, something we hadn’t been expecting—it calls attention to itself and to its message: Miss Marple is not content with one source of information; she has to know everything. And she will know everything. You wouldn’t want to be someone who has something to hide.”
That attention to every word of a simple sentence is one of the keys to Fish’s thesis that a sentence is a structure of logical relationships, and we make the one error “to worry about” when we are illogical. His central rule: “(M)ake sure that every component of your sentence is related to the other components in a way that is clear and unambiguous (unless ambiguity is what you are aiming at).”
As for a sentence that “would be an accomplishment even if we didn’t know the story it brings to an end,” consider the last words of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein:
“He was soon borne away by the waves and lost in darkness and distance.”
When you want to take a break from your writing or reading in order to learn more about “how” to write or read, you could do much worse than to pick up How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One.
Writer, editor, writing coach, France aficionado, and family friend Janet Hulstrand produced a delightful little book earlier this year entitled Demystifying the French: How to Love Them and Make Them Love You. Having just finished this advice manual for travelers and others interested in living more successfully with the French, I found Janet’s take on how to understand these sometimes curious, somewhat frustrating, occasionally mystifying, but always interesting people to be delightful, informative, and useful all at once.
“Demystifying the French” by Janet Hulstrand
I also found that Janet had—either on purpose or unwittingly, I’m not sure which—captured some wonderful life lessons from her observations about the country she’s now observed and come to love as a visitor and resident for some 40 years.
The book is written as if you are sitting by the fireplace with a wonderful French wine and a good friend who is giving you a crash course before you venture out on your first trip to France. Janet’s writing is clear and, as one reviewer put it, “breezy and digestible.” She begins with five essential tips for “even brief encounters” that start with the all important, “Instead of smiling, say bonjour.” Say bonjour before you say anything else. Janet notes that she lived in France for years before she figured this out, and admits that she still will occasionally forget her own #1 tip to getting along with the French.
Following the five top tips, she moves into ten chapters to help understand the French mentality. Here you’ll learn about the country’s passion for complication as well as the (relative) unimportance of money. As with the tips, Janet provides background to flesh out her observations, often with hilarious asides and anecdotes. I certainly laughed out loud at the descriptions of which swear words Americans should avoid saying in France, even though the French will use them liberally in their conversation.
As I was reading this delightful guide, I found myself agreeing with a number of the ways in which the French have decided to live their lives. And while Janet may mention her feelings on specific topics with a comment such as “I think Americans could do with a little bit more of that kind of approach to life,” she doesn’t try to force the reader to accept that the French way is better. Rather, she simply wants us to understand the rationale behind what we may initially see as inexplicable behavior.
But stopping to seriously consider why we do what we do can be life altering. Why not take an approach to living that, upon reflection, seems not only perfectly reasonable, but better for us, for our communities, and for our planet? The following came to mind as I read Janet’s “demystifying” manual:
Why not greet each and every person with a kind word and leave them with a cheerful au revoir (until we see each other again)?
Why not throw out our assumption that everyone speaks our language and is just like us? Why not replace that assumption with a question that asks if they speak English before barging ahead in our native tongue (but not theirs)? Why not, in other words, treat strangers as we would want to be treated?
Why not expect and support beauty in both our civic spaces and life?
Why not lower our voice instead of speaking at a decibel level that ensures that everyone within 100 feet hears our conversation?
Why not take our time? What’s the rush?
Why not, instead of being self-absorbed or all wrapped up in what we do, work on simply being interesting?
This last one comes out of the chapter entitled “The Importance of Being Interesting,” and Janet begins it with this short story.
“Years ago, a friend of mine had a dalliance with a Frenchwoman. When they went their separate ways, neither of them was truly terribly upset—it was a casual affair, and it was over. But she did make certain to tell him before going on her way, that to her, he and his friends were ‘not interesting.’ (‘I know many peoples who are more interesting zan you!’ were her precise words.)”
Janet goes into some depth about the ways and whys of being interesting, noting that the French have a general respect “for education, for intellect, and for the importance of learning how to think rationally.” They don’t talk about their work and tie their self-esteem up in their jobs. Instead, they build on the philosophy courses that are a staple of all French high school curricula in order to produce “enlightened citizens capable of intelligent criticism.”
As I’m listening to what passes for political and rational thought by today’s Trump-dominated Republican party, all I can say is, “What a concept.”
Demystifying the French makes a great stocking stuffer this Christmas season for those who have gap year students traveling to France, who know friends or family heading to Paris, who enjoy good French food and want to find out more about the people behind those wonderful creations, or who simply would find unexpected life lessons in a small, delightful read a real treasure.
‘Tis the season to begin thinking about finding and supporting some excellent holiday music, which we’ll do in this edition of the Saturday Soundtrack. When you tire of the endless, dreary Christmas muzak, I suggest you set up a winter solstice playlist or take in a concert by Robin Bullock to alleviate your pain.
Robin Bullock (on guitar) with fiddlers Elke Baker and Ken Kolodner (also on hammered dulcimer) at the 2012 IMT Celtic Holiday Concert
For years I’ve been a regular at Bullock’s Celtic Holiday Concert sponsored by the Institute of Musical Traditions, and I’ll be there again next week for the 2019 performance. Set for Monday, December 9th at St. Mark’s in Rockville, the concert also includes, besides Bullock, the world-class folk instrumentalist Ken Kolodner on fiddle and hammered dulcimer, along with U.S. National Scottish Fiddle Champion Elke Baker.
Bullock is a master of the acoustic guitar, cittern, and mandolin, where he blends
“…the ancient melodies of the Celtic lands, their vigorous American descendants, and the masterworks of the Baroque and Renaissance eras into one powerful musical vision. The 17th-century harp tunes of legendary Irish bard Turlough O’Carolan, the spirited jigs and reels of rural Ireland, the haunting ballads of the southern Appalachians and the timeless compositions of Bach, Dowland and Francesco da Milano all find a musical common ground in Robin’s music, where lightning-fast fingerwork one moment is perfectly balanced with tender, quiet intimacy the next.”
There’s a great deal of Robin’s music on You Tube, but this year—given all that the country has endured—I thought it would be especially appropriate to hear his lovely arrangement of the Ukrainian tune Carol of the Bells. Composed by Mykola Leontovych—an internationally recognized choral conductor, teacher, and composer who was assassinated by a Soviet state security agent in 1921—this beautiful tune comes alive in Robin’s hands.
Robin was based in the Washington area in the 1990s, before moving to France and then to Black Mountain, North Carolina, his current home. Along with Kolodner and one of the founders of the Baltimore Consort, Chris Norman (flutes, whistles & smallpipes), Bullock was a founding member of the acoustic world-music trio Helicon, which still gathers annually for a Winter Solstice concert. This year the group has three DC/Baltimore-area concerts scheduled for Saturday December 14th and the following Saturday, December 21st. North Carolina friends can see Bullock at the Swannanoa Solstice in Asheville on the 22nd.
Enjoy the music of the solstice this year.
More to come…
DJB
Image: Robin Bullock performing at the 2012 IMT Celtic Holiday Concert by DJB
Last evening a sold-out Georgetown crowd was treated to a sumptuous musical feast of the season by the English-based VOCES8 ensemble. The “impeccable quality of tone and balance” that has been recognized by Gramophone and many others was on full display in the splendid acoustics of historic St. John’s Episcopal Church.
The program was varied, reaching back to the music of Tómas Luis de Victoria, Michael Praetorius, Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, and Benjamin Britten, while also reaching forward to contemporary composers Jonathan Rathbone, Jonathan Dove, and David Pickthall, among others.
For me, the evening’s highlight was the moving Philip Stopford setting of the Coventry Carol, the traditional English carol dating from the 16th century. Stopford’s Lully, Lulla, Lullay—filmed by VOCES8 earlier this year in St. Stephen’s Walbrook Church, London—is as haunting and beautiful on film as it was in the live performance last evening. Soprano Eleonore Cockerham‘s soft, clear, yet ethereal voice is a treasure.
The subject of the carol—the massacre of the innocent male children of Bethlehem by King Herod’s army following the birth of Jesus, as depicted in the Gospel of Matthew—is remembered in the church as the Feast of the Holy Innocents. While scholars widely agree that it never happened, it remains an important part of the retelling of the nativity for a variety of reasons. One does not have to look far today—from the southern border of the U.S., to Palestine, to South Sudan, to North Korea, to all around the globe—to see how war, violence, and greed impacts the youngest and most vulnerable among us. When I hear Lully, Lulla, Lullay, I place it as much in today’s world as in the historical context of Bethlehem.
Washington was the first stop in a nine-city U.S. holiday tour that continues tonight in Baltimore and then moves to Texas, Alabama, and New York. This is a hard-working ensemble which had just completed performances of Handel’s Messiah with the Academy of Ancient Music prior to leaving for the U.S. tour. Full Disclosure: Our son Andrew sang with VOCES8 and the Choir of the VOCES8 Foundation last Tuesday evening, December 3rd, at the Messiah concert at Trinity College Chapel in Cambridge. It was refreshing to meet the singers last evening and have them give eyewitness reports from the U.K. that “Andrew is doing well” and is a delight to have as part of the larger ensemble for these concerts. Andrew was privileged to be one of the tenor soloists for the Bach St. John Passion performed by VOCES8, the VOCES8 Scholars, Apollo5, and the Academy of Ancient Music at the VOCES8 International Music Festival at Milton Abbey this past summer. (Shameless parental promotion: to hear him sing, check out the tenor aria Ach mein Sinn at the 31:00 minute mark of the video.)
Many thanks to our long-time friend, the Rev. Gini Gerbasi, Rector of St. John’s Georgetown, for her hospitality last evening. Do yourself a favor if you live in the Washington area and take in one or more of the remaining musical delights of this season’s Georgetown Concert Series. You’ll thank me for it!
More to come…
DJB
Image: VOCES8 (Photo credit: Kaupo Kikkas courtesy of voces8.com)
Anticipating the Politics and Prose Holiday Member Sale and assorted bookstore sales events across the country this weekend, I thought that—like me—you may enjoy a peak at books others are recommending before you rush out to make your purchases.
As I look through this list from The Guardian, I note that I’ve read eight of their selections and have four more in my reading pile; a pile that, by the way, reminds me of the always overflowing pasta bowl in Tomie dePaola’s beloved children’s book Strega Nona: it threatens to bury our house, if not the whole village. But I quickly found at least a dozen more in this list that I thought I’d like to add to that pile. And then, of course, a former colleague sent me an email recently and said, “I was thinking of you and wondered if you’ve read this book?” . . . and then proceeded to reference Maryanne Wolf’s 2008 Proust and the Squid, which sounds like another absolutely fascinating work.
Let’s see…will I be able to wait at leastuntil thestart of the Politics and Prosesale?!
After taking dePaolo’s cautionary tale of Big Anthony seriously, perhaps I’ll work on being a bit more prudent and only pick up 3-4 new works…at least until that pile is reduced a bit more.
But no matter the size of my reading pile, I’d still be excited to hear about what’s on your “best of” list.
We all have our phobias and fears. For much of my life, that personal horror was stage fright. I’m surprised when people tell me they have never experienced the sensation of walking to a podium or settling in with their musical instrument and, suddenly, being gripped by a paralyzing fear. That dread just came naturally to me.
Working through my stage fright in order to speak from the pulpit at the Ryman Auditorium: The Mother Church of Country Music
Stage fright—or performance anxiety, as it is also known—is a condition that affects many people who have to talk for a living or want to perform for others. I’ve experienced it in both speaking publicly—say, for television interviews—and in playing music in any space other than my living room. If you don’t address your fears, the feeling saps your confidence and energy in ways that seem to make poor performance a self-fulfilling prophecy. With work and experience, I overcame at least a part of my anxiety through the years and came to enjoy public speaking and conversation.
A little bit of online research will turn up 21.5 million results (I Googled it) around ways to combat stage fright. There are multiple TED Talks on the topic, including one by a folk singer who ended up writing a song about stage fright to help him overcome his performance anxiety. But one remedy that doesn’t appear in TED Talks, Web.MD or Psychology Today came instead from a touching story told recently by Margaret Renkl, one of my new favorites among the roster of New York Times opinion writers.
Renkl, who grew up in Alabama and now lives in Nashville, recently wrote of facing a book tour unsure as to how to cope with her life-long stage fright. Knowing that her usual collection of pocket-size security blankets—her buckeye, sea shell, or worry stone—would not pull her through, she “thought of the family wedding rings.”
Renkl had come into possession of several family wedding rings over the past few years, but she had never thought to wear them, and certainly not all at once. But in a lovely tale, she relays the meaning of each ring to her life and how the women who originally wore them—her mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, and mother-in-law—taught and inspired her. She felt they would give her strength for the tour, so she “took out the wedding rings of all my treasured forebears and put them on.”
And just as she felt that simply thinking to wear five wedding rings in the first place was a miracle, she recounts,
“In what might be another minor miracle, for we are clearly in the realm of magical thinking here, it worked. I stood in front of microphone after microphone, spinning the thin bands around my fingers, and I looked out upon all those strangers, and, lo, I was not afraid.
Full disclosure: It’s possible that menopause, which has fostered an “Oh, who in hell really cares?” attitude in me for some time now, may have dispensed with my lifelong stage fright, too, and I just never noticed, having been on no stages in recent years. But I prefer to think the family matriarchy saved me, that my beloved elders closed ranks around me, my mother and mother-in-law on one flank, my grandmother and great-grandmother on the other, to shore me up and give me strength.”
I’m taking the side of the family matriarchy over menopause in this one, because I know the power of personal stories that remind us of hope in the face of suffering and hardship.
We all have stories in our past that can provide hope for the future, if we do the work to dig them out. Renkl recounts several, including how her grandmother taught school in a two-room country schoolhouse because her grandfather’s farm never quite made enough income to pay the bills. In my life, I can look at a watch that my grandfather used as a conductor on the Franklin to Nashville Interurban rail line and recall that he worked multiple jobs to help get his family through the Depression. Because he was occasionally between jobs, my grandmother also ran a boarding house in their home, serving meals to workers and travelers, to make ends meet.
Hope is grounded in memory. Hope as a sense of uncertainty and coming to terms with the fact that we don’t know what will happen, but we have memories that show us that good things—powerful things—can happen. Stories from our personal pasts can point towards a resilience and strength we need today.
Near the end of her story, Renkl builds on the thought of hope being grounded in memory. She writes, “Perhaps these family histories, small as they might be and utterly invisible to the world, hold the key to facing our larger worries, too, and showing the way through.”
Like Renkl, I do believe these family stories and histories provide hope that is key to facing larger worries. Which is why I’ll take the family matriarchy story line every time.
MORE TO COME... 